The haunting impossibility of a society that lives up to our stated ideals can feel painful when set against the actual societies that fall so far short of them. This is why the dream of utopia, or “no place,” has disturbed the sleep of many thinkers for so long it can feel instead like a nightmare. Given the hypocrisy of a world where cruelty often feels like the point, what business do we have supposing things could be better? How can allegedly wise and intelligent people dream of utopia when wisdom and intelligence all point to its impossibility?

David Albertson and Jason Blakely’s new book Utopia for Our Century: A Manifesto of Hope presents a thoughtful history of those daring souls who have dreamed of better. But more than a history, it attempts to think through the political and ideological value of utopian thinking and push against the line that it is just wishful thinking. Albertson and Blakely find much to admire in utopian authors, seeing them as “virtuoso dreamers, who lived realities at least as bleak and fearsome as our own but did so with indestructible hope.” At their best, utopians emphasized hope without guarantees — a wise position that carves a middle path between blind optimism and the resigned inertia of faux “realism.”

Their archetype is Thomas More, whose Utopia, published in the sixteenth century, christened the concept. For Albertson and Blakely, More gives us insight into the personality of utopians. They are not the naive optimists of caricature.