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In the nearly-500 years since its publication, Thomas More's Utopia has influenced everything from the thinking of Gandhi to the tech giants of Silicon Valley, writes Tom Hodgkinson.

An English lawyer, statesman, writer and saint, Thomas More was a strange character. Born in 1478, he was progressive in some ways (he educated his daughters to a very high level) while also clinging to archaic customs (he wore hair shirts). An establishment figure, he was also an enemy of the Protestant Reformation and is known today as a Catholic martyr, having been beheaded by King Henry VIII.

Today, though, we may know More best for his invention of a word - and for his development of an idea that would be exported around the world. This concept would shape books, philosophies and political movements as varied as Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Mahatma Gandhi's doctrine of passive resistance and the founding of the state of Pennsylvania.

The idea, of course, was 'utopia'.

More coined the word to describe an island community with an ideal mode of government. First published in Latin in 1517, the book Utopia means "no place" in Greek; some scholars have said that it may also be a pun on "happy place".

More's Utopia was not the first literary work to play around with policy ideas: dreaming of a better life is an innate part of being human. In 380 BC, Plato wrote his dialogue The Republic, in which Socrates describes a communistic, egalitarian city-state ruled by philosopher-kings called guardians, made up of both men and women. Instead of procreating within a family unit, these leaders leave the city once a year for a wild sex orgy. The resulting children, happily ignorant of their real parentage and brought up by the state, become the new generation of guardians.

Christine de Pizan, shown here in a 15th-century miniature presenting her book, imagined utopia as a female-only city (Credit: Master of the Cité des Dames/British Library)

Various medieval works also imagined what an ideal society might look like. The great writer Christine de Pizan, who worked for the royal court in France, published The Book of the City of Ladies in 1405. Illustrated by a gorgeous painting of medieval ladies building a city brick by brick, the book defends women's accomplishments over the aeons and sets up a symbolic city populated by a pantheon of "all women who have loved and do love and will love virtue and morality" - a city meant to be a refuge from patriarchy. Written more than 500 years before Germaine Greer's feminist milestone The Female Eunuch, it deserves a mention: for most of history, utopian ideas - at least those that made it to publication - have generally been written by men.

A very different idea of utopia, meanwhile, also entered the mainstream by the mid-14th Century. This was the Land of Cockaygne, a utopia concocted by medieval peasants and preserved in the Kildare Poems, compiled around 1330 in Ireland.

The Land of Cockaygne, as imagined by Pieter Brueghel, was a land of fun and equality - and no work

Memorably imagined by Pieter Brueghel the Elder in his 1567 painting, Cockaygne was a land of no work, equality between men and women and no authority figures. It shared one or two features with More's Utopia - notably a lack of private property - but was a lot more fun. As the poem goes:

There are rivers broad and fine Of oil, milk, honey and of wine

Every man may drink his fill And needn't sweat to pay the bill.

'No place on earth compares to this/For sheer delightfulness and bliss,' goes the poem the Land of Cockaygne, here in the 14th-century Kildare Lyrics (Credit: British Library)

A key feature of the Land of Cockaygne? Free love. Monks and nuns cavort freely. After prayers, the nuns throw their clothes off and jump into the lake:

When the young monks see that sport, Straightway thither they resort, And coming to the nuns anon, Each monk taketh to him one, And, swiftly bearing forth his prey, Carries her to the Abbey grey, And teaches her an orison, Jigging up and jigging down.

But though there may always have been fantasies of a communistic Golden Age stretching back through the Middle Ages to antiquity, Thomas More's genius was to give it a name and create a handy philosophical idea.

In part, Utopia was an attempt to cling to the medieval ideal of the contemplative life - an ideal that the Reformation, which privileged action and change, was 'disrupting', to use the modern coinage. Monkish life itself was under attack from the forces of the Reformation, and was soon to reach a climax with the dissolution of the monasteries in 1536.

The word 'utopia' was coined by Sir Thomas More, depicted here by Hans Holbein the Younger, in his 1517 book

More writes of the Utopians: "They think that the contemplation of nature, and the praise thereof coming, is to God a very acceptable honour." However, like a good modern politician, More also emphasises that Utopia is a land of hard-working families: "idleness they utterly forsake and eschew, thinking felicity after this life to be gotten and obtained by busy labours and good exercise."

More's ideal state is puritanical. His vision of a perfect society was a long way from the sensual self-indulgence dreamt of by the peasants in Cockagyne. Forget free love and lying around doing nothing. Instead, in Utopia, there is a class of bosses - called the Syphograuntes - who look out for work-shy slackers.

And citizens are constantly being watched. More writes: "You see how it is - wherever you are, you always have to work. There's never any excuse for idleness. There are also no wine-taverns, no ale-houses, no brothels, no opportunities for seduction, no secret meeting-places. Everyone has his eye on you, so you're practically forced to get on with your job, and make proper use of your spare time."

More was influenced by Amerigo Vespucci's tales of non-capitalist communities in the New World, as shown in this 1600 print (Credit: The Elisha Whittelsey Collection)

Utopia has communistic elements too. More had been influenced by the travel literature of the time, particularly Amerigo Vespucci's accounts, which circulated widely. Vespucci had apparently met tribes of natives who lived in decidedly non-capitalist fashion, as the explorer describes in his memoirs: "They neither sell not buy nor barter, but are content with what nature freely gives out of her abundance. They live in perfect liberty, and have neither king nor lord. They observe no laws. They have their habitations in common, as many as six hundred sharing one building."

