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"From the time of its first discovery, the island of King Utopus has been shrouded in ambiguity, and no latter-day scholars should presume to dispel the fog, polluting utopia's natural environment with an excess of clarity and definition" (Manuel and Manuel 1979, p. 5).

But this ambiguity extends well beyond simple obscurity or murkiness; it reaches to unqualified contradiction. Many utopian visionaries have been denounced for their meticulous delineation of details as they constructed models of social worlds bearing no resemblance to existing, potential, or possible reality. Utopias, it would seem, suffer from the twin infirmities of ambiguity and excessive...