Utopia and State Power

Abstract

This chapter surveys how utopian socialists and revolutionary societies focused their energies on the boundaries between public and private life. It first surveys a series of utopian writers—Plato, Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Charles Fourier, and Edward Bellamy—to see how their ideal societies wanted to reshape the relationship between families and the community, as well as relationships within families themselves. The chapter then looks at how private life fared under revolutionary regimes such as Russia under the Soviet Union and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. By looking at how these states sought to undermine privacy and private life, we can see how those costs were felt.