ABSTRACT
Francis Lodwick is known primarily for his work in the seventeenth-century philosophical language movement. He had printed only three texts, all of which outline his system of an artificial, a priori, philosophical language, while his utopian A Country Not Named remained in manuscript until well after his death. Lodwick’s utopian text depicts a society that actually adopts an a priori language that it uses to govern its people with strict control. By reading it alongside Lodwick’s printed works on philosophical languages, A Country Not Named depicts a linguistic utopia in which the subjectivity of its inhabitants comes under the strict control of language. To analyze both the linguistic and social control of Lodwick’s society, I use the theories of Lacan and Foucault, respectively, to argue that linguistic and social control are in fact one and the same and that each one informs the other.
