Utopianism is an approach to social or political theory based upon the design of a perfect society (a ‘utopia’, after the title of Sir Thomas More’s example of the genre, from 1516, using an imaginary island of that name). Earlier writers had, of course, had elements of utopianism in their work. The most obvious are the political systems designed in Plato’sRepublic and The Laws. The point of difference though is that Plato, and most political theorists, either expect that their systems could actually be put into operation, or admit that they are second best precisely because of the impossibility of carrying out an ideal design in reality. More’s Utopia and subsequent works of utopian writing stress the ideal as a measuring tool for reality, rather than as an empirical possibility. Utopias, if intended as such, are really thought experiments, political theory’s equivalent to the perfect frictionless bearing, or perhaps an economist’s perfect competition model.
The idea that utopias are impossible, and that some recognized writings on utopias may never have been intended as blueprints, is stressed because the concept of utopianism has largely become derogatory. Marx was one of the earliest writers to use the concept as a criticism, when writing of some early socialist blueprints. Marx thought that, by not taking sufficient note of the brutal facts of material restrictions and class warfare, these socialist writers were being purely utopian, operating in a fantasy land. Thomas More did not believe that his island political paradise could ever exist; later Jean Jacques Rousseau was to stress in his writings, especially the Social Contract, that hardly any existing society could be transformed to his specifications. This is why, indeed, the conditions of political life are so much more pleasant on the island of Utopia than in, for example, Hobbes’Leviathan. The latter is, if anything, the opposite of a utopia, a dystopia, a system designed to fit with the worst possible realities of human nature and political incompetence, and thus practicable but hardly desirable. At the same time, while Hobbes might help us set up a state that could work, as might Machiavelli, it requires a Thomas More or a Rousseau to inspire our political judgements and ambitions.
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