There will not be one kind of community existing and one kind of life led in utopia. Utopia will consist of utopias, of many different and divergent communities in which people lead different kinds of lives under different institutions. Some kinds of communities will be more attractive to most than others; communities will wax and wane. People will leave some for others or spend their whole lives in one. Utopia is a framework for utopias, a place where people are at liberty to join together voluntarily to pursue and attempt to realize their own vision of the good life in the ideal community but where no one can impose his own utopian vision upon others.
Les utopies ne sont souvent que des verites prematuriees=--Utopias are often only premature truths.
Beneath the social construction, that complicated marvel of a structure, there are excavations of all sorts. There is the religious mine, the philosophical mine, the economic mine, the revolutionary mine. Such and such a pick-axe with the idea, such a pick with ciphers. Such another with wrath. People hail and answer each other from one catacomb to another. Utopias travel about underground, in the pipes. There they branch out in every direction. They sometimes meet, and fraternize there. Jean-Jacques lends his pick to Diogenes, who lends him his lantern. Sometimes they enter into combat there. Calvin seizes Socinius by the hair. But nothing arrests nor interrupts the tension of all these energies toward the goal, and the vast, simultaneous activity, which goes and comes, mounts, descends, and mounts again in these obscurities, and which immense unknown swarming slowly transforms the top and the bottom and the inside and the outside. Society hardly even suspects this digging which leaves its surface intact and changes its bowels. There are as many different subterranean stages as there are varying works, as there are extractions. What emerges from these deep excavations? The future.
Though up till the beginning of the year 1880 he did not cease to give some attention to state affairs, the king's interests lay in quite other spheres. His personal idiosyncrasies had, in fact, developed meanwhile in a most unhappy direction. His enthusiasm for all that is beautiful soon led him into dangerous bypaths. It found its most innocent expression in the earliest years of his reign when he formed an intimate friendship with Richard Wagner, whom from May 1864 to December 1865 he had constantly in his company. Louis was entirely possessed by the soaring ideas of the master, and was energetic in their realization. He not only established Wagner's material position at the moment by paying 18,000 gulden of debts for him and granting him a yearly income of 4000 gulden (afterwards increased to 8000), but he also proceeded to realize the ambitious artistic plans of the master. A series of brilliant model performances of the Wagnerian music-dramas was instituted in Munich under the personal patronage of the king, and when the further plan of erecting a great festival theatre in Munich for the performance of Wagner's "music of the future" broke down in the face of the passive resistance of the local circles interested, the royal enthusiast conceived the idea of building at Bayreuth, according to Wagner's new principles, a theatre worthy of the music-dramas. For a time Louis was entirely under Wagner's influence, the fantastic tendencies of whose art cast a spell over him, and there is extant a series of emotional letters of the king to Wagner. Wagner, on the whole, used his influence in artistic and not in political affairs.[1] In spite of this the opposition to him became permanent. Public opinion in Bavaria for the most part turned against him. He was attacked for his foreign origin, his extravagance, his intrigues, his artistic utopias, and last but by no means least, for his unwholesome influence over the king. Louis in the end was compelled to give him up. But the relations between king and artist were by no means at an end. In face of the war which was imminent in 1866, and in the midst of the preparation for war, the king hastened in May to Triebschen, near Lucerne, in order to see Wagner again.[2] In 1868 they were seen together in public for the last time at the festival performances in Munich. In 1876 Wagner's _Ring des Nibelungen_ was performed for the first time at Bayreuth in the presence of the king. Later, in 1881, the king formed a similar friendship with Joseph Kainz the actor, but it soon came to an end. In January 1867 the young king became betrothed to Duchess Sophie of Bavaria (afterwards Duchesse d'Alençon), daughter of Duke Max and sister of the empress of Austria; but the betrothal was dissolved in October of the same year. Entry: LOUIS
These were, however, only slight beginnings, general forecasts of a coming line of thought, and Montesquieu's remarks on laws and legal customs read now almost as if they were meant to serve as materials for social Utopias, although they were by no means conceived in this sense. At this distance of time we cannot help perceiving how fragmentary, incomplete and uncritical his notions of the facts of legal history were, and how strongly his thought was biased by didactic considerations, by the wish to teach his contemporaries what politics and law should be. Entry: 1
