Call for Papers: Utopia and Failure (II) - Newcastle, September 10-11, 2024 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Krisis 2016-1
Published in 1516, Thomas More’s Utopia would become the founding text of the utopian tradition. The scholarly debate on whether Utopia should be read as satire, or as a detailed blueprint for a new society has implications that stretch far beyond the text itself. More’s Utopia functions as a platform to discuss the merits of utopian thought and intellectual engagement as such. Do utopian ideas necessarily lead to violence and totalitarianism? Does it need to end “in a miserable fit of the blues”, as Marx once famously wrote? Is it possible to transform society on the basis of ideas? What role can intellectuals play in politics? The Dutch philosopher Hans Achterhuis has formulated forceful answers to these questions. In his view, More’s Utopia has carved a path that subsequent generations of utopian thinkers have been forced to follow, often against their will. A path that has inexorably lead to the modern totalitarian regimes of Stalin, Mao and the Khmer Rouge. The dismissal of societal alternatives as theorized by Achterhuis, became a defining feature of the postpolitical culture in the Netherlands after 1989, the year that Wim Kok, leader of the social democrat party (PvdA), renounced its “striving towards the Grand Aim”. Though there is no final resolution to be reached on the interpretation of More’s Utopia - which remains a rather enigmatic book - there are convincing arguments to approach it as a satirical text in the tradition of serio ludere. In this tradition, utopia should be understood, not as a blueprint to be implemented in its detailed totality, but an unstable and unrealizable image of the future that serves to critique the present. While having some fun in the process, too.
An Undermined Utopia, Term Paper
The dystopian image of the future of society in mass culture "We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other's happiness -not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men's souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost... To those who can hear me, I say -do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed -the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish..." -from "The Great Dictator"
2005
(or what you will) of an imaginative writer. I wrote that book in order to clear up the muddle in my own mind about innumerable social and political questions, questions I could not keep out of my work, which it distressed me to touch upon in a stupid haphazard way, and which no one, so far as I knew, had handled in a manner to satisfy my needs. But Anticipations did not achieve its end. I have a slow constructive hesitating sort of mind, and when I emerged from that undertaking I found I had still most of my questions to state and solve. In Mankind in the Making, therefore, I tried to review the social organisation in a different way, to consider it as an educational process instead of dealing with it as a thing with a future history, and if I made this second book even less satisfactory from a literary standpoint than the former (and this is my opinion), I blundered, I think, more edifyingly-at least from the point of view of my own instruction. I ventured upon several themes with a greater frankness than I had used in Anticipations, and came out of that second effort guilty of much rash writing, but with a considerable development of formed opinion. In many matters I had shaped out at last a certain personal certitude, upon which I feel I shall go for the rest of my days. In this present book I have tried to settle accounts with a number of issues left over or opened up by its two predecessors, to correct them in some particulars, and to give the general picture of a Utopia that has grown up in my mind during the course of these 4 A Modern Utopia speculations as a state of affairs at once possible and more desirable than the world in which I live. But this book has brought me back to imaginative writing again. In its two predecessors the treatment of social organisation had been purely objective; here my intention has been a little wider and deeper, in that I have tried to present not simply an ideal, but an ideal in reaction with two personalities. Moreover, since this may be the last book of the kind I shall ever publish, I have written into it as well as I can the heretical metaphysical scepticism upon which all my thinking rests, and I have inserted certain sections reflecting upon the established methods of sociological and economic science….
Political Geography, 1997
As one who comes from the field of the academic study of religion, I have some comments on the paper by Andrew Kirby from a religious studies perspective. In examining the 'oppositional' groups that are the subject of the Kirby paper, I start with the proposition that they reflect a certain 'world construction', to use Peter Berger's phrase. I would characterize this perspective as 'Western historical', and particularly, in the case of groups within the United States, as 'linear'. This constructed analogical 'world' can be viewed as either benign or detrimental, from the standpoint of society in general. depending on how things are set up. The key player within this world construction is, of course. God, who is the Guarantor of order and the unfolding purposes of human history-thus the 'linear' outlook of such perspectives. This general world construct gets individualized when a particular group or individual comes to see themselves (or himself or herself) as more than merely a general agent. He or she becomes an essential or even exclusive instrument of the purpose that God is guaranteeing to the world. In the most extreme case, one is dealing with what might be called a 'messianic' complex. Groups and individuals such as these see