Live Long & Prosper: Utopian philosophy from Plato to Star TrekUtopia is a name for an ideal community or society possessing a seemingly perfect socio-politico-legal system. The word was invented by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. The term has been used to describe both intentional communities that attempted to create an ideal society, and fictional societies portrayed in literature. It has spawned other concepts, most prominently dystopia.The word comes from the Greek, "not", and, "place", indicating that More was utilizing the concept as allegory and did not consider such an ideal place to be realistically possible.

Utopia is largely based on Plato's Republic. It is a perfect version of Republic wherein the beauties of society reign (e.g.: equality and a general pacifist attitude), although its citizens are all ready to fight if need be. The evils of society, e.g.: poverty and misery, are all removed. It has few laws, no lawyers and rarely sends its citizens to war, but hires mercenaries from among its war-prone neighbors (these mercenaries were deliberately sent into dangerous situations in the hope that the more warlike populations of all surrounding countries will be weeded out, leaving peaceful peoples). The society encourages tolerance of all religions. Some readers, including utopian socialists, have chosen to accept this imaginary society as the realistic blueprint for a working nation, while others have postulated nothing of the sort.

Is such a utopian society possible? Desirable?What are some of the barriers preventing it?How might such a society evolve from our current state of world affairs?Would such a utopian society need to have territorial boundaries; citizenship requirements; immigration restrictions; population limits; self-contained, sustainable resources; correctional facilities; banishment provisions; etc.?What role would technology play in enhancing or inhibiting the development of utopia?

Join Plato’s Cave philosophers as we consider the psycho-social-cultural-anthropological complexities involved in the potential evolution of a utopian society.

LIVE LONG & PROSPER: Philosophy of ideal/Utopian societies in Science-FictionPosted by: Ben Forbes Griffith on May 17, 2010We've done a lot in recent meetups regarding the ontology, ethics, and epistemology of humans - but let's broaden that debate to ethics writ-large (imposed, indoctrinated, or institutionalized), i.e. how an "ideal" human society could BEST promote the "good life" / "human flourishing" / peace & justice that we've talked so much about in other recent meetups. Examples from Star Trek have already been quite frequently mentioned, and we can delve into those specifically in the detail they deserve; however, there are also numerous other sci-fi works we could draw on - while while still narrowing the focus of the discussion to "utopian politics" and using imaginary visions of possible futures as lenses to comment on, better understand, or transcend both current and past human societies... Or, can we even initially agree that no human utopia has YET existed on a large scale? Moreover, shall it ever be possible that one could exist (e.g. the Federation in Star Trek, if some of us think that might be an example)?

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UtopiaUtopia is a name for an ideal community or society possessing a seemingly perfect socio-politico-legal system. The word was invented by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. The term has been used to describe both intentional communities that attempted to create an ideal society, and fictional societies portrayed in literature. It has spawned other concepts, most prominently dystopia.The word comes from the Greek, "not", and, "place", indicating that More was utilizing the concept as allegory and did not consider such an ideal place to be realistically possible. The English homophone Eutopia, derived from the Greek, "good" or "well", and, "place", signifies a double meaning.

Utopia is largely based on Plato's Republic.[2] It is a perfect version of Republic wherein the beauties of society reign (e.g.: equality and a general pacifist attitude), although its citizens are all ready to fight if need be. The evils of society, e.g.: poverty and misery, are all removed. It has few laws, no lawyers and rarely sends its citizens to war, but hires mercenaries from among its war-prone neighbors (these mercenaries were deliberately sent into dangerous situations in the hope that the more warlike populations of all surrounding countries will be weeded out, leaving peaceful peoples). The society encourages tolerance of all religions. Some readers, including utopian socialists, have chosen to accept this imaginary society as the realistic blueprint for a working nation, while others have postulated More intended nothing of the sort. Some[who?] maintain the position that More's Utopia functions only on the level of a satire, a work intended to reveal more about the England of his time than about an idealistic society. This interpretation is bolstered by the title of the book and nation, and its apparent confusion between the Greek for "no place" and "good place": "utopia" is a compound of the syllable ou-, meaning "no", and topos, meaning place. But the homophonic prefix eu-, meaning "good," also resonates in the word, with the implication that the perfectly "good place" is really "no place."Another version of this concept is found in the Panchaea island, of the "Sacred History" book of Euhemerus, a writer from the 3rd century BC.

