Abstract

The scholarly field of utopian studies has to date focused primarily on three broad varieties of utopianism: literary utopias, utopian social thought, and communal experiments. By comparison, the study of the relationship between utopia and politics has been relatively neglected. In his book Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction, published in 2010, Lyman Tower Sargent observes that at the time of writing there was no general study of the role utopianism plays in political theory. Nor, it may be added with due acknowledgment of partial exceptions such as Barbara Goodwin and Keith Taylor's The Politics of Utopia, is there any extant general study of the role utopianism plays in politics more broadly or...