About the Author

Lyman Tower Sargent is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. He was a Visiting Member of the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) and a Highfield Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies, University of Nottingham. He has been a Visiting Professor at various universities in England and New Zealand; a Fellow at Mansfield College, the Centre for Political Ideologies (Oxford); and the Stout Research Centre, Victoria University of Wellington. His publications include Contemporary Political Ideologies: A Comparative Analysis (14th ed. 2009); Living in Utopia: Intentional Communities in New Zealand (2004) with Lucy Sargisson; Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction (2010); and other books and articles. He co-edited The Utopia Reader (1999/2nd ed. 2017) with Gregory Claeys; Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World (2000) with Gregory Cleays and Roland Schaer; and The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies (2013) with Michael Freeden and Marc Stears. He founded the journal Utopian Studies in 1990 and edited it until 2004. He also also provided the basic entries for an online bibliography of material about utopianism, which can be found at http://arus.letras.up.pt/. He received the Distinguished Scholar Award of both the Communal Studies Association and the Society for Utopian Studies, which has since named the award the Lyman Tower Sargent Distinguished Scholar Award.