The Uses of Utopia: Travels to the Limits of Thought - Hardcover

Raymond Wren, Joad

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0241761085 ISBN 13: 9780241761083

Publisher: Allen Lane, 2026

Synopsis

Utopia is not somewhere you can go. But neither is it an idle fantasy.

It runs through history and literature from Plato to Thomas More, Margaret Cavendish to Ursula Le Guin. Utopia, this book shows, was for them a tool for exploring the horizons of thought, asking the unaskable and challenging entrenched assumptions about how society has to be.

The Uses of Utopia travels not only to the remote islands, parallel realities and distant planets where this played out, but also the places where those inspired by visions of perfection tried to establish them, from the egalitarian communities built in colonial Mexico to the novelist Étienne Cabet’s disastrous attempt to realize socialism on the Mississippi. We see the groundbreaking ideas, about liberty and the law, sex and the sexes, work and wealth, that imagining an ideal society made possible. We hear the voices of radicals of many kinds talking freely to each other - and also to us. Here, in our imperfect world, how will you use utopia?

About this title

About the Author

Joad Raymond Wren is a writer and historian who has taught at the universities of Oxford, Aberdeen, East Anglia, Paris-Sorbonne and Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of books about cheap print and news, angels and the role of the imagination in political thought, among them The Invention of the Newspaper, Milton's Angels, The Great Exchange and the novel All the Colours You Cannot Name.

Edition details

• Publisher: Allen Lane
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0241761085
• ISBN 13: 9780241761083
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336