Liberalism and Utopia
Now, obviously, the philosophy of Liberalism was developing during this time. The Liberals saw utopia differently. They believed that there could be a better world but they also recognized that satisfaction comes from the individual and that no two people achieve satisfaction the same way, so there was no one utopia for everybody. In their writings, they were very careful never to say that satisfaction was guaranteed, but instead that a better system was one in which people were given increased freedom. In this sense, the Individualists, the true Liberal philosophers, were anti-utopian; they were too realistic to expect mankind to suddenly become angelic and live in perfect harmony. This anti-utopianism is also part of our own government. The Declaration of Independence cites the pursuit of happiness as a right of man, not happiness itself; there was no guarantee.
There was another evolution which occurred in the European ideas of utopia. The first change, just discussed, was the result of the rediscovery of the Greek writers. The second change was a result of the gradual spread of industrialism in the late 1700s and 1800s. Until then, the world was almost entirely agrarian. Most people in countries around the globe farmed the land their parents had farmed, and consumed most of what they produced. Then industrialism began to spread, first in England and Western Europe, and then in America. James Watt invented his steam engine, railroads began, and there was new productivity and wealth. Where the limit of production formerly had been set by the strength of a human being working with a draft animal power, now by harnessing the energy of coal more could be accomplished, greater amounts of goods could be produced.
With all of these advances, one could imagine that bigger and better machines producing ever greater amounts were certain to be invented. Many people believed industrialism would finally allow the creation of a material heaven on Earth, and in this material heaven a higher human being would develop. People believed that men and women would become the ideal beings that political philosophers had once only envisioned.
This was a new vision of utopia, and very definitely a new vision of humankind. Sir Thomas More and other authors of the old utopian books had been describing what a perfect society would be like if people were moral. In the communities which were founded in the 1600s, people were trying to lead moral lives by living closer to a set of beliefs or moral codes. However they considered much of the rest of the world immoral; they never thought that the whole of humanity would become angelic and pure. It was only with the development of industrial utopianism in the mid 1700s that the belief in the possibility of a universal "higher man" came to exist.
The belief in the possibility, and even likelihood of the creation of a higher, more noble man seemed a logical part of a belief in progress. Man was shaping the world around him; surely he could also shape himself. People today are fairly accustomed to the growth of technology. Imagine what it would have been like 200 years ago. James Watt patented his steam engine in 1769. Richard Trevithick built the first practical steam locomotive in 1804. Robert Fulton built the first steam passenger boat in the U.S. in 1807. There was so much progress being made that it was hard not to believe that there would also be progress in improving human nature, the eventual creation of a "higher human". It was hard not to believe in this new vision of utopia in the late 1800s.
A person can't believe in a utopia, a heaven, without believing in a path to heaven, a means of getting there. In the 1800s in Europe they saw two main ways to do this. Either the world would eventually evolve into heaven and a higher man would develop naturally as part of evolution, or heaven and the higher man would have to be brought about by government.
Next: Three Paths to Utopia