There was a time when the lion and the lamb laid down…
Not always the sharpest tool in the box, I’ve only just realised that the Rousseauean idea of a “noble savage” where everyone lives in harmony with nature is a variation of the old ‘Atlantis’/Shangri-La myth of a utopia where government was uncorrupt, people lived in harmony with each other. One is a rural idyll, one a sort of ‘urban’ (though a vastly different meaning of the word to what we have now) idyll.
Best book I read on utopias and “back to nature” – King Fisher Lives by Julian Rathbone.
I have an awesome book on utopias published in England… can’t find the date, early 80s?
Utopia, by Ian Todd and Michael Wheeler. Full of fascinating illustrations. I keep going back to it.