Like Plato's Republic, More's Utopia is the creation of a well-meaning member of the upper classes with a plan, rather than the live-for-the-moment dream of a peasant or worker. In Utopia, private property is abolished. "There is nothing within the houses that is private or any man's own," writes More. Every three months, the people pile up loads of stuff in the market place; anyone can come along and take what they need - like a recycling centre.

Above all, Utopia was the earnest attempt to create a fair society, not one which benefited only the rich. "I can perceave nothing but a certein conspiracy if rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of commonwealth," More writes.

More's fantasy opened the floodgates for a new wave of utopian writing in the 17th Century. Most of these visions looked either backward or forward: they celebrated an old-fashioned ideal of community or envisioned a future paradise where the machines did all the work.

In 1619 came Christianopolis, a Christian utopia by German theologian mystic Johann Valentin Andrea; and in 1623, Italian writer and Dominican friar Thomas Campanella published his City of the Sun.

Theologian Johann Valentin Andrea's imagining of the walled utopian city Christianopolis (Credit: AF Fotografie/Alamy)

Then in 1627, polymath and Lord Chancellor of England Francis Bacon produced a book called New Atlantis, proclaiming science as saviour. Bacon argued that the state should endow a scientific college, which would invent machines to guarantee England's pre-eminence on the world stage. His was a tech-based utopia and featured aeroplanes and submarines. As he wrote: "We imitate also the flights of birds: for we have some degree of flying in the air... we have ships and boats for going under water."

In the 17th Century, some attempted to move beyond theory and create living, breathing alternative societies. This was a turbulent period. In Britain, there was a Puritan revolution, the king was overthrown and Cromwell's Leninist-style Commonwealth endured for 15 years - during which time Christmas, dancing, theatre and maypoles were banned. But rather like later communist governments, the natural tendency of the ordinary people to buy and sell products, celebrate pagan rituals and try to enjoy themselves overcame. Cromwell's experiment came to an end with the Restoration of the popular libertine King Charles II.

In the middle of all this ferment, a farmer called Gerrard Winstanley attempted to create an ideal colony. His followers were called Diggers - and they were the Occupy movement of their day. In 1649, they started digging the common land at St George's Hill near Weybridge, Surrey, intending to cultivate it. In Winstanley's pamphlets, he advocated a communistic philosophy: "The earth ought to be a common treasury to all."

The Diggers were attacked by both local men and landlords. Undeterred, Winstanley and his 20 or so followers moved to nearby Cobham Manor where they built four wooden houses. State troops pulled the houses down so the Diggers built "some few little hutches like half-cribs" and planted crops. But the local vicar paid a bunch of men - rather like when security guards are paid to remove protestors from road-building projects - to roust them and pull down any more houses or tents they made.

The Diggers gave up that particular battle. But Winstanley went on to write books of utopian schemes and to join another movement with socialist overtones: the Quakers.

The Quaker movement emphasised the importance of charity, as shown in this 1862 illustration of a Quaker soup kitchen in Manchester (Credit: Mary Evans Picture Library/Alamy)

The charismatic George Fox was the leader of the Quakers. He believed that he and his followers were returning to a pure form of Christianity based on the importance of charity. Unlike some utopian movements, therefore, he did not create a colony of like-minded individuals and escape to it. Instead, Quaker efforts were based around projects to help the poor and to educate people on the arts of self-sufficiency. In 1696, one of the Quakers wrote a pamphlet called Proposals for Raising a College of Industry of all Useful Trades and Husbandry - an idea closely related to More's medieval notion that everyone should have a trade or craft in order to make an honest living.

In fact, handicrafts and small-scale husbandry have been an enduring feature of utopian schemes to this day. (I myself attempted to create a little utopia, too: I lived on a farmhouse in Devon for 12 years and attempted some basic carpentry, kept chickens and pigs and grew vegetables, with varying degrees of success.)

Another charming production of this period was a book called The Isle of Pines by republican wit Henry Neville. Published in 1668, it was the Robinson Crusoe of its day: the hero is stranded on a beautiful island.

This utopia is more Land of Cockaygne than tightly controlled socialist system. As Neville writes: "The country was so very pleasant, being always clothed in green, and full of pleasant fruits, and variety of birds, and ever warm, and never colder than in England in September; so that this place, had it the culture that skilful people might bestow on it, would prove a paradise."

A few years later, in the early 18th Century, Daniel Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe and Jonathan Swift wrote Gulliver's Travels. Both owed much to More's Utopia - and both became far better known.

Jonathan Swift sends his protagonist around a series of utopias - not all good - in his book Gulliver's Travels (Credit: Mary Evans Picture Library/Alamy)

Gulliver's Travels is a journey round a series of utopias, some good and some bad. In it Swift, like previous utopists, rails against the injustice of the modern world in quasi-Marxist terms, complaining that: "The rich man enjoyed the Fruit of the poor Man's Labour, and the Latter were a Thousand to One in Proportion to the former. That the bulk of our People was forced to live miserably by labouring every day for small wages to make a few live plentifully."

The later 1700s saw a marked decline in utopian writings and utopian experiments. But toward the end of the century came both a revolution in France and a Romantic backlash against the Industrial Revolution.

The English Romantic William Blake complained about the "dark satanic mills" where men and women toiled to create enormous wealth for a few. He imagined a utopia called Jerusalem:

The fields from Islington to Marylebone, To Primrose Hill and Saint John's Wood, Were builded over with pillars of gold, And there Jerusalem's pillars stood.

The Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for his part, hatched plans to sail away from England to America and create what he called a Pantisocracy: a place on the banks of the Susquehanna, Pennsylvania where he and his friends would combine buffalo hunting with philosophising. All property would be in common.

The scheme got as far as a flat-share in Bristol and collapsed.

After Robert Owen's first cooperative village in New Lanark, Scotland opened in 1813, the idea spread throughout Britain (Credit: Clearview/Alamy)

One significant, and more successful, utopian figure of the 19th Century was Robert Owen. A progressive mill-owner from Wales, he improved conditions for workers at his Manchester mill, joining the Manchester Board of Health to improve sanitary conditions and in 1817 introducing an 8-hour day for his workers with the slogan "Eight hours labour. Eight hours recreation. Eight hours rest."

Owen launched a more ambitious scheme, though, in 1813, buying a school and ballroom with a group of Quakers in New Lanark, Scotland. It was the first of Owen's "cooperative villages" - which spread, along with the idea of socialism, throughout Britain. The Victorian period was filled with earnest discussion among do-gooders and intellectuals on how to alleviate the conditions of the poor. In the mid-19th Century, dozens of Owenite experiments sprang up: small co-operative farms and communities, so-called 'village colonies' that provided every family with both a piece of land and farming lessons.

Robert Owen set up the cooperative village of New Harmony in Indiana in 1825; the experiment failed within two years (Credit: Mary Evans Picture Library/Alamy)

Most of these schemes failed - or at least did not last long. They did, however, give birth to the co-operative movement which is still with us today and to organisations like Britain's National Trust. We can even trace the roots of the trade unions back to Owen's efforts.

Also still with us are the model communities of Bournville near Birmingham and Port Sunlight near Liverpool, the first built with chocolate money by the Cadbury family, the second with soap money by Lord Leverhulme, founder of Sunlight Soap (now owned by Unilever). Both were capitalist attempts to build comfortable environments for workers. I went to visit Port Sunlight in the early '90s and found it to be pretty and well cared for - though residents of the surrounding villages viewed the inhabitants of Port Sunlight as a bit dim and brain-washed.

Less successful was a town called Pullman near Chicago, Illinois. In 1880, railroad entrepreneur George Pullman of Pullman Palace Car fame launched the ambitious model village, named after himself. He aimed for the town to run as a business and return a profit to investors.

The whole town was carefully planned and built according to what were called "scientific principles" - which made for a number of very unappealing features. First off, like More's Utopia, there were no wine-taverns or ale-houses and no booze was allowed - though an exception was made for wealthy visitors staying at the grand Hotel Florence. Second, there were no public gatherings of any size. Third, workers had to buy goods in the over-priced Pullman shops. And fourth, no blacks were allowed.

In short, it was a disastrous mixture of the worst of centrally-controlled socialism and grasping capitalism - with racism thrown in for good measure.

An 1885 engraving of the 'model village' of Pullman, Illinois, which was planned according to 'scientific principles' (Credit: Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy)

Following the great market collapse of 1893, Pullman hiked rents. The workers were so squeezed, one man paid $9 a month in rent and received a wage check for $9.07.

In 1894, 4,000 Pullman residents, like thousands of workers across the US at that time, went on strike. The situation got violent; troops went in to quell the uprising. The government forced Pullman to sell his town. He died in 1897 so widely loathed, he had to be buried 12 feet underground for fear that his body would be dug up and desecrated by disgruntled employees.

Pullman's capitalist utopia demonstrated the fundamental problem in creating perfect worlds: people don't like being told what to do. Everyone's utopia is different. And since most utopias are inflexible, what happens to your ideal community when market conditions - which are outside your control - change?

At around the same time in England, William Morris was concocting a far gentler version of paradise. The generously bearded Victorian hero wrote one of the great utopian fantasies, News from Nowhere - a book full of charm, wit and good ideas. Morris also created the company Morris & Co, which had the Thomas More-like aim of restoring medieval attitudes, in particular handicrafts, and providing enjoyable work for people.

Morris himself was absurdly energetic, managing to pursue simultaneous careers as a poet, artist, novelist, printer, pamphleteer, painter, designer, typesetter, business man, socialist pioneer and rabble-rouser (he was thrown in jail for attending an anti-war rally). He had little tolerance for the lazy and memorably declared: "If a chap cannot compose an epic poem while he's weaving tapestry, he had better shut up, he'll never do any good at all."

One of the fabrics created by Morris & Co, one of the many careers of the multi-talented William Morris (Credit: V&A Images/Alamy)

Morris is dearly loved by the British left; the great Marxist historian EP Thompson wrote a long and adoring biography of him which emphasised his socialist principles. Unlike the big-headed Pullman, though, Morris never imposed his utopian visions on anyone else by actually creating a commune or village. He was a romantic who became a revolutionary. As he wrote of himself:

Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time, Why should I strive to set the crooked path straight?

News from Nowhere was published in 1890. It is sub-titled "an utopian romance", giving the reader a clear sign that it's not meant to be interpreted as a blueprint for an ideal community. Really, Morris wanted all people to live what he called a refined life, to have the leisure time to read and play music and think and be poets.

Morris's utopia did not come out of nowhere: there was something of a medievalist fervour at that time. John Ruskin, another medievalist and fan of the guild system, was outlining projects for ideal village communities, while the Arts and Crafts movement also was inspired by the Middle Ages.

