Empire and Utopia: Images of the New World in Francis Bacon’s Works

Abstract

This essay examines the figure of the New World in Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum, analyzing the topos of the New World-as-nature in light of Bacon’s writings on colonialism and empire. A number of scholars have recently sought to distance Bacon’s epistemology from his politics, arguing that the metaphor of the “New World” provides a striking contrast between the political dominion of nations over other nations and the extension of humanity’s collective dominion over nature. Tracing the dialectical tension between political and “human” empire in Bacon’s major works, I argue that what appears on the surface to be a metaphor is in fact metonymical in structure. The discovery of the New World is not just a figurative image of an anticipated human empire; it is part of this expanded vision of empire. Nowhere is this more evident than in Bacon’s unfinished work of utopian fiction, the New Atlantis, where the founding event that establishes Bacon’s scientific utopia necessitates the destruction and historical erasure of existing Amerindian empires. Within Bacon’s narrative, this erasure is what makes the utopian extension of “human empire” possible. [J. W.]