Utopia BritannicaBritish Utopian Experiments 1325 - 1945

THE HISTORY OF UTOPIAhttp://www.utopia-britannica.org.uk/pages/homebase.htm

Utopia has a chequered history amongst historians. Some would argue that the good place that is no-place has no 'real' history and that its rightful place is in the study of literature. Others have ridiculed utopians and tried to consign them to the footnotes of history. But the utopian tendency has an uncanny resilience - trying to make the world a better place would seem to be a basic human instinct and far from being marginal to our history it has played at times a central and pivotal role.

Utopia Britannica began life as a history of intentional communities in the British Isles, what were called communes in the 1960s & ‘70s. As I set off on my journey down the communal memory lane with my baggage of preconceptions I thought I

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was clearly bound for the footnotes of history, but as I travelled through both geography and time, engaged in the research, I found myself in places that I never knew existed, accompanied by a cast of characters that ranged from the truely strange & eccentric, right through the corridors of power to the dizzy heights of fame & fortune.

What slowly emerged was a Utopian landscape stretched to the farthest corners of our country and whose influences are embedded so deep into our national culture as to be virtually invisible.I have spent alot of time reading the footnotes of other history books piecing together a jigsaw map of UtopiaBritannica, and now when I travel I move through another country; a countryof the imagination dreamt into existence by generations of utopian experimenters who refused to accept that there wasn’t a better place to be than the one that they found themselves in.

Chris Coates 4.6.2001

Utopia Britannica - British Utopian Experiments 1325 - 1945

Index of Utopian StoriesThe stories of utopian experiments below are a selection taken from the

book Utopia Britannica - in some cases they contain additional material that there wasn't room to publish in the book or material I have collected since

publication.http://www.utopia-britannica.org.uk/pages/Stories%20index.htm

Scotland Scotland had its own homegrown utopian tendency as well as importing various schemes from South of the Border. Many later projects being attempts to stem mass emigration.St Kilda C1500 –1950http://www.utopia-britannica.org.uk/pages/SCOTLAND.htmA small archipelago of islands lying 110 miles west of the Scottish mainland - the remotest inhabited place in the British Isles. Varying in population over the years from 80-140 the St Kildans lived in isolation in what amounted to an island republic governed by its own island parliament. Living off seabirds and Soay sheep they held all goods in common, knew nothing of money until the mid 1800s and operated a system of barter right up until the islands were evacuated in 1930. In 1931 St Kilda was sold to the Marquess of Bute, a keen ornithologist. He bequeathed them to The National Trust for Scotland in 1957. The Islands are now in the care and keeping of the Trust which organises annual working parties to keep the cottages, cleits and other structures in good repair. There is also a small military base on Hirta.GRID REF: NF104991

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REF: The Life & Death of St Kilda. . / St Kilda. and other Hebridean Outliers.

John Stuart Mill: a liberal looks at Utopian Socialism in the years of revolution 1848-9 (1).(Essays)Utopian Studies | March 22, 2003 | Levin, Michael |MARX AND ENGELS'S DENUNCIATION of what they termed 'utopian socialism' is relatively well-known. Less attention has been paid to an analysis of the same phenomenon made by John Stuart Mill. Given that Mill was preparing his Principles of Political Economy in the same year (1847) that Marx was drafting the Communist Manifesto, it is just possible that they were simultaneously sitting at their desks in different parts of London writing on Utopian Socialism. However, whereas in the Manifesto Marx, in a brief coverage (ch.3.3), treated Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen as effectively … http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-114088064.html

Utilitarianism: The Greatest Good for the Greatest Numberhttp://whatandwhy.wordpress.com/2009/10/19/utilitarianism-the-greatest-good-for-the-greatest-number/Much is being said in current culture about the sacrifice we should all make for the sake of the “greater good.” This sounds like a fine doctrine on the surface, right? What could possibly be a higher ethic than wanting to look out for the most people possible? But let’s take a deeper look. Below you’ll find a great analysis by Kerby Anderson of Probe Ministries that should bring a more informed understanding of the danger of this growing ethical dogma.

