Introduction

Abstract

Utopia, the search for the good society, or at least a much improved one; and science, the pursuit of knowledge, both as an end in itself and for the betterment of human life. Surely the two should go together? And so they have done, according to many utopian scholars, from the seventeenth-century scientific revolution onwards. For Gregory Claeys, utopia ‘has come increasingly to rely on science, to the extent that the two are inextricably intertwined and scientific progress has emerged as the quintessential ideology of modernity’.² M.I. Finley observes that ancient and early modern utopias took scarcity for granted and therefore had to stress ‘simplicity, the curbing of wants, asceticism, and a static society’; but then came ‘the release of new sources of energy and with it a flood of technological Utopian imagination’.³

The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.

Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis (1627)¹