PAOLO PISSAVINO

Utopia  e arco storico. Linee preliminari per un'analisi differenziale 

N. 1/1985

Summary — This essay is a part of large scale inquiry into utopian thought, and it is devoted, with particular attention to the Italian political trends during the XVIth and XVIIth centuries. Several times in this essay the Author has stressed that it must be counted as a sort of first approximation of the subject he treats, and he tried to demonstrate that previous and traditional discussion of the subject (Mannheim, Firpo, Baczko) must be used only as a starting point for the research.

The focus of the present essay is that the single rubric "utopia" is not adequate to describe the range of diverse assumptions, intellectual attitudes related to " ideal state ", and it is necessary to study also other imagines of the city (Venice, architectural planning) to understand the changeable features of "utopia ". In fact, the Author considers not only the usually quoted texts, but he studies others — Paruta, Caimo, Croce, Ruzante — that give a proper hint of the plurality of vision discernible within the confines of the ideal state and utopian tradition.

Considerations of the long term problem of the utopia thought have revealed that particular features and intellectual attitudes discernible within texts written during the XVIth and XVIIth centuries are present in other utopian texts (dystopie and Nozick), written in the XXth century.

The method the Author used to study and applied to the utopian tradition is "arco storico". In spite of its formulation, the "arco storico" is the period 1400-1900 — in this period we can see the political expansion of the modern state — as a frame of relationships of several modal figure describing the political space, and it is also possible to study the permanency of genetic features. In this way, the Author points out several of the directions which he hopes future research might take, while offering a system of suggestions on how the picture he has drawn might be supplemented in various details and modified in others.