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Utopia:
The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World
The notion of an ideal society, one organized in ways that guarantee the felicity of its members, has been a staple element in human experience through all of recorded history. The details of this society — where and when it exists, how one gets to it, how it is governed, who lives in it, the ramifications of its existence — can, and do, vary radically, producing the broadest possible set of answers to the question of what constitutes the ideal.
This exhibition traces how women and men have, over the space of several thousand years of Western culture, imagined, depicted, described, and created new versions of ideal societies. It seeks to show as well that the history of these places is inseparable from the histories of the people, cultures, and periods that gave birth to them. For each individual dream is really the refracted image of a specific moment in time, an imaginary construct in which specific problems of the concrete world are resolved and happiness — that most elusive of goals — is attained.Utopia is the result of a collaborative effort between two of the world’s great libraries, the Bibliothèque nationale de France and The New York Public Library. It represents the first time that two such institutions have merged their staffs in order to produce a unified exhibition. Materials and topics included in Utopia reflect the strengths of both libraries’ collections, while representing the variety of utopian proposals and experiments in the Western world. To have included the history of Eastern utopian thought would have doubled the size of the exhibition, so that exploration has been left to others.
The exhibition is arranged chronologically. Sources, Other Worlds, and Utopia in History explore utopian thinking from its earliest sources in Antiquity and the Bible through the end of the nineteenth century. Dreams and Nightmares considers utopias and dystopias of the twentieth century. In addition, a look at how the Internet is expanding the notion of utopia may be found in Metaworlds on this website. The question before us as we look both backward and forward from this millennial threshold is whether the urge to attain the ideal society will persist and yield fruit in the centuries to come.
In the ongoing search for the ideal society, the Internet has been proposed as a "place" in which an ideal society could exist. Take the poll to help you think about and give your opinion on the Internet as a utopia.
