A more politically radical Malcolm Gladwell. -- New York Times

After working all day at jobs we often dislike, we buy things we don't need. Rutger Bregman, a Dutch historian, reminds us it needn't be this way -- and in some places it isn't. Rutger Bregman's TED Talk about universal basic income seemed impossibly radical when he delivered it in 2014. A quarter of a million views later, the subject of that video is being seriously considered by leading economists and government leaders the world over. It's just one of the many utopian ideas that Bregman proves is possible today.

Utopia for Realists is one of those rare books that takes you by surprise and challenges what you think can happen. From a Canadian city that once completely eradicated poverty, to Richard Nixon's near implementation of a basic income for millions of Americans, Bregman takes us on a journey through history, and beyond the traditional left-right divides, as he champions ideas whose time have come.

Every progressive milestone of civilization -- from the end of slavery to the beginning of democracy -- was once considered a utopian fantasy. Bregman's book, both challenging and bracing, demonstrates that new utopian ideas, like the elimination of poverty and the creation of the fifteen-hour workweek, can become a reality in our lifetime. Being unrealistic and unreasonable can in fact make the impossible inevitable, and it is the only way to build the ideal world.

Five hundred years since its first publication, Thomas More's Utopia remains astonishingly radical and provocative. More imagines an island nation where thousands live in peace and harmony, men and women are both educated, and property is communal. In a text hovering between fantasy, satire, blueprint and game, More explores the theories and realities behind war, political conflicts, social tensions and redistribution, and imagines the day-to-day lives of a citizenry living free from fear, oppression, violence and suffering.

But there has always been a shadow at the heart of Utopia. If this is a depiction of the perfect state, why, as well as wonder, does it provoke a growing unease?

In this quincentenary edition, published in conjunction with Somerset House, More's text is introduced by multi-award-winning author China Mi ville and accompanied by four essays from Ursula K. Le Guin, today's most distinguished utopian writer and thinker..

In this timeless classic, Utopia, Thomas More presents a fascinating exploration of an ideal society. Translated by Gilbert Burnet, this thought-provoking narrative delves into the structure of a perfect community on the fictional island of Utopia. More's work challenges readers with its insightful reflections on justice, governance, and societal norms. A cornerstone of political philosophy and social critique, Utopia remains a compelling read for those seeking to understand the complexities of creating a just and equitable society.

The Utopia Reader compiles primary texts from a variety of authors and movements in the history of theorizing utopias.

Utopianism is defined as the various ways of imagining, creating, or analyzing the ways and means of creating an ideal or alternative society. Prominent writers and scholars across history have long explored how or why to envision different ways of life. The volume includes texts from classical Greek literature, the Old Testament, and Plato's Republic, to Sir Thomas More's Utopia, to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and beyond. By balancing well-known and obscure examples, the text provides a comprehensive and definitive collection of the various ways Utopias have been conceived throughout history and how Utopian ideals have served as criticisms of existing sociocultural conditions.

This new edition includes many historically well-known works, little known but influential texts, and contemporary writings, providing an even more expansive coverage of the varieties of approaches and responses to the concept of utopia in the past, present, and even the future. In particular, the volume now includes feminist writings and work by authors of color, and contends with current concerns, such as the exploration of the ecological ideals of Utopia. Furthermore, Claeys and Sargent highlight twenty-first century trends and popular narrative explorations of Utopias through the genres of young adult dystopias, survivalist dystopias, and non-print utopias. Covering a range of original theories of utopianism and revealing the nuances and concerns of writers across history as they attempt to envision different, ideal societies, The Utopia Reader is an essential resource for anyone who envisions a better future.

Exact facsimile of 1928 Edition. The book is, in Wells's words, a scheme to thrust forward and establish a human control over the destinies of life and liberate it from its present dangers, uncertainties and miseries. It proposes that largely as the result of scientific progress, a common vision of a world politically, socially and economically unified is emerging among educated and influential people, and that this can be the basis of a world revolution aiming at universal peace, welfare and happy activity that can result in the establishment of a world commonweal. This is to be achieved by drawing together a proportion of all or nearly all the functional classes in contemporary communities in order to weave the beginnings of a world community out of their selection. This will ultimately be a world religion. Still topical in light of the conflicts resulting from efforts to establish the European Community and the New Global Order.

