"A deeply moving and delightfully readable account of the political journey [Berman's] generation has taken."—Isaac Kramnick, New York Observer 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 ).