This need not lead us to despair of enlightenment, to imagine, as some do, that the hope of material improvement must always decay into murderous utopianism.
A utopia is not, like Peter Pan's Neverland, an impossible place; that would turn utopianism into mere fantasy.
Historically, conservatives have diagnosed serious dangers in utopianism.
This is, according to the punditocracy, the summer of our discontent, the moment when utopianism slides into profound disillusionment and "change" in D.C. morphs into "business as usual".
Gray's writing has a bracing clarity, but he tries to fit too much into his model of utopianism with too little argument.
This construction mania jarred, however, with a different kind of utopianism that was coming into fashion.
It was the kind of utopianism that seeped even into the French Revolution, though it was tempered by the guillotine.
You don't have to look elsewhere for the destructive utopianism that turns believers into apostates.
Of equal importance is that, as well as the culture of 30s utopianism, the art of St Ives tapped into a tradition of primitivism, specifically of a kind of ruralist revival of the handmade and of craft.
What the series shows is how this idea spread into the heart of the modern world, from internet utopianism and dreams of democracy without leaders to visions of a new kind of stable global capitalism run by computers.
