By Itxu Díaz

Written by Itxu Díaz

For a long time, it has been commonly accepted that the fall of the Berlin Wall symbolized the end of the century of utopianism. Social experimentation seemed to have hit rock bottom with the collapse of the Soviet Union, sinking into blood and misery as it leapt from written theory to real life. Perhaps we were mistaken. Utopianism, the dream of a happy world, was merely shedding its skin in secret, much like what Nicolás Gómez Dávila said about stupidity: it “changes its subject in every era so it won’t be recognized.” Though the methods may have evolved, the victim remains the same today as it was three hundred years ago: individual freedom.

Much of this utopianism can be traced back to the Age of Enlightenment’s fantasies about perfecting society. Although largely unknown today, the French author Étienne-Gabriel Morelly is particularly representative of this tendency. Today he is forgotten partly because his utopian theories are now overshadowed by the more famous communist ideologues, and partly because his central work was anonymous and falsely attributed for centuries to Diderot, who, in any case, did nothing to deny the attribution and even tried to capitalize on it. The work in question is titled Code of Nature, Or, The True Spirit of Laws. Morelly, of whose biography we know almost nothing, had published Floating Islands, or the Basiliad (1753), an allegorical novel depicting a society founded on the precepts of communism. The backlash against Basiliad was so fierce and widespread that just two years later, the author responded to his critics with Code of Nature, an essay in which he dogmatically laid out the theoretical framework glimpsed in the fiction of his novel. In a way, it could be seen as a user manual for bringing the utopian vision of Basiliad to life.

Morelly thus became the first to codify the communist utopia into enthusiastic law, and the result, viewed through the lens of 2025, is chilling—not for its utopianism, but for the number of parallels we can draw between his totalitarian roadmap and the thinking and policies of our modern Western societies in the twenty-first century. I suspect we’ve also been underestimating Morelly’s importance in the gestation of the more radical strands of the Enlightenment.

Eighteenth-century authors who fought against private property broadly fall into two groups. Some, like Rousseau or Diderot, attacked the social order underpinning property but stopped short of fully rejecting it, while others, like Morelly or Mably, adhered blindly to communist principles. Morelly in particular believed in the natural goodness of man and attributed all evils and deviations to greed. And, as you might guess, for him, the sole cause of greed was the existence of private property.

What was novel about Morelly’s utopian Code of Nature was his determination to build the communist system from a moral theory, as well as his crafting of a pragmatic plan for the birth of a regenerated society where men could once again be happy as they were in their primitive origins, before private property. That plan consists of the “fundamental and sacred laws that uproot vices and all societal ills.”

Remarkably, his scheme for revolutionizing law bears a certain similarity to latter-day utopian plans, such as the United Nations’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Swap “sustainable development” for “collective happiness,” and you’ll see that three hundred years later, we’re more or less in the same place. And it’s not just the 2030 Agenda. What’s been called “wokeism” advocates for strong state intervention to correct historical injustices through laws, quotas, or policies aimed at repairing historical harm or restoring what was theoretically stolen from certain groups. The goal is the same: to march toward a happy world without inequalities.

Like the radical Enlightenment, contemporary woke ideology, whose seams have recently begun to fray, also originates from the notion that traditional structures—capitalism, the family, gender, individual freedom, or meritocracy—are the root of all ills, namely, artificial inequalities that must be eradicated. In both cases, the ideal is a happy society where differences, whether material, biological, identity-based, or even in talent, do not create hierarchies. In both cases, the only way out is repression or coercion, perhaps reminding us once again of Reagan’s words, 36 years after the fall of the Wall: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.”

The first of Morelly’s laws establishes the abolition of private property: “Nothing in society will belong particularly to anyone, except things of current use for the individual, for their needs, pleasures, or daily work.” Citizens are forbidden from accumulating; they can only take what they need at that moment. You could acquire your daily bread, as allotted, and the baker could acquire the grain needed based on the loaves he plans to bake. All acquisitions would be free because everything belongs to the state. The citizen owns nothing. It’s impossible not to recall here the controversial World Economic Forum video about the year 2030 and its slogan: “You’ll own nothing and be happy.”

The second law turns all citizens into state employees: “Every citizen will be a public man, maintained and supported at public expense.” While the United States still partially resists this invasion of public life into the private sphere, Europe’s political elites have been walking this path for years, seeking to control as much of citizens’ lives as possible—whether directly through public employment or indirectly through subsidies, endless bureaucracies, and other forms of public dependency. Elites, from the Davos Club to UN leaders, also push for state intervention to “free” the individual.

We can find something like Morelly’s ideology in nearly the entire framework hidden within what today’s utopian theorists call “social justice.”

