A Modern Utopia
Glossary
A
- Anticipations
- Wells's own earlier book (1901), mentioned in Chapter 1 as the first in the series of speculative writings that led to A Modern Utopia — written, in Wells's words, to "clear up the muddle" in his own mind about the social and political questions this later book develops at length.
- Related: The New Republic, Scepticism of the Instrument
C
- Cabet's Icaria
- Étienne Cabet's 1840 communist Utopia, cited in Chapter 5 as a "free store" economy in which goods become yours only after you requisition them from a central supply — one more historical model of communal property Wells weighs against Utopia's own more qualified, individually held property system.
- Related: Property in Utopia, William Morris's News from Nowhere
E
- Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward
- The 1888 American Utopia Wells credits with a "vivid sense of individual separation" more modern than Plato's or More's, but still built on a labor-credit economy Wells finds impractical enough to be worth refuting in Chapter 5's footnotes. Wells treats Bellamy as the American counterpart to William Morris — both departing from older communistic Utopias but not far enough for Wells's own individualist, kinetic model.
- Related: William Morris's News from Nowhere, The Kinetic Utopia
- Eugenics
- Chapter 8's term, borrowed from "Mr. Francis Galton," for controlling who may become a parent — in Utopia enforced not by breeding decree but by economic qualification: prospective parents must show "a minimum of personal efficiency," solvency, physical health, and freedom from transmissible disease before the State sanctions marriage and motherhood. Wells distinguishes this from cruder historical "stirpiculture" experiments, which he treats as premature and commonplace failures.
- Related: Minimum Wage as Marriage Qualification, Motherhood as State Service
F
- Francis Bacon's New Atlantis
- The unfinished 1627 Utopia Wells credits with the earliest foreshadowings of mechanical, science-driven society, though he notes even Bacon barely grasped machinery's power to reshape social organization. Its scientific institution, the "House of Salomon," is echoed in Chapter 11 by the World State's own university-style endowments for poietic research.
- Related: Plato's Republic, Poietic, Kinetic, Dull, and Base
M
- Malthus and the Population Problem
- Thomas Malthus's 1798 argument, cited in Chapter 8, that population tends to outrun the means of subsistence — the classical problem Wells says any "sound and happy World State" progressing from good to better must solve, which drives his chapter's case for economically qualified marriage and motherhood rather than unrestricted reproduction.
- Related: Eugenics, Minimum Wage as Marriage Qualification
- Minimum Wage as Marriage Qualification
- The economic threshold Utopia sets for the right to marry and have children: a man must be "in receipt of a net income above the minimum wage," of sound health, and past a minimum age before the State will sanction the marriage. Wells frames this as Utopia's practical substitute for both aristocratic breeding schemes and unregulated reproduction.
- Related: Eugenics, Motherhood as State Service
- Motherhood as State Service
- Chapter 8's proposal that childbearing and rearing be treated as "a service done, not to a particular man, but to the whole community," entitling a mother to wages above the minimum wage and to the same freedom, respect, and dignity as any state official. Since the State claims the right to forbid or sanction motherhood, Wells argues it must also support it financially, rather than leaving a woman's security dependent on marrying well.
- Related: Eugenics, Minimum Wage as Marriage Qualification
P
- Plato's Republic
- The classical forerunner Wells cites throughout as the first great Utopia — one that, like Utopia proper, "stood armed ready for defensive war" and assumed slave or lower-class labor rather than machinery, and whose scheme for breeding guardians Wells reads (via Aristotle's criticism) as treating women and children as a kind of common property.
- Related: Thomas More's Utopia, Eugenics
- Poietic, Kinetic, Dull, and Base (the Four Classes of Mind)
- Utopia's non-hereditary classification of temperament used to shape political organization: the Poietic (creative, originating minds), the Kinetic (competent minds who work within the known and accepted), the Dull ("persons of altogether inadequate imagination"), and the Base (defined not by intelligence but by a narrow, persistent selfishness of bias). The Poietic and Kinetic form "the living tissue of the State"; the Rule is designed to draw in the first two classes and screen out the latter two.
- Related: The Samurai, The Rule
- Positivism
- The philosophical outlook, associated with Auguste Comte, that the narrator says he held "without knowing it" in his early years — a purely objective, fact-focused cast of mind untroubled by subjective or introspective questions, described in Chapter 14 as his starting point before he turned to the philosophical skepticism of "Scepticism of the Instrument."
- Related: Scepticism of the Instrument
- Property in Utopia
- Utopia's middle path between private ownership and pure communism: personal effects, tools, books, and business gains a man creates remain his own, but "all natural sources of force" — coal, water power, land — are "inalienably vested" in the World State and its local authorities, which lease rather than sell them. Chapter 5 presents this as the answer to both the abuses of unrestricted private property and the impracticality of Morris's or Cabet's fully communal alternatives.
- Related: The World State, William Morris's News from Nowhere, Cabet's Icaria
R
- Race in Utopia
- Chapter 12's discussion of whether a single World State can or should absorb humanity's racial and cultural differences, framed through the general human tension between the desire for individual distinction and the desire to merge into a larger group ("aggregations"). Wells has the statesman-narrator argue that the World State must promote unifying "aggregatory ideas" while resisting narrow, exclusionary ones — a passage now read, and contested, in light of the era's racial theorizing it draws on.
