The potentialities of utopia: the case of Baruch Spinoza

Abstract

The hypothesis of this paper is that the critical function of utopia has changed since the publication of the work of the same name by Moro since, if for him the exercise of devising an ideal political community sought to question the status quo, the following decades and centuries will show that the concept of utopia will become polemical and pejorative, disqualifying those projects that attempt to modify the current state of affairs. The distinction between the author's intention when creating a term and writing a work, and the meaning that the term later acquired can only be addressed through methodological precautions without which, as we will finally see in the case of Spinoza’s thought, ideas are often easily qualified with anachronistic and inaccurate concepts.