ABSTRACT
Contrary to the assertions of many utopians, utopianism is not simply moral or political idealism. Being a utopian is not the same as possessing ideals, and idealists and there ideals are not necessarily utopian. Karl Marx and Fnedrich Engels, beginning in the 1840s, used the adjective Utopian for propaganda purposes, applying it to the work of rival socialist writers, principally the Comte de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier and Robert Owen. The New Left acquired its name and became a radical movement of consequence in 1956, the year of the Anglo-French occupation of the Suez Canal, the Hungarian uprising, and, in the United States, the beginning of the Civil Rights movement led by Martin Luther King. For Utopian democrats, it is the dominant economic classes and non-leftist elites of democratic nations, and their political parties who are the source of the political opportunism, incompetence, corruption of democratic institutions and other deficiencies of contemporary representative democracies.
