Utopia is an imaginative exercise associated with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. More wrote in 1516, Campanella in 1602, Bacon in 1623, Harrington in 1656. These centuries were the early centuries of what the geographer Mackinder in 1904 called the 'Columban' age. By this he meant the age which began with the conscious and continuous attempt to know the world as an actual whole, through travel, trade and conquest, and which ended when the world was finally known as a whole: when the world became a fixed or steady-state system, which he thought had happened in around his own time, that of the late nineteenth century.

Here, in the spirit of world-historical systematisation, we can extend what Mackinder did for one era forwards and backwards to distinguish three distinct eras in world history, which will here be called the Alexandrian age, the Columbian age and the Scottian age. There is undoubted bias in this, as there is, as Kierkegaard saw, in all attempts to see the history of anything, let alone the world, as a whole. But, despite an English bias, each of the names can be justified: each figure--Alexander, Columbus, Scott--was symbolic of the age, even embodied its greatest aspirations, and displayed its greatest weaknesses. But even if others prefer their biases to be observed in whatever names they would rather choose, the division of these three ages far exceeds any significance the names may be supposed to have.
The ALEXANDRIAN age is the age of all humanity until the end of the fifteenth century. It is the age which includes the dispersion of humanity around the world between eighty and fifteen thousand years ago, the succession of the technologies associated with the stone, bronze and iron ages, the emergence of language, writing and a literature which formalised the inheritance of the imaginative generalisations which are the elements of human thought, the domestication of plants and animals, and the foundation of villages, cities and finally empires--all of which distinguished themselves from the other and, in so doing, through literature, enabled history itself to be written for the first time. This age is named after Alexander because he embodied the apparently purposeless ambition to extend the boundaries of the known world, the oikoumene, so it became the same as the entire world. He conquered the Persian empire, carried Greek culture as far as Egypt and Bactria, was only held back from crossing the Indus by his weary followers, and dreamed on his deathbed it is said, of knowing and conquering north Africa and Spain. But he lacked an orientation: he did not know, we may suppose, how much greater the actual world (soon to be measured by Eratosthenes and other geometers) was than his known world.
Columbus had such an orientation, and knew he was circumnavigating the world from east to west in the direction of Asia. He had a conception of the spherical earth as the entire world. The COLUMBIAN age is therefore the age of the extension of knowledge and conquest from one point of origin outward to accommodate the whole world. Until the late fifteenth century, all civilisations had been either nomadic, potamic or thalassic: that is, they were established on pasture, rivers or inland seas. Each civilisation was local, and yet supposed itself in some sense to be the world, or at least a singularly important world. The great civilisations of the old world, the Chinese, Indian, Mesopotamian and Egyptian, formed a periphery around a vast waterless swathe of pasture, steppe and desert from which the essentially unhistorical barbarians emerged. Histories and geographies were emanations of civilisation, and local in origin: and what lay beyond the boundaries of their local worlds was unknown, a chaos, disordered. But with Columbus, an era of oceanic travel began. The great open seas, which formerly were feared, were now crossed. This is the age of sea empires, of colonies, of world trade, of world wars: of sails, maps, charts, books. The maps were drawn, year by year, and shaded in, until only darkest Africa (whitest on the maps) remained. Ships linked the coasts of the world from the late fifteenth century onwards; and then trains linked the coasts of the world to the great continental plains, rendering them navigable, shortening time, forcing cosmopolitanisation inward from the seas. As Mackinder said, the Columbian age ended when the world was fully known, fully ordered, fully claimed. There was no longer an old world and a new; but one world. And so the point of origin--Europe--was lost, or no longer required. There was no longer a point of origin, but now just a whole.
