Power and Utopia in Thomas More's Utopia and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels

Abstract

Utopia is an imaginary community where everything is perfect and everyone is in peace and harmony with one another. But whether such a society can exist is still a big mystery in itself. Even so, people still believe in the possibility of its existence as they all hope for a positive future. One of the key features to keep this utopian society stable is power. However, power brings in lots of serious issues with itself. So, it is necessary to investigate how power is utilized in a utopian society. Unfortunately, even though lots of research has been conducted on the topic of utopia, few of them have tried to investigate how power is exercised in utopia. So, the primary objective of this research paper is to bring in Michel Foucault's theory of power and explore how power is exercised in the utopias of Thomas More's Utopia and Jonathon Swift's Gulliver's Travels and how the use of this power overall affects the utopian vision.