The financial crisis of 2007-2008 cast a pall of pessimism over many forecasters’ views of the future. As familiar as the mass psychology of economic cycles may be, there seems to be something different going on: Are we witnessing some sort of transition in attitudes towards the future?

The history of utopian thinking has passed through four stages.

Stage one: The cyclical time of tradition

Once upon a time there was the time of no history, the time of the ancients and the traditionalists, in which the basic features of reality were understood to be unchanging and eternal. Yes, there was a distinction between better and worse, and there were aspirations to gain access to the idea of the good. But those aspirations were not so much towards the good yet to come. The love of wisdom, philosophy, was an upward quest towards eternal ideals, towards a kind of great blueprint in the sky that did not change.

Stage two: Modernity and progress

Following the first stage, when time was regarded as ‘the moving image of eternity’, there came the time of progressive history and evolution. Christian eschatology pointed towards a future salvation. In the 19th century, a sense of progressive history came to define the very spine of modernity. From getting better every day in every way, to DuPont's advertising slogan from 1935 to 1982, ‘Better living through chemistry’, the march of progress through advances in science gained a firm foothold in Western culture.

During this long second stage in the history of utopia, the quest for the good no longer followed an upward path towards eternal truths. Instead, a more worldly path lay in the direction of a better future. Invention flourished.

But just as people were inventing better technologies, so they invented better utopias. The very nature of utopian thinking underwent its own form of progress. In the 19th century utopian thinking evolved away from the physical particulars of cities and towards the more ethereal aspects of the human spirit. Utopian thinking passed through a period during which it shifted from architecture, city planning, and drainage systems to psychology, philosophy, and states of mind. During what might be called the sublimation of utopia, the terms ‘utopia’ and ‘utopian’ came to connote more about minds than about bricks and mortar. Delusions of utopia fed the kind of totalising metanarratives that can send millions to their deaths.