The Ten Stupidest Utopias

Over at Strange Horizons, Jeremy Adam Smith gives ten Utopian visions a synopsis and a skewering. Fun stuff.

The Republic lives on in the rhetoric of contemporary political movements of both right and left—every elitist and technocratic fantasy of our time has grown from the seed of The Republic. Plato would not have understood the term "dehumanization" as we understand it—he'd never, of course, seen a factory floor or a gas chamber—but when his ideas have been enacted in places like the Soviet Union, Mussolini's Italy, or modern state-capitalist China, they have proven brutally dehumanizing, his apparat of "guardians" thoroughly corrupted by power.

(See also Smith's Ten Sexiest Dystopias)