Abstract

What is the difference between the earthly paradise, the Golden Age and the ideal city? This question is most important for whoever is interested in the various ways human societies have had for imagining an ideal state of perfection or social harmony. If we are not to confuse such different systems of representation as mythical thought, millenarianism and Utopia, it is absolutely necessary that we do not reduce the descriptions of an earthly paradise and a Golden Age to simple precursors of the ideal city of the Utopians. It is especially important not to call “Utopian” every representation of the ideal society, Utopia being only one— and the most, recent—of its modalities. The Utopian dream Translated by Jeanne Ferguson takes up and at the same time alters the paradisiacal and millenarian imagination: it would be difficult to believe that the passage of primitive societies to great urban civilizations, then to modern society occurred without major repercussions on the vision of these societies, that the ideal state of social perfection did not vary from one to the other.