Visions of Utopia

From the sex-free paradise of the Shakers to the worker's paradise of Marx, utopian ideas seem to have two things in common: they all are wonderfully plausible at the start and they all end up as disasters. In Visions of Utopia, three leading cultural critics--Edward Rothstein, Martin Marty, and Herbert Muschamp--look at the history of utopian thinking, exploring why they fail and why they are still worth pursuing. The book is based on a series of lectures given at The New York Public Library.