The Uses of Utopia

Utopia is not somewhere you can go. But neither is it an idle fantasy. This book traces utopian ideas across the centuries, from Plato to Margaret Cavendish and Italo Calvino. It reveals the concerns - with the relationship between authority and freedom, law and morality, sex and the sexes, work and the good life - that have animated utopian thinkers from the very beginning. Utopia enabled them to explore the limits of thought, to go beyond what we know and interrogate the very foundations of our societies. The Uses of Utopia offers a beguiling tour not only of the remote islands, parallel realities and distant planets where this played out, but also places where those inspired by these visions of perfection attempted to bring them into being, from the humane, egalitarian communities devised by Vasco de Quiroga in colonial Mexico to etienne Cabet''s disastrous attempt to realise socialism on the Mississippi. It is a book brimming with voices as well as ideas. Luminaries and radicals of all persuasions speak freely with one another - and also to us. Here, in the world utopians reject, utopia still challenges us to reconsider where we stand.

Autorentext

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.

Klappentext

**'This fascinating intellectual history of imagined paradises takes us from Thomas More to Ursula K Le Guin' (Guardian)
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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?