Travels in Icaria

by Étienne Cabet, Leslie Roberts (Translator)

Radical in its day and long overdue in English this rare French classic traces the journey of fictional British Lord Clarisdall to the exotic island nation of Icaria. To his delight, Clarisdell discovers an ideal utopian democracy prospering amid peace and harmony. Devoid of competition or property, Icaria triumphs over the social evils of nineteeth-century capitalism.

Clarisdell's amazement is constant. Foreign affairs are conducted by the community. Money and domestic commerce do not exist. Everyone gives to and draws from the common pot in equal measure. No pastoral idyll, the narrative describes a modern machine-age economy with social policies free education, equality for the sexes, strict family/moral ties that reflect enlightenment. Crime here is a myth; arts and culture are treasured commodities.

Cabet described a totally integrated "community of goods" in the fifty years following the great revolution of 1782. Published at personal risk, his bold allegory gave birth to a real Icarian community that lasted into the late 1800s.

Genres: Politics, Philosophy, Utopia, Novels, 19th Century

250 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1840

About the author

Étienne Cabet, French philosopher and political thinker.

Reviews

[Moshtagh hosein]

ریویو نوشتن یا نمره دادن به این کتاب ، به ذهنیت خود آدم از یوتوپیا بستگی داره.

[Emily · Rating 2 out of 5]

At this point, if you’ve read one utopia you’ve read them all

[Aaron Michael]

“Similar ideas were propounded by the lawyer and journalist Étienne Cabet (1788-1856), a man of humble origins who had taken part in the 1830 Revolution and served as an oppositional deputy in the early 1830s. More determinedly egalitarian than Fourier, he envisaged in his famous Voyage to Icaria (1840) a community where everyone worked equally and received the same rewards, everyone would have the vote, and all property would be held in common. This was ‘communism’, a word he invented. The downside of his Utopian prescription was that everyone would have to obey the community's laws, and there would only be one newspaper, whose function was to express the common opinion of the community's members. The desire for liberty, he warned, was 'an error, a vice, a grave evil' born of 'violent hatred'. In 1848, despairing at ever being able to put his plans into operation in Europe, he sailed with a multinational group of followers, mostly artisans, to the United States, where they founded a number of Icarian communes. Most of them were short-lived. Their rules, which included a ban on smoking, were too strict for many of their members; even Cabet himself was expelled from one of them shortly before his death in 1856. It seemed that merely establishing Utopian communities was not enough by itself to convince humankind of their utility. Something more was needed.”
—Richard J. Evans, The Pursuit of Power