ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the founding text of radical utopianism, Thomas More’s Utopia. Utopia is clearly a book ‘concerned with the relation of wealth and poverty, with the abolition of classes, and, ultimately, with the questions of human happiness and social justice’. The chapter suggests that although Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were critical of the Utopian Socialists, they saw at the same time only positive possibilities in their version of radical utopianism and would have probably pointed to Thomas More as the author of the profoundly useful political methodology. Moreover, many of Marx’s brief accounts of the future communist society are very similar to accounts found in the work of the Utopian Socialists. Marx and Engels’ critique of their socialism has become quite wrongly a general dismissal of utopianism. They point to an important and fundamental difference between the socialism offered by Utopian Socialists and the valuable utopian force of their analysis.
