Free love or genocide? The trouble with Utopias

Ever since Thomas More wrote Utopia 500 years ago, visionaries from William Morris to Ursula K Le Guin have dreamed of ideal worlds. But beneath the fig-leaf of fiction, the results are often bland - or bloody

A quarter of a century ago, the whole idea of utopia seemed irredeemably sullied. At the start of the 1990s, the largest social experiment in human history - the USSR - imploded, and with it went the notion that imagining a radically different society was a serious activity. It seemed that the rewards of such experiments were always so enticing that genocide inevitably ensued.

That was the lesson drawn from any totalitarian regime informed by the highest (or lowest) idealism: the Khmer Rouge, the Videla regime in Argentina, Nazi Germany, you name it. Back then, it was thought best not to fantasise too much about a better world, but to learn to live in this one. The academic and political atmosphere in the 1990s was decidedly pragmatic, rather than optimistic. It was an era in which the liberal democracies celebrated (prematurely, of course) "the end of history". The story of humanity was a march to freedom, we were told, and we had arrived. This was as good as it got, and the idealists and unrealists should stop fantasising, because it was a dangerous hobby.

Related: Utopias, past and present: why Thomas More remains astonishingly radical