In his lifetime, John Ruskin's desire to live an ideal life - one that soared above reality - was often a subject of satire (Credit: Chronicle/Alamy)

Morris was attacking the sordid utilitarianism which dominated his own age. In his

utopia, presented through a dialogue between an elder of the new world and a young man who finds himself transported there, green fields cover London's Piccadilly Circus. Money has been abolished. There is no private property. Women of 40 look 20 and wear simple clothes are not "upholstered like arm-chairs, as most women of our time are". Children get out into nature: when our hero notices that there are camps of feral children living in the woods of Kensington, his guide tells him that "the less they stew in houses the better for them." Above all, the narrator says, the society reminds him of the 14th Century.

Meanwhile, the Houses of Parliament are now used as "a storage place for manure" - quite a satisfying Victorian joke.

In fact, Morris's utopia, refreshingly, has elements of the Land of Cockaygne to it. It is not, like More's Utopia, puritanical in nature. The inhabitants have a lot of fun: the narrator, for example, records with pleasure that dinner is served with a bottle of very good Bordeaux.

Immediately following Morris came HG Wells, who wrote a dozen utopian and dystopian novels. They were generally technological in nature: Woody Allen's Sleeper, with its giant vegetables, sex machines and robotic butlers, is a satire of Wells's 1899 The Sleeper Awakes.

HG Wells's dystopian The Sleeper Awakes was satirised by Woody Allen in his 1973 film Sleeper (Credit: Alamy)

Perhaps the most surprising reverberation of More's utopia, though, was found in the towering figures of Leo Tolstoy and Mahatma Gandhi. It's a little-known fact that the Indian nationalist corresponded with the aristocratic Russian novelist. Tolstoy, an anarchist and a Christian, held that the state was responsible for most of the bad stuff: taxes, wars and general irresponsibility. Tolstoy counselled passive resistance and non-violence instead.

Communes based on Tolstoy's version of Christianity sprang up in the UK. The familiar elements were there: a return to handicrafts and small-scale agriculture, partial rejection of the gewgaws of the modern world, communal dining and shared expenditure.

Two of these communes still exist today in the UK. One is the Brotherhood Church of Stapleton, which, according to a recent New Yorker piece, is home to four humans, a deaf cat, a few hens and an enormous cow. The other is the Whiteway Colony in the Cotswolds, formed in 1898. More village than commune, Whiteway is a collection of 68 houses loosely bound by a monthly meeting.

In 1909 a young Indian philosopher started to correspond with Tolstoy. He called himself the Count's "humble follower"; the two men discussed Indian home rule, pacifism, passive resistance, freedom from toil and other utopian issues. In 1910, the young man - Gandhi -launched a cooperative colony in South Africa which he named Tolstoy Farm. It was Gandhi's utopian thinking, inspired by Tolstoy, that led to his doctrine of passive resistance and his campaign for Indian home rule.

One of my favourite 20th-Century utopian societies, however, is the anarchist occupation of Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. Here, from 1936 to the start of Franco's reign in 1939, authority and rank were suspended, people called each other 'comrade' and an anarchist system ruled. It is described without sentiment by George Orwell, who fought for the anarchists, in his account Homage to Catalonia.

Anarchists tried to set up a version of a 'utopian' society in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, one which suspended authority and rank (Credit: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy)

Meanwhile, utopias continued to hatch from the imaginations of novelists. In 1915, American author Charlotte Perkins Gilman published her feminist utopia Herland. In this ideal society, there are no men at all, and the women prize education above all else. Women have learned to reproduce via parthenogenesis - no men required. Children are the responsibility of everyone, though during the first two years of life the child is closely attached to her real mother. There is no war or private property.

At the same time, other novelists decided that it would be more fun to write dystopias than utopias - and hence science fiction began. EM Forster added to the swelling genre with his brilliant novel The Machine Stops. In this grim fantasy, the people live alone in underground cells, connected to everyone else in the world by screen... sound familiar? The machine is worshipped as source of all knowledge and freedom: "The Machine feeds us and clothes us and houses us; through it we speak to one another, through it we see one another, in it we have our being. The Machine is the friend of ideas and the enemy of superstition: the Machine is omnipotent, eternal; blessed is The Machine."

The genre ultimately gave birth to two of the most famous utopian experiments of the 20th Century, both of them literary.

Aldous Huxley once said that he originally conceived Brave New World, published in 1931, as a gentle satire of Wells's endless utopias. Huxley was also worrying about the increasing 'Americanisation' of Europe. And there are many of what you might call 'American' features in his brave new (and dystopian) world: pain, for example, has been destroyed; when life gets overwhelming, the citizens take the drug soma which is a kind of cross between ecstasy and Prozac. To read the book today is startling as so many of its predictions have come true - like the Philistinism of the state, the debasement of sex and the insistence on happiness.

The book was a huge hit. So was George Orwell's later dystopia 1984, published in 1949. Both books also were loathed by Oxbridge Marxists.

Some of the lines from George Orwell's 1984 have become instantly recognisable (Credit: Hello/Stockimo/Alamy)

One historian called AL Morton, writing in 1952, really believed that a real utopia was being built in Soviet Russia and that Orwell and Huxley's negative views of a totalitarian state were decadent and counter-revolutionary. Huxley's ideas, writes Morton, are "self-evidently false, and in practice they are being shown daily to be false before our eyes, in that third of the world which is now building socialism upon quite different postulates." For good measure, he adds, 1984 "as an intellectual attack on Marxism... is beneath contempt".

Morton then goes on to claim that "the fantasies of Cockaygne... are now being translated into facts in the plans that are now beginning to change the face and climate of the USSR and other socialist countries."

Of course, at the time of writing, the USSR's leader was Stalin. But such naive and blinkered optimism was typical of the socialist intellectuals of the 1950s.

