Abstract

The little book we now familiarly refer to as Utopia was published five hundred years ago in Leuven, the capital of what is today the Flemish province of Brabant in Belgium. As a work of fantasy it has had an astonishingly successful history. As both the no-place and the good-place, then eventually perhaps also the place-one-should-not-go, the dream that becomes a nightmare when we try to realize it, utopia has become inscribed in our vocabulary and our ideas. It means many things to many people, yet few would deny the power of the concept. So it is worth briefly revisiting just how this has mutated over the centuries.First, then, to Sir Thomas and his ideas. The text is presented to us in the form of a...