Realism and utopia (about More and Spinoza)

Abstract

Rationalism, deism, freedom and tolerance-recognition, republican pacifism: this paper offers an insight into a few themes on which a comparison (very often neglected in scholarship) between ‘utopian’ More and ‘realist’ Spinoza can be based. Notwithstanding the differences between these authors’ political philosophies, there are some significant similarities in argumentation and in the common philosophical grounds on which they are rooted: the ruins of finalism and of universal principles. Both Utopia, a reversed mirror image of society, and Spinoza’s political treatises show a deep awareness of the situatedness and relativity of culture (‘reason’) as opposed to reality: they show an awareness of the inescapable overflow of reality and the inadequacy of any political-philosophical claim on it, and yet never give up the possibility of action. Extreme realism, paradoxically enough, at the beginning of the modern era.