IntroductionYou have probably heard a politician say he or she passed a piece of legislation because it did the greatest good for the greatest number of citizens. Perhaps you have heard someone justify their actions because it was for the greater good.In this article, we are going to talk about the philosophy behind such actions. The philosophy is known as utilitarianism. Although it is a long word, it is in common usage every day. It is the belief that the sole standard of morality is determined by its usefulness.Philosophers refer to it as a “teleological” system. The Greek word “telos” means end or goal. This means that this ethical system determines morality by the end result. Whereas Christian ethics are based on rules, utilitarianism is based on results.Utilitarianism began with the philosophies of Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). Utilitarianism gets its name from Bentham’s test question, “What is the use of it?” He conceived of the idea when he ran across the words “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” in Joseph Priestly’s Treatise of Government.Jeremy Bentham developed his ethical system around the idea of pleasure. He built it on ancient hedonism which pursued physical pleasure and avoided physical pain. According to Bentham, the most moral acts are those which maximize pleasure and minimize pain. This has sometimes

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been called the “utilitarian calculus.” An act would be moral if it brings the greatest amount of pleasure and the least amount of pain.John Stuart Mill modified this philosophy and developed it apart from Bentham’s hedonistic foundation. Mill used the same utilitarian calculus but instead focused on maximizing the general happiness by calculating the greatest good for the greatest number. While Bentham used the calculus in a quantitative sense, Mill used this calculus in a qualitative sense. He believed, for example, that some pleasures were of higher quality than others.Utilitarianism has been embraced by so many simply because it seems to make a good deal of sense and seems relatively simple to apply. However, when it was first proposed, utilitarianism was a radical philosophy. It attempted to set forth a moral system apart from divine revelation and biblical morality. Utilitarianism focused on results rather than rules. Ultimately the focus on the results demolished the rules.In other words, utilitarianism provided for a way for people to live moral lives apart from the Bible and its prescriptions. There was no need for an appeal to divine revelation. Reason rather than revelation was sufficient to determine morality.

Founders of UtilitarianismJeremy Bentham was a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law and one of the founders of utilitarianism. He developed this idea of a utility and a utilitarian calculus in the Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1781).In the beginning of that work Bentham wrote: “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it.”{1}Bentham believed that pain and pleasure not only explain our actions but also help us define what is good and moral. He believed that this foundation could provide a basis for social, legal, and moral reform in society.Key to his ethical system is the principle of utility. That is, what is the greatest good for the greatest number?Bentham wrote: “By the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question: or, what is the same thing in other words, to promote or to oppose that happiness.” {2}John Stuart Mill was a brilliant scholar who was subjected to a rigid system of intellectual discipline and shielded from boys his own age. When Mill was a teenager, he read Bentham. Mill said the feeling rushed upon him “that all previous moralists were superseded.” He believed that the principle of utility “gave unity to my conception of things. I now had opinions: a creed, a doctrine, a philosophy; in one among the best senses of the word, a religion; the inculcation and diffusion of what could be made the principle outward purpose of a life.”{3}Mill modified Bentham’s utilitarianism. Whereas Bentham established an act utilitarianism, Mill established a rule utilitarianism. According to Mill, one calculates what is right by comparing the consequences of all relevant agents of alternative rules for a particular circumstance. This is done by comparing all relevant similar circumstances or settings at any time.

