The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists, and Secret Agents is a 2010 book by Alex Butterworth about anarchism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Europe and the United States.

Mike Rapport of BBC History praised Butterworth's sympathetic treatment of his subjects and described the book as "intriguing, provocative and written with a novelist’s eye for detail ... an engrossing journey".

[6] Mark Mazower of Bookforum commended the book for showing the significance of the period between 1870 and 1914 in shaping the leftism, activism and terrorism, and political repression, and wrote that it was "none the worse for" being "very much a tale of anarchism for own times".

[9] David Peers, in the anarchist newspaper Freedom, recommended the "racily and colourfully written" book while pointing outs its omission of anarcho-syndicalism and anarchism in Ukraine and Mexico.

[14] In the International Socialist Review, Eric Kerl wrote "The World That Never Was brilliantly contextualizes the political radicalism of the time", but criticised Butterworth's ambivalence towards Marxism and Leninism and lack of an analysis of revolutionary strategy.