Conclusion

Abstract

This chapter returns to a consideration of the fictional element in present and past perceptions of reality. The illusory and imaginative construction of the status quo is evoked as central to More’s thinking in Utopia and in the work of James Harrington and Gerrard Winstanley. The radical and the utopian are seen as inhabiting moments when the fictions, fantasies and collective illusions sustaining the status quo become unsupportable. Reformation or transformation involved the negotiation of forms and so impinged on the early-modern period’s engagement with the living God who was seen, in some senses, as a destroyer or disturber of forms and formality. The radical and the utopian imagination, seeking to avoid the fantasies of the status quo, had to be a disciplined imagination, and utopian writing is considered as a special case in this regard. The links between the theatres of interest and social conditioning produced by radical and utopian imaginations and cultural relativism are briefly explored as is the tension between decentralising and centralising modes of adoption and implementation envisaged for these alternative worlds. The chapter concludes with some reflection on the achievement of early-modern radical and utopian writers and their alternative worlds imagined.