Nowhere was somewhere: How history makes utopias and how utopias make history

by Arthur E. Morgan

extremely rare,very good condition

234 pages, Unknown Binding

Published January 1, 1976

Reviews

[Lester Fisher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although not widely read, Nowhere WAS Somewhere... Two researchers take More at his word. It is quite possible, they argue, that he did meet an explorer who had encountered or heard about a pre-Columbian society in the Americas that served More as a prototype for Utopia. Arthur E. Morgan, an engineer who was chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1930s, takes the Inca Empire as the prototype (Nowhere was Somewhere: How History Makes Utopias and How Utopias Make History, University of North Carolina Press 1946), while the anthropologist Lorainne Stobbart identifies the Utopians with the Maya of the Yucatan Peninsula in present-day Mexico (Utopia: Fact or Fiction? The Evidence from the Americas, Alan Sutton 1992). I tend to believe the latter. Thomas More was a very down to earth man. Phantasy was not his genre. He did, however, have strong beliefs about social structure (for which he was beheaded by Henry VIII). It seem perfectly probable to me that the society he portrays in Utopia would have been acquired through knowledge of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, which had been underway for 17 years before More wrote Utopia.