Pierre Bayle e le repubbliche ideali

This essay aims to examine Pierre Bayle’s views on utopian literature. Although he did not write any utopian texts, many passages from his writings show that Bayle had read many works concerning ideal republics as well as accounts by missionaries. Utopias are often criticized by Bayle, who considered them a consequence of Platonic philosophy: according to Bayle, both utopias and Platonism share the same tendency to focus on groundless ideals, instead of understanding reality. However, Bayle also appears to think that some utopias can be useful. In his Dictionnaire historique et critique he admits that utopian works of the late 17th century, such as those of Joseph Hall, Denis Veiras and Gabriel Foigny, express controversial content in a non-scandalous way, since they refer to the remotest corners of the Earth and describe imaginary people, whose laws and religions are fictitious.