When “anthropology” and aesthetics struck up a close alliance during the late Enlightenment, this threw literary utopias into a deep crisis. Tracts about societies composed of autonomously reasoning individuals clashed with an image of human nature that emphasized the power of the conditioned body. Especially on account of their dubious reputation, utopias give us the chance to reflect upon “anthropology” as an explosive new form of knowledge. This study examines how thinkers of the Enlightenment and Romanticism used the utopian genre to respond to the ethical and political problems resulting from the “rehabilitation of sensualism”.