Morelly’s third law, inevitably, mandates universal labor: “Every citizen will contribute to the public good according to their strength, talent, and age; their duties will be regulated accordingly by distributive laws.” The author of Code of Nature then decreed a kind of mandatory military service, but for agricultural production: farm work would be compulsory for all from ages 20 to 35, after which individuals could choose their profession. All products would belong to the state, which would distribute them, with bartering, exchange, or trade strictly forbidden. This law aligns with the 2030 Agenda’s goals on education, inequality reduction, decent work, peace, industry, innovation, infrastructure, justice, and strong institutions. But this is just the beginning of the laws. The true social engineering unfolds in subsequent decrees. The nation is divided into families, tribes, and provinces. All must live in cities, mandatorily distributed across identical neighborhoods and buildings, and even clothing is dictated by enforced equality: the state provides uniform attire.

The Code’s slightest hint of freedom appears in the matter of marriage: Morelly’s laws permit it, yes, but make it mandatory upon reaching adolescence, “according to conjugal laws that prevent all licentiousness.” Divorce is allowed, but only after ten years of marriage. Even love is rationed, in a typically utopian exercise of dehumanization.

Children are raised by their mothers until age five. At that point, they are separated from their parents and moved to a sort of gymnasium, where the state educates them equally. From age ten, children are assigned to workshops for vocational training.

The preservation of marriage is a mere illusion. For Morelly, the family structure is just another link in the chain of state control, expanding from the individual to the family, from the family to the tribe, and then to the city. The happiness he promises is, after all, the chimera of a new Sparta. Forced marriage and the state’s theft of children are nothing more than a ploy to dissolve the individual’s only hope of freedom: the privacy of the family and the home. Using different mechanisms, today’s left promotes the destruction of the family, dissolving the institution into a mere shapeless mass.

And what of God and religion? Before banning personal revelations and dreams of faith, Morelly decrees that children be taught only “that the author of the universe can be known solely through his works; that they proclaim him as an infinitely good and wise being”; “the youth will be made to understand that the innate feelings of sociability in man are the only oracles of divine intentions.” It’s striking how closely Morelly’s educational ideas align with those Rousseau would outline seven years later in Emile. This species of secularism, of course, lives on in the ideology of the left today.

Morelly believes freedom of thought must be eradicated in youth. Thus, he establishes “laws for studies that will prevent the wanderings of the human mind and any transcendental delirium.” “There shall be,” he adds, “absolutely no other moral philosophy than that founded on the plan and system of laws.” This may be the point where, in 2025, we feel most trapped by the same utopia. Cancel culture policies, the mandatory belief that climate change is humanity’s fault, or the impossibility of publicly questioning the virtues of multiculturalism are prime examples of how freedom of thought—and the ability to subscribe to any alternative moral philosophy—is mutilated. The consequences are harsh, though with some differences still between Europe and the United States: social and professional exclusion, legal persecution, and public shaming of dissenters.

In the height of his contradictions, the French thinker senses that his utopia of mandatory happiness might collapse on its own. Perhaps that’s why he concludes his work with penal laws: serious offenses lead to social exclusion and transfer to horrific prisons located in the most remote, barren, and gloomy outskirts of the city, surrounded by massive, impenetrable bars. Of all crimes, the one Morelly pursues most fiercely is that of anyone who attempts to “abolish the sacred laws to introduce detestable property.” Such a person “will be confined for life, like a raving madman, in a cave situated” in “the place of public graves,” and marked as an “enemy of Humanity.” Furthermore, “his name will be erased forever from the list of citizens: his children and entire family will abandon that name and be separately incorporated into other tribes, cities, or provinces.” It’s astonishing how he juxtaposes an idyllic description of the utopian society—claiming the community is the social state best suited to nature and the source of all good things—while simultaneously devising a plan of gruesome punishments to force citizens to uphold this supposedly sublime and pleasurable system.

Once again, whenever communism leaps from theory to practice, it must include an appendix to its happy, egalitarian fundamental laws, outlining every possible form of repression to sustain the utopian system—as the history of twentieth-century totalitarianism demonstrates.

Perhaps you’re thinking that Morelly’s description better fits today’s China, Soviet Russia, or even Cuba or Venezuela than the West. Yet what’s more immediate and novel is how, like Morelly, our century has sought to impose uniform thought through woke ideology. The penalties, as noted: cancellation and social exclusion. The mandatory beliefs: feminism, environmentalism, egalitarianism, multiculturalism. The state’s savage distributism: taxes, fines, and fees.

In short, we find Morelly—and those who followed him down the totalitarian communist path—in nearly the entire framework hidden within what today’s utopian theorists call “social justice.” The key difference is that the French author merely wrote it on paper, while today’s woke utopians are actively carrying out this experiment through planned social engineering to limit private property, outlaw capitalism (replaced by the circular economy), and muzzle individual freedom to an extreme degree. I can still hear Milton Friedman’s words echoing with stunning relevance: “A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.”

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This article was published by Law&Liberty, and is reproduced with permission.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons Henri Demare

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