Negotiations at the Border of Knowledge: The Paradox of Privacy in Early Modern Utopia

Abstract

Utopianism has had a contradictory relationship with privacy since Thomas More envisioned a society without privacy and private property in Utopia (1516). Paradoxically, utopia is a private place; its isolation protects it from outside corruption. This contradiction invites an investigation of early modern conceptions of privacy in utopian literature. Given utopias’ aspiration to social harmony, what might it suggest about ideas to resolve the tensions involved in social negotiations over the boundaries of private spaces, and which individuals and knowledge should be allowed entry or be excluded? This article explores this question in two early modern utopias, The History of the Sevarambians by Denis Vairasse (1675–79) and Description of the Mighty Kingdom of Krinke Kesmes by Hendrik Smeeks (1708). I examine the meaning of privacy in these utopias by drawing on Philipp Sarasin’s approach to the history of knowledge. I explore how utopian social knowledge is constructed, how it circulated, and the material conditions of its framing in printed texts. I conclude that Vairasse and Smeeks understood the creation of knowledge from a Baconian perspective as requiring a filtered privacy that must be negotiated, defined, and protected to maintain social harmony.