In medieval Europe, poor people cheered themselves up by telling stories about the land of Cockaigne, where rivers flowed with wine, churches were made of puddings and it rained delicious fluffy cheese. Here was a fantasy of sensual excess, a caricature of the peasant dream of material abundance to keep you going through the dark ages.
Not all utopias have been quite so big on the pleasures of the belly. Indeed, as Niall Kishtainy demonstrates in this glorious book, the dreamers and schemers who conjure up ideal future states tend to downplay consumption on principle. The goal of utopians throughout history, from Thomas More and William Morris all the way up to Extinction Rebellion, has been for people to have as much as they need – not just food but housing, education and fresh air – and no more. Taking extra creates scarcity for someone else, and that is not the utopian way.
Kishtainy starts his narrative with More, whose 1516 text Utopia gave its name to a whole genre. In More’s book, a traveller called Raphael reports on his recent travels to an island Eden where men and women spend their days reading, farming, crafting and being gently content. The rivers may not run with wine, but there’s no need, since drunkenness and gluttony are off the menu too.
More wrote Utopia (a pun in Greek, meaning “no place” but sounding very similar to “good place”) in order to throw early Tudor living conditions into sharp relief. As a successful London lawyer, he had seen first-hand how the move away from medieval governance towards sharp-elbowed individualism had left the poor and needy behind. Those who failed to prosper in this fast-commercialising city had only themselves to blame.
Not that More was encouraging his readers to pull up the cobblestones of Cheapside and start a revolution. His utopia was intended as a thought experiment rather than a plan of action. It wasn’t until more than a hundred years later that an agrarian socialist called Gerrard Winstanley set out to create a utopia on earth, specifically on the Surrey-London borders. Winstanley and his followers, known as the Diggers (not to be confused with the Levellers or the Ranters – there were a lot of one-word utopians around at the time),, cultivated a patch of scrubby land on the grounds that it was “a common Treasury to all”. Taking the Bible as his guide, Winstanley sacralised the acts of planting, reaping and manuring, turning the mindful cultivation of the soil into a principled attempt to set the earth free “from intanglements of Lords and Landlords”.
These early utopians did not generally end up with the lovely lives that they deserved. Thomas More, famously, lost his head for putting a spanner in Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon. Winstanley, by contrast, gave up digging to become a parish official, a constable and a prosperous corn trader back in the city of London. He threw in his lot with the vested interests he had spent so much energy opposing.
Winstanley’s decision may not be as much of a sellout as it sounds, though. As Kishtainy reminds us repeatedly as he follows his utopians through their communes, model villages and garden cities, creating heaven on earth can have its dark side. In the mid-20th century the British philosophers Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper spoke out against devising blueprints for ideal lives. The utopian mindset presumes a fixed and unchanging view of human nature and is often tetchy, if not downright vicious, about anyone who refuses to join in.
Both Berlin and Popper were refugees from Europe and drew a direct line from utopianism to totalitarianism, whether in the form of fascism or communism. Better, they argued, to stay with the muddle of actual living and work instead on eliminating “concrete miseries” such as poor sanitation or broken roads. Do that enough and you might well end up achieving more good than if you had insisted on promoting an ideal about which the population as a whole will never, ever agree.
• The Infinite City: Utopian Dreams on the Streets of London by Niall Kishtainy is published by William Collins (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
