In some ways, a history of late twentieth-century utopianism fits neatly into histories of the twentieth century. Many scholars have emphasized that efforts to realize sweeping revisions to the structure and function of society became a twentieth-century priority. In other ways, though, a history of late twentieth-century utopianism seems incompatible with histories of the twentieth century, especially given that the century was as effective in destroying those projects as it was in initially conjuring them. The passions behind twentieth-century dreams could easily become pathological: the pursuit of mass sovereignty led to bellicose nationalism; mass production to human and ecological exploitation; and mass culture to the anaesthetization of its consumers.Dreams became tragedies. Each failure narrowed the spectrum of viable possible futures. This trajectory had a measurable impact on the willingness of intellectuals to take utopian thought seriously. Most accounts written after the defeat of the century’s massive social engineering projects saw only two paths for utopianism: either naïve idealism or dangerous totalitarianism. The politically cataclysmic year of 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union appeared to confirm their skepticism. Academics and public intellectuals eagerly published on the inconceivability of utopian thinking. Writing after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the conservative German historian Joachim Fest declared a crisis of utopianism. American political scientist Francis Fukuyama argued that the global victory of liberal democracy had finally punctuated the long sentence of humanity’s political development. And British prime minister Margaret Thatcher similarly proclaimed that “there is no alternative” to Western liberal democracy and free market capitalism.The wind behind my book’s sails originated out of this pessimism. I was struck by how little these discourses aligned with how ordinary people thought about the future. When confronted with circumstances that failed to fulfill their expectations, they have continued to believe in the possibility of overturning established institutions, thinking up superlative alternatives, and pursuing those alternatives.But this wasn’t your grandma’s utopia. By the late twentieth century, many were willing to consider that a utopia could look different than the visions that had reigned since the nineteenth century. They reimagined utopia’s scale. Instead of seeking to change society as a whole like Europe’s totalizing social engineering projects, they pursued modest but concrete programs in finite segments of society. They also began to imagine utopia might have a different relationship to time. Instead of prescriptions for the future, these new utopians embraced the act of working toward. They believed a superlative future was realizable only through ongoing micro-attempts to approximate its normative agenda in the present. Finally, they insisted on new agency in utopian thought and practice. New utopias needed to emerge from ordinary people, not from the top down. In other words, these utopian revisionists helped to occasion nothing less than a sea change in the way the world thinks about and tries to realize radical ambitions for the future.