Bacon’s utopia was more patriarchal and market-driven than prior communal utopias.

Evidence

In the early seventeenth century, two utopian plans, Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun (1602) and Johann Valentin Andreä’s Christianopolis (1619), articulated a philosophy of communal sharing that responded to the interests of artisans and the poor for a more egalitarian distribution of wealth based on an original harmony between people and nature. They contrast markedly with a third utopia, The New Atlantis of Francis Bacon (1627), which undermined and transformed the concept of an organic utopian community. Yet historians have largely emphasized the similarity of the three works for the emergence of modern science and educational theory. As we shall see later, Bacon’s ideas were rooted in an emerging market economy that tended to widen the gap between upper and lower social classes by concentrating more wealth in the hands of merchants, clothiers, entrepreneurial adventurers, and yeomen farmers through the exploitation and alteration of nature for the sake of progress. Andreä’s and Campanella’s utopian communities postulated a more egalitarian view of woman and man, artisan and master, than Bacon’s more hierarchical and patriarchal community. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 365

Categorization

• XREF: Challenges the familiar frame of Bacon solely as scientific method founder; connects to reader’s ecofeminist strand on how Bacon’s New Atlantis encoded gendered hierarchy. — connects to: Bacon rendered women nearly invisible in his ideal patriarchal utopia. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 689; Bacon’s science reinforced early capitalism’s growth and progress tendencies — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 740
• QUESTION: Worth verifying whether Merchant develops the Bacon-versus-Andreä/Campanella egalitarianism contrast with specifics on women’s roles later.

Broader Connections

• Bacon rendered women nearly invisible in his ideal patriarchal utopia. #corroborates (0.92) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 689
• Bacon’s science reinforced early capitalism’s growth and progress tendencies #expands (0.75) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 740