Landscape itself is an idea: the term does not exist without that of an ideal landscape - as a complex imagination connected to the thought that one should strive for its realization. At the same time, landscape is also connected to ideas, especially political utopias. In this volume, Ludwig Trepl retraces the idea of landscape in its historical development - from the Enlightenment and Romanticist images of landscape via those of classical conservatism and of blood and soil ideology to the »greening« of landscape in the environmental movement - and investigates the different concepts and their respective inner structures and the logic of their opposition and intertwinement.