This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Citing Articles via Scopus Google Scholar Articles by Mazlish, B. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                         What's this?

A Tale of Two Enclosures

Self and Society as a Setting for Utopias

MIT

Utopian thinking, and utopias as a genre, flourished as forms of the imaginary until recently. The emergence of the genre, with Thomas More, emphasizing spatial arrangement and with Louis-Sébastien Mercier invoking future orientation, I argue, is illuminated by placing them next to the economic enclosures of their time. (I treat the connection of enclosures and utopias as both a literary conceit and as an elective affinity.) Their utopias, however, closed off both the individual and time from the capitalist changes around them, allowing for little or no variation or expression of self. Thus, their imagined virtuous societies actually sought to foreclose the future and other spaces. The paradox is that capitalist development, with its admitted inequities and horrors, favored an expansive self and vital societies, which carry with them their own virtues. In spite of the ameliorative tendencies of utopias, their limitations, that is, their closed-mindedness, slowly but surely discredited the genre itself. Its place has been taken today by science fiction, futurist studies and the exercise of the imaginary in terms of social science.

Key Words: capitalism • modernity • self • society • space • time

Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 20, No. 1, 43-60 (2003)
DOI: 10.1177/0263276403020001920


CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter    What's this?