Authors: Nohlen
Summary: In about 100 words this short entry dates the emergence of this literary genre back to T. Morus political novels of the middle 16th century. Utopia is defined as a detailed and concrete description of a fictitious society in its economic, political, social, and ideological order. A distinction is made between a positive utopia, that describes an ideal but unreachable state order, and a negative utopia, that warns for the catastrophic consequences of possible political consequences. What both forms have in common is that the author knowingly ignores aspects of reality that will most likely prevent the hypothetical order to become reality, or exaggerates an existing development. The entry ends by pointing to the very specific usage of the term by Marx and Weber to distinguish scientific socialism from utopian socialism.