Utopias

Talk about synchronicity! Matthew Beaumont also discusses utopias today and wonders if it's even possible to imagine them anymore, or if we're doomed to believe Margaret Thatcher's famous injunction, "There is no alternative!" It's become a cliche to link utopianism to totalitarianism, as if simply believing in a better world is dangerously hubristic. We read writers like Saint Simon or Plato who conceived of ideal states run like factories by bureaucratic administrators and cannot help but think of what the reality was. On the other hand, we're certainly not going to fantasize about scientifically engineered bureaucratic states that guarantee happiness any more, are we? But what about a Utopia in which the state provided nothing?