The book brought its author more than literary glory. In 1689 Fénelon was gazetted tutor to the duke of Burgundy, eldest son of the dauphin, and eventual heir to the crown. The character of this strange prince has been drawn once for all by Saint-Simon. Shortly it may be said that he was essentially a mass of contradictions--brilliant, passionate to the point of mania, but utterly weak and unstable, capable of developing into a saint or a monster, but quite incapable of becoming an ordinary human being. Fénelon assailed him on the religious side, and managed to transform him into a devotee, exceedingly affectionate, earnest and religious, but woefully lacking in tact and common sense. In justice, however, it should be added that his health was being steadily undermined by a mysterious internal complaint, and that Fénelon's tutorship came to an end on his disgrace in 1697, before the pupil was fifteen. The abiding result of his tutorship is a code of carefully graduated moral lessons--the _Fables_, the _Dialogues of the Dead_ (a series of imaginary conversations between departed heroes), and finally _Télémaque_, where the adventures of the son of Ulysses in search of a father are made into a political novel with a purpose. Not, indeed, that Fénelon meant his book to be the literal paper Constitution some of his contemporaries thought it. Like other Utopias, it is an easy-going compromise between dreams and possibilities. Its one object was to broaden Burgundy's mind, and ever keep before his eyes the "great and holy maxim that kings exist for the sake of their subjects, not subjects for the sake of kings." Here and there Fénelon carries his philanthropy to lengths curiously prophetic of the age of Rousseau--fervid denunciation of war, belief in nature and fraternity of nations. And he has a truly 18th-century belief in the all-efficiency of institutions. Mentor proposes to "change the tastes and habits of the whole people, and build up again from the very foundations." Fénelon is on firmer ground when he leads a reaction against the "mercantile system" of Colbert, with its crushing restrictions on trade; or when he sings the praises of agriculture, in the hope of bringing back labour to the land, and thereby ensuring the physical efficiency of the race. Valuable and far-sighted as were these ideas, they fitted but ill into the scheme of a romance. Seldom was Voltaire wider of the mark than when he called _Télémaque_ a Greek poem in French prose. It is too _motivé_, too full of ingenious contrivances, to be really Greek. As, in Fénelon's own opinion, the great merit of Homer was his "amiable simplicity," so the great merit of _Télémaque_ is the art that gives to each adventure its hidden moral, to each scene some sly reflection on Versailles. Under stress of these preoccupations, however, organic unity of structure went very much to the wall, and _Télémaque_ is a grievous offender against its author's own canons of literary taste. Not that it altogether lost thereby. There is a curious richness in this prose, so full of rhythm and harmony, that breaks at every moment into verse, as it drags itself along its slow and weary way, half-fainting under an overload of epithets. And although no single feature of the book is Greek, there hangs round it a moral fragrance only to be called forth by one who had fulfilled the vow of his youth, and learnt to breathe, as purely as on "the double summit of Parnassus," the very essence of the antique. Entry: FÉNELON
When in 1326 Louis of Bavaria saw the arrival in Nuremberg of the two authors of the book dedicated to him, startled by the boldness of their political and religious theories, he was at first inclined to treat them as heretics. He soon changed his mind, however, and, admitting them to the circle of his intimates, loaded them with favours. Having become one of the chief inspirers of the imperial policy, Marsilius accompanied Louis of Bavaria to Italy, where he preached or circulated written attacks against the pope, especially at Milan, and where he came within the sight of the realization of his wildest utopias. To see a king of the Romans crowned emperor at Rome, not by the pope, but by those who claimed to be the delegates of the people (Jan. 17, 1328), to see John XXII. deposed by the head of the Empire (April 18), and a mendicant friar, Pietro de Corbara, raised by an imperial decree to the throne of St Peter (as Nicholas V.) after a sham of a popular election (May 12), all this was merely the application of principles laid down in the _Defensor pacis_. The two authors of this book played a most active part in the Roman Revolution. Marsilius, appointed imperial vicar, abused his power to persecute the clergy who had remained faithful to John XXII. In recompense for his services, he seems to have been appointed archbishop of Milan, while his collaborator, John of Jandun, obtained from Louis of Bavaria the bishopric of Ferrara. Entry: MARSILIUS