An important analysis and defense of contemporary uses of ‘utopian’ thinking as well as of its literary and philosophical tradition as a sign for the possibility of imagining another world. Written in 1976, this book takes the history of socialist thought as a utopian construct in and of itself, and by relying on the Gramscian critique of ‘stateolatry’ suggests that the version of Russian socialism then embodied by the USSR is a distortion of the socialist tradition.