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In this highly influential book, Ruth Levitas provides an excellent introduction to the meaning and importance of the concept of utopia, and explores a wealth of material drawn from literature and social theory to illustrate its rich history and analytical versatility. Situating utopia within the dynamics of the modern imagination, she examines the ways in which it has been used by some of the leading thinkers of modernity: Marx, Engels, Karl Mannheim, Robert Owen, Georges Sorel, Ernst Bloch, William Morris, and Herbert Marcuse. Utopia remains the most potent secular concept for imagining and producing a 'better world', and this classic text will be invaluable to students across a wide range of disciplines.

"We have long since lost our faith in the idea that human beings could achieve human happiness in some future ideal state, a state that Thomas More, writing five centuries ago, tied to a topos, a fixed place, a land, an island, a sovereign state under a wise and benevolent ruler. But while we have lost our faith in utopias of all hues, the human aspiration that made this vision so compelling has not died. Instead it is re-emerging today as a vision focused not on the future but on the past, not on a future-to-be-created but on an abandoned and undead past that we could call retrotopia. The emergence of retrotopia is interwoven with the deepening gulf between power and politics that is a defining feature of our contemporary liquid modern world ? the gulf between the ability to get things done and the capability of deciding what things need to be done, a capability once vested with the territorially sovereign state. This deepening gulf has rendered nation-states unable to deliver on their promises, giving rise to a widespread disenchantment with the idea that the future will improve the human condition and a mistrust in the ability of nation-states to make this happen. True to the utopian spirit, retrotopia derives its stimulus from the urge to rectify the failings of the present human condition - though now by resurrecting the failed and forgotten potentials of the past. Imagined aspects of the past, genuine or putative, serve as the main landmarks today in drawing the road-map to a better world. Having lost all faith in the idea of building an alternative society of the future, many turn instead to the grand ideas of the past, buried but not yet dead. Such is retrotopia, the contours of which are examined by Zygmunt Bauman in this sharp dissection of our contemporary romance with the past"--

"Whatever historical judgments one wishes to make about Mao Tse-tung and the Maoist era," Maurice Meisner writes, "that era will be recorded as one of the great utopian episodes in world history, and the history of Maoism will remain relevant for those who seek to understand the fate of Marxism and the role of utopianism in the modern world, whatever their political persuasions. In an age which suffers from a paucity of utopian imagination, it is perhaps a history worth recalling." In this volume, Meisner makes an important contribution to understanding the Maoist era in the history of Chinese Communism by exploring the utopian strains in the thought of Mao Tse-tung. Believing that an activistic utopianism is essential to the vitality of Marxism in the contemporary world. Meisner argues that it was precisely Mao's utopian departures from orthodox Marxism-Leninism that transformed the inherited body of Marxist theory into a doctrine relevant to the needs of revolution in the modern Chinese historical environment. He argues further that it was Mao's visionary utopianism in the years after 1949 that was responsible, in large measure, for molding much of what has been distinctive about the postrevolutionary history of the People's Republic of China. In examining the nature of Maoist utopianism, Meisner employs cross-cultural and comparative perspectives to analyze the relationship of Maoism to the original writings of Marx and Engels, early nineteenth-century Western European socialist theories, and classical Russian Populist thought. He also discusses the idiosyncratic character of Mao's utopian vision, the phenomenon of the cult of Mao, and the fate of Maoist utopianism in post-Maoist Chinese Marxist ideology.

Award-winning Ukrainian-born writer Vitali Vitaliev takes stock of Britain today and investigates the state of the nation's many disparate attempts to create a utopian community, including the Garden City that inspired Lenin; the model villages where alcohol was forbidden; and the rural communities that have sought to disconnect themselves from the chaos and strife of ever encroaching modernity. He looks at what remains of these utopian experiments, questioning their success, their purpose and their viability today. Throughout this journey, Vitali also reflects on his own childhood, growing up in the USSR during the Cold War. These reflections are often triggered in the most unlikely of places, and the results are sometimes humorous, sometimes touching - and always interesting. Drawing on these personal experiences, Vitali poses questions on the validity of the utopian idea throughout history and on what exactly Utopia means in Britain today, as he embarks on a quest for the fragments of his Soviet past.