One of the surprising tendencies of the last decade is the return of utopian thinking. Whether it be demands for the abolition of the family, defunding the police, open borders, universal basic income, or full automation, an alternative world is on the agenda. These demands do not necessarily amount to a coherent vision of a new social order. We have not returned to the Fourierite or Owenite experiments of the nineteenth century. They do, however, speak to the diffuse sense that the future can be radically different from the past. Other ways of living are bubbling up from under the surface of really existing capitalism.

This is something of a turnaround. Utopia was seemingly dead and buried in the 1990s and 2000s. François Furet, the conservative French historian, put this point particularly bluntly in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall: ‘The idea of another society has become almost impossible to conceive of, and no one in the world today is offering any advice on the subject.’ All the great slogans of this moment—’the end of history’ from the right and ‘capitalist realism’ from the left—spoke to this closure of hopeful imaginaries.

Something has clearly changed: many people are now engaged in the task of formulating images of new worlds. The crises of the last decade have made it a particularly propitious moment to articulate visions of novelty and alterity. In the face of the global financial crash, the climate emergency, continued racist and imperialist violence, and the resurgence of the radical right, it is increasingly difficult to maintain that the future will bring more of the same. Instead, the situation is one of utopia or bust. A radical change is afoot, and it must be directed away from catastrophe and towards liberation.

There is nothing unique about this feeling of living at a moment of bifurcation. There was another time, in the not so distant past, when utopia and catastrophe faced off against one another: the interwar period. It is this historical moment that is examined by Anna Neima in The Utopians: Six Attempts to Build the Perfect Society, a book that carefully recuperates the wild desires of a diverse group of dreamers who founded new societies between the 1920s and the 1940s. Ranging from Rabindranath Tagore’s experiment in communal living in Bengal to Gerald Heard’s school for the spiritual leaders of the new world in California, Neima traces the global emergence of new utopias in the aftermath of the First World War.

There is little ideological or political commonality between the communities that are focused on in The Utopians. The rich mysticism of G. I. Gurdjieff’s Paris-based Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man contrasts with Leonard Elmhirst’s obsession with scientific agriculture at Devon’s Dartington Hall. Similarly, the Christian asceticism of the Bruderhof community in Weimar Germany stands at some distance from the libertarian desire for self-realisation promoted by Mushanokōji Saneatsu in his commune in the mountains of the Japanese island of Kyushu.

Yet, despite this diversity, these utopian experiments were enlivened by a similar set of concerns. Confronting the industrialised murder of the First World War, the mass deaths associated with the so-called Spanish flu, and the emergence of fascism, alongside perennial concerns of capitalism and colonialism, the challenge faced by Neima’s dreamers was one familiar to us today: to establish a world where war, violence, and exploitation are rendered impossibilities. Each new community, in its own distinct way, attempted to fulfil this task.

One of the particularly refreshing aspects of Neima’s study is her refusal to associate utopianism with totalitarianism. This is something particularly pertinent in the interwar context. In the background of Furet’s dismissal of utopia is the wearisome influence of Cold War liberals, most prominently Karl Popper, who held that any attempt to build an ideal world inevitably leads to Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia. On this perspective, utopia involves the attempt to violently impose a perfect social order on the heterogenous material of humanity.

The communities described by Neima could not be further removed from this image of utopia as a rigid and timeless plan for a new social order. The Utopians continually emphasises the open-endedness of the experiments in alternative ways of living pioneered in the interwar period. For instance, the pupils educated at Dartington Hall’s school were not prescribed a recipe for the good life, but instead encouraged to direct their own learning. Utopia, it was thought, would emerge from exploration and play. In a similar fashion, the Harmonious Development of Man, despite the sometimes overbearing and chaotic presence of Gurdjieff, offered a space for individuals to achieve personal enlightenment in their own way. The Institute’s value was in suspending the habits of the outside world rather than offering a positive plan for the minutiae of daily life.

Neima’s understanding of utopias as partial piques to otherness is not new. From fictional visions of flawed utopias like Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974) to the emphasis on utopian desire in the work of theorists such as Miguel Abensour and Ruth Levitas, the association of utopianism with blueprints has become increasingly suspect. To borrow the words of Marx and Engels’ caustic critique of utopian socialism in The Communist Manifesto, the idea that the ‘personal inventive action’ of a single individual could successfully plan the life of an entire society, arranging everything from its property relations to its leisure pursuits, is absurd. However, utopianism as a collaborative process involving constant debate and development is far more promising. The Utopians traces the prehistory of this flexible and fluid mode of utopianising, highlighting the necessity of spaces of experimentation and discovery.

It is no surprise, then, that Neima has a partiality for utopian experiments that display a high degree of ideological heterogeneity. One of the great joys of the book is the kookiness of the projects she highlights. We are given insight into the laboratory of utopia, studying how intellectuals and activists of the 1920s and 1930s stitched together alternative modes of existence from the fragmented and contradictory semiotic elements floating around them. For example, Mushanokōji’s political project was a finely balanced collision of the radical individualist philosophy of Maurice Maeterlinck and a Tolstoian valorisation of peasant communalism, while Gurdjieff, as he trekked across Europe with his followers as they were exiled from one country after another, haphazardly combined the insights of all the major world religions into a new way of life.

Still, such an approach has limitations. The emphasis in The Utopians on these noisy mixes of different tendencies results in a lack of attention to the major political movements of the interwar period. While socialism is a constant companion (and sometimes antagonist) to the worlds described, none of the experiments highlighted can be straightforwardly described as having their roots in the labour movement. This is not due to a lack of socialist utopianism in the period. One only needs to think of the storm of communes established in the first decade of the Russian Revolution or the new modes of life developed in the Spanish Civil War, famously described in George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938), to appreciate this fact. The lacuna regarding socialism  is also clear from the final chapter of Neima’s study, where she mentions a number of contemporary utopias, such as the communities of Toyosato in Japan and Auroville in India, but leaves aside anti-capitalist experiments like the Zapatistas and Rojava.

All of this is relevant to the sense of failure that accompanies the dreamers of Neima’s study. The divorce between the utopian dreamers and mass movements had a tragic outcome. The great hopes for a new world raised in the interwar period were steadily snuffed out by internal contradictions and external repression, often leaving behind only fragmentary traces of their existence. A particularly poignant moment occurs when Eberhard Arnold, a leader of the Bruderhof community, writes a letter to Hitler begging him not to destroy his utopia and, more ambitiously, attempting to convert him to the path of peace and tolerance. Needless to say, the letter failed and the community was violently shut down by the Nazis in 1937.

Reading about the failures of the 1920s and 1930s, it is difficult not to sympathise with Yamakawa Hitoshi, the leader of the Japanese Communist Party, in his critical assessment of Mushanokōji’s commune. Yamakawa is quoted by Neima saying ‘even if an oasis survives for tens of thousands of years, it will never make the desert bloom’. In other words, something more than utopian experimentation is required if social change is to be achieved. Does this mean that alternative ways of living are entirely pointless? No, not quite. We cannot do without the life, colour, and strangeness of utopia; its capacity to jolt the congealed horizons of the present is indispensable.

Rather, the question posed by The Utopians is how figures like Mushanokōji or Gurdjieff, with all their outlandish ideas and peculiar desires, can enrich and develop a mass social movement with the capacity to effect structural transformation. To borrow a term from that great Marxist utopian Ernst Bloch, a concrete mode of utopianism is needed, in which experiments in otherness clarify the dissatisfaction felt by those dispossessed by society as it exists. In other words, utopia must be socialist in content and practice, the glimmering image of a new world giving direction to the messy struggles of the contemporary moment.