Overview

"This survey of utopias, which spans from Plato to the twentieth century, was Lewis Mumford's first success. He was particularly interested in what he calls utopias of reconstruction, models for reshaping an imperfect world. Beginning with a survey of famous utopian ideas and writings, he moves from Plato's Republic, More's Utopia, Andreæ's Christianopolis, Bacon's New Atlantis, Campanella's City of the Sun, Fourier's phalanxes, Cabet's Icaria, Bellamy's Looking Backward, Morris's News from Nowhere, and finally on to H.G. Wells's utopian fiction. He then produces the essence of a checklist for assessing how closely a society comes to utopian ideals, looking at work and standards of living, housing, democratic (or not) governance, sex and marriage, the raising of children, our relationship with nature, and the importance of the arts and creativity. A century later, the book stands not only as an introduction to the work of a maverick scholar who had worldwide influence, but also suggests ways to approach a future even more challenging than that faced by Mumford's post-war generation. Mumford delves into issues that remain relevant today: social equity in his chapter on the country house, for example, and the relationship between science and the arts in his concluding chapter about how we can find, or build, utopia. Mumford was thinking, as many of us are, about the practical lessons offered by imagined utopias. He posits that there are utopias of escape and utopias of ""reconstruction,"" and was particularly interested in these utopias of reconstruction, models for reshaping an imperfect world: The utopia of reconstruction is what its name implies: a vision of a reconstituted environment which is better adapted to the nature and aims of the human beings who dwell within it than the actual one; and not merely better adapted to their actual nature, but better fitted to their possible developments. If the first utopia [of escape] leads backward into the utopian's ego, the second leads outward-outward into the world. In contrast with The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot, also published in 1922 by Boni & Liveright and republished by Berkshire Publishing Group in 2022, The Story of Utopias is largely about this idea of reconstruction, rather than the disillusion that Eliot's poem so powerfully captures."

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9781614720508

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The first study of utopias I read was Mumford's The Story of Utopias, and while there have been many surveys of Western utopian literature since then, several of which argue with Mumford, it remains an excellent introduction. Since he struggled with the idea throughout his life, it is also essential reading for anyone interested in his thought. Lyman Tower Sargent, author of Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction The first edition of The Story of Utopias included an introduction by the bestselling author Hendrik Willem van Loon whose The Story of Mankind (1921), an illustrated history of the world for children, had just won the first Newbery Medal. He wrote: It is a sunny day and I am sitting on the top of a mountain. Until this morning, it had been the mountain of a fairy story that was twenty centuries old. Now, it is a mighty hill and I can feel its warm coat of white reindeer-moss, and if I were willing to stretch out my hand, I could pluck the red berries that are in full bloom. A hundred years from now it will be gone. For it is really a large chunk of pure iron, dumped by a playful Providence in the very heart of Lapland. . . . Kirunavaara no longer hears the shrill kiru-kiru of rising birds. Twice a day it listens to the terrific detonation of half a hundred charges of dynamite. Then it is shaken by the little trains which carry the rock to the valley. In the evening, it sees the lights of the large electric engines which hoist the valuable metal across the arctic wilderness of Lake Tornotrask. Two months later, the ore has been melted and worked into those modern articles of trade which go by the name of bridges and automobiles and ships and apartments. A hundred years later, the Kirunavaara mountain is not gone, but the nearby Swedish city of Kiruna is being moved because of mining subsidence. The new Kiruna is being planned with twenty-first-century utopian ideals in mind: a focus on sustainability, green and blue infrastructure, and public transport rather than automobiles.

Author Information

Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) was a world-renowned historian, sociologist, philosopher, and critic who refused to be defined by any of those titles. He is perhaps best known for his studies of the city in history and for his writing on, and criticism of, technological society, and was the architectural critic and also art critic at the New Yorker for forty years. His thinking on ecological planning and design had considerable influence on the international green movement. Mumford was born in New York City and educated at Stuyvesant High School and the City College of New York, but never received a degree. He later taught at the University of Pennsylvania (which now holds his archives), Stanford, and MIT. Mumford and his wife Sophia were prominent in efforts to bring the United States into the fight against Hitler and after the war campaigned against nuclear weapons. Later, he was an early and vocal critic of the Vietnam War. His honors include the Presidential Medal of Freedom, National Award for Literature, National Medal for the Arts, Prix Mondial Cino Del Duca, Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, and a KBE from Queen Elizabeth II. His 1961 book, The City in History, received the National Book Award.

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