siraanamwong/iStock Utopia —a term meaning both “good place” and “no place”—has a long history: It dates back to Thomas More’s book of the same name, which was published in 1516. More imagined a perfect world as a lens through which to see the current one: In order to fully appreciate the unfairness of 16 th -century England, More contrasted it with a hypothetical Utopia where all men were equally prosperous.
No one mistook More’s Utopia for a policy proposal. As Rutger Bregman explains in the introduction to Utopia for Realists , virtually all of humanity was living in extreme poverty […]
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