Muhammad Yunus, who created microcredit, invented social business, and earned a Nobel Peace Prize for his work in alleviating poverty, is one of today's most trenchant social critics. Now he declares it's time to admit that the capitalist engine is broken -- that in its current form it inevitably leads to rampant inequality, massive unemployment, and environmental destruction. We need a new economic system that unleashes altruism as a creative force just as powerful as self-interest.

Is this a pipe dream? Not at all. In the last decade, thousands of people and organizations have already embraced Yunus's vision of a new form of capitalism, launching innovative social businesses designed to serve human needs rather than accumulate wealth. They are bringing solar energy to millions of homes in Bangladesh; turning thousands of unemployed young people into entrepreneurs through equity investments; financing female-owned businesses in cities across the United States; bringing mobility, shelter, and other services to the rural poor in France; and creating a global support network to help young entrepreneurs launch their start-ups.

In A World of Three Zeros, Yunus describes the new civilization emerging from the economic experiments his work has helped to inspire. He explains how global companies like McCain, Renault, Essilor, and Danone got involved with this new economic model through their own social action groups, describes the ingenious new financial tools now funding social businesses, and sketches the legal and regulatory changes needed to jumpstart the next wave of socially driven innovations. And he invites young people, business and political leaders, and ordinary citizens to join the movement and help create the better world we all dream of.

From renowned feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland depicts the journey of three men after they stumble upon a society where only women live. The men are forced to confront their biases and prejudice when challenged by the utopian nature of this society, where there is no crime, no grime, and no malice. The women defy every expectation the men have by their grace, strength, and physicality. A groundbreaking utopian novel, Herland prompts the reader to ponder whether conceived gender norms are nothing more than figments of prejudice, and whether such a utopia can be built by men... or by anyone else.

The Open Conspiracy presents H. G. Wells' vision for an international movement to establish control over the destinies of human life. Through a process of propaganda and a conspiracy unfolding in full view, Wells hopes to create a world which is politically, socially and economically unified, ultimately leading to a revolution aimed at peace, welfare and happiness - a world commonwealth.

First published in 1928 when radical movements like communism and fascism were shaking the established order, Wells pushes for a utopian world in which science is a religion, nation states do not exist any more, and population size and the distribution of food are coordinated by a global elite of businessmen and experts.

The Open Conspiracy prophetically foreshadows current developments towards global, technocratic governance and data-driven decision making.

Authoritarianism is on the march--and so is dystopian fiction. In the brave new twenty-first century, young-adult series like The Hunger Games and Divergent have become blockbusters; after Donald Trump's election, two dystopian classics, 1984 and The Handmaid's Tale, skyrocketed to the New York Times best-seller list. This should come as no surprise: dystopian fiction has a lot to say about the perils of terrible government in real life.

In Survive and Resist, Amy L. Atchison and Shauna L. Shames explore the ways in which dystopian narratives help explain how real-world politics work. They draw on classic and contemporary fiction, films, and TV shows--as well as their real-life counterparts--to offer funny and accessible explanations of key political concepts. Atchison and Shames demonstrate that dystopias both real and imagined help bring theories of governance, citizenship, and the state down to earth. They emphasize nonviolent resistance and change, exploring ways to challenge and overcome a dystopian-style government. Fictional examples, they argue, help give us the tools we need for individual survival and collective resistance. A clever look at the world through the lenses of pop culture, classic literature, and real-life events, Survive and Resist provides a timely and innovative approach to the fundamentals of politics for an era of creeping tyranny.

Within the history of African American struggle against racist oppression that often verges on dystopia, a hidden tradition has depicted a transfigured world. Daring to speculate on a future beyond white supremacy, black utopian artists and thinkers offer powerful visions of ways of being that are built on radical concepts of justice and freedom. They imagine a new black citizen who would inhabit a world that soars above all existing notions of the possible.

