Utopias of the British Enlightenment

Description

This is the first major collection of eighteenth-century British utopias. Seven tracts, spanning the century, show how the image of the ideal society was used as a form of social criticism, and particularly as a means of focussing on ideas of progress and commercial development. Radical and republican thinking about property ownership, social equality, and commerce and luxury - of particular relevance to the critique of 'corruption' in this period - coexists with nostalgic and conservative notions of the ideal hierarchical community. The introduction, which examines the relationship of these tracts to the political thought of the period, shows how issues and developments of key importance, from the debate surrounding the French Revolution to the origins of Romanticism and early socialism, are illuminated by an understanding of the utopian tradition.

"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