Synopses & Reviews
This collection of eighteenth-century British utopias shows how the image of the ideal society was used as a form of social criticism, particularly as a means of focusing on ideas of progress and commercial development. The texts chosen reveal important trends in the development of liberal rights theories, of proto-socialist concepts of property distribution, and of conservative notions of the ideal hierarchical community. The introduction examines their relationship to the key issues and developments in the political thought of the period.
Review
"Claeys has performed a great service to utopian studies. Furthermore, his Introduction, which places these utopias in the context both of other such writings and of the social, political, and economic milieu from which they stem, provides an excellent approach to understanding the eighteenth-century British mind. This collection is worth having." SFRA Review
Synopsis
The first major collection of tracts from the British utopian tradition.
Table of Contents
Introduction; The Island of Content; A Description of New Athens in Terra Australis Incognita; Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth; An Account of the First Settlement, Laws, Form of Government, and Police, of the Cessares, a People of South America; Memoirs of Planetes; The Commonwealth of Reason; Bruceâs Voyage to Naples.