The capacity—or the temerity—to contrive utopias

It is easy to say that those earlier utopian landscapes were rendered obsolete by changes in American society. But utopias are not supposed to be subject to the vicissitudes of history. When one of them dies, it is for an internal reason; and our two utopias, the agrarian and the romantic, died because there were no longer utopian men to inhabit them. What justified the grid and kept it valid for almost a century was the firm belief among Americans that it was possible to produce an ideal known as the Virtuous Citizen; what justified the elaborate landscaping of the romantics was the no less firmly held belief that it was possible to produce an ideal known as Man the Inhabitant of the Earth. Thoreau and Jefferson were poles apart in their definitions of human nature, but they agreed completely as to the possibility in their definitions of human nature, but they agreed completely as to the possibility of defining it; and, having one defined it, of creating a suitable environment for it.

What we have lost in the last generation is this assurance, and with it the capacity—or the temerity—to contrive utopias. It is of no use trying to resurrect the vanished forms, beautiful though they may have been; their philosophical justification has gone. All we can now do is to produce landscapes for unpredictable men, where the free and democratic intercourse of the Jeffersonian landscape can somehow be combined with the intense self-awareness of the solitary romantic. The existential landscape, without absolutes, without prototypes, devoted to change and mobility and the free confrontation of men, is already taking form around us. It has vitality, but it is neither physically beautiful nor socially just. Our American past has an invaluable lesson to teach us: a coherent, workable landscape evolves where there is a coherent definition not of man but of man’s relation to the world and to his fellow men.

John Brinckerhoff Jackson, “Jefferson, Thoreau, and After,” Landscape 15, no. 2 (Winter 1965-66): 25–27. Reprinted in Jackson, Landscape in Sight: Looking at America (New Haven: Yale UP, 1997).