Utopia, Anti-Utopia, Dystopia

George Orwell tries to rationalize his conflicting attitudes toward Gulliver's Travels (though it is ‘a great work of art,’ its ‘world-view … just passes the test of sanity’) by positing a dichotomy between politics and literature. But what Orwell seems most uneasy about, Book Four of the Travels, is often thought of as utopian fiction; and the utopian mode, if it admits Orwell's distinction between politics and literature at all, does not admit it readily. As Northrop Frye indicates by identifying conceptions of utopia as the counterpart of theories of social contract (the latter being ‘myths’ of the origin of society, the former ‘myths’ of its telos), utopias represent normative models of social order and are therefore, in that sense, political by their very nature rather than by historical accident.

As normative models, utopias are analyzable in Kenneth Burke's terms of dialectical and ultimate order. The utopian order is dialectical in that it necessarily defines itself, at least implicitly, against a status quo; it is ultimate in so far as it purports to be not only antithetical but also superior to the status quo (that is, more or less ideal). The ratio between these two components determines the orientation of the utopia, which is satirical to the extent that dialectical outweigh ultimate considerations, visionary to the extent that the reverse is true.

Plato's Politeia (389/369 BCE) is primarily visionary. It stresses the ultimateness of the Republic, or Commonwealth, as an absolute norm; and it does so in part by rigorously subordinating or suppressing potentially ‘dialectical’ elements – notably the various notions of Justice that open Book One, the disparate levels of perception suggested in Book Seven's Allegory of the Cave, and the competing varieties of polity discussed in Book Eight – according to a logic of hierarchic supersession, whereby the higher purposes of clarifying the Platonic ideal totally subsume any satiric effect of ‘dialectical’ contrast.

Thomas More, on the other hand, relies on dialectical contrast as the inherent structuring principle of Utopia (1516) and thus attains an equilibrium of visionary and satiric impulses.