Michael Robertson’s “The Last Utopians: Four Late Nineteenth-Century Visionaries and Their Legacy” (Princeton) is instructive and touching, if sometimes inadvertently funny. The instructive parts rise from Robertson’s evocation and analysis of a series of authors who aren’t likely to be well known to American readers, even those of a radical turn of mind. All four wrote books and imagined ideal societies with far more of an effect on their time than we now remember. The touching parts flow from the quixotic and earnest imaginations of his heroes and heroine: the pundit Edward Bellamy, the designer William Morris, the pioneering gay writer Edward Carpenter, and the feminist social reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman. His utopians showed enormous courage in imagining and, to one degree or another, trying to create new worlds against the grain of the one they had inherited. They made blueprints of a better place, detailed right down to the wallpaper, and a pleasing aura of pious intent rises from these pages.

The comedy, which is inadvertent, springs from Robertson’s absence of common sense about these utopian projects, pious intent being very different from pragmatic achievement. Hugely sympathetic to his subjects, he discovers again and again as he inspects their projects that, for all the commendable bits that anticipate exactly the kinds of thing we like now, there are disagreeable bits right alongside, of exactly the kinds that we don’t like now. The utopian feminists are also eugenicists and anti-Semites; the men who dream of a perfect world where same-sex attraction is privileged also unconsciously mimic the hierarchy of patriarchy, putting effeminate or cross-dressing “Uranians” at the bottom of their ladder. The socialists are also sexists, and the far-seeing anarchists are also muddle-headed, mixed-up mystics.

The sensible lesson one might draw from this is that the human condition is one in which the distribution of bad and good is forever in flux, and so any blueprint of perfection is doomed to failure. Instead, Robertson assumes that if we can just add to the utopian visions of 1918 the progressive pieties of 2018—if we reform their gender essentialism and their implicit hierarchism and several other nasty isms—then we will at last arrive at the right utopia. This gives his book something of the exhausted cheerfulness of a father on a nine-hour car trip. “We’re almost there!” he keeps saying, as the kids in the back seat fret, and peer at license plates.

As every student was once taught, the idea of utopia, or at least the name for it, originated with Thomas More, the man for all seasons, who wrote the first one down in 1516. “Utopia” means “no place” in Greek, and so a sly element of rueful self-acknowledgment resides within the idea, with the auto-negation of a Magritte drawing. More’s original Utopia is, like many that followed it, a charming mixture of intelligent social criticism and bizarre sexual aspiration, none of it meant, one feels, to be taken altogether seriously. In More, the two ironies that govern nineteenth-century utopian thinking are already present: artisanal craft is rated over mental work by an intellectual author, and sexual egalitarianism is proposed by an imagination not entirely at ease with it. In More’s island society, everyone has to weave or sew or do carpentry, and partner-switching through divorce is permitted. There’s no private property and no locks on the houses, but there are slaves—kept in gold chains, to teach children to despise the substance. Women have to confess their sins to their husbands, but the husbands must obey their wives. Though his motives in writing the book are still puzzling to scholars (was More mocking Catholic rules or merely toying with them?), he created a template for later utopias, which were always marked by those two tenacious ironies: thinking people are told by a thinking person to stop thinking, and changing the world is imagined to depend on changing who we sleep with and how. (By contrast, the French tradition, as in the ideal worlds of Fourier and Comte, has an edge of instruction; they really mean it, in a way that More and the writers Robertson inspects don’t quite.)

Edward Bellamy is the first of Robertson’s nineteenth-century utopians. When his blandly written book “Looking Backward” appeared, in 1888, it created a now puzzling craze both in his native America and in England. Bellamy’s hero falls asleep in 1887—bizarrely, he’s been entombed in a specially built cell designed to help cure his insomnia—and wakes up in 2000. Instead of immediately rushing off to see “Mission: Impossible 2,” though, he enters a world of communistic order. As Robertson rightly sees, Bellamy offers a nightmarish vision of a hyper-regimented society in which everyone works for the government and retires at forty-five, and where the most fun you can have is to go shopping by picking out goods from a catalogue, ordering them from big depots via pneumatic tube, and then having them delivered at home. Where Wells’s “The Time Machine,” which came out not long after, gave us pale Eloi and proletarian Morlocks, Bellamy was chiefly prescient about Amazon Prime.

What in the world made “Looking Backward” appealing not only to men of letters like William Dean Howells and Mark Twain but to so many farmers and workers that Bellamy was eventually made a delegate of a populist party? Part of the appeal, Robertson persuasively argues, had something to do with post-Civil War nostalgia for the purity of wartime regimentation. In a time of confused plutocracy, everyone wanted a variant of what William James later called “the moral equivalent of war.”

But pursuing the moral equivalent of war always gives you the warrior’s idea of morality. As Bellamy’s book progresses, power, brutality, and the capacity to dominate become all that matters. Rules are made and harshly enforced. Robertson chides Bellamy for being inconsistently feminist, which is true, but what is chilling in Bellamy is how much of the totalitarian imagination is already in place in his work, and how alluring it can seem. It’s the same phenomenon that we find in the Athenian intellectual’s idealization of Sparta: intellectuals always dream of a closed society even though they themselves can exist only in an open one.

Bellamy’s book, hard to read now, had a falling-domino effect on Robertson’s next and more interesting utopian, William Morris; “Looking Backward” helped inspire Morris’s “News from Nowhere,” from 1890. Though written as a kind of corrective to Bellamy, as the Gospel of Matthew is a Jewish corrective to the Gentile-welcoming Gospel of Mark, “News from Nowhere” signals a more radical break with nineteenth-century orthodoxy than Bellamy could achieve. Heroes and heroines of the time are always falling asleep and waking up in some illustrative elsewhere—the pattern holds true for everyone from Alice to Twain’s Connecticut Yankee—and Morris’s hero wakes up in a perfect socialist-agrarian England, restored to a pastoral purity that somehow doesn’t include dawn-to-dusk labor in the fields or the constant threat of famine.

Yet the improbability of the vision shouldn’t diminish the originality of the take. Marxist accounts are concerned with the distribution of the goods that work makes; the utopian remonstrance is concerned with the nature of work itself. For Morris, industrial, agricultural, and even clerical work amount to forms of regimentation no different from slavery, a series of insults to the human spirit. The evil is industrialized labor itself—an entire existence spent like a galley slave pulling an oar. Owning your own oar doesn’t change the inhumanity of a life given over to rowing in the dark.