The New Atlantis

Bacon’s unfinished utopian fable, in which shipwrecked European sailors reach the island of Bensalem and discover that its governing institution is not a court or an assembly but Salomon’s House — a state-funded research college whose stated purpose is “the knowledge of Causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible.” It is the founding text of the idea that organised, collaborative, publicly supported inquiry is a political institution in its own right.

Why it’s on the list: It sits in the Renaissance and Enlightenment Political Thought section, where the curriculum turns from the classical question of the best regime to the modern project of mastering nature — Bacon is where the research institution enters political thought.

Where I saw it: Brendan McCord’s Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List, in the section on Renaissance and Enlightenment Political Thought. A structured curriculum shared March 9, 2026 and saved to Kyle’s Apple Note “Books To Read”; the full 211-entry transcription is on The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List.

Connections

• Francis Bacon — the author.
• Utopia — the genre the fable works in.
• Science — Salomon’s House as the first design for an institution of organised inquiry.
• Institution Building — the book’s real subject.
• The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List — the curriculum this came from.
• UATX Fall Reading List — assigned again in the University of Austin’s “Renaissance and Reformation” course, in a combined volume with The Great Instauration, beside On the Dignity of Man.