For centuries, basic income has been considered a great utopia. Since its first formulation, in 1797 by the philosopher Thomas Paine, it has been the subject of theories from great thinkers.
As a matter of fact, over the centuries, philosophers and economists such as Thomas Spence, John Stuart Mill, Charles Fourier have put this concept at the center of their regards. But great economists too, such as Bertrand Russel, in his work Proposed Roads to Freedom: Socialism, Anarchism, and Syndicalism, along with James Meade in Agathotopia, without forgetting with the formulations of more contemporary economists such as Friedrich von Hayek, James Tobin and John Kenneth Galbrait.
These are visionary works that made inevitably different assumptions on basic income, but all of them shared the vision that this same great utopia would have allowed the overcoming of ancient and ideological contrasts.