In Black Utopia, Alex Zamalin offers a groundbreaking examination of African American visions of social transformation and their counterutopian counterparts. Considering figures associated with racial separatism, postracialism, anticolonialism, Pan-Africanism, and Afrofuturism, he argues that the black utopian tradition continues to challenge American political thought and culture. Black Utopia spans black nationalist visions of an ideal Africa, the fiction of W. E. B. Du Bois, and Sun Ra's cosmic mythology of alien abduction. Zamalin casts Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. Butler as political theorists and reflects on the antiutopian challenges of George S. Schuyler and Richard Wright. Their thought proves that utopianism, rather than being politically immature or dangerous, can invigorate political imagination. Both an inspiring intellectual history and a critique of present power relations, this book suggests that, with democracy under siege across the globe, the black utopian tradition may be our best hope for combating injustice.

A historical document reintroducing Dallas as an early French socialist utopia, pieced from journal entries, letters, and sketches of French scholar Victor Considerant.

In the aftermath of the French Revolution, where visions of egalitarian futures brewed, Victor Considerant set off with a legion of over two hundred European settlers to create their own socialist utopia. Their settlement was La Réeacute;union, just thirty miles outside of Downtown Dallas, along the scenic Trinity river. Utopian visions clashed with the harsh agrarian realities of Texas, as the settlers - academics, musicians and intellectuals - floundered in the heat, and La Réunion wilted.

Victor Considerant's name can be found everywhere in Dallas, but the history of its provenance is not as ubiquitous. Collecting his journal entries, letters to friends back home, and sketches of his surroundings, The Road to Texas provides a glimpse into his ambitions and visions and a sketch of 18th century Dallas. Full of lush descriptions, ardent aspirations, and harsh lessons, it is both an incisive, informative documentation of the founding of Dallas, and an important historical resource to re-examine our present.

A love letter to liberation, from Palestine to the ground beneath your feet.

When you think of freedom, where are you? And where are you headed? Letters from a Living Utopia invites readers to engage with utopia as both a destination and a lived reality starting with the ground beneath our feet. Dreaming of freedom from the displaced and occupied realities of Palestine, Mx Yaffa builds bridges between the historical struggle for liberation and self-determination and the everyday, intimate, and interconnected ways that we build freedom where we are, through care, healing, and bonds of solidarity. Letters from a Living Utopia is a remarkable journey to a world in formation, emergent in our resilience and our repair, our spiritual grounding and our non-attachment, our love and joy, and our sustainable and sustaining relations to the earth in its abundance.

In The New Atlantis, Sir Francis Bacon envisions a utopian society driven by scientific discovery and enlightenment. Set on the fictional island of Bensalem, the work explores themes of knowledge, exploration, and human progress, offering a timeless meditation on the potential of science to transform civilization.

Utopia is a work of fiction and socio-political satire by Thomas More, published in 1516. The book is a frame narrative primarily depicting a fictional island society and its religious, social, and political customs. More pieces his world together in great detail, taking pleasure in what makes his world different from our own. However, he wants the reader to take his story seriously, which is why he bases it in reality, saying it is a part of the New World, this being the parts of America and its surrounding islands which were recently discovered.

The first part of Utopia expresses strong criticism of then-modern practices in England and other Catholicism-dominated countries, such as the crime of theft being punishable by death, and the over-willingness of kings to start wars. Part two deals with a socialist state called Utopia and the narrator's aim of convincing the reader about its superior state of affairs. Since publication, Utopia has become one of the most talked about works both in defense of socialism and against it.

This case laminate collector's edition includes a Victorian inspired dust-jacket.

When Mosley was working on a doctorate in political theory, he envisioned himself writing very different kinds of books from the ones he writes now. But once you've been tagged as a novelist, and in Mosley's case, a genre writer, even a bestselling one, it is hard to get an airing of ideas that cross those boundaries. Folding the Red into the Black has grown out of Mosley's public talks, which have gotten both enthusiastic and agitated responses.

