Not long ago, utopianism was a mark of naïveté or extremism; now pragmatists are denigrated for complacent cynicism. Illustration by Golden Cosmos

Five hundred years ago, a man who condoned torture, religious persecution, and burning at the stake wrote a book about the perfect world. In “On the Best Kind of a Republic and About the New Island of Utopia” (the book’s full title, translated from Latin), Sir Thomas More envisaged a paradise where men and women could choose their religion, without fear of violence or coercion. In practice, as Lord Chancellor of England, More oversaw the burning of at least six Protestants and the jailing of some forty. One merchant was tortured in More’s own home, and tied so tightly to a tree that blood reportedly flowed from his eyes. More referred to it as “the Tree of Truth.”

Contradiction and hypocrisy have always hovered over the utopian project, shadowing its promise of a better world with the sordid realities of human nature. Plato, in the Republic, perhaps the earliest utopian text, outlined a form of eugenics that would have been right at home in the Third Reich—which was itself a form of utopia, as were the Gulag of Soviet Communism, the killing fields of Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and, more recently, the blood-and-sand caliphate of ISIS. “There is a tyranny in the womb of every utopia,” the French economist and futurist Bertrand de Jouvenel wrote.

The twentieth century was perhaps the cruellest for utopian hopes. “Innumerable millions of human beings were killed in this century in the name of utopia,” the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz reminded his audience, at a 1986 PEN conference. In a 2007 polemic, “Black Mass,” John Gray proclaimed “the death of utopia.” Indeed, utopia’s name has become so tarnished that it has recently been used almost interchangeably with its evil twin, dystopia—a word coined by John Stuart Mill, three and a half centuries after the publication of More’s book, to describe a society that was “too bad to be practicable.”

Now the tide may have shifted. As the literary Marxist Fredric Jameson observes, “In the last years, utopia has again changed its meaning and has become the rallying cry for left and progressive forces.” A slew of books have arrived to celebrate the utopian spirit, notably two on the history of utopia in the United States. Erik Reece’s “Utopia Drive” is a travelogue through the ghosts of America’s nineteenth-century intentional communities. In Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Virginia, New York, and Massachusetts, Reece visits the remains of a handful of utopian settlements and towns, mining their histories to reflect on the present. Chris Jennings’s “Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism,” a historical account of five utopian projects, is more firmly rooted in the past. Both books seek to capture the spirit of what Jennings calls “a long, sunny season of American utopianism”—a period of about a century, roughly bookended by the optimism of American independence and the butchery of the Civil War.

Neither author is blind to the shortcomings of his subject. Jennings is attuned to the latent “terror and repression” in the utopian project. Reece has a sharp eye for the contradictions of communities that condemn the capitalist economy but are sustained by vibrant commercial enterprises. The founders of these communities—a colorful cast of prophets, dreamers, and narcissists—preach against private property and possessions as they jealously guard their own. “One thing we can say about the seductive visionaries who led the utopian movement in America,” Reece notes dryly, “is that they did not lead the most self-examined lives.”

Despite the caveats, the over-all tone of both books is enthusiastic, even laudatory. Set against the general opprobrium that has tarred utopia in the twentieth century, these are works of intellectual and political rehabilitation. Jennings laments “a deficit of imagination” in our era, and argues that, “uncoupled from utopian ends, even the most incisive social critique falls short.” Reece likewise ends his travels convinced “that things will only get worse if we don’t engage in some serious utopian thinking.” For Reece, in particular, the process of rehabilitation is an explicitly political project—an attempt to exhume the lessons of the past in order to frame an alternative to the economic, environmental, and political despair of recent times. Sitting in a hammock in the intentional community of Twin Oaks, in Virginia, he reads More’s “Utopia” and thinks of Bernie Sanders. Driving toward what remains of the community of Modern Times, on Long Island, he decries “Big Oil, Big Coal, Big Agra, Big Pharma” and the “corporate vandals” who “pollute the commons.” Although their books are formally about nineteenth-century intentional communities, both Reece and Jennings tap into an altogether more contemporary strand of post-crisis (i.e., post-2008) economic and political discourse.

A rejuvenated Marxism underlies much of this thinking. In fact, Marx and Engels were dismissive of nineteenth-century bourgeois “utopian socialism,” contrasting it with their own “scientific socialism.” Yet many of the principles championed by these communities—collectivism, egalitarianism, the rejection of capitalism and individualism—reflect a softer version of Communism: what Benjamin Kunkel has described as “Marxish” thought. As Fredric Jameson notes in his manifesto “An American Utopia,” now republished, along with several commentaries, in book form, modern-day utopians embrace “Marxism as a negative and critical analysis of capitalism, without any longer being attracted to the cultural, social, and political traditions established over a century by the communist movement.”

One sign of how far political rhetoric has shifted in recent years is that when Reece and Jennings write about “secular communism” or the “communistic” tendencies of these projects they are writing in celebration, instead of lamenting an ideology that tyrannized vast swaths of the planet. Not long ago, utopianism was a mark of naïveté or fanaticism, or even of solidarity with political coercion; today, anti-utopianism is denigrated as a form of political cynicism and complicity with the global forces of oppression.

Utopias come in waves. The era that Reece and Jennings write about represents an early heyday of American idealism. For ambitious young men of the nascent Republic, utopia schemes were the apps of their day. “Not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote. The nineteen-thirties witnessed a short-lived flowering of New Deal utopias, government-created coöperatives built to generate employment; the next big wave was in the sixties. Each of these periods was marked by a sense of tumult, of cultural and financial dislocation, much like the present. Jennings writes that “literature is a sensitive indicator of utopian sentiment.” Could these books—along with the other recent utopian books—offer guidance for a grand new moment of social reform?

Oneida, in central New York, was one of the most prominent, and promising, of these communities. It was founded in 1848 by a mercurial Vermont-based preacher named John Humphrey Noyes, whose followers pooled their resources and bought a hundred and sixty acres of land on the Oneida Reserve, named for a local Indian tribe. They set about realizing Noyes’s vision of “Bible Communism,” believing that Christ had already made his Second Coming (“like a thief in the night,” as the Bible puts it), and that humans were thus living free of sin, with the responsibility to create a perfect world.

The pursuit of Perfectionism, as the doctrine was called, led to a number of unorthodox practices, notably “complex marriage” and “sexual communism,” which were essentially coinages for radical polyamory and free love. (Utopia is very good at rebranding existing human behaviors.) Underlying Oneida’s quirky sexual norms was, in fact, a set of deeply progressive beliefs in collective ownership and equality, notably for women.