Ideal Commonwealths: Five Utopias

The five utopias in this anthology are imaginary islands with a perfect social, legal, and political system. Plutarch's "Lycurgus," Thomas Morus'"Utopia," Francis Bacon's "New Atlantis," Tommaso Campanella's "City of the Sun," and Joseph Hall's "Mundus Alter et Idem" all have in common a few mythical archetypes inscribed in most cultures of the world. They resurge with special vitality when people are in difficult and critical times. However, the projection of the utopian myth of an ideal world in these five masterpeces does not take place towards the remote past, but either towards the future or towards distant and fictional places. How distant or fictional they are is up to the reader.