SOURCE: A chapter from The Story of Utopias, Boni and Liveright, 1922. Reprint by The Viking Press, 1962, pp. 29-55.

In the following essay, Mumford discusses the origins of the concept of Utopia in ancient Greece, focusing on Plato's conception of the ideal city in the Republic.

Before the great empires of Rome and Macedonia began to spread their camps through the length and breadth of the Mediterranean world, there was a time when the vision of an ideal city seems to have been uppermost in the minds of a good many men. Just as the wide expanse of unsettled territory in America caused the people of eighteenth century Europe to think of building a civilization in which the errors and vices and superstitions of the old world might be left behind, so the sparsely settled coasts of Italy, Sicily, and the Aegean Islands, and the shores of the Black...