The History of Utopian Thought

This book embodies two related and yet distinct types of sociological endeavor. It is a study in the history of social thought, a field which has only been receiving serious and widespread attention in recent years, and attempts to give an historical cross-section of representative Utopian thought. But it is also a study in social idealism, a study in the origin, selection and potency of those social ideas and ideals that occasional and usually exceptional men conceive, with particular emphasis upon their relation to social progress. The Text also covers the views spanning from the prophets of religion, Jesus, Bacon, More, Owen, the Utopian Socialists and the great Philosophers. The merit of this book lies in the fact that, it is the first book that attempts to give an unprejudiced, systematic treatment of the social Utopias as a whole.