Contents
Introduction by Hendrik Willem van Loon, Ph.D.
Chapter One
How the will-to-utopia causes men to live in two worlds, and how, therefore, we re-read the Story of Utopia—the other half of the Story of Mankind.
Chapter Two
How the Greeks lived in a New World, and utopia seemed just round the corner. How Plato in the Republic is chiefly concerned with what will hold the ideal city together.
Chapter Three
How something happened to utopia between Plato and Sir Thomas More; and how utopia was discovered again, along with the New World. 57
Chapter Four
How the new Humanism of the Renascence brings us within sight of Christianopolis; and how we have for the first time a glimpse of a modern utopia.
Chapter Five
How Bacon and Campanella, who have a great reputation as utopians, are little better than echoes of the men who went before them. 101
Chapter Six
How something happened in the eighteenth century which made men “furiously to think,” and how a whole group of utopias sprang out of the upturned soil of industrialism.
Chapter Seven
How some utopians have thought that a good community rested at bottom on the right division and use of land; and what sort of communities these land-animals projected.
Chapter Eight
How Étienne Cabet dreamed of a new Napoleon called Icar, and a new France called Icaria; and how his utopia, with that which Edward Bellamy shows us in Looking Backward, gives us a hint of what machinery might bring us to if the industrial organization were nationalized.
Chapter Nine
How William Morris and W. H. Hudson renew the classic tradition of utopias; and how, finally, Mr. H. G. Wells sums up and clarifies the utopias of the past, and brings them into contact with the world of the present.
Chapter Ten
How the Country House and Coketown became the utopias of the modern age; and how they made the world over in their image. 191
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
How the half-worlds must go, and how eutopia may come; and what we need before we can build Jerusalem in any green and pleasant land.