Wells' uncanny ability to highlight the problems which are now most acute and supply tentative solutions that allow a maximum of individual freedom merits serious consideration. A Modern Utopia is one of the first important blueprints for the modern welfare state and an early major statement of Wells' idea of the World State, an idea that is perhaps his greatest contribution to the intellectual history of this century. In this quintessential utopia Wells sums up and clarifies the utopia's of the past, and brings them into contact with the world of the present.