People have been arguing about whether I meant Utopia literally since the day I published it. The answer – which I offered at the time, and which has been consistently ignored – is: that is not the right question.
The right question is not whether I believed a perfect society was achievable. I did not. The right question is whether the act of imagining one serves a purpose. It does, and the purpose is indispensable to political life.
The Exercise
Utopia – the word itself means “no place,” which should have been a sufficient hint – is a thought experiment. Not a blueprint. The distinction matters because the criticism most frequently leveled against utopian thinking is that it is impractical, and this criticism is both correct and irrelevant.
Of course it is impractical. That is the point.
The purpose of imagining an ideal society is not to build one. It is to create a standard against which the actual society can be measured. Without that standard, the only basis for evaluation is comparison to the past – “are things better than they were?” – and this is a dangerously low bar. Things can be better than they were and still be very bad indeed.
The utopian exercise asks a different question: not “are things better?” but “how far are we from what is possible?” This question is uncomfortable, which is why it is so rarely asked and why those who ask it are so frequently dismissed as dreamers.
The Dystopian Reflex
It is worth noting that our age has almost entirely abandoned the utopian exercise in favor of its opposite. We are prolific generators of dystopias – in fiction, in political rhetoric, in our baseline assumptions about the future. We find it far easier to imagine the worst than to imagine the best.
This is not merely a cultural preference. It is a political failure.
A society that can only imagine its own decline is a society that has lost the capacity for aspiration. And a society without aspiration is a society that has, in effect, conceded that the current arrangement – however unjust, however inadequate – is the best that can be managed.
The powerful benefit from this concession. If the public cannot imagine an alternative, the public cannot demand one. The dystopian imagination, whatever its literary merits, functions politically as a counsel of resignation.
I propose – as I have before, with similar results – a return to the utopian exercise. Not because utopias are achievable. Because the act of imagining them is the precondition for improving anything.
How to Use Utopia
The utopian exercise works best when it is applied to specific institutions rather than to society as a whole.
Ask: what would a perfect healthcare system look like? Not a realistic one – a perfect one. A system designed entirely around patient welfare, unconstrained by current economic or political arrangements. Describe it in detail. Then measure the existing system against it.
The gap between the ideal and the actual is not an indictment of idealism. It is a map of the work that remains to be done.
Ask: what would a perfect justice system look like? One in which every person receives genuinely equal treatment under the law, in which rehabilitation is the goal, in which the dignity of every participant – including the accused – is maintained throughout. Describe it. Then look at what you have.
The gap is the argument. The ideal is the compass. And the people who tell you that the ideal is unrealistic are almost always the people who benefit from the gap.
The Irony Problem
I am aware – deeply, personally aware – that writing about ideal societies from the perspective of a man who was executed by his own government contains a certain irony. I served as Lord Chancellor. I participated in the system. I enforced laws I found disagreeable. I made compromises.
And then I reached the compromise I could not make, and they took my head.
The lesson is not that compromise is always wrong. It is that there must be a line, and the utopian exercise is how you find it. If you have no vision of the ideal, you have no basis for determining which compromises are acceptable and which are not. Everything becomes negotiable, including the things that should never be.
My Utopia was not a plan. It was a boundary. It said: at minimum, a society should provide this. Anything less is a choice to accept injustice.
The Invitation
I invite you to imagine.
Not the realistic. Not the achievable within the current political window. Not the thing that can be accomplished in one legislative session.
The ideal. The best. The “no place” that, by its very impossibility, reveals how far the actual place has to go.
This is not escapism. It is the most practical political exercise available, because it gives you a destination. And a society without a destination is not pragmatic. It is lost.
We are currently lost. We have been, I think, for some time.
The way back begins with the willingness to imagine that things could be otherwise. Not that they will be. That they could be. That the gap between what is and what should be is not a fixed property of the universe but a measure of what we have chosen not to do.
Start there. The rest follows.