The late '60s saw hippies pick up on the now-familiar elements of classical utopias like back-to-the-land ideals, small scale crafts, the end of private property, an undermining of bourgeois marriage restrictions and an attack on consumerism. If we have learned anything from surveying utopian writing and real-life experimentation, it is that the same ideals keep returning.

Such communal living experiments don't tend to survive very long. However - though sometimes invaded by violent drug-dealers and various other problems - the anarchist community of Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen has proved decidedly resilient. Founded in 1971 on an old military base, it is today home to 850 citizens and as a thriving bicycle business. Its mission statement reads: "The objective of Christiania is to create a self-governing society whereby each and every individual holds themselves responsible over the wellbeing of the entire community. Our society is to be economically self-sustaining and, as such, our aspiration is to be steadfast in our conviction that psychological and physical destitution can be averted."

Founded in 1971, Copenhagen's anarchist community of Freetown Christiania has been a particularly long-lasting experiment in communal living (Credit: Juan Jimenez/Alamy)

Christiania is a car-free neighbourhood, and like other hippy-ish communities allows its residents to build their own houses. The result is a very beautiful architectural vernacular: the houses look like wooden Babapapa houses. A famous son of the village is lead singer of international pop band Lukas Graham, behind the mega-hit 7 Years.

Today, the utopian spirit is far from dead. Like their capitalist forebears in the 19th Century, Silicon Valley capitalists talk about building ideal societies. In a small way their workplaces - like the Google or Facebook campuses - aim to provide workers with a progressive working environment.

More ambitiously, billionaires are planning libertarian colonies. One of the most powerful players in the Californian tech revolution of the last 20 years is Peter Thiel. He was a co-founder of Paypal, which he predicted would be "something big" in a 1999 speech. He also was the first serious investor in Facebook. He invested $500,000 in the company and later sold his shares for $1 billion.

Thiel has recently invested over $1 million in a project called the Seasteading Institute. His concept: geeks will set up self-governing cities in the sea free from the interference of government. They look a bit like medieval city-states. The mission statement says that they aim "to establish permanent, autonomous ocean communities to enable experimentation and innovation with diverse social, political, and legal systems".

The back-to-the-land hippy-ish experiments continue, too. The writer David Bramwell recently published his Number Nine Bus to Utopia, his account of a year spent visiting eccentric communities around the world. And Tobias Jones, having written his own account of contemporary utopian experiments, set up one of his own in 2009, a farm-based refuge in Somerset for waifs and strays which he and his wife Fra still run today. His gruelling and frequently comical experiences are brilliantly related in his book A Place of Refuge: An Experiment in Communal Living, published in 2015.

The Arcosanti collective in the Arizona desert is planned around concern for both the environment and design (Credit: Jim DeLillo/Alamy)

Another utopian experiment that survives today is the arts centre and open house colony Dial House, founded by artists Penny Rimbaud and Gee Vaucher in 1968. Situated on an acre of land in Essex, the house has given birth to a number of successful projects including most famously the anarchist punk band Crass, which introduced hundreds of thousands of working-class kids to utopian concepts like vegetarianism, pacifism, the end of wage slavery, feminism and animal rights.

So Utopia isn't dead. But what have we learned from these centuries of ideas, hopes and plans?

It seems practically nothing. The communist ideal remains attractive but elusive. The 1% continue to indulge in warfare, government and money-lending. And the rest of us get along as best we can - with the occasional trip to the Land of Cockaygne on Friday nights.

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In the nearly-500 years since its publication, Thomas More's Utopia has influenced everything from the thinking of Gandhi to the tech giants of Silicon Valley, writes Tom Hodgkinson.

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Michael Grunwald: The Second Age of Reason: Information Overload Will Improve Our Lives

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Dystopian fiction is hot. Sales of George Orwell's "1984" and Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" have skyrocketed since 2016. Young adult dystopias - for example, Suzanne Collins' "The Hunger Games," Veronica Roth's "Divergent," Lois Lowry's classic, "The Giver" - were best-sellers even before.

And with COVID-19, dystopias featuring diseases have taken on new life. Netflix reports a spike in popularity for "Outbreak," "12 Monkeys" and others.

Does this popularity signal that people think they live in a dystopia now? Haunting images of empty city squares, wild animals roaming streets and miles-long food pantry lines certainly suggest this.

We want to offer another view. "Dystopia" is a powerful but overused term. It is not a synonym for a terrible time.

The question for us as political scientists is not whether things are bad (they are), but how governments act. A government's poor handling of a crisis, while maddening and sometimes disastrous, does not constitute dystopia.

Legitimate coercion

As we argue in our book, " Survive and Resist: the Definitive Guide to Dystopian Politics," the definition of dystopia is political.

Dystopia is not a real place; it is a warning, usually about something bad the government is doing or something good it is failing to do. Actual dystopias are fictional, but real-life governments can be "dystopian" - as in, looking a lot like the fiction.

Defining a dystopia starts with establishing the characteristics of good governance. A good government protects its citizens in a noncoercive way. It is the body best positioned to prepare for and guard against natural and human-made horrors.

Good governments use what's called " legitimate coercion," legal force to which citizens agree to keep order and provide services like roads, schools and national security. Think of legitimate coercion as your willingness to stop at a red light, knowing it's better for you and others in the long run.

No government is perfect, but there are ways of judging the imperfection. Good governments (those least imperfect) include a strong core of democratic elements to check the powerful and create accountability. They also include constitutional and judicial measures to check the power of the majority. This setup acknowledges the need for government but evidences healthy skepticism of giving too much power to any one person or body.

