Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

9-2026

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

Political Science

Advisor

Robyn Marasco

Committee Members

Susan Buck-Morss

Alyson Cole

Keywords

Utopianism, Apocalpyticism, German Peasants' War, English Revolution, Thomas More, Political Theology

Abstract

Reading classic works of early modern political theory in the context of the popular uprisings that unfolded as they were written, this dissertation demonstrates that one of the most central concepts for the radical political imagination, utopia, is a product of both the philosophical and political repression of revolutionary movements. This dissertation charts the formation of the word, genre, and idea of utopia, literally ou-topos, no-place. The first English utopias—More’s Utopia (1516), Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626), and Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656)—were written in opposition to egalitarian currents by depicting them as elsewhere fictions. These works transformed ideas born of concrete struggles against private property into theoretical visions of phantasmal worlds, furnishing a new concept for the elite political imagination: utopia, a secularized version of heaven. By contrast, lower-class apocalyptic movements, which the first utopians opposed—the rebellious propagandist Simon Fish (1530), Thomas Müntzer and the German Peasants’ War (1524-1526), early anti-enclosure riots (1596, 1607), and the Diggers and Ranters (1642-1651)—refused and creatively re-narrated the terms of their domination in experimental practices of mass resistance, collective textuality, and communalism. Reading the words and deeds of the commoners who opposed the first utopians, the gesture of thought that appears adequate to the experience of mass self-emancipation is not utopia, but apocalypse, apocalypsis, literally unveiling or revelation, the sudden seeing of where we are, here, just now. I theorize this antagonism as one between “utopia from above,” an imaginative projection of an elsewhere world animated by an investment in order and containment, and “apocalypse from below,” forms of lower-class apocalypticism that prioritized revelation of the here-and-now and embodied collective action.

Pursuing a contrapuntal mode of reading, I pair each utopian author with the insurgent movement he opposed. Chapter One recasts the first appearance of the word “utopia” in More’s Utopia, interpreting the text not through its intended humanist audience but through its intentionally excluded audience, the lower classes of Europe, and situating it against More’s overlooked opposition to the German Peasants’ War and to commoner propagandist, Simon Fish. Chapter Two turns to the abundant archive of peasant practices, ordinances, territorial constitutions, prophecies, and sermons to theorize the apocalyptic forms of radical vision that animated the insurgents, expressed through what I call a “political theology of ingression.” Chapter Three situates Bacon’s New Atlantis in his role in two moments of political repression, the 1596 Oxfordshire Conspiracy of Bartholomew Steer and the 1607 Midlands Rising. The chapter reframes Bacon’s utopianism as countersubversion and as a Freudian “reaction-formation.” Chapter Four demonstrates that utopian republican, James Harrington’s, signature concepts, equality, balance, and agrarian law, were formulated against “levelling” insurgencies. Chapter Five turns to Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers of the English Civil War, whose vision of “true levelling” challenges the central premises of Harringtonian utopianism. The last chapter of the dissertation turns to the afterlife of the concepts in two twentieth century theorists of utopia and apocalypse, Ernst Bloch and Jacob Taubes. This chapter establishes a phenomenological distinction between the two concepts. Phenomenologically, I argue, utopia works through imaginative projection founded on separation in an elsewhere or the future, and apocalypse operates through embodied, deictic perception of the here and now. This view of apocalypse makes it the phenomenological figure adequate to revolutionary experience because it grounds consciousness in the present, the only place of collective action.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,  both elite utopias and lower-class apocalyptic movements fashioned new, earthly visions of the doctrine of heaven. On one side was utopia from above, elite fictions of a displaced good place, and on the other, stand lower-class demands to bring heaven to earth in the here and now (apocalypse from below), two opposing versions of what I call profane heaven. These two heavens are both earthly, returned to human use. However, as a profane heaven, utopia’s perfected earthly realm is always elsewhere, and lower-class apocalypticism locates paradise in earthly action for the common good. In drawing the distinction between utopia (from above) and apocalypse (from below) distinction, the dissertation recovers these egalitarian movements in and on their own terms, rather than through a concept forged against them.

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