Reproductive Utopias and Dystopias: More, Campanella, Bacon and Huxley

Our reproductive imaginaries have changed considerably in the XX century. This cultural change can be described as a transition from Utopia to Dystopia. Plato imagined that in his perfect State women and children were in common, and that adequately matched couples would yield a perfect breed. On the contrary, Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) is based on a modern liberal view of the family, where divorce is allowed and relationships are free. Tommaso Campanella’s The City of the Sun (1602) understands relationships exactly in terms of a eugenic policy. Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626) also conceives of generation as a public good. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1934) creates a vision of reproduction as a total nightmare. The whole process of reproduction has been taken into control by an ideology. We must distinguish liberal utopias from totalitarian ones, which evolve into dystopias.