Manuel, Frank E
Entry updated 13 May 2024. Tagged: Author.
(1910-2003) US academic and author, married to his collaborator Fritzie P Manuel from 1931 until his death. Some of his early work – like the various articles later assembled as The Politics of Modern Spain (1938), contain prescient analyses of the consequences of the Spanish Civil War. He was a prolific historical scholar, though it is his magnum opus, Utopian Thought in the Western World (1979) with Fritzie P Manuel, that is of most direct interest in the frame of this encyclopedia. The enormous text sophisticatedly surveys a very extensive arrays of authors and texts, within an overall framework in which Sir Thomas More is seen as the paradigm creator of a narrated, emplaced, detailedly argued Utopia; but that theoretical starting point is swathed within a remarkably enriched frame of reference.
For the Manuels, Plato is expectedly seen as central to the envisioning of any Western para-society adjacent to the world, of any imagined Zone which may provide a local habitation for cognitive reparation of that world; but their model also incorporates the less prevalent (but perhaps more intoxicating) allure of utopia as an immanence which we tap in awe. The Island (or Archipelago) where utopias are so often located may therefore either be a planned City or a sacred omphalos [for Eden and Polder see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]; or, of course, both. Through an engagingly supple narrative exposition, the several hundred thousand words of text of Utopian Thought examine Icons of utopian thought from More to unavoidable twentieth century figures like Aldous Huxley; seemingly darker writers like George Orwell and Yevgeny Zamiatin are only mentioned en passant, as the Manuels central line of thought leaves Dystopias to one side. Their demolition job on the savage intuitions of Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) captures a tendentious thinker in precarious flux, but miss the terror in his intuition that "repressive tolerance" may, in the end, imprison a species as addicted to rewards as Homo sapiens.
Estimably, the Manuels do conceive of a central aspirational urgency in the flow of utopian thinking, one that they properly argue is multiply caused. But rattling that vision of a surprisingly clement flow over the centuries is the uneasy intuition that
- Western civilization may not be able to survive long without utopian fantasies any more than individuals can exist without dreaming. . . . To cultivate wisely the ancient art of wishing as an antidote to the present saturation with the pseudoscience of prediction and the busyness of the masters of applied utopistics may be a paramount moral need of the age.
The several volumes Manuel published subsequently deal with other matters. [JC]
Frank Edward Manuel
born Boston, Massachusetts: 12 September 1910
died Boston, Massachusetts: 23 April 2003
works (highly selected)
- Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979) with Fritzie P Manuel [nonfiction: hb/nonpictorial]
works as editor
- Utopias and Utopian Thought: A Timely Appraisal (Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin, 1966) [nonfiction: anth: hb/]
- French Utopias: An Anthology of Ideal Societies (New York: The Free Press, 1966) with Fritzie P Manuel [anth: hb/]
links
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