On the Useful Fiction of Utopia
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.