I + 

There is a gap in the Utopian tradition between the seventeenth century and the nineteenth. Utopia, the place that must be built, faded into no-man’s land, the spot to which one might escape; and the utopias of Denis Vayrasse and Simon Berington and the other romancers of this in-between period are in the line of Robinson Crusoe rather than The Republic. + 

One finds the clue to this lapse in Tiphaigne de la Roche’s Giphantia, a sketch of what was and what is and what will be, and in particular, an inquiry into the “Babylonian” mode of life. The author of Giphantia tells a parable about Sophia, the incarnation of Wisdom, who rejects the offers of the spendthrift, the merchant, the soldier, and the student, and accepts the suit of a diffident fellow who had retired in solitude to the country, to spend his days like a cultivated gentleman. One remembers the way in which Montaigne spent his declining years; one remembers Voltaire; and one sees how deeply the ideal of Robinson Crusoe⁠—a cultivated Robinson Crusoe, surrounded with books and beyond the reach of any king and court⁠—colored the deepest aspirations of this period. Rousseau, writing about the corrupting influence of the arts and sciences, and Chateaubriand, seeking the noble savage in the American wilderness and finding him in his own bosom⁠—these men struck the dominating note of the eighteenth century. In a society that was already painfully artificial and “arranged” the institutes of Lycurgus and Utopus must have seemed as repressive as those of Louis XIV. So almost two centuries pass before we find any fresh regions to explore in Utopia. + 