The King of Utopia

What is a king in Utopia? A look back at Thomas More’s Utopia first reminds us that at the origin of the optima Respublica was Utopus, a most authoritarian king, who had his territory separated from the mainland to make an island, the focus of future political conjectures. Then, by considering Entretien d’un Européen avec un insulaire du royaume de Dumocala (1752), the only utopia written by a real king, we develop some insights into the metaphorical resonance of utopian kings. What emerges is that, in the end, it is the authors who should be considered the true kings of utopia. Never dethroned, they are led in the progress of History to pay ever greater attention to their own status as creators and to the nature of their fictions in the face of a world capable of both realising dreams and radically reversing their signs. his became particularly clear after the French Revolution, when it was thought that the time had come to make utopia a reality.their