本丛书囊括了所有著名的经典原著，但与此同时，它又扩展了传统的评价尺度，以便能够纳入范围广泛、不那么出名的作品。每一本书都有一个评论性的导言，加上历史年表、生平梗概、进一步阅读指南，以及必要的词汇表和原文注解。

Introduction
Chronology of main eighteenth-century British utopian and anti-utopian texts
Bibliographical note
A note on the texts
Anon:The Island of Content:or,A New Paradise Discovered
Anon:A Description of New Athens in Terra Australis Incognita
David Hume:Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth
James Burgh:An Account of the First Settlement,Laws,Form of Goverment ,and Police,of the Cessares,A People of South America
Thomas Northmore:Memoirs of Planetes,or a Sketch of the Laws and Manners of Makarr
William Hodgson:The Commonwealth of Reason
Anon:Bruce's Voyage to Naples
Index

This is the first major collcetion of eighteenth-century British utopias.Seven tracts ,spanning the centur ,show how the image of the ideal society was used as a form of social criticism,and particularly as a means of focussing on ideas of progress and commercial deveopment.Radical and republican thinding about property ownership ,social equality, and commerce and luxury - of particular relevance to the critique of corruption in this period - coexists with nostalgic and conservative notions of the ideal hierarchical community.The introduction.which sets hese tracts in a wider conetxt of similar texts,examines their realtionship to the political thought of the period,and shows how issues and developments of key importance,from the debate surrounding the French revolution to the origins of Romanticism and early socialism,are iluminated by an understanding of the utopian tradition.