Utopia and Revolution

There is a fateful moment in human history when the vision of the perfect society confronts the movement toward violent social change. In a remarkable feat of scholarship in intellectual history, Melvin J. Lasky charts the course of this confrontation over some five centuries. In so doing he traces the ideological extension of the human personality through the writings of political theorists, philosophers, poets, and historians—from Dante to More, from More to Marx.