内容简介

This is the first major collcetion of eighteenth-century British utopias.Seven tracts ,spanning the centur ,show how the image of the ideal society was used as a form of social criticism,and particularly as a means of focussing on ideas of progress and commercial deveopment.Radical and republican thinding about property ownership ,social equality, and commerce and luxury - of particular relevance to the critique of corruption in this period - coexists with nostalgic and conservative notions of the ideal hierarchical community.The introduction.which sets hese tracts in a wider conetxt of similar texts,examines their realtionship to the political thought of the period,and shows how issues and developments of key importance,from the debate surrounding the French revolution to the origins of Romanticism and early socialism,are iluminated by an understanding of the utopian tradition.