ABSTRACT
The four traits above are defining features of utopias as a family of intellectual constructs among which socialism has been, at least for a century and a half, by far the most prominent member. Defined in such a way, utopia does not immediately reveal its bond with a specific stage of human history. Our definition has invoked so far only such attributes of human beings and their intellectual products as do not betray their time-limitations and may well be seen as accompanying human life at all times and in equal measure. Yet, utopia is a thoroughly modern phenomenon. Chad Walsh, to be sure, suggests that the entire history of utopias may be portrayed as a collection of footnotes to Plato’s Republic:1 this may well be so, but only in the same sense as the view that the whole of Western civilisation has done little more than elaborate and improve on seminal ideas of Plato’s contemporaries and disciples. Its indebtedness to a history-long motif of human thought does not necessarily make a phenomenon ancient or timeless. And a strong case can be made for the assertion that whatever their sources of inspiration, utopias entered the historical stage as important members of the cast only after the stage had been set by a series of social and intellectual developments usually identified with the advent of modernity. I shall attempt below to single out the most significant of these phenomena, without which the advent of utopias answering the above fourfold definition would hardly be plausible.
