The Uses of Utopia: Travels to the Limits of Thought

by Joad Raymond Wren

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?

Kindle Edition

Expected publication July 2, 2026

About the author

Joad Raymond is a writer and historian of early modern Europe who has taught at the universities of Oxford, Aberdeen, East Anglia, Paris-Sorbonne and Queen Mary University of London.

Reviews

[Lysandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Press UK (Allen Lane) for the ARC! All opinions are my own.

5/5

“The Uses of Utopia” by Joad Raymond Wren is both a presentation of and an independent theoretical debate of the concept of “utopia” through a Marxist critical theory lens as the methodological approach — meaning that even when the theory is laid out in an objective manner, the author’s own subjectivity regarding the topic still manages to surface here and there. The argumentation theory used is the forever classical Toulmin method, which is excellently used from a rhetorical standpoint, utilising alliterations and other linguistic emphasis enhancers when required. Excellent usage of language and editing. The exposition has a natural, fluid flow, and the language is accessible.

My personal preference is centred around such theoretical debates being more objective in nature, and I must admit I didn’t enjoy the usage of the self-inserting first person in the elucidation, nevertheless, as I advanced I understood the purpose was to make this discourse more approachable — it ultimately felt like a lecture, as if you’re having a chat with your own Ethics/Philosophy Professor. Consequently, even someone who has had no previous tangent with the concept of “utopia” can pick up this book and understand everything from scratch.

That being said, the contents are widely encompassing; I studied the concept of “utopia” in both my undergraduate and postgraduate times, and found it particularly fascinating, oftentimes picking up scifi and fantasy books with such a world-building. I had stopped actively researching it though, despite my constant exposure to the concept of morality, so this book served both as a refresher and a more in depth study, as it includes a lot of sources not listed on my legal scholar syllabus, such as the emphasis on its usage in the literature I was actually reading. You could say this book also serves as a literary critique of the literary genre, in a manner.

The citations methodology is Vancouver. (Although I could be wrong, having read the ebook ARC and following edits can possibly change this.)

I would recommend this book to anyone and everyone who wants to know more on the subject of “utopia”, or simply desires a refresher. It is excellently written, particularly detailed and very approachable.