DRAFT: Prosperity & "Utopia": The Moving Target :: History of Economic Growth Lecture Notes 1.5
DRAFT: Why the best-laid plans of philosophers and poets never quite survive contact with history—or the marketplace. From Arkadian simplicity to Sybaritic pleasure, what do ancient utopias teach us about the economics of “enough”? & can sufficient prosperity and technological power deliver us to the or at least a “utopia”, or can all it do is to merely sharpen our appetite for new discontents?…
I have never given this “utopia” lecture. In every course I have ever taught, it has been one single slide. Thus it has only been five minutes, a maybe a few more. It would have taken an hour. And I never had an hour.
But I wish I had, at least once.
Behind the paywall for now, as I still have hopes of revising it this summer of 2025…
1.5. Prosperity & “Utopia”: The Moving Target
In the process of economic growth, as we visionaries of a future science-based utopia see it, technological research and development is supposed to enlarge the storehouse of human capabilities to master nature and productively organize ourselves, and so lead us towards if not to peace, prosperity and utopia.
But what kind of society would a “utopia” be?
We need references: things we can point to. We need societies if which we can say: if only things were like they were in that society, only if it were more like itself. They can, perhaps, serve as intellectual bencharks—orienting us for dreams that history never delivered.
Spoiler: the answer is as complicated as human desire itself. But we can at least peer into the gap between myth and reality, and asks whether economic growth is the bridge or the barrier to the good life.
1.5.1. Prosperity & “Utopia”: Sparte, Arkadia, & Sybaris
What, exactly, do we mean when we invoke “utopia”? Is it a society defined by perfect order, where every individual is meticulously trained and deployed for their social role, regardless of whether they regard what they experience as personal happiness?
If so, you are describing what the ancient Hellenes imagined as “Sparte.”
In the view of it as seen from classical Hellas’s city of the Athenai, Sparte, the city that was the unwalled grouped villages of the Lakedaimonai, was less a real place than a rhetorical device—a foil constructed by Athenian aristocrats to criticize what they saw as the chaos and decadence of their own city: actual historical Sparte bore only a passing resemblance to this idealized version. The myth served a polemical function more than it did a descriptive one. Do not mistake the Athenian-aristocratic image for the actual on-the-ground reality of life in Laconia, in southern Greece’s Eurotas Valley underneath Mount Taygetos.
The Spartan model of utopia is not about maximizing individual flourishing or personal fulfillment. Rather, it prioritizes collective discipline, martial prowess, and the subordination of individual desires to the needs of the state. The “well-ordered society” here is one in which usefulness and conformity are elevated above all else, and where the lives of citizens—at least the male citizens, women and helots need not apply—are orchestrated in service of a higher communal goal.
If you find yourself drawn to visions of utopia that emphasize structure, hierarchy, and an almost militaristic sense of purpose, you are in distinguished company: Platon’s Politeia, for example, is shot through with Spartan undertones. But before you sign up for the agoge, recall that this vision of order comes at the expense of personal liberty and, often, of basic human joy. The “Sparte” archetype is a cautionary tale as much as a blueprint—a reminder that the pursuit of order, taken to its logical extreme, may crowd out the very things that make life worth living.
(A parenthesis: Why do I say “city of the Athenai”, “Sparte”, “Platon”, “Politeia”, and so forth; rather than “Athens”, “Sparta”, “Plato”, and “Republic”? Because the second set of words are far too familiar to us. We think that they are part of our culture. Maybe mid-1950s Oxford or Harvard students or professors. People like us. They were not. Really, they were not. We need, if we are to see clearly what they were, to distance themselves from us: to make them strangers to us and estranged from us. That is what I am trying to do here.)
Suppose your vision of utopia is not one of rigid order, but rather of people living contentedly in harmony with their environment, unburdened by the pursuit of luxury or excess?
This is the Arkadian ideal—a notion popularized by Virgil, who romanticized a rural Greek backwater into a symbol of pastoral simplicity and happiness. Arkadia, in the classical imagination, was a land where shepherds played their pipes, communities were egalitarian, and existence was untroubled by the corrupting influences of wealth and ambition.
Of course, the historical reality was rather more prosaic: the actual Arkadia was a marginal, mountainous region of Greece, so poor and infertile that it was left largely alone by its more powerful neighbors. Its peace was less the product of a philosophical commitment to moderation than of simple geographic and economic irrelevance. Yet for millennia now, Arkadia has served as a canvas onto which intellectuals project their fantasies of the “natural” good life—a society where happiness comes not from abundance, but from living in accordance with one’s nature, accepting limits, and eschewing the rat race of status and consumption.
In our era of relentless striving and engineered scarcity, the Arcadian model stands as a quietly subversive alternative: utopia as sufficiency, not surplus; as contentment, not conquest. But, as ever, one should be wary of mistaking the myth for the reality.
Are all material desires for comfort, entertainment, and amusement instantly and completely satisfied?
