Our most important task at the present moment is to build castles in the air. We need not fear, as Thoreau reminds us, that the work will be lost. If our eutopias spring out of the realities of our environment, it will be easy enough to place foundations under them. Without a common design, without a grand design, all our little bricks of reconstruction might just as well remain in the brickyard; for a disharmony between men’s minds betokens, in the end, the speedy dilapidation of whatever they may build. Our final word is a counsel of perfection. When that which is perfect has come, that which is imperfect will pass away. BIBLIOGRAPHY For the benefit of the reader who wishes to travel further along the trails opened up in this survey of utopias, I am giving a list of the principal books on the subject. This list includes all the important utopias that are accessible in English, as well as a few that are not; but it is not exhaustive, for the region of Utopia has its swamps and arid places as well as its fertile and cultivated land; and no one but a scholarly explorer need attempt to enter the more forbidding parts of the country. Needless to say, in dealing with our historic utopias I had a rough criterion of selection. I set out to treat such plans for the improvement of the human community as had been embodied in complete pictures of an ideal commonwealth: this excluded important essays in politics like Hobbes’ Leviathan and Harrington’s Oceana; and it ruled out any treatment of abstract idealisms which, however important, did not exemplify the essential utopian method. Next, I resolved to deal at length only with those utopias which have exercised some influence on thought and life, particularly in the Western European world. Third, I sought to emphasize what was common in the methods and ends of the classic utopias; making plain their relations within the world of utopias and their relevance in the present day, rather than attempting to show in any detail the social milieu in which each utopian wrote. In dealing with the nineteenth century my criterion became a little shaky; and I frankly chose the nineteenth century utopias on the basis of their association with temporal movements like state socialism, the single tax, and syndicalism, rather than because of their conformity to standards which served to weed out irrelevant utopias in the earlier centuries. In devoting a little space to Fourier and Spence and giving short shrift to Owen I have tried to restore these interesting and significant figures to the place that they deserve. There will doubtless be disagreements over my selections and the amount of space I have allotted to various writers; but at least, where there has been madness there has also been method.