Introduction

Abstract

Chapter 1 outlines the focus of concern in this book and the standpoint from which it has been written. It identifies present-centred condescension as a major obstacle to our better understanding of early-modern radical and utopian thought and three ways in which such condescension operates. They are: anachronism, the uncritical charge of unrealism, and labelling. In the process, the inevitability of an imaginative basis for the radical/utopian conception of alternatives raises the question of ‘realisms’ and ‘realities’, which are themselves imaginatively constructed. Accordingly, we should be looking for alternative ways of evaluating past radical and utopian thinking. The chapter goes on to some preliminary discussion of what might be involved here.