The most frequent qualification is that utopia should be, or in particular cases is, ‘realistic’ or ‘feasible’. This recurs across disciplines and outside the academy in relation to both cognitive models and prefigurative practices. […] Qualifying utopia as realistic sets limits on its legitimacy, potentially confining it to a conservative reading of the present or binding imagination too closely to what can be imagined as possible rather than what can possibly be imagined. What remains may be only, in Mannheim’s terms, a form of ideology. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 129

The tension between realism and utopia occurs in relation to both abstract theory and practical politics, where it is expressed in the opposition between pragmatism and utopia. Karl Popper identified utopia with intellectual and social closure, insisting on the superiority of gradual and piecemeal change. The usual meaning of political pragmatism, more usually contrasted with ideology, is pursuit of ‘what works’. It prioritises short-term fixes for problems within the current system; questions of the viability or justice of that system itself, and certainly radical alternatives, are placed outside legitimate political debate. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 132