- Related: The World State, The Samurai
S
- Samuel Butler's Erewhon
- The 1872 satirical Utopia Wells cites in Chapter 3 alongside More and the New Atlantis as an example of a Utopia imagined as isolated and self-protecting from outside intrusion — one of the tradition's many attempts to wall itself off, which Wells argues a genuinely modern Utopia can no longer credibly do on a shrinking, interconnected planet.
- Related: Thomas More's Utopia, Francis Bacon's New Atlantis
- Scepticism of the Instrument
- The title of Chapter 14, a reprinted 1903 philosophical paper Wells appends to the book, arguing that language and classificatory logic ("the instrument") are inherently too rigid and general to capture the unique, ever-changing particulars of real things. Wells treats this epistemological skepticism as the philosophical foundation underlying the whole book's insistence on a fluid, "kinetic" rather than fixed and systematic Utopia.
- Related: The Kinetic Utopia, Positivism
- Statute of Mortmain
- A real historical category of law restricting property from being held in perpetuity by institutions (originally the Church); Wells's Chapter 5 footnote proposes a Utopian equivalent — periodic revision of endowments — so that a dead man's wealth cannot indefinitely dictate how the living use it.
- Related: Property in Utopia
T
- The Botanist
- The narrator's earthly traveling companion into Utopia — a grave, less talkative man whose private heartbreak over a broken engagement keeps intruding on the philosophical tour. Wells uses him to test abstract utopian theorizing against one ordinary, wounded human life, and his personal crisis triggers the book's abrupt ending in Chapter 13.
- Related: The Owner of the Voice, The Utopian Double
- The Kinetic Utopia
- Wells's organizing claim in Chapter 3 that a modern Utopia must be imagined "not as a permanent state but as a hopeful stage leading to a long ascent of stages," unlike the fixed, finished perfections of Plato, More, or Bellamy. Because it stays in motion and remains capable of failure, this Utopia can absorb Darwinian change instead of freezing history at one ideal moment.
- Related: The World State, Thomas More's Utopia, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward
- The New Republic
- An idea the narrator recalls from his own world in Chapter 11 — a proposed "organisation for revolution" resembling the Samurai in spirit but never fully worked out — which Wells uses as a bridge connecting the fictional Samurai to real contemporary debates in Edwardian England about who should hold organized political power.
- Related: The Samurai, Anticipations
- The Owner of the Voice
- Wells's name for the book's narrator, introduced in Chapter 2 as a distinct persona rather than Wells himself — a philosophical professor whose "Voice" carries the argumentative, italics-free portions of the text. Wells uses this device to let the narrator argue, digress, and even be wrong without those positions being read as Wells's own final word.
- Related: The Botanist, The Kinetic Utopia
- The Rule
- The written code of self-discipline — covering diet, exercise, reading, solitude, and conduct — that anyone may voluntarily adopt to join the Samurai, and abandon at will. The narrator's double explains it was "planned to exclude the dull, to be unattractive to the base, and to direct and co-ordinate all sound citizens of good intent," deliberately excluding no lineage or race by design.
- Related: The Samurai, Poietic, Kinetic, Dull, and Base
- The Samurai
- The voluntary order of the able and disciplined who govern Utopia, open to "every physically and mentally healthy adult" who chooses to submit to its austere Rule of living rather than inheriting or buying power. Chapter 11 presents it as the deliberate historical solution to Utopia's central political problem — how to select rulers without hereditary or plutocratic privilege — and the class in whose hands "all the real power of the world resides."
- Related: The Rule, The World State, Poietic, Kinetic, Dull, and Base
- The Utopian Double
- The narrator's counterpart in Utopia — the same man, shaped by a different history — whom he meets and questions at length in Chapter 11 about the Samurai, the Rule, and the World State's governance. The device lets Wells stage Utopia's political theory as a direct dialogue rather than pure exposition, and the narrator's dread of meeting his own double becomes a source of dramatic tension resolved only late in the book.
- Related: The Samurai, The Owner of the Voice
- The World State
- Utopia's single, planet-wide political and economic order, first glimpsed in Chapter 5 through its unified coinage — no separate nations, a common language, and natural resources "inalienably vested" in public authorities rather than private hands. It is the "rising level platform on which individualities stand," the final legatee of property and the source against which all Utopian law and economics are measured.
- Related: The Kinetic Utopia, The Samurai, Property in Utopia
- Thomas More's Utopia
- The 1516 book that gave the genre its name, repeatedly invoked in Chapter 3 and Chapter 5 as the archetype of the static, finished ideal commonwealth Wells is deliberately departing from — an island of "absolute community of goods" and denied privacy that, unlike Wells's Utopia, allows for no further change or failure.
- Related: The Kinetic Utopia, Plato's Republic, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward
U
- Uitlanders
- The narrator's self-mocking term, borrowed from the contemporary term for foreign (chiefly British) settlers in the Boer republics, for himself and the botanist as outsiders newly arrived in Utopia in Chapter 4 — uncertain what they may touch, own, or do under a property and legal system not their own.
- Related: The Botanist, Property in Utopia
W
- William Morris's News from Nowhere
- The 1890 socialist Utopia Wells singles out in Chapter 3 as almost the only one with individuality and warmth rather than "handsome but characterless buildings" and generalized people — praise sharpened by Wells's own admission that were he wholly free, he too "should follow Morris to his Nowhere." Its free-store economy (goods taken, not bought) is contrasted with Utopia's regulated property system in Chapter 5.
- Related: Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, Property in Utopia