Rutger Bregman Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017, HB, 336pp, £16.99, 978-1408890264
Some might say that the title of this book has an oxymoronic quality: can a realist believe that a Utopia is achievable? By the end of the argument I remained uncertain, but there is no doubting the author’s command of his evidence or his degree of commitment to his cause. Bregman is described as ‘one of Europe’s most prominent young thinkers’, and this book became a bestseller in his native Netherlands when first published in 2014. The translation by Elizabeth Manton is easy to read, and maintains what I assume to be the sharp and witty style of the original.
The author begins by characterising current developed economies as lands …