Reminiscent of Gulliver’s Travels and Sophie’s World in turn, this delightful satirical comedy is a whirlwind tour through the utopias of our modernity. Along the way, Lukes both pays homage to and reveals the tragic failure of each utopia in achieving the perfect world.
Nicholas Caritat, a modern-day professor and scholar of the Enlightenment, takes a journey through the fictional world of western political philosophy. Conversing mentally with Voltaire and Condorcet, he seeks to avoid the political struggle in Militaria, the police state where he lives, and though he is arrested by the police, he is liberated by guerrillas who dub him Pangloss because they want him to find the best of all possible worlds. Traveling through Utilitaria, Libertaria, Communitaria, and Egalitaria, his misadventures reveal to him and us that none of them is ideal because, alone, each lacks the strengths of the others.