Exchanges of Knowledge at the Private–Public Divide in Smeeks’s Krinke Kesmes

Privacy and the private are central problems of utopian thought. Although utopian speculations are typically focused on the public realm, paradoxically, the operation of the utopian imagination requires a setting in a private space, separate from the world. In the early modern period, in particular, utopian social visions are typically set on islands or other isolated parts of the earth, and envision social models that abolish private property and even eliminate privacy altogether, as in Thomas More’s Utopia, first published in Latin in 1516. Yet as capitalism pervaded European societies with ever more privatized spaces, utopia also embraced more materialism and privacy. In this essay, I explore traces of early modern shifts in the conceptualization of privacy through a comparison of More’s influential work and the first Dutch utopia, Hendrik Smeeks’s Krinke Kesmes (1708). I compare utopia’s austere, anti-private, Morean inheritance with the more positive valuation of privacy that may be seen in Smeeks’s work, published in the context of the buoyant mercantile capitalism of the Dutch Republic.