Utopia for Our Century
A Manifesto of Hope
David Albertson author Jason Blakely author
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Yale University Press
Publishing:22nd Sep '26
£25.00
This title is due to be published on 22nd September, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

Inspired by the humanist and Catholic martyr Thomas More, David Albertson and Jason Blakely imagine a new politics of hope
In Thomas More’s Utopia, a traveler from the New World delivers a shocking message: on a lost island beyond the horizon, people live far better lives than in Europe. More, a leading intellectual of his day, was murdered by Henry VIII in 1535 for refusing to sign a loyalty oath, but his utopian vision inspired some of the most consequential movements in the modern world. In their provocative manifesto, David Albertson and Jason Blakely retrieve More’s insights and apply them to our moment.
Amid the decline of liberalism and the rise of authoritarianism, Albertson and Blakely resist the dystopian fears taking root. Utopian politics, they argue, can help us break free of today’s entrenched polarities and recast what is possible. They return to the “virtuoso dreamers,” ranging from Plato and Saint Augustine to Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King, Jr., who faced dire circumstances yet were buoyed by indestructible hopes. Channeling More’s spirit of experimentation, creativity, and levity, their utopianism is invested in making new worlds—the most serious kind of play.
Inviting us to dream more boldly, this book offers a radical alternative to the ecological, political, and spiritual crises that plague our world.
“At a particularly dark moment in political and cultural history, Utopia for Our Century is a marvelous call to sanity and charity, to a morally imaginative vision of society, and to the possibility of truly seeing the future in the light of eternal hopes.”—David Bentley Hart, author of All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life
“Utopia for Our Century is an ambitious book that champions the cause of hope against deep currents of despair, arriving just as faith in the American project seems to be rapidly disintegrating. But Albertson and Blakely have much more on their minds than political analysis. Their insight is that dreams of the future arrive not in carefully plotted programs but as gleaming fragments of hope illuminating the possibility that we already contain the keys to a flourishing future inside ourselves, in the shape of worlds to come.”—Elizabeth Bruenig, staff writer, The Atlantic
“Passionate, erudite, and evocative, this book is a welcome and urgent contribution to contemporary political thinking. In these malicious times, when cruelty and swindle and ignorance constitute official policy, we need utopia more than ever.”—Eugene McCarraher, Villanova University
“Clear lines are usually drawn between utopian and realistic socialism, and between Utopia and the Kingdom of God. But Thomas More explodes these suppositions, as this brilliant book so lucidly demonstrates. Its authors point the way beyond ‘progress’ and ‘realism’ towards the irrepressible hope for virtuous community here on earth, already within human time.”—John Milbank, professor emeritus, Department of Philosophy, University of Nottingham
ISBN: 9780300278088
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
168 pages