Searching for the best of all possible worlds in London – The Spectator

Utopia can never exist, literally, since the word, which Sir Thomas More coined in his 1516 book of that name, comes from the Greek for not and place. For the avoidance of doubt, More doubled down on the wordplay, naming the governor of his fictional island Ademos, meaning no people, and the river that runs through it Anyder, meaning no water.

Interrupting your steak to recite from Leviticus isnt everyones idea of fun

Yet theres more to it than this, because it turns out that one mans idea of an ideal society is often very different from anothers. Mores vision was proto-communist. Houses in his Utopia are allocated by lot, and re-allocated every ten years. Each morning the citizens rise early and devote themselves to study before the real work starts.

As Niall Kishtainy points out in his excellent history of London-based utopian thought, this fictional creation has much in common with the contented solemnity of Mores own home life in the City of London and later Chelsea. At dinner, the family would take it in turns to read aloud from the scriptures and then discuss a question posed by More. And herein lies the faultline of all utopianism. Happiness, when you look into it, is as subjective as its opposite. Interrupting your steak to recite from Leviticus isnt everyones idea of fun.

Nevertheless, Kishtainy clearly feels fond of his cast of saints and crackpots who lived in and around London as they dreamed of a better world. Why, though, does he stick to London? Why not extend his scope to Platos Republic, which the philosopher suggested would best be governed by (you guessed it) philosophers? Why exclude recent micro-states, such as the Independent Principality of Sealand, the abandoned anti-aircraft installation in the North Sea which an Essex family has held since the 1960s without ever sorting out the heating as I learned to my cost when I stayed there for a few bone-chilling days a decade ago?

Kishtainy never really justifies his geography except to say that the labyrinth of his Infinite City provides a foil for its utopian dreamers. But this arbitrary element is forgotten amid the momentum of his many-peopled narrative. We learn, for example, of Gerrard Winstanley, who was told by God in a trance to work together, eat bread together and declare this all abroad. He tried to do just that with his fellow Diggers near Cobham in the 1640s, much to the consternation of the locals.

Then there was Thomas Spence, the 18th- century radical who believed that the poor were kept in ignorance by the difficulty of the English language. He invented a phonetic system of spelling which, he wrote (using his new method), would save them from many veksathus, tedeus and ridikilis absurditez. It never caught on. In the 19th century, one John Adolphus Etzler claimed that utopia could be achieved by labour-saving machinery which would enable people to live to the age of 170. The thrust of his argument was undermined when one of his prototypes, a wave-powered boat, sank in the Thames on its maiden voyage.

In the 20th century, nationwide attempts to realise some version of utopia in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia engendered atrocities. Thinkers such as Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin argued that this may have been inevitable. Since no one can agree what utopia should look like, it can only be realised by force, which leads to totalitarianism.

The counter-argument, a historical instance of utopian ideals being realised to the benefit of all, is the welfare state. So says Kishtainy, a left-wing LSE professor and instinctive utopian, who believes that in Britain the advances of the 1940s were eroded by the Tories in the 1980s. He might not sound an obvious choice for Spectator readers, but you dont have to agree with someone to enjoy their company. He is now in despair about the state of things on the grounds that so many people consume the knee-jerk narratives of journalists that feed on feelings of fear. Prove him wrong by buying his vigorous, rigorous and eminently readable book. You may even finish it feeling heartened.

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The capacity to imagine a world thats better than the one you were born into is a uniquely human attribute. You can describe this in a work of fiction, as More did, and as is done, arguably, by almost every novelist; you can attempt to create it in miniature in your domestic life; or you can try to realise it in politics. These are all manifestations of an impulse we share, wherever we sit in the political spectrum.

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Searching for the best of all possible worlds in London - The Spectator