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Analysis of UtilitarianismWhy did utilitarianism become popular? There are a number of reasons for its appeal.First, it is a relatively simple ethical system to apply. To determine whether an action is moral you merely have to calculate the good and bad consequences that will result from a particular action. If the good outweighs the bad, then the action is moral.Second, utilitarianism avoids the need to appeal to divine revelation. Many adherents to this ethical system are looking for a way to live a moral life apart from the Bible and a belief in God. The system replaces revelation with reason. Logic rather than an adherence to biblical principles guides the ethical decision-making of a utilitarian.Third, most people already use a form of utilitarianism in their daily decisions. We make lots of non-moral decisions every day based upon consequences. At the checkout line, we try to find the shortest line so we can get out the door more quickly. We make most of our financial decisions (writing checks, buying merchandise, etc.) on a utilitarian calculus of cost and benefits. So making moral decisions using utilitarianism seems like a natural extension of our daily decision-making procedures.There are also a number of problems with utilitarianism. One problem with utilitarianism is that it leads to an “end justifies the means” mentality. If any worthwhile end can justify the means to attain it, a true ethical foundation is lost. But we all know that the end does not justify the means. If that were so, then Hitler could justify the Holocaust because the end was to purify the human race. Stalin could justify his slaughter of millions because he was trying to achieve a communist utopia.The end never justifies the means. The means must justify themselves. A particular act cannot be judged as good simply because it may lead to a good consequence. The means must be judged by some objective and consistent standard of morality.Second, utilitarianism cannot protect the rights of minorities if the goal is the greatest good for the greatest number. Americans in the eighteenth century could justify slavery on the basis that it provided a good consequence for a majority of Americans. Certainly the majority benefited from cheap slave labor even though the lives of black slaves were much worse.A third problem with utilitarianism is predicting the consequences. If morality is based on results, then we would have to have omniscience in order to accurately predict the consequence of any action. But at best we can only guess at the future, and often these educated guesses are wrong.A fourth problem with utilitarianism is that consequences themselves must be judged. When results occur, we must still ask whether they are good or bad results. Utilitarianism provides no objective and consistent foundation to judge results because results are the mechanism used to judge the action itself.

Situation EthicsA popular form of utilitarianism is situation ethics first proposed by Joseph Fletcher in his book by the same name.{4} Fletcher acknowledges that situation ethics is essentially utilitarianism, but modifies the pleasure principle and calls it the agape (love) principle.Fletcher developed his ethical system as an alternative to two extremes: legalism and antinomianism. The legalist is like the Pharisees in the time of Jesus who had all sorts of laws and regulations but no heart. They emphasized the law over love. Antinomians are like the libertines in Paul’s day who promoted their lawlessness.

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The foundation of situation ethics is what Fletcher calls the law of love. Love replaces the law. Fletcher says, “We follow law, if at all, for love’s sake.”{5}Fletcher even quotes certain biblical passages to make his case. For example, he quotes Romans 13:8 which says, “Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for he who loves his fellow man has fulfilled the law.”Another passage Fletcher quotes is Matthew 22:37-40. “Christ said, Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. . . . Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”Proponents of situation ethics would argue that these summary verses require only one absolute (the law of love). No other universal laws can be derived from this commandment to love. Even the Ten Commandments are subject to exceptions based upon the law of love.Situation ethics also accepts the view that the end justifies the means. Only the ends can justify the means; the means cannot justify themselves. Fletcher believes that “no act apart from its foreseeable consequences has any ethical meaning whatsoever.”{6}Joseph Fletcher tells the story of Lenin who had become weary of being told that he had no ethics. After all, he used a very pragmatic and utilitarian philosophy to force communism on the people. So some of those around him accused him of believing that the end justifies the means. Finally, Lenin shot back, “If the end does not justify the means, then in the name of sanity and justice, what does?”{7}Like utilitarianism, situation ethics attempts to define morality with an “end justifies the means” philosophy. According to Fletcher, the law of love requires the greatest love for the greatest number of people in the long run. But as we will see in the next section, we do not always know how to define love, and we do not always know what will happen in the long run.

Analysis of Situation EthicsPerhaps the biggest problem with situation ethics is that the law of love is too general. People are going to have different definitions of what love is. What some may believe is a loving act, others might feel is an unloving act.Moreover, the context of love varies from situation to situation and certainly varies from culture to culture. So it is even difficult to derive moral principles that can be known and applied universally. In other words, it is impossible to say that to follow the law of love is to do such and such in every circumstance. Situations and circumstances change, and so the moral response may change as well.The admonition to do the loving thing is even less specific than to do what is the greatest good for the greatest number. It has about as much moral force as to say to do the “good thing” or the “right thing.” Without a specific definition, it is nothing more than a moral platitude.Second, situation ethics suffers from the same problem of utilitarianism in predicting consequences. In order to judge the morality of an action, we have to know the results of the action we are about to take. Often we cannot know the consequences.Joseph Fletcher acknowledges that when he says, “We can’t always guess the future, even though we are always being forced to try.”{8} But according to his ethical system, we have to know the results in order to make a moral choice. In fact, we should be relatively certain of the consequences, otherwise our action would by definition be immoral.Situation ethics also assumes that the situation will determine the meaning of love. Yet love is not determined by the particulars of our circumstance but merely conditioned by them. The

