(I myself attempted to create a little utopia, too: I lived on a farmhouse in Devon for 12 years and attempted some basic carpentry, kept chickens and pigs and grew vegetables, with varying degrees of success. Also: A person inclined to be imaginative or idealistic but impractical: an imaginary country that has a perfect social and political system. In a small way their workplaces – like the Google or Facebook campuses – aim to provide workers with a progressive working environment.More ambitiously, billionaires are planning libertarian colonies. Born in 1478, he was progressive in some ways (he educated his daughters to a very high level) while also clinging to archaic customs (he wore hair shirts). And the rest of us get along as best we can – with the occasional trip to the Land of Cockaygne on Friday nights. His vision of a perfect society was a long way from the sensual self-indulgence dreamt of by the peasants in Cockagyne. All property would be in common.The scheme got as far as a flat-share in Bristol and collapsed.After Robert Owen’s first cooperative village in New Lanark, Scotland opened in 1813, the idea spread throughout Britain (Credit: Clearview/Alamy)One significant, and more successful, utopian figure of the 19th Century was Robert Owen. Illustrated by a gorgeous painting of medieval ladies building a city brick by brick, the book defends women’s accomplishments over the aeons and sets up a symbolic city populated by a pantheon of “all women who have loved and do love and will love virtue and morality” – a city meant to be a refuge from patriarchy. The resulting children, happily ignorant of their real parentage and brought up by the state, become the new generation of guardians.Christine de Pizan, shown here in a 15th-century miniature presenting her book, imagined utopia as a female-only city (Credit: Master of the Cité des Dames/British Library)Various medieval works also imagined what an ideal society might look like. We can even trace the roots of the trade unions back to Owen’s efforts.Also still with us are the model communities of Bournville near Birmingham and Port Sunlight near Liverpool, the first built with chocolate money by the Cadbury family, the second with soap money by Lord Leverhulme, founder of Sunlight Soap (now owned by Unilever). It was Gandhi’s utopian thinking, inspired by Tolstoy, that led to his doctrine of passive resistance and his campaign for Indian home rule.One of my favourite 20th-Century utopian societies, however, is the anarchist occupation of Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. There’s never any excuse for idleness. This was a turbulent period. This concept would shape books, philosophies and political movements as varied as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Mahatma Gandhi’s doctrine of passive resistance and the founding of the state of Pennsylvania.More coined the word to describe an island community with an ideal mode of government. There are also no wine-taverns, no ale-houses, no brothels, no opportunities for seduction, no secret meeting-places. The inhabitants have a lot of fun: the narrator, for example, records with pleasure that dinner is served with a bottle of very good Bordeaux.Immediately following Morris came HG Wells, who wrote a dozen utopian and dystopian novels. The situation got violent; troops went in to quell the uprising. He was a co-founder of Paypal, which he predicted would be “something big” in a 1999 speech. Monks and nuns cavort freely. The generously bearded Victorian hero wrote one of the great utopian fantasies, Morris himself was absurdly energetic, managing to pursue simultaneous careers as a poet, artist, novelist, printer, pamphleteer, painter, designer, typesetter, business man, socialist pioneer and rabble-rouser (he was thrown in jail for attending an anti-war rally). Utopian society synonyms, Utopian society pronunciation, Utopian society translation, English dictionary definition of Utopian society. Both were capitalist attempts to build comfortable environments for workers. The communist ideal remains attractive but elusive. And since most utopias are inflexible, what happens to your ideal community when market conditions – which are outside your control – change?At around the same time in England, William Morris was concocting a far gentler version of paradise. adj. )Another charming production of this period was a book called The Isle of Pines by republican wit Henry Neville. Instead of procreating within a family unit, these leaders leave the city once a year for a wild sex orgy. He imagined a utopia called Jerusalem:The Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for his part, hatched plans to sail away from England to America and create what he called a Pantisocracy: a place on the banks of the Susquehanna, Pennsylvania where he and his friends would combine buffalo hunting with philosophising. “There is nothing within the houses that is private or any man’s own,” writes More.

More village than commune, Whiteway is a collection of 68 houses loosely bound by a monthly meeting.In 1909 a young Indian philosopher started to correspond with Tolstoy.