The SCOTTIAN age is the age of intensive activity within a fully known, conquered and claimed world. Not only ships and trains but aeroplanes link the world's cities. It is the age of satellites, of television, of the internet. There is no longer any unknown for myth to play on. Everything is known; and so the unknown has been forced out to extremes: to the extreme of subatomic particularities, or to the extreme of astronomical immensities, or to the extreme of existential indeterminacies. It is named after Scott of the Antarctic, because his attempt to reach the south pole was the wholly arbitrary determination to seek out something which had not been sought before. Alexander sought whatever he could, for he knew not what there was; Columbus sought the new world; and Scott sought finality, as it seemed, in attempting to reach the end of the earth. And if Scott is preferred to Amundsen as symbolic of this age, this is because Scott, like Alexander and Columbus, failed: his achievement is the more symbolic, because it was an aspiration rather than a realisation. Alexander, who had purpose without orientation, wanted to conquer the world: and did not. Columbus, who had both orientation and purpose, wanted to reach Asia: and did not. Scott, who had orientation without purpose, wanted to reach the southernmost point of the world first: and did not. Alexander had no definite purpose; Columbus had a definite purpose; and Scott had an arbitrary purpose: so his arbitrary purpose can stand as expressing as well as can be expressed the arbitrarily intensive nature of the activity carried out by humans on this fully known earth. Some might suggest this third age should be called the Wrightian or Wilsonian or Armstrongian age, but, for the moment, the apparent, or low-level, conquest of the air has not significantly changed anything except the immediacy of the world as it encounters itself; the attempt to seek world peace has not led to a revolution in human experience in itself; and the conquest of space, or, more realistically, the successful achievement of elaborate but limited enterprises beyond the limits of the earth's atmosphere, has not yet suggested what revolution might yet come from that first step. For the moment, our activity on earth is not extensive in the Scottian age, but intensive. And we are more aware of limitation, of failure, of the hybris involved in attempting anything at all.
Utopian thinking has to be located within these ages. Utopias of the Alexandrian age were mythical: they were not nowhere. Perhaps they were depictions of golden ages, of foreign peoples, or of long lost superior civilisations over the sea, to the east or west. Utopias of the Columbian age--that is, utopias proper--were utopias which were deliberate fictions, conjectures, which occupied the imaginative boundary between the known and the unknown. There were worlds out there, new worlds, and amongst the eventually known novus orbis, there might well be worlds which could, if theorised, if seen, lend us their wisdom. These utopias were possible, as sketched in advance of the disillusionment of actual discovery, and were exemplary. They were not likely, or expected: they were projections of a sense of possibility into the gradually demystified unknown. Later, once the world was more or less known, at least known in its coasts, by the eighteenth century, the enthusiasm for utopia as a literary art was gone. And then Hegel could write that utopias were the 'setting up of a world beyond which exists God knows where--or, rather, of which we can very well say that we know where it exists, namely in the errors of a one-sided and empty ratiocination'. But Hegel wrote in the full maturity of the Columbian age; however, a century on, the arrival of the universally extensive but otherwise intensive Scottian age encouraged a revival of utopian literature, although now its tendency was to drift into satire, idealism or science fiction. Utopia in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and since, tended to suggest that these other worlds were in the centre of the earth, or in the future, or in the darkest (or most iridescent) chords of the inner soul.
Utopia was of its time: the early Columbian era. No amount of wishful thinking will revive this now antique form. There were literatures about unknown, superior worlds before and after, but it is only when humans were encircling the globe and not yet wholly sure about what they were about to find that utopian literature had real force. It operated on the imaginative possibilities awoken by imminent discovery; and once the actual discoveries were completed, this literature was worthless, abandoned as a genre, now only a historical curiosity belonging of a former age. Modern, or Scottian, utopias have nothing in common with these early Columbian utopias: they are, simply, wishful thinking conditioned by its emergence into a wholly different world. They are utopias thrust out of space into other dimensions, even other universes: they lack the possibility which made utopia what it was. For a proper, Columbian, utopia to exist, it had to be possible or even probable that it existed--and also it had to be inevitable, given that possibility, that it would be encountered, on earth, by humans, soon.

James Alexander, professor of political theory at Bilkent University in Ankara, is author of the forthcoming Shaw's Controversial Socialism.