A vivid collective biography of a group of 19th-century freethinkers is crammed with hopeful visions from the past Last year, believe it or not, was the year of Utopia. A perfect society: happy, prosperous, tolerant, peaceful – this idyll was widely commemorated, although its location, appropriately, was nowhere (from the Greek _ou-topos_: U-topia). The occasion was the 500th anniversary of Thomas More’s _Utopia_, a “splendid little book” (in More’s words) that, over the centuries, has found echoes in innumerable dreams and schemes, especially on the left. Socialism has always harboured utopian visionaries, although they have not always been welcome there. From the “communities of universal harmony” sponsored by Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, Henri de Saint-Simon and their early 19th-century followers (dismissed by Marx and Engels as “purely utopian”); to the libertarian-communist Edens of William Morris, Edward Carpenter and other _fin de siècle _New Lifers; to the free-loving, free-living arcadias of 1960s radicals, utopianism has been alternately embraced and repudiated by the left. The scope of socialist aspirations has widened and narrowed with changing times. Today, in a climate of ascendant neoliberalism and far-right populism, the aspirations have dwindled to the point where even the modest social-democratic ambitions of Jeremy Corbyn and his followers are slated as “cranky utopian fantasies” by their Labour party detractors. Continue reading...
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