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situation does not determine what is right or wrong. The situation instead helps us determine which biblical command applies in that particular situation.From the biblical perspective, the problem with utilitarianism and situation ethics is that they ultimately provide no consistent moral framework. Situation ethics also permits us to do evil to achieve good. This is totally contrary to the Bible.For example, Proverbs 14:12 says that “There is a way which seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death.” The road to destruction is paved with good intentions. This is a fundamental flaw with an “ends justifies the means” ethical system.In Romans 6:1 Paul asks, “Are we to continue sinning so that grace may increase?” His response is “May it never be!”Utilitarianism attempts to provide a moral system apart from God’s revelation in the Bible, but in the end, it does not succeed.Notes1. Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, printed in 1781 and published in 1789 (Batoche Books: Kitchener, ON Canada, 2000), 14.2. Ibid.3. John Stuart Mill, “Last Stage of Education and First of Self-Education,” Autobiography, 1873 (New York: P.F. Collier & Sons, 1909-14).4. Joseph Fletcher, Situation Ethics: The New Morality (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1966).5. Ibid., 70.6. Ibid., 120.7. Ibid., 121.8. Ibid., 136. © 2004 Probe Ministries

Sorman on Revel's Last Exit to Utopia Sunday, December 20, 2009http://incentives-matter.blogspot.com/2009/12/sorman-on-revels-last-exit-to-utopia.htmlGuy Sorman has an article in the City Journal about one of Jean-François Revel's books titled Last Exit to Utopia: The Survival of Socialism in a Post-Soviet Era (La grande parade, Essai sur la survie de l'utopie socialiste). Here's an extract:

French public intellectuals have a reputation—well-deserved—for being socialists, Marxists, or Trotskyists. One thinks in this regard of popular figures like Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, and Simone de Beauvoir, all with fan clubs on American campuses. Some French thinkers, however, have carried forward another intellectual tradition, that of classical liberalism—pro-democracy and pro-market—and running from the work of Alexis de Tocqueville to Albert Camus to the philosopher and journalist Jean-François Revel, who died at 82 in 2006. ...Revel tried to explain this [leftist] utopian yearning through Rousseau’s influential doctrine: man was inherently good, society bad. Therefore, as Rousseau had it, reforming society—starting with the suppression of private property—would allow man’s fundamentally good nature to shine forth. Another source of the utopian fantasy, he believed, came from the European Catholic canon: good intentions count most. Even after learning that the Soviet Union and the Third Reich killed approximately the same

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number of their own citizens, leftist intellectuals rejected any comparison between the two regimes; after all, the Soviets’ intentions were better than the Nazis’, and intentions trump results. Revel could barely contain his ire at leftist scholars who refused to discuss the matter honestly.

Freedom"The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental or spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest."John Stuart Mill

After the Death of Utopia Hans Blommestein - 2004-03-10http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/blommestein1/EnglishA decade ago, people spoke of the end of history, meaning the ultimate triumph of a liberal capitalist political order. Nowadays, many scoff at that notion as too simplistic. Nonetheless, we are at both the end and beginning of something remarkable. In the wake of the death of the utopian - and often bloody - certainties of the 19th and 20th centuries (Communism's collapse was but the latest spectacular example), and with fading belief in the liberal welfare state, traditional views about work, retirement, education, the Church, solidarity, and other social institutions are changing rapidly. The central driver of all this is today's enormous acceleration in the underlying pace of technological and economic change. Call it fast-forward modernization . Of course, the worldwide crash of high-tech stocks in 2000 chilled the hype about a "new economy" that seemed to be emerging at the "end of history." But falling share prices should not blind us to the fact that on top of the ongoing information revolution, three fresh waves of revolutionary technology are poised to hit: bio-technology (including new medical technologies and genetic engineering, such as the creation of human embryos through cloning), nanotechnology, and robotics. Each is its own industrial revolution, and will profoundly alter our lives and ways of thinking. Indeed, the revolution is already upon us. For the first time in history, a global techno-market order is transforming the world of finance, business, politics and, indeed, physiology, beyond recognition. This new techno-market system is shaped and characterized by a belief in the increasing importance of knowledge, new ideas, innovations and new technologies, and a higher pace of what the economist Joseph Schumpeter famously called "creative destruction." As a result, corporate capitalism is rapidly becoming obsolete, replaced by a creative capitalism in which entrepreneurship, combined with a greater willingness to adopt innovations, transforms the business landscape. Innovative start-up firms become huge companies faster than ever before. But these infant giants are quickly threatened with eclipse by even newer enterprises. Take the example of computers. It took 15 years for other countries to compete successfully with America's Silicon Valley in semi-conductors, but less than five years in Internet technology.

