ABSTRACT
The utopian citizen will find himself confronted, as does the citizen of today, with a choice between immediate and long-range advantages; and the choice may sometimes be painful for him, as it is for us. The first job of the Utopian writer is to take stock of the world into which he is born, to assess its total functioning. The true Utopist's pledge to reality is, at the same time, his pledge to hope: hope for a more satisfactory state of affairs than the present provides. This hope is neither a panacea nor an anodyne, though many Utopists have confused matters in the fashion of quack doctors. In strict truth, it is not even a "specific": the very idea of prescription is alien to the Utopian concern and either adulterates it or destroys it altogether. Rather than being therapeutic, Utopias are essentially diagnostic, and what they diagnose is a possible state of affairs that would be acceptable to all.
