Editing Utopia (section)

==Varieties==
Chronologically, the first recorded Utopian proposal is [[Plato]]'s ''[[Republic (Plato)|Republic]]''.<ref>More, Travis; Vinod, Rohith (1989)</ref> Part conversation, part fictional depiction and part policy proposal, the ''Republic'' sets out a system that would categorize citizens into a rigid class structure of "golden", "silver", "bronze" and "iron" socioeconomic classes. The golden citizens are trained in a rigorous 50-year-long educational program to be benign oligarchs, the "philosopher-kings". Plato stressed this structure many times in statements, and in the ''Republic'' and other published works. The wisdom of these rulers will supposedly eliminate poverty and deprivation through fairly distributed resources, though the details on how to do this are unclear. The educational program for the rulers is the central notion of the proposal. It has few laws, no lawyers and rarely sends its citizens to war but hires [[mercenary|mercenaries]] from among its war-prone neighbors. These mercenaries were deliberately sent into dangerous situations in the hope that the more warlike populations of all surrounding countries will be weeded out, leaving peaceful peoples to remain.

During the 16th century, Thomas More's book ''[[Utopia (More book)|Utopia]]'' proposed an ideal society of the same name.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item126618.html|title=Thomas More's Utopia|website=bl.uk|access-date=14 May 2017|archive-date=2 May 2017|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170502205735/http://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item126618.html|url-status=live}}</ref> Readers, including Utopian socialists, have chosen to accept this imaginary society as the realistic blueprint for a working nation, while others have postulated that Thomas More intended nothing of the sort.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.utopiaanddystopia.com/utopia/utopian-socialism/ |title=Utopian Socialism |publisher=The Utopian Socialism Movement |website=utopiaanddystopia.com |access-date=14 May 2017 |archive-date=11 May 2017 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170511155642/http://www.utopiaanddystopia.com/utopia/utopian-socialism/ |url-status=live }}</ref> It is believed that More's ''Utopia'' functions only on the level of a satire, a work intended to reveal more about the [[England]] of his time than about an idealistic society.<ref>{{cite news |last=Dalley |first=Jan |url=https://www.ft.com/content/73b9bed6-a7ea-11e5-955c-1e1d6de94879 |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20221210/https://www.ft.com/content/73b9bed6-a7ea-11e5-955c-1e1d6de94879 |archive-date=2022-12-10 |url-access=subscription |url-status=live |title=Openings: Going back to Utopia |work=[[Financial Times]]|location=London |date=30 December 2015 |access-date=27 August 2018}}</ref> This interpretation is bolstered by the title of the book and nation and its apparent confusion between the Greek for "no place" and "good place": "utopia" is a compound of the syllable ou-, meaning "no" and topos, meaning place. But the [[Homophone|homophonic]] prefix eu-, meaning "good", also resonates in the word, with the implication that the perfectly "good place" is really "no place".