Abstract

After the many meetings held in 2016 to commemorate the five hundredth anniversary of the publication of Thomas More's Utopia, it seems fitting that we should consider the relevance of its central themes to the idea of what Europe has come to represent in the past sixty years or so. This article will proceed by recalling More's leading ideas and then indicating how later thinkers, especially after 1800, moved some of these in a specifically European direction. After touching on some key moments in the European utopian narrative, this article will briefly consider some discordant dystopian episodes in this story. Then it will turn to the present and to our prospects for the longer-term future, or, at any rate, the rest of the twenty-first century.