The word 'utopia', coined by Thomas More in 1516, means both 'good place' and 'no place' — a deliberate ambiguity. Utopian thinking has always been met with scepticism: it is dismissed as naive, dangerous, or simply impossible. Yet critics of utopianism rarely notice that the defence of the status quo is also a political choice — one that accepts the suffering embedded in the present as inevitable. The philosopher Ernst Bloch argued that utopian impulses are present in all human culture: in fairy tales, in religious hope, in the belief that things could be different. The political question is not whether to imagine alternatives but how to navigate between the dangers of utopianism — its tendency towards totalitarianism when pursued without humility — and the dangers of anti-utopianism: the foreclosure of political imagination that leaves the future to those who benefit from the present.

💡 Did you know? Thomas More, who wrote Utopia in 1516, was executed by Henry VIII in 1535 for refusing to endorse the king's divorce. The man who imagined a perfect society was killed for holding a principled position in an imperfect one.