The urtext of utopian thought is Thomas More's Utopia, written in Latin and published in 1516. More, who was Lord Chancellor of England as well as a scholar and a humanist, formed the term ‘utopia’ from a combination of Greek root words that could be read in two ways. Utopia was u-topia, no-place, but it was also eu-topia, the good place. This ambiguity was fundamental to More's purposes, for he wanted to say that his utopia was a good place that might never exist. Utopia was translated during the sixteenth century into all the major European languages, and there are now well over one hundred editions of the book. Utopia is of paradigmatic importance, to say the least, for it set the pattern for Western utopia and launched a whole tradition of utopian thinking in the Western world. In the wake of Utopia, utopian literature flourished especially between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, when Andreae, Campanella, Francis Bacon and a host of other authors wrote ‘classic’ utopian novels. Utopian tradition is therefore as old as the Reformation – it may even be older than Christianity, if we also regard Plato's Republic and various myths of religious paradise as utopias.

In the early nineteenth century, there was another remarkable outburst of utopian thought, when utopias became closely attached to forms of political thought later called socialism and anarchism. Later in the century, Marx famously warned against writing ‘recipes for the cook-shops of the future’, and he consciously created and organized his ideas in opposition to what he regarded as socialist utopianism (Owen, Fourier, Saint-Simon), bourgeois (anarchist) individualism (Stirner) and anti-organizational socialism (Bakunin). But contrary to his own presentation of his political philosophy, there is a utopian streak in Marx's complex system, and much of utopian literature in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was explicitly socialist in orientation. Compared with the great nineteenth-century socialist utopias and anarchist exhortations of ‘natural comradeship’, there were relatively few outstanding utopian authors in the twentieth century.