Mosley's is an elastic mind, and in this short monograph he frees himself to explore some novel ideas. He draws on personal experiences and insights as an African-American, a Jew, and one of our great writers to present an alternative manifesto of sorts: We need to throw off the unbearable weight of bureaucratic Capitalist and Socialist demands; demands that exist to perpetuate these systems, not to praise and raise humanity to its full promise. And so I propose the word, the term Untopia.

Utopia (1516) is a work of political satire by Thomas More. Published in Latin while More was serving as Privy Counsellor under King Henry VIII, the text is stylized as a true account of a new civilization discovered in the New World by traveler Raphael Hythlodaeus. While there have been varying interpretations of Utopia over the centuries, it is most consistently regarded as a work of political philosophy in the tradition of Plato's Republic that satirizes European society by contrast with the laws and traditions of the Utopian people. The island of Utopia is in the middle two hundred miles broad, and holds almost at the same breadth over a great part of it, but it grows narrower towards both ends. Its figure is not unlike a crescent. For centuries, Utopia has been seen as an essential work of Renaissance humanism for its vision of a just and highly organized political system characterized by the abolition of private property, communal values, full employment, and free accessible healthcare. While scholars have long debated whether More envisioned his Utopia as a positive representation of society or as merely an unattainable vision of life on earth, his work remains an essential contribution to political discourse that continues to inform readers today. This edition of Thomas More's Utopia is a classic work of English literature reimagined for modern readers.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

A fascinating glimpse into an experimental British nudist culture that radically challenged and transformed conventional attitudes to bodies and their representations

This richly illustrated volume examines the idiosyncratic phenomenon of social nudism in mid-20th-century Britain, an island nation fabled for its lack of sunshine and its reserved social attitudes.
Structured across three interrelated phases, readers first encounter the movement at its genesis in the 1920s, when nudism was synonymous with vegetarianism, intellectualism and utopianism. That nascent culture proliferated in the postwar era, with a widening landscape of amateur clubs and governing organizations alongside high-circulation publications and censorship-challenging photographers. Finally, Annebella Pollen examines the movement's redefinition as naturism, its cultural battles and its struggle to survive amid shifts in sexual liberation in the permissive 1960s.
Unadorned bodies were the central campaigning tool of British naturism's photographic propaganda. They drew attention to the cause and drove publication sales but they also attracted regular public opprobrium. Naturism's shifting visual culture thus provides a microcosmic view of British moral, legal and aesthetic transformations in a period of rapid social change, revealing evolving perspectives on health and sex, gender and ethnicity, pleasure and power.
Annebella Pollen is Reader in History of Art and Design at the University of Brighton. Her first book, Mass Photography: Collective Histories of Everyday Life, explored 55,000 amateur snapshots taken on one day in 1987. The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift examined the modernist craft and occult spirituality of former scoutmasters in 1920s England.

Utopia, a term coined by Thomas More from the Greek meaning nowhere, envisions an imaginary island where a perfect society flourishes. This groundbreaking work of socio-political satire, divided into two books, offers a detailed account of the customs, governance, and daily life within this ideal community.

In Book One, More crafts a narrative through correspondence with real-life acquaintances he met across Europe, lending credibility to his fictional creation. The story then shifts to a dialogue between More and a well-traveled philosopher, Raphael Hythlodaeus, who critiques the social ills of contemporary Europe.

Book Two transports readers to the New World, where Raphael recounts his journey beyond Brazil, after parting ways with the explorer Amerigo Vespucci, to the island of Utopia. Here, he spends five years observing the islanders' way of life, where unique practices include the election of a prince, the equitable redistribution of people to maintain balanced populations, the ease of divorce, the absence of private property, gender equality in labor, religious tolerance, and a deep aversion to war.

Utopia is a seminal work that popularized the concept of imagined societies and inspired a wealth of early literature, including Tommaso Campanella's The City of the Sun, Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, and Voltaire's Candide. This robust Warbler Classics edition is based on the time-honored translation by Gilbert Burnet and includes notes by Hugh Hirsch Goitein, an introduction by Henry Morley, an afterword by George Sanderlin, a biographical sketch of More by Erasmus, and a detailed chronology.