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What can properly be called a utopia?

— Glenn Negley The Quest for Utopia (1952)

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Utopias are expressions of political philosophy and theory, to be sure, but they are descriptions of fictional states in which the philosophy and theory are already implemented in the institutions and procedures of the social structure.

The Quest for Utopia (1952)

It seems apparent that the circumstances of existence in modern society are in many ways more restrictive of privacy than conditions in the past; we seem haunted by specters of the organization man, Big Brother, and the omnipresent state. Yet the facts of a changing social and political structure do not themselves attest the badness of that change.

In the first place, utopia literally means "no place", and the use of the fiction of an imagined or mythical state is indeed a characteristic mark of utopian writing. This primary and necessary discrimination eliminates from utopian literature all speculation the form of which indicates that it should properly be designated political philosophy or political theory.

The Quest for Utopia (1952)

Perhaps the last philosopher who gave any significant attention to the privacy of the individual was Jeremy Bentham; his strongly expressed view that law was an invasion of privacy that must be justified on the ground of necessary utility was somewhat, but not profoundly, modified by John Stuart Mill.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Glenn Negley (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.