ABSTRACT
Utopian experiments are inherently spatial in character. The issue of time emerges when their orientation turns from the present to the future (see Hetherington, forthcoming). We often think of such experiments in terms of distinct communities, either imaginary ones on paper, or lived ones attempted in practice. As particular spaces that set themselves apart as islands of ordered perfection, their aim is to establish a source of comparison against which the seemingly disordered and troubled mess that makes up society might be compared and judged. The hope of the narrator is that outsiders will judge their own society as not living up to the utopian community. Not only will it offer an example of an alternative moral community that better addresses the problems of the day but it will also suggest practical everyday examples of social and economic relations through which society might come to be ordered. In practice, of course, the comparison can work in the opposite direction too as the dystopian tradition, as well as the failure of many utopian experiments, would suggest.
