Utopia

Utopia is a genre of imaginative literature that portrays the image of an ideal, perfectly ordered society built on principles of justice, equality, and rational order. The name comes from the work of the English humanist Thomas More, Utopia (1516) — the Greek ou-topos means 'a place that does not exist'. Utopia expresses humanity's dream of a better world and at the same time criticizes the vices of the existing order. Classic examples are Tommaso Campanella's The City of the Sun and Francis Bacon's New Atlantis. Utopian motifs — a striving for a harmonious social order — are present in Ukrainian social thought and literature, in particular in the philosophy of Hryhorii Skovoroda with his idea of 'kindred labor' and the 'heavenly republic'. In the twentieth century utopia largely gave way to its negation — dystopia, which warned against the dangers of realizing ideal projects.