No escaping brutal reality: the death penalty in early modern utopias

Abstract

ABSTRACT All utopias share one crucial characteristic, namely the critique of contemporary society, either explicit or implicit. This paper shows, however, that there were limits to this critique, as well as to the compassion and imagination of utopian authors. It addresses the crimes that were punishable by death in contemporaneous communities and utopias. The descriptions of executions in utopias are compared to the types of executions in reality at the time and ancient sources. Several early modern utopias have been scrutinized closely, from Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) to Mercier’s L’An deux mille quatre cent quarante (1771) and beyond. Utopias from different countries and languages were analysed to capture the early modern European character of such attitudes. This article argues that death penalty was such an integral part of the early modern era that utopian authors, highly educated and sophisticated humanist scholars, could or would not imagine societies without capital punishment. This proves that early modern utopian writers did not look to the future, but rather to the past to find the ideal model for their societies.