I try to look at the evolution of these utopian claims. In the late '60s there was an assumption that the wealth generated by industry would be taxed and then put into social programs and it would provide a baseline of stability that would allow people to have the time for self-expression; and that social contract has eroded over the last four decades and now it's every person for themselves.
The thing that had fueled these utopian communities was a literal belief, and not just a general sense of optimism, that the earth was about to become a paradise. That idea cannot hold water after the war.
If utopian fiction became the new trend, I wouldn't read it.
Home is pretty utopian.
There was a period when the utopian scenario was almost true - when we felt that you could do almost anything in a club, as long as it was any good. There was no rigid expectation from the audience as to how it had to be delivered. But this didn't last very long. It was almost palpable, the decline of this in the new millennium.
On the conservative side, today's libertarianism is far more dogmatic and devoid of qualification than the liberalism of Adam Smith or J. S. Mill. Like Marxism, libertarianism is a utopian worldview based on an economic-determinist vision of history. Unlike Marxism, libertarianism is highly specific in its predictions about the transition to the utopian world order, rendering it vulnerable to fact.
If you're utopian, you're never satisfied.
The dreams get anchored in aged wisdom not some utopian fantasy.
Utopian speculations. . . must come back into fashion. They are a way of affirming faith in the possibility of solving problems that seem at the moment insoluble. Today even the survival of humanity is a utopian hope.
It's not Utopian to believe that we can create a global registry of financial assets so we know who owns what in different countries.
In the modern world, in which thousands of people are dying every hour as a consequence of politics, no writing anywhere can begin to be credible unless it is informed by political awareness and principles. Writers who have neither product utopian trash.
Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labeled Utopian.
I feel as if dystopian and utopian representations are historically the most effective way of criticizing modern society. You know, because you don't have to be factually accurate. You can kind of construct some awesome strawman arguments in your fictional world.
Looking back, nothing seems so simple than a utopian vision realised.
I'm interested in utopian communities of the past. Many of them didn't survive and I'm examining closely the reasons they failed.
The complete destruction of traditional marriage and the nuclear family is the 'revolutionary or utopian' goal of feminism.
Architecture is a hazardous mixture of omnipotence and impotence. It is by definition a c h a o t i c a d v e n t u r e. . . In other words, the utopian enterprise.
I'm not an activist by nature. I am suspicious of Utopian thinking and equally suspicious of its alternate.
Almost without exception, everything society has considered a social advance has been prefigured first in some utopian writing.
Its a heartening fact about the human race that utopian fiction precedes dystopian fiction in the evolution of literature.
