The Nature of Utopia

Utopia and utopianism are words to have been born simultaneously with man’s power of thinking. There have also been many thinkerys who have deliberated over and written about an imaginary city with a perfect social and political system at a golden age in a desirable life. At any rate, utopia must be an ideal place imagined like ‘Paradise’ which does not really exist on the earth. In Persian, utopia means “a city we do not know where it is”, since it is taken as an abstract word made and polished in the mind, a place that has not been realized yet.The term ‘utopia’ was first coined in the 16th century and used afterwards. In the following centuries, some antiutopian writers like Huxley arose and some critics such as Pauper appeared to oppose the idea of the “perfect city” to come into come into being or to be true.Utopia and Ideology, which is the manner of thinking about a desirable economic, political system in real life, are in contradiction. Ideology basically explains the existent system but utopia negates such a real physical system.Utopianism has paid much attention to most of human aspects of life such as family relations, possession of things, consumption of goods and food, organization of political life, religious beliefs and others. But many of its plannings are in contradiction with one another since they do not have identical characteristics. However, by studying different utopias, we can come to the conclusion that although, their characteristics seem to be different, some common concepts in utopias link them together. Such common concepts can be named as justice orientation, low-centeredness, general connection, peace seeking, etc…