Federalism, the division of power between national and subnational governments, is a further check. It has proved useful lately, with state governors and mayors emerging as strong political players during COVID-19.

Three kinds of dystopias

Bad governments lack checks and balances, and rule in the interest of the rulers rather than the people. Citizens can't participate in their own governance. But dystopian governments are a special kind of bad; they use illegitimate coercion like force, threats and the "disappearing" of dissidents to stay in power.

Our book catalogs three major dystopia types, based on the presence - or absence - of a functioning state and how much power it has.

There are, as in Orwell's "1984," overly powerful governments that infringe on individual lives and liberties. These are authoritarian states, run by dictators or powerful groups, like a single party or corporate-governance entity. Examples of these governments abound, including Assad's murderously repressive regime in Syria and the silencing of dissent and journalism in Russia.

The great danger of these is, as our country's Founding Fathers knew quite well, too much power on the part of any one person or group limits the options and autonomy of the masses.

Then there are dystopic states that seem nonauthoritarian but still take away basic human rights through market forces; we call these "capitocracies." Individual workers and consumers are often exploited by the political-industrial complex, and the environment and other public goods suffer. A great fictional example is Wall-E by Pixar (2008), in which the U.S. president is also CEO of "Buy 'N Large," a multinational corporation controlling the economy.

There are not perfect real-life examples of this, but elements are visible in the chaebol - family business - power in South Korea, and in various manifestations of corporate political power in the U.S, including deregulation, corporate personhood status and big-company bailouts.

Lastly there are state-of-nature dystopias, usually resulting from the collapse of a failed government. The resulting territory reverts to a primitive feudalism, ungoverned except for small tribal-held fiefdoms where individual dictators rule with impunity. The Citadel versus Gastown in the stunning 2015 movie "Mad Max: Fury Road" is a good fictional depiction. A real-life example was seen in the once barely governed Somalia, where, for almost 20 years until 2012, as a U.N. official described it, "armed warlords (were) fighting each other on a clan basis."

Fiction and real life

Indeed, political dystopia is often easier to see using the lens of fiction, which exaggerates behaviors, trends and patterns to make them more visible.

But behind the fiction there is always a real-world correlate. Orwell had Stalin, Franco and Hitler very much in mind when writing "1984."

Atwood, whom literary critics call the " prophet of dystopia," recently defined dystopia as when "[W]arlords and demagogues take over, some people forget that all people are people, enemies are created, vilified and dehumanized, minorities are persecuted, and human rights as such are shoved to the wall."

Some of this may be, as Atwood added, the "cusp of where we are living now."

But the U.S. is not a dystopia. It still has functioning democratic institutions. Many in the U.S. fight against dehumanization and persecution of minorities. Courts are adjudicating cases. Legislatures are passing bills. Congress has not adjourned, nor has the fundamental right of habeas corpus - the protection against illegal detention by the state - (yet) been suspended.

Crisis as opportunity

And still. One frequent warning is that a major crisis can cover for the rolling back of democracy and curtailing of freedoms. In Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale," a medical crisis is the pretext for suspending the Constitution.

In real life, too, crises facilitate authoritarian backsliding. In Hungary the pandemic has sped democracy's unraveling. The legislature gave strongman Prime Minister Viktor Orban the power to rule by sole decree indefinitely, the lower courts are suspended and free speech is restricted.

Similar dangers exist in any number of countries where democratic institutions are frayed or fragile; leaders with authoritarian tendencies may be tempted to leverage the crisis to consolidate power.

But there are also positive signs for democracy.

People are coming together in ways that didn't seem possible just a few months ago. This social capital is an important element in a democracy.

Ordinary people are performing incredible acts of kindness and generosity - from shopping for neighbors to serenading residents at a nursing home to a mass movement to sew facemasks.

In politics, Wisconsin primary voters risked their lives to exercise their right to vote during the height of the pandemic. Citizens and civil society are pushing federal and state governments to ensure election safety and integrity in the remaining primaries and the November election.

Despite the eerie silence in public spaces, despite the preventable deaths that should weigh heavily on the consciences of public officials, even despite the authoritarian tendencies of too many leaders, the U.S. is not a dystopia - yet.

Overuse clouds the word's meaning. Fictional dystopias warn of preventable futures; those warnings can help avert the actual demise of democracy.

[ Get facts about coronavirus and the latest research. Sign up for The Conversation's newsletter.]

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'Dystopia' is a term that's gained popularity during the coronavirus pandemic. But it's not a synonym for 'a bad time,' and a government's poor handling of a crisis does not constitute dystopia.

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Utopia & Dystopia einfach erklärt - Englisch Abitur Zusammenfassung - Charakteristika & Merkmale

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Colette Parker

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Patient Care Manager at Qunomedical GmbH

The advancement of new technology has been taking place since the beginning of human history. From the invention of items like the spear and knifes made out of rocks and sticks to aid in the capturing and killing of animals for food, to items like the first printing press and the computer.

The advancement in technology has been exceptionally fast in the 20th and 21st century. With electronic technology and machines being produced and improved all the time, it was very likely that along with the positive aspects of these new advancements, people would also consider the negative aspects and look to criticise new technology.

