A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 (PB) (1997)

The ideological passions that, along with critical acclaim, greeted the publication of Paul Berman's A Tale of Two Utopias showed how persistent are some of the battle lines drawn in the tumultuous years around 1968.

A Tale of Two Utopias recounts in clean, clear, often funny style (Washington Post) four episodes in the history of a generation: the worldwide student radicalism of the years around 1968; the birth of gay liberation and modern identity politics; the anti-Communist trajectory of the '68ers in the Eastern bloc; and the ideals and self-criticism of thinkers in America and in France who lived through these events and debated their meaning.

Praised for both sheer intellectual high-spiritedness (Houston Chronicle) and the same sensitivity to the moral needs of the participants, and the same lucid evaluative balance, as Edmund Wilson's accounts of earlier periods (philosopher Richard Rorty), A Tale of Two Utopias firmly establishes Berman as one of America's leading social critics (New Leader) and one of our most gifted essayists (Boston Globe).