Grand Designs The Peace Plans of the Late Renaissance

Abstract

The frustration of intellectuals who attempt to cure mankind of its follies is perennial and proverbial. Reactions to this frustration, at all times, range from resignation to revolution. In the sixteenth century resignation received philosophical expression in Neostoicism which taught the wise man how to survive in adversity and preserve his peace of mind and moral rectitude, and as an extreme example of revolutionary reaction one could cite the Munsterite attempt to establish a New Jerusalem by force. In between these two poles lies the field of utopias: literary descriptions of things as they should be, visions to be aspired to but often without a prescription as to how they are to be attained. For this weakness the absence of a precise bridge leading from reality to ideal utopias are frequently dismissed as ' 'melancholic sighs which are not calls for action. Yet not all utopists were armchair intellectuals indulging in day dreams, and one of the tantalizing aspects of the study of their visions is the attempt to deduce the means by which they hoped to realize the dream, or, in other words, what they considered to be possible agents of change. Most Renaissance utopias were blueprints for a single perfect community existing within an unreformed world. Thus their authors had to contend with the question of the relations of their ideal society with the rest of the still-imperfect world. In certain cases the problem was solved by locating the Utopian country in such a remote place that it would be cut off from the rest of civilization, hidden and protected from its evils; other utopists imagined their perfect community as strong enough to repel any invader and even, when necessary, to conquer neighbours and impose upon them the ideal way of life; and some visionaries claimed that the security of their land would be assured since its Utopian simplicity, austerity and absence of gold would deflect the envy and greed of potential enemies. Yet in none of the