Every day another company brings out something more advanced in an attempt to win the consumer war against another company. This consumerism is driving the rate of advancement faster and faster each year. The development of the IPhone by Apple is an example of this. Apple brought out a phone that could literally do everything and no other company in the mobile phone market could compare to it. Not only could you make phone calls and text, but you could also watch videos, take pictures and videos, listen to music, connect to the internet, you had app's for almost anything. It's the application market that really blew the other mobile phone companies out of the market at the time. You could download games, books, news, social networking sites in seconds. Of course this was a positive as people could use the phone to store data for work, education, entertainment. But the negative claims began as well, too expensive, quick battery power loss and could a device like this stop face to face communication all together to name just a few claims.
Technology will always have negative aspects because it depends on what the use of the technology is for and who is using it; Albert Einstein once said 'Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal'.[1]

One of the biggest negative claims seen in past years was against the advancement of gaming technology. A game called Grand Theft Auto was developed and the game consisted of stealing cars, shooting and hurting random people to more offensive material like the prostitute characters. Computer games were given negative press after an incident in the USA with one teenage boy who shot at two police men and a dispatcher killing them in 2003. He had already been brought into the station on suspicion of driving a stolen car, which is something that happens within the game series. But he was not old enough to be playing the game in the first place. The media reported the incident in ways such as 'Lawsuit: 'Grand Theft Auto' Led Teen to Kill'[2]. The media chose to blame the technology and the companies who created and sold the game "What has happened in Alabama is that four companies participated in the training of Devin ... to kill three men."[3] This sort of media attention can be seen to support the negative claims made by Jacques Ellul, a French sociologist. He viewed 'technology as an irresistible, mysterious force'[4] he continued in calling it 'menacing'[5] and 'has an ability to change every aspect of life that it encounters'[6]. The press on this advancement in technology were trying to make out that the console and the game was changing and disrupting the young boys life, they quoted him to have said ''Life is a video game. You've got to die sometime."[7] Showing how this technology has changed the boy's mental state and changed his view on life itself, that it's nothing but a game. They make out that technology has taken over the boy and controlled him into committing such an act of violence. Ellul also described technology as 'some kind of living breathing monster, out of control'[8] like it's trying to distribute evil and change and scare people like it changed and persuaded Devin to kill those policemen. Although the argument to the negative claims that technology is evil and changes peoples mind set's is that it's one of the only cases like this to emerge from such technology. There hasn't been an instant in the UK where a murder was blamed upon console or gaming technology.

Another critic of technology is Neil Postman. He writes in his book called Technopoly, that 'technology in sum, is both friend and enemy'. He can see the benefits and how technology can be seen as a friend to humanity that 'it makes life easier, cleaner and longer'[9]. He can accept it does humanity good. It's almost a positive claim based on technology like medical advancements such as x-ray devices and medical drugs that help to lengthen life and help humanity. Medical advancements have meant that the average life expectancy of humanity has slowly been getting older. This is a very positive aspect of the advancement because we can improve health and lengthen our lives. But these medical advancements are mainly produced by companies, who then choose to monetise the advancement. Companies make millions out of these medical advancements, if it helps to lengthen or save people then places like the NHS will buy it at almost any cost. Moral responsibility is weakened by this greed for money; they have lost the objective in saving lives or making people healthy again. They are only creating advancements in technology in order to make a lot of money. Neil Postman also sees technology as undermining human processes as well. That technology creates 'a culture without moral foundation'[10] and undermines social relations between humans. This can currently be seen with the argument over social networking sites on the internet. It was created for people to communicate and network, yet some people use it as their only form of communication with other people. This doesn't necessarily help their social skills in the real and outside world away from the internet. People can become addicted and reliant on this technology and use it as their main form for creating social relations. It makes things like understanding facial expressions and body language hard to grasp. Again this is only if people rely on it, which only emerges in very few cases.

Professor Joseph Weizenbaum agreed that advancements in technology were leading to a loss of moral responsibility. He carries on in the tradition of 'those who value humans and human society above all and who are alarmed by the degree to which society seems ready to accept technology and all its supposed benefits with little question'[11] He appears to warn society that we shouldn't readily accept all the advancements of technology, but question them and look at the dangers of computers one day being so advanced they replace humans. He was the one to introduce 'Alien intelligence' a term to really argue that while 'intelligent computers may appear to be by virtue of advances in artificial intelligence, they should never be involved in human affairs.'[12] His statement is a warning about computers, that they may be intelligent and rational but they have no feelings. They may only ever be cold and calculating. You cannot trust them with decisions that should be made by humans that possess emotions like compassion and caring. If a computer was given a task like that given to an army where it must kill a certain target, would there be more collateral damage, more civilians killed because the computer knows no feelings. He is warning of the severe dangers of trusting computers and technology and that they should not replace humans as they can never do the morally right thing.

Lewis Mumford, a social critic and distinguished historian of technology can be seen to have a similar argument to that of Weizenbaum. He believes the computer will cause the elimination of the human mind and spirit if advances in technology keep progressing at such a rate. For Lewis Mumford 'the computer itself and its role in automation is just one more step along a road of constrained human choice.'[13] This negative claim is based on the fear that if we keep advancing and developing technology, that it will eventually have a mind of its own and turn against humanity and as such enslave it. This fear is what appears to drive the majority of the negative claims against the advancement in technology.
Lewis Mumford also suggests that even if computers do not rise against humanity one day but are making fundamentally human decisions that the outcome of these decisions could be catastrophic because 'computers may be programmed to return only those results desired by the leaders and managers.'[14] This suggests that advanced technology in the wrong hands is a fear that society should be looking at carefully. Most of Mumford's writing came before the Atomic bomb was created, but his fear is somewhat realised in this technology. This advancement in science and weaponry can be seen to have fallen into the wrong hands as the bomb was detonated over the Japanese city of Hiroshima and later over the city of Nagasaki killing almost 200,000 Japanese people who were mostly civilians. The bomb was the decision of life or death and in the United States hands, they desired death and so the bomb was detonated. Mumford's fear and criticism wasn't unjust or even dramatic in anyway. He had a fair criticism and his fear with the atomic bomb can be seen to have come true. Technology was controlled for power alone.

