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For other uses, please see Utopia (disambiguation)
Left panel (The Earthly ParadiseGarden of Eden) from Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights.

Utopia [1] is a name for an imaginary community or society with a perfect system of laws and politics.[2]

Sir Thomas More invented the word for his 1516 book Utopia. The book was about a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. The word has been used to describe both a perfect society, and societies in literature. A related idea is dystopia.

There have been many utopias based on politics, economics, religion, ecology. Some of these have been propagated in books and pamphlets, some as actual communities. In practice, attempts to create utopias seem doomed, as good intentions run against problems. Most of the literary utopias are actually satires of existing societies.

Literature examples[change | change source]

References[change | change source]

  1. pronounced /juːˈtoʊpiə/
  2. http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2130
  3. Morris, William (2006) [1903]. The Earthly Paradise. Obscure Press. ISBN 1846645239.