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"Utopia"
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The Space Between What Is and What Wants to Be: The Abandoned Practice of Utopian Thinking
The word \"utopia\" is derived from two Greek words: utopos, which means \"good place,\" and outopos, which means \"no place\"--a nonexistent space that is imaged into consciousness by an expectation of what the future could be. Utopian thinking can be nostalgic, a looking back in order to move forward; a sense that in order to hypothesize the idealized future, one has to imagine an ideal past, the lost Eden or Atlantis, an imaginary conflation of time and place when the species cohabitated in an idyllic condition. That Golden Age, projected by Hesiod and others, was based on a bucolic representation of enough for all and a subsequent absence of greed, vying for power, and corruption.
Journal Article
Dreams of Peace and Freedom
In the wake of the monstrous projects of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and others in the twentieth century, the idea of utopia has been discredited. Yet, historian Jay Winter suggests, alongside the \"major utopians\" who murdered millions in their attempts to transform the world were disparate groups of people trying in their own separate ways to imagine a radically better world. This original book focuses on some of the twentieth-century's \"minor utopias\" whose stories, overshadowed by the horrors of the Holocaust and the Gulag, suggest that the future need not be as catastrophic as the past.The book is organized around six key moments when utopian ideas and projects flourished in Europe: 1900 (the Paris World's Fair), 1919 (the Paris Peace Conference), 1937 (the Paris exhibition celebrating science and light), 1948 (the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), 1968 (moral indictments and student revolt), and 1992 (the emergence of visions of global citizenship). Winter considers the dreamers and the nature of their dreams as well as their connections to one another and to the history of utopian thought. By restoring minor utopias to their rightful place in the recent past, Winter fills an important gap in the history of social thought and action in the twentieth century.
eBook
Utopia
Saint Thomas More's Utopia is one of the most important works of European humanism and serves as a key text in survey courses on Western intellectual history, the Renaissance, political theory, and many other subjects. Preeminent More scholar Clarence H. Miller does justice to the full range of More's rhetoric in this masterful translation. In a new afterword to this edition, Jerry Harp contextualizes More's life and Utopia within the wider frames of European humanism and the Renaissance. \"Clarence H. Miller's fine translation tracks the supple variations of More's Latin with unmatched precision, and his Introduction and notes are masterly. Jerry Harp's new Afterword adroitly places More's wonderful little book into its broader contexts in intellectual history.\"-George M. Logan, author ofThe Meaning of More's \"Utopia\" \"Sir Thomas More'sUtopiais not merely one of the foundational texts of western culture, but also a book whose most fundamental concerns are as urgent now as they were in 1516 when it was written. Clarence H. Miller's wonderful translation of More's classic is now happily once again available to readers. This is the English edition that best captures the tone and texture of More's original Latin, and its notes and introduction, along with the lively afterward by Jerry Harp, graciously supply exactly the kinds of help a modern reader might desire.\"-David Scott Kastan, Yale University
eBook
Utopoly : a Utopian Research Method
This thesis is an account of Utopoly, a new utopian research method that incorporates a game. It is the result of research provoked by a question concerning the validity of using games in the field of utopian studies. My research set out to develop methods that would complement utopian literary fiction by providing more concrete rather than abstract utopian conceptualisations. Speculative forms of utopian discourse are brought into explicitly social, political and economic configurations of utopian thought. Through the Utopoly method participants can experience utopia-aspractice by co-constructing and encountering their own vision of a utopian future. Utopoly evolved through collaborative practice-based research over several years. It was collectively imagined and improvised through a series of public workshops in which Utopoly was enacted, critiqued and subsequently modified. The method incorporates an adapted Future Workshop where participants critique and analyse established political, socio-economic, environmental situations and then engage their imagination to produce possibilities for a better society. The architecture of the board game Monopoly is then co-operatively 'hacked' to incorporate these visions as alternative features, including values, currencies and rules. Participants then play the new game to negotiate, interact with and evaluate the utopian possibilities they have created. An important realisation for the method during the research was that the creative and utopian practices that emerged during its development should be incorporated into the method itself. The method then includes various utopian processes such as: critique, improvisation, imagination, playfulness and hopeful narratives of a better future. By enacting the method, a creative event is produced where new knowledge emerges through praxis. Utopoly contributes to the imaginary reconstitution of society. This thesis concludes with a detailed set of guidelines - like those to enable a game to be played - to allow the reproduction of the method. The method developed has already been used independently by other research groups in diverse contexts. Utopoly therefore creates utopian moments and temporary utopians and is presented as a new utopian research method in the field of utopian studies and beyond.
Dissertation
Utopia
For more than 2,000 years utopian visionaries have sought to create a blueprint of the ideal society: from Plato to HG Wells, from Cloudcuckooland to Shangri-La, the utopian impulse has generated a vast body of work, encompassing philosophy and political theory, classical literature and science fiction. And yet these utopian dreams have often turned to nightmare, as utopia gives way to its dark reflection, dystopia. Utopia takes the reader on a journey through these imaginary worlds, charting the progress of utopian ideas from their origins within the classical world, to the rebirth of utopian ideals in the Middle Ages. Later we see the emergence of socialist and feminist ideas; while the twentieth century was to be dominated by expressions of totalitarian oppression. From the novel to the political manifesto, from satire to science fiction, utopias have always reflected the age that gave rise to them, and this guide will explore this historical context, offering both an analysis of the key texts and an account of their political and cultural background. Today, it is claimed that we are witnessing the death of utopia, as increasingly the ideals that give rise to them are undermined or dismissed. These arguments are explored and evaluated here, and contemporary examples of utopian thought used to demonstrate the enduring relevance of the utopian tradition.
eBook
The Idea of Rome in Late Antiquity
This book approaches the manifestation and evolution of the idea of Rome as an expression of Roman patriotism and as an (urban) archetype of utopia in late Roman thought in a period extending from AD 357 to 417. Within this period of about a human lifetime, the concepts of Rome and Romanitas were reshaped and used for various ideological causes. This monograph unfolds through a selection of sources that represent the patterns and diversity of this ideological process. The theme of Rome as a personified and anthropomorphic figure and as an epitomized notion 'applied' on the urban landscape would become part of the identity of the Romans of Rome highlighting a sense of cultural uniqueness in an era when their city's privileged status was challenged. Towards the end of the chronological limits set in this thesis various versions of Romanitas would emerge indicating new physical and spiritual potentials.
eBook