Relation to others· Society and history
Utopianism
Axis: Ideal and reality — Should politics aim at the ideal city, or work with human beings as they are?
Political thought must conceive the just city, even if it exists nowhere. The ideal is no idle fancy: it serves as a standard for judging actual societies and a horizon for transforming them.
Movements 1
Platonismexplicit
The Republic sketches an ideal city (politeia, the just constitution ruled by the model of the Forms), a paradigmatic model of justice founded on the Forms rather than on existing political experience. This utopianism (the claim to rule the city by a perfect order conceived a priori) assumes that the organization of the city should be ruled by a perfect intelligible order, even at the cost of clashing with facts.
Plato, Republic, books II-V, the just city · Plato, Republic, 472b-473b, the city as paradigm
Philosophers 3
Platoexplicit
The builds the just city in thought, an ideal model ruled by the Form of the Good, with its three classes, community of property and of women among the guardians, and education as the art of turning the soul. This is an avowed normative utopianism: the actual city must conform to the paradigm, not the reverse.
Republic, II-V, 369a-473e · Republic, IX, 592a-b
Show inferred positions (2)
Laoziinferable
Chapter 80 sketches a dreamed community: a small, sparsely peopled country that forgoes machines and travel, returns to knotted cords for counting, where neighboring villages hear each other's singing yet never visit. This nostalgia for a pre-civilizational simplicity is a regulative ideal turned toward the past, more utopian than realist, even though it presents itself as a return rather than a construction.
Dao De Jing, ch. 80
Baconinferable
sketches an ideal city, Bensalem, organized around "Salomon's House": Bacon uses the utopian genre to picture what a society governed by science would be. But it is a utopia of a singular kind, which does not project a perfect social order to be imposed on people: it imagines above all the institution of collective knowledge, while the seasoned statesman of the remains a shrewd judge of human beings as they are, hence a position only moderate.
New Atlantis