The historian Thomas Nipperdey has examined the function of utopia in political thinking in modern times. He defines utopia essentially as follows: It is the "design of a possible world which consciously exceeds the limits and possibilities of a given reality and aims at a substantially different world, a world which is characterized by a high degree of perfection ... Utopia designs – you may compare this to leap frogging - a world which is right, a world which is institutionally ordered in such a way that man's life succeeds in it.”
Source: The book "Ist Nachhaltigkeit utopisch?" by Professor Dr. Christian Berg, published by the publishing house oekom in 2020
