This interdisciplinary volume offers a crucial new perspective on the appeal and profound cultural meaning of socialism in the modern world. At a time when socialism appears to be in inexorable decline, it is time to rethink the factors that account for its meteoric-and, in the past two centuries, unparalleled-rise. Socialism did not attract millions of people primarily because of logical argument and empirical evidence, important though those were. Rather, it told the most compelling story about the past, present, and future.

List of figures. List of Contributors. Acknowledgements. Introduction: Socialist Imaginations, Stefan Arvidsson, Jakub BeneS, Anja Kirsch. Part I: The Nineteenth-Century Socialist Future. Chapter 1. Contested Christianities: Communism and Religion in July Monarchy France, Julian Strube. Chapter 2. Religious Dreams of a Socialist Future: The Case of Owenism, Edward Lucas. Chapter 3. Beyond the 'Grand Designs': Owenism, Architecture, and Utopia, David Leopold. Part II: Ideals for the Working-Class Movement. Chapter 4. "If that is Socialism, we won't help its advent": The impact of Edward Bellamy's utopian novel Looking Backward on socialist thought in late-nineteenth-century Western Europe, Philipp Reick. Chapter 5: Christian philanthropy, or political class struggle? Imaginations of Socialism and Christianity in Swedish prose-fiction of the early 1900s, Beata Agrell . Chapter 6. 'The Omnipotence of Spring': Ideas of Progress in Norwegian Socialism before 1940, Åsmund Borgen Gjerde. Part III: The Imagination of Socialism in Power. Chapter 7. Imaginations of Insecurity: Representations of the State Security Service in East German Television in the late 1960s and 1970s, Sebastian Haller. Chapter 8. Frugal deaths: socialist imaginations of death and funerals in modern China, Philipp Hetmanczyk. Chapter 9. Xi Jinping's China: Keeping the Imagination Alive Under Socialism in Power, Roland Boer. Chapter 10. Afterword: Socialist Cultures and Sociabilities, Gregory Claeys. Index