Utopia as Topos of Boundaries Erosion between Private & Public Sphere

The article covers ideas of public life in ancient Greek philosophy having given rise to discussion on the necessity of separation and rapprochement of public and private spheres. This study rests upon the analysis of ‘publicness’ and ‘privacy’ in the philosophical conceptions of such authors as J. Habermas who deems ‘publicness’ as communication, and H. Arendt who refers to ‘publicness’ as the polis-based worldview. Plato’s dialogue ‘The State’, which can be deemed as the first-ever example of a utopian text, provides us with the most detailed and consistent instance of criticism of the private sphere, the necessity to merge it into public life to create society. Only in this way could society become a model of an ideal polis leading to the common good. The utopism of Plato’s pattern determines characteristics of the entire utopian genre arising from the idea of the individual merging with the state, and the private sphere merging into the public sphere. Plato’s ideal polis is contrasted with the concepts of the state formed by Modern Age liberal thought, which have largely determined modern views on the division of these spheres, leading to a revision of the utopian projects and a change in the relationship between the private and the public therein. A comparison of various utopian texts results in finding out that the utopian idea of the refusal of the private sphere of life in favour of serving the common good contradicts the modern ideal of freedom, which is the reason for its criticism and for the increasing number of texts with an anti-utopian character.