Utopia (1758)

About this item

THE TRANSFORMATION OF UTOPIA IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, FROM A ROMANTIC IDEAL TO A POLITICAL OBJECTIVE Until the Age of Enlightenment, utopia was a popular literary genre, but without concrete political effects. However, in the decades leading up to 1789, its status gradually changed from an entertaining thought experiment to a socialist project. Imagining the ideal city took on the task of articulating revolutionary transformation of society towards equality and social justice. In Utopia , Stéphanie Roza explores the nascent ideal of a community of property and labour, not yet called communism, and the thinkers who engaged with it in the lead-up to the French Revolution. These philosophers included Étienne-Gabriel Morelly, a fierce critic of private property and the mysterious author of the Code de la Nature ; the Abbé de Mably, a radical republican and interlocutor of Rousseau; and Gracchus Babeuf, who, from the 1780s onwards