Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life

To be sure, peace won’t look like the world joining hands and singing kumbaya. It will look, at first, like pockets of exhausted people seeking refuge. Writers and thinkers will break from the herd. People will seek out community based on what they love instead of who they hate.

Not to speak of the failure of dreams. Where once there were societies that served as models for a better future, grand plans, utopias, now there is distrust and dissatisfaction with any form of politics, a sense of powerlessness edging into nihilism.

My hope would be that more parties try to work out where they want to go—how they might reimagine welfare, or the governance of technology, or the everyday workings of democracy—and my guess is that all of them would find this energising. The more they can involve the wider public, and particularly young people, in these exercises the better, not s