Su suggerimento di bullone

Non tutte le utopie sono progressive, e quelle progressive non sono liberali. Il massimo che il liberalismo può garantire, in termini di utopia, è una società difettosa: come la nostra, ma meno crudele. O almeno così la pensa Adam Gopnik sul New Yorker, recensendo “The Last Utopians: Four Late Nineteenth-Century Visionaries and Their Legacy” di Michael Robertson, il quale di utopia ne passa in rassegna diverse, evidenziandone l’empito idealistico e i lati oscuri.

As every student was once taught, the idea of utopia, or at least the name for it, originated with Thomas More, the man for all seasons, who wrote the first one down in 1516. “Utopia” means “no place” in Greek, and so a sly element of rueful self-acknowledgment resides within the idea, with the auto-negation of a Magritte drawing. More’s original Utopia is, like many that followed it, a charming mixture of intelligent social criticism and bizarre sexual aspiration, none of it meant, one feels, to be taken altogether seriously. In More, the two ironies that govern nineteenth-century utopian thinking are already present: artisanal craft is rated over mental work by an intellectual author, and sexual egalitarianism is proposed by an imagination not entirely at ease with it.

All utopias are not progressive, and progressive utopias are not liberal. Indeed, as close as liberalism gets to utopia is a society flawed, like our own, but less cruel

Immagine: Wikipedia