ABSTRACT
All Utopias from Plato’s Republic to George Orwell’s brave new world of 1984 have one element in common: they are all societies from which change is absent. Utopian societies have certain structural requisites; they must display certain features in order to be what they purport to be. The case of Marx is even more pertinent. It is well known how much time and energy Lenin spent in trying to link the realistically possible event of the proletarian revolution with the image of a Communist society in which there are no classes, no conflicts, no state, and, indeed, no division of labor. Universal consensus means, by implication, the absence of structurally generated conflict. In fact, many builders of Utopias go to considerable lengths to make it clear that in their societies conflict over values or institutional arrangements is either impossible or simply unnecessary. The social system, like Utopia, has not grown out of familiar reality.
