Explore "The Story of Utopias" by Lewis Mumford on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
How something happened to utopia between Plato and Sir Thomas More; and how utopia was discovered again, along with the New World.
There is a span of nearly two thousand years between Plato and Sir Thomas More. During that time, in the Western World at any rate, utopia seems to disappear beyond the horizon. Plutarch's Life of Lycurgus looks back into a mythical past; Cicero's essay on the state is a negligible work; and St. Augustine's City of God is chiefly remarkable for a brilliant journalistic attack upon the old order of Rome which reminds one of the contemporary diatribes of Maximilian Harden. Except for these works there is, as far as I can discover, scarcely any other piece of writing which even hints at utopia except as utopia may refer to a dim golden age in the past when all men were virtuous and happy.