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This system provides unprecedented financial incentives to scientists and entrepreneurs to aggressively develop new technologies and thus become rich. But the revolution is not only for the elite; it also offers a realistic (non-utopian) promise of dramatically improved lives for many people around the entire globe - not in 100 years, but in the foreseeable future. We are not just witnessing a simple adaptation of social structures and ways of living to suit new technologies. The Nobel laureate Robert Fogel argues that a new synergism between technological and physiological improvements has produced a radically new form of human evolution, which he calls technophysio evolution. Only this, Fogel believes, can explain recent trends in longevity, body size, the durability of vital organs, and chronic diseases. These changes are also triggering changes in human consciousness. The result is a litany of "post-utopian" values that include a stronger emphasis on individual freedom and personal responsibility. In this world without utopia, individual freedom is the supreme value. But, as with any change of such magnitude, there are holdouts. Indeed, politics everywhere now seems dominated by the "war of lifestyles" that has emerged from today's emphasis on individual autonomy. Not so long ago, issues such as the environment, the balance of work versus leisure in daily life, and the role of marriage, abortion, and other family concerns were secondary political disputes, as politicians fought over who would receive what share of a nation's wealth. Now these issues define domestic political agendas. Much of the new battle over lifestyles is undoubtedly misunderstood, perhaps because debates about them are conducted in a simplistic way: anti-global movements versus multi-nationals, environmentalists versus corporate polluters, small farmers versus agro-business, and so on. But, beyond slogans, there is an underlying fault line between those who have the cultural capacity to embrace change and those who resist it by adhering to traditional ideas about how one's life and, by extension, society, should be organized. This conflict exists globally. In societies that have been preparing themselves by opening their markets and embracing universal education, the disruptions of this revolution can probably be absorbed and handled. Conflict is most acute in closed societies characterized by a politically repressive climate and culturally induced obstacles to growth. Such obstacles include the absence of an informed and capable workforce, instinctive mistrust and rejection of new ideas and technologies just because they come from the West, lack of respect for those who acquire new knowledge, and endemic discrimination against women. The new battle of lifestyles has given rise to new enemies of open societies, such as the Taliban and Al Qaeda. It is no coincidence that terrorism thrives in societies that are intrinsically hostile to today's modernizing values and belief in individual autonomy. So long as these ideas clash, violence will lurk. To defend post-utopian values in the longer-term, politicians (and generals and spymasters) cannot seek security by drastically curtailing fundamental freedoms, because to do so risks forfeiting public support and a weakening of the pillars of the post-utopian market order. In challenging groups like Al Qaeda, they must understand that they are engaged in a war of ideas; winning the hearts - and the lifestyles - of societies is the only way to win that battle. Hans Blommestein is an economist with the OECD, and author of After the Death of Utopia. The opinions expressed here are his own. Copyright: Project Syndicate /Institute for Human Sciences, March 2004.

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US History Encyclopedia:

Utopian Communitieshttp://www.answers.com/topic/utopian-communitiesAlthough they date to the earliest days of U.S. history, Utopian communities, intentional communities created to perfect American society, had become institutionalized in American thought by the 1840s. Various groups, struggling under the pressures of urbanization and industrialization, challenged the traditional norms and social conservatism of American society. Their desire to create a perfect world often lay in sharp contradiction to the world in which they lived, one in which capitalism, the Industrial Revolution, immigration, and the tension between the individual and the community challenged older forms of living.The first American Utopias grew out of Robert Owen's attempt to create a model company town in New Lanark, Scotland. In the United States, Owen organized the New Harmony Community along the Wabash River in western Indiana in 1825. There the residents established a socialist community in which everyone was to share equally in labor and profit. Just months after the creation of a constitution in January 1826, the thousand residents at New Harmony divided into sub-communities that then disintegrated into chaos. In 1825 Francis Wright established another Owenite