Utopia is classically defined as both a no-place and a good place. Its primary determination is spatial: utopia appears as an elsewhere, set apart from existing reality. Time, by contrast, has often been treated as secondary or even absent. Influential interpretations, most notably those of Reinhart Koselleck and Bronisław Baczko, argue that utopian thought becomes temporal when it projects itself into the future and aligns with broader transformations of Enlightenment political imagination. Suc…
Read moreUtopia is classically defined as both a no-place and a good place. Its primary determination is spatial: utopia appears as an elsewhere, set apart from existing reality. Time, by contrast, has often been treated as secondary or even absent. Influential interpretations, most notably those of Reinhart Koselleck and Bronisław Baczko, argue that utopian thought becomes temporal when it projects itself into the future and aligns with broader transformations of Enlightenment political imagination. Such readings risk imposing a linear narrative on a heterogeneous corpus. By analysing selected eighteenth-century French utopian texts, this article challenges the idea of a unidirectional process of temporalisation. It demonstrates instead that utopian writing mobilises distinct temporal orientations: the past as a critical elsewhere in Fénelon’s Telemachus (1699) and Terrasson’s Sethos (1731); the future as a mode of distance rather than a horizon of realisation in Mercier’s L’An 2440 (1771); and cyclical temporality in Tiphaigne de La Roche’s Histoire des Galligènes (1765). The article thus proposes a plural and non-linear conception of utopian time, in which past, present, and future are intertwined. This perspective refines the historiography of eighteenth-century utopias while contributing to broader theoretical debates on the relationship between time and utopia.
