Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life

Doubters can mount a stiff resistance, but in every generation from Aristophanes on down, the dreamers persist.

resistance to new ways of thinking may be most extreme when it concerns how we structure our private lives.

For millennia, new ways of organizing social relations have emerged when philosophers, theologians, reformers, writers, and other visionaries imagine them elsewhere, in some idealized world that serves as a mirror to reflect the deficiencies of the accepted state of things.

a persistent and profound suspicion of political imagination; readers avoid even thinking about visions labeled or derided as “utopian.”

where we reside, how we raise and educate our children, our personal relationship to things, and the quality of our connections to friends, families, and partners impact us as much as tax policies, the price of energy, or the way we organize formal employment.

Dreamers Have Always Had Haters

The German sociologist Karl Mannheim argued that utopia was a necessary antidote to what he considered the normative role of “ideology,” a term he specifically defined as the unseen but omnipresent social, cultural, and philosophical structure that upholds a particular “order of things” and protects those who wield political and economic power.

“Utopian” as I use it simply denotes thinkers and movements that attempted to rearrange the domestic sphere in ways significantly out of keeping with the prevailing traditions of their societies for the purpose of living together in greater harmony in pursuit of either secular or spiritual goals.

Historically, moments of political uncertainty often give birth to utopian dreaming, which is one reason why it is enjoying such a renaissance today.