The Story of American Utopianism

When exactly did utopia become less interesting than dystopia? The vision of a grim and gray future is just as much a fantasy as that of a perfectly ordered society, but somehow it is the grim one that now captures our attention. The descriptions of a glistening City of the Sun or a New Atlantis have given way to the warnings of 1984 and Brave New World. If those title phrases have passed into general usage, as the word utopia once did, it is because they stand for things that we urgently want to talk about.