The Prophetic Prometheans: Envisioning a New World and New Earth

Theorists of utopia typically envision the radical reform of society, Meyer observes, and many have seen the radical reform of society’s natural environment as equally essential to the achievement of a perfected future. He shows that the politically progressive program of a new world and a new earth combined, the latter achieved by the human control and transformation of the earth’s surface, had notable advocates in the period and countries examined. Among them were the utopian socialists Charles Fourier and Robert Owen and their disciples. Another was the Russian theologian N.F. Fedorov, many of whose Promethean ideas the Soviet regime following the Revolution either adopted or independently reinvented as part of its official ideology.