Abstract
Social Imagimaries is based on the metaphor of the labyrinth, which is also a human creation, and in which new, interconnected corridors are created to be traversed. It requires reason, imagination, social creation and action. The truth of passages is recognized in fragments through discussion and articulation.
The paper I am submitting for consideration builds on these ideas. The paper provides a comprehensive overview of the history of utopian thought and the conception of ideal states by individual authors. In studying utopian thought, a live question is whether utopia arose as a constitutive element of the historical process by which modernity as an epoch separated itself from the Middle Ages, or whether it had its origins in medieval ideas of the biblical paradise according to St. Augustine. The history of utopias begins with a humanist distinction between antiquity and its own present, and it begins with an awareness of the primacy between the two epochs, as well as an intention to recover what existed before, and what, as utopian, is considered separate from its own place and time. Thomas More, in his Utopia, picks up a passage from Plato's Constitution where Socrates talks about how the proposed model of the community (POLIS) might one day become a reality. Campanella's social utopia, The Sunshine State, in turn mixes a critique of feudalism with a critique of capitalism. Francis Bacon's New Atlantis sought to multiply human knowledge in a technical sense, making the writing the first scientific utopia. The Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire believed in optimizing pleasure and alleviating pain through virtue. In an ideal world, people should recognize those virtues that favor the collective of people over the individual. This paper will focus not only on these philosophers, but also on their predecessors and followers.
In relation to the social order, the paper will also include authors of texts on dystopian societies as creators of eutopian visions of a bad and terrifying social order.