2007 Conference

The idea that a perfect society could be planned, created and sustained can be traced back to Plato’s description of Atlantis, but it entered the popular imagination during the religious and cultural upheavals of Renaissance and Reformation when, in the early sixteenth century, Sir Thomas More published Utopia, his speculative vision of an ideal society. Since that time speculative philosophers, enthusiasts, dreamers, visionaries and reformers — of every shade of religious, political and philosophical opinion — have presented countless other visions of the ideal society to the world at large, ranging from Sir Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. These have varied from messianic and impracticable dreams, sometimes satirical or even dystopian in tone, to a number of real projects that have, for a time, succeeded and flourished. Many Enlightenment projects could perhaps be viewed as utopian in character.

These visions frequently represented an optimistic view of human society, offering innovative ideas and espousing such values as religious and political tolerance, mutual aid and openness to philosophical and spiritual speculation. Their value to us lies not only in their historical interest and in the intriguing nature of individual utopian visionaries, but also in the significance of their ideas for the improvement of a world in a state of uncertainty and flux.