If any political ideal has taken a drubbing over the past hundred years, it’s surely the left’s vision of utopia. How far we’ve fallen from those lofty 19 th -century dreams—the classless society, the withering away of the state, the happy news from Nowhere. Merely to mention such hopes nowadays is to call up ghastly images of failure, not merely censors sharpening their scissors and babushkas queuing for bread but Checkpoint Charlie, the Gulag Archipelago, the Great Leap Forward toward the Killing Fields. Even glimpses of utopianism, such as the giddiness unleashed by the election of Barack Obama, now feel destined to end in disappointment if not crushing defeat. Avatar not withstanding, pop energy swung decades ago to the side of dystopia, which, rather than asking us to explore political possibilities, urges us to revel in the thrills of oppression—the balefully beautiful neon-lashed high-rises of Blade Runner , the sinister doppelgangers enforcing the illusions of The Matrix ,...