Formal Utopia/Informal Millennium: The Struggle Between Form and Substance as a Context for Seventeenth-Century Utopianism

Abstract

In the early-modern period, utopian thinking faced a much more pervasive approach to envisaging the transformation of politics and society—the belief in a coming, if not imminent, millennium. As this chapter explains, the antithesis between them hinged round concepts of formality and informality. Formality has to be seen as essential to the meaning and embodiment of liberty and authority, as well as their reconciliation, in the period. Utopia, as an embodiment of the aspiration to socio-political order, embraced formality and its conception of freedom. Powerful currents of millennialism and providentialism sought to free God’s instruments from formality, seen as a barrier to or distraction from the essence of true religion, close to hypocrisy and idolatry.