Download or read book Utopianism A Very Short Introduction written by Lyman Tower Sargent and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2010-09-23 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are many debates about utopia - What constitutes a utopia? Are utopias benign or dangerous? Is the idea of utopianism essential to Christianity or heretical? What is the relationship between utopia and ideology? This Very Short Introduction explores these issues and examines utopianism and its history. Lyman Sargent discusses the role of utopianism in literature, and in the development of colonies and in immigration. The idea of utopia has become commonplace in social and political thought, both negatively and positively. Some thinkers see a trajectory from utopia to totalitarianism with violence an inevitable part of the mix. Others see utopia directly connected to freedom and as a necessary element in the fight against totalitarianism. In Christianity utopia is labelled as both heretical and as a fundamental part of Christian belief, and such debates are also central to such fields as architecture, town and city planning, and sociology among many others Sargent introduces and summarizes the debates over the utopia in literature, communal studies, social and political theory, and theology. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Download or read book Coming of Age in Utopia written by Paul M. Gaston and published by NewSouth Books. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this exquisitely wrought memoir of a committed life, historian, and civil rights activist, Paul Gaston reveals his deep roots in Fairhope---the unique Utopian community founded in 1894 by his grandfather on the shores of Mobile Bay, Alabama. Fairhope grew into a unique political, economic, and educational experiment and a center of radical economic and educational ideals. As time passed, however, Fairhope's radical nature went into decline. By the early 1950s, the author began to look outward for ways to take part in the coming struggle---the civil rights movement. Gaston's career at the University of Virginia, where he taught from 1957-97, forms the core of Coming of Age in Utopia.
Download or read book Utopia written by Thomas More and published by e-artnow. This book was released on 2019-04-08 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utopia is a work of fiction and socio-political satire by Thomas More published in 1516 in Latin. The book is a frame narrative primarily depicting a fictional island society and its religious, social and political customs. Many aspects of More's description of Utopia are reminiscent of life in monasteries.
Download or read book After Utopia written by Judith N. Shklar and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A political philosophy classic from one of the foremost political thinkers of the twentieth century After Utopia was Judith Shklar’s first book, a harbinger of her renowned career in political philosophy. Throughout the many changes in political thought during the last half century, this important work has withstood the test of time. In After Utopia, Shklar explores the decline of political philosophy, from Enlightenment optimism to modern cultural despair, and she offers a critical, creative analysis of this downward trend. She looks at Romantic and Christian social thought, and she shows that while the present political fatalism may be unavoidable, the prophets of despair have failed to explain the world they so dislike, leaving the possibility of a new and vigorous political philosophy. With a foreword by Samuel Moyn, examining After Utopia’s continued relevance, this current edition introduces a remarkable synthesis of ideas to a new generation of readers.
Download or read book Automation and Utopia written by John Danaher and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-24 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Automating technologies threaten to usher in a workless future, but John Danaher argues that this can be a good thing. A world without work may be a kind of utopia, free of the misery of the job and full of opportunities for creativity and exploration. If we play our cards right, automation could be the path to idealized forms of human flourishing.
Download or read book The Utopian Crescendo of Hope written by Ronald Alan Duskis and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2000-06 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reveals the hope that all of us need to know: that everything will eventually work out together for our common good as a human race! God guarantees it! This book not only gives the events that will lead up to the Utopia or Paradise that we all want; but it also gives us how to obtain it in a personal way! The reader will see that God loves everyone and wants them to know that a Utopia and Paradise is not too far off into the future that will be their HOME forever! This book goes through every verse of the Book of Revelation showing what events will take place in what order. It also shows that all the events such as Armageddon, the Great Tribulation, and the Day of the Lord do not have to take place if everyone on earth will turn to God with all their heart and mind. It also shows in Revelation, Chapters 2 and 3, what every human needs to change in their lives for the betterment of the human race! This book shows the crescendoing hope towards Paradise in nearly every sentence or every verse! Please, please, please sit back and enjoy your journey of hope that will become reality someday as we as a human family journey to Utopia as our final destiny that no one can stop!
Download or read book The Immanent Utopia written by Axel van den Berg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-01-16 with total page 810 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The spectacular growth in the 1970s and 1980s of the Marxist literature on politics and the state in capitalist society was hailed at the time as cumulative proof of Marxism's success in producing an effective theory of the political superstructure. More generally, it was seen as confirmation of the health and vigor of Marxist theory. Axel van den Berg questions both of these claims. Through comprehensive analysis of Marxist thought on bourgeois politics and the state, from that produced by Marx himself on, van den Berg radically challenges the viability of a distinctly Marxist theory of the state and of recent Marxist theorizing in general. In an exhaustive review of the literature, van den Berg shows that neo-Marxist theories are, for the most part, not empirically testable. To the extent that it is possible to draw any empirical implications from these theories at all, such implications are virtually indistinguishable from those of "bourgeois" theories. Van den Berg proceeds to lay bare the contradiction at the heart of Marxist theory in general: it presupposes the viability and desirability of some ideal socialist society yet its "anti-utopian" insistence that all criticisms of capitalism must rest on foundations immanent in capitalism itself prohibits any open discussion of such a utopia. Now available in paperback, this is a fundamental work for political and social theorists. "This work is brilliant in its polemical courage, its originality, and its detailed and revealing examination of texts. Van den Berg demonstrates that postwar Marxist political theory and sociology is not only vague and contradictory but that it actually makes critical concessions to the bourgeois thought' it claims to surpass. Appearing in the midst of afar-reaching reconsideration of the Marxism project in Europe, this volume crystallizes these issues for North American social science..."--Jeffrey Alexander, University of California, Los Angeles. "Van den Berg has made a major contribution to the long overdue relegation of Marxism to the museum of nineteenth-century ideological antiquities."--Dennis Wrong, Contemporary Sociology. Axel van den Berg is a Dutch-Canadian professor of sociology at McGill University in Montreal. His most recent work is The Social Sciences and Rationality.
Download or read book Black Mass written by John Gray and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2008-09-30 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the decade that followed the end of the cold war, the world was lulled into a sense that a consumerist, globalized, peaceful future beckoned. The beginning of the twenty-first century has rudely disposed of such ideas—most obviously through 9/11and its aftermath. But just as damaging has been the rise in the West of a belief that a single model of political behavior will become a worldwide norm and that, if necessary, it will be enforced at gunpoint. In Black Mass, celebrated philosopher and critic John Gray explains how utopian ideals have taken on a dangerous significance in the hands of right-wing conservatives and religious zealots. He charts the history of utopianism, from the Reformation through the French Revolution and into the present. And most urgently, he describes how utopian politics have moved from the extremes of the political spectrum into mainstream politics, dominating the administrations of both George W. Bush and Tony Blair, and indeed coming to define the political center. Far from having shaken off discredited ideology, Gray suggests, we are more than ever in its clutches. Black Mass is a truly frightening and challenging work by one of Britain's leading political thinkers.
Download or read book Paradise Now written by Chris Jennings and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2017-08-22 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For readers of Jill Lepore, Joseph J. Ellis, and Tony Horwitz comes a lively, thought-provoking intellectual history of the golden age of American utopianism—and the bold, revolutionary, and eccentric visions for the future put forward by five of history’s most influential utopian movements. In the wake of the Enlightenment and the onset of industrialism, a generation of dreamers took it upon themselves to confront the messiness and injustice of a rapidly changing world. To our eyes, the utopian communities that took root in America in the nineteenth century may seem ambitious to the point of delusion, but they attracted members willing to dedicate their lives to creating a new social order and to asking the bold question What should the future look like? In Paradise Now, Chris Jennings tells the story of five interrelated utopian movements, revealing their relevance both to their time and to our own. Here is Mother Ann Lee, the prophet of the Shakers, who grew up in newly industrialized Manchester, England—and would come to build a quiet but fierce religious tradition on the opposite side of the Atlantic. Even as the society she founded spread across the United States, the Welsh industrialist Robert Owen came to the Indiana frontier to build an egalitarian, rationalist utopia he called the New Moral World. A decade later, followers of the French visionary Charles Fourier blanketed America with colonies devoted to inaugurating a new millennium of pleasure and fraternity. Meanwhile, the French radical Étienne Cabet sailed to Texas with hopes of establishing a communist paradise dedicated to ideals that would be echoed in the next century. And in New York’s Oneida Community, a brilliant Vermonter named John Humphrey Noyes set about creating a new society in which the human spirit could finally be perfected in the image of God. Over time, these movements fell apart, and the national mood that had inspired them was drowned out by the dream of westward expansion and the waking nightmare of the Civil War. Their most galvanizing ideas, however, lived on, and their audacity has influenced countless political movements since. Their stories remain an inspiration for everyone who seeks to build a better world, for all who ask, What should the future look like? Praise for Paradise Now “Uncommonly smart and beautifully written . . . a triumph of scholarship and narration: five stand-alone community studies and a coherent, often spellbinding history of the United States during its tumultuous first half-century . . . Although never less than evenhanded, and sometimes deliciously wry, Jennings writes with obvious affection for his subjects. To read Paradise Now is to be dazzled, humbled and occasionally flabbergasted by the amount of energy and talent sacrificed at utopia’s altar.”—The New York Times Book Review “Writing an impartial, respectful account of these philanthropies and follies is no small task, but Mr. Jennings largely pulls it off with insight and aplomb. Indulgently sympathetic to the utopian impulse in general, he tells a good story. His explanations of the various reformist credos are patient, thought-provoking and . . . entertaining.”—The Wall Street Journal “As a tour guide, Jennings is thoughtful, engaging and witty in the right doses. . . . He makes the subject his own with fresh eyes and a crisp narrative, rich with detail. . . . In the end, Jennings writes, the communards’ disregard for the world as it exists sealed their fate. But in revisiting their stories, he makes a compelling case that our present-day ‘deficit of imagination’ could be similarly fated.”—San Francisco Chronicle
Download or read book Thinking Utopia written by Jörn Rüsen and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2005 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the breakdown of socialist and communist systems in the East, it had become fashionable to declare the so-called "end of utopia" ("end of history," "end of narratives"). The authors of this volume do not share this view but think that it is time to rehabilitate utopian thought. The political concept of Utopia that has given its name to these transcendental projections onto the world has been too narrow to describe and analyze the moving forces of the mind perceiving human existence beyond reality. By broadening the perspectives of utopian studies, these essays enable the reader to reconstruct scholarly paradigms and strategies of utopian, complex and holistic thinking in modern cosmology, philosophy, sociology, in literary, historical and political sciences, and to compare traditions and ways of Western utopian thought to the practice in the East.
Download or read book In Utopia written by J. C. Hallman and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2010-08-03 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chronicling one man's search to find the meaning of Utopia in our present-day world, "In Utopia" explores the history of utopian literature and thought in the narrative context of the real-life fruits of that history. b&w illustrations.
Download or read book The Task of Utopia written by Erin McKenna and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2001-11-13 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At their best, both American pragmatism and utopianism are about hope. Both encourage people to think about the future as a guide to understanding the past and forming the present. Just as pragmatism has often been misunderstood as valueless instrumentalism, utopianism has been limited to dreams of a static perfect world. In this book, Erin McKenna argues that utopian vision informed by pragmatism results in a process model of utopia that can help form the future based on critical intelligence. Using John Dewey's works with feminist theory and literature, McKenna develops this pragmatist feminist model of utopia.
Download or read book Planet Utopia written by Mark Featherstone and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-02-17 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has become clear that utopian thought has returned to the political scene. Featherstone traces the history of utopia and also discusses a number of contemporary case studies. This examination of the nature of utopian politics in the twenty-first century will be essential reading for political scientists and sociologists.
Download or read book The Coming Race Or the New Utopia written by Edward Bulwer Lytton Baron Lytton and published by . This book was released on 1883 with total page 812 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Utopia s Worlds and Frontiers of the Imaginary written by Maria do Rosário Monteiro and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2016-11-03 with total page 735 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea of Utopia springs from a natural desire of transformation, of evolution pertaining to humankind and, therefore, one can find expressions of “utopian” desire in every civilization. Having to do explicitly with human condition, Utopia accompanies closely cultural evolution, almost as a symbiotic organism. Maintaining its roots deeply attached to ancient myths, utopian expression followed, and sometimes preceded cultural transformation. Through the next almost five hundred pages (virtually one for each year since Utopia was published) researchers in the fields of Architecture and Urbanism, Arts and Humanities present the results of their studies within the different areas of expertise under the umbrella of Utopia. Past, present, and future come together in one book. They do not offer their readers any golden key. Many questions will remain unanswered, as they should. The texts presented in Proportion Harmonies and Identities - UTOPIA(S) WORLDS AND FRONTIERS OF THE IMAGINARY were compiled with the intent to establish a platform for the presentation, interaction and dissemination of researches. It aims also to foster the awareness and discussion on the topics of Harmony and Proportion with a focus on different utopian visions and readings relevant to the arts, sciences and humanities and their importance and benefits for the community at large.
Download or read book Utopia Ltd written by Matthew Beaumont and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2005-03-01 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This literary-historical account of late-nineteenth century utopianism offers a fascinating rereading of the fin de siècle in terms of the political futures that were produced in England during a period of cultural upheaval, and marks an original contribution to the Marxist critique of utopian ideology.
Download or read book The Faber Book of Utopias written by John Carey and published by . This book was released on 2000-09-01 with total page 531 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utopias come in every conceivable cultural and sexual shade: communist, fascist, anarchist, green, techno-fantastic, all male, all female. John Carey's anthology encompasses many noble schemes, as well as chilling attempts at social control.