Norbet Wiener a mathematician and cybernetics specialist, appears to make positive claims about technology that include claims like 'initially technological innovation may result in the loss of jobs but eventually more jobs are created than lost'[15] and that 'his concerns were starting to be accepted by the business world.'[16] That while unemployment would come about with new technology that new career prospects would be created to deal and use the new technology. Employment in the long run would eventually rise when businesses starting to create the right jobs to go with the new technology. He still worries about the advance in technology and had a 'deep concern about the possible social impact of his work.'[17] He also worried about the enslavement of humanity and worried his own work in the cybernetic field could impact on this. He viewed 'automatic equipment as equivalent to slave labour'[18] machines were being created to do a job humans were doing for a much lower cost and means that 'humans in competition with the mechanical slaves must accept economic conditions equivalent to theirs.'[19] If humans wanted to do the job machines are capable of doing then they must accept payment and working hours that are the same as the machine. This is essentially slave labour as machines never have to stop to eat or sleep like humans. Sweat shops in third world countries are currently in competition with machine run factories. These people are paid a pittance and are expected to work long and hard hours in an effort to cut costs for companies and make a bigger profit. This competition with machines means that essentially these sweat shops are like slave camps. The people work hard and get almost nothing for their work. They are treated like machines and once they cannot perform any more they are replaced without a moment's thought. Although machines too have created new jobs such as IT technicians, robotic engineers, mechanic's for cars and trains to name just a few. With each new advancement or invention of technology comes a new job prospect. The invention of the locomotive brought not only faster and easier travel to society but many new jobs with it. Drivers, technicians, ticket collectors and traffic controllers are just a few examples. The running of the technology and maintaining of it needs human input and so employment is created. Technology cannot run essentially without the input of a human. Whether it's to direct the technology or write its software, a human must give the technology input for it to work, otherwise it will cease to exist.

Technology does not yet have a mind of its own, but that it what most of the negative claims are suggesting and are fearful of. The loss of tradition is also a fear that comes through on the majority of the negative claims. They can rarely see the positives of technology because they are living in fear of losing their heritage and giving it over to something that they fear could overrule humanity. They don't look at the medical advancements that make them healthy, or the technology that was used to create the paper they write on and the pens they use to write their criticism upon. The rate of technological advancement is increasing with time, society is looking to create and develop easier ways to live and lengthen their lives. The internet is a massive source of information that millions of people use and depend on every day. It's updated all the time from many places across the globe and is storing the history and heritage of the world that we live in.

Herbert Simon a Nobel prize winner, presents a more positive and optimistic technological visions 'As we design new technology, as we make use of our knowledge about the world and the knowledge that we are gaining about ourselves, about our thinking processes, through research in Al and cognitive simulation, we will realise that we have to apply our technology in a way that keeps man's peace with the universe in which he lives, instead of conceiving our technology as a weapon with which man can wage war on the rest of nature.'[20]
Technology is all about what you do with it, its humanity's choice on whether the advancement of technology will be used for positive or negative outcomes.

[1] R.Rosenberg, The social impact of computers (London, Elsevier, 2004) pg70

[2] February 2005, Lawsuit: 'Grand Theft Auto' Led Teen to Kill. Fox News Available from: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,147722,00.html

[3] February 2005, Lawsuit: 'Grand Theft Auto' Led Teen to Kill. Fox News Available from: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,147722,00.html

[4] R.Rosenberg, The social impact of computers (London, Elsevier, 2004) pg75

[5] R.Rosenberg, The social impact of computers (London, Elsevier, 2004) pg75

[6] R.Rosenberg, The social impact of computers (London, Elsevier, 2004) pg75

[7] February 2005, Lawsuit: 'Grand Theft Auto' Led Teen to Kill. Fox News Available from: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,147722,00.html

[8] R.Rosenberg, The social impact of computers (London, Elsevier, 2004) pg76

[9] R.Rosenberg, The social impact of computers (London, Elsevier, 2004) pg79

[10] R.Rosenberg, The social impact of computers (London, Elsevier, 2004) pg79

[11] R.Rosenberg, The social impact of computers (London, Elsevier, 2004) pg78

[12] R.Rosenberg, The social impact of computers (London, Elsevier, 2004) pg78

[13] R.Rosenberg, The social impact of computers (London, Elsevier, 2004) pg72

[14] R.Rosenberg, The social impact of computers (London, Elsevier, 2004) pg72

[15]R.Rosenberg, The social impact of computers (London, Elsevier, 2004) pg77

[16] R.Rosenberg, The social impact of computers (London, Elsevier, 2004) pg77

[17] R.Rosenberg, The social impact of computers (London, Elsevier, 2004) pg77

[18] R.Rosenberg, The social impact of computers (London, Elsevier, 2004) pg77

[19] R.Rosenberg, The social impact of computers (London, Elsevier, 2004) pg77

[20] R.Rosenberg, The social impact of computers (London, Elsevier, 2004) pg82

Patient Care Manager at Qunomedical GmbH

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The advancement of new technology. Positive or negative?

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The advancement of new technology has been taking place since the beginning of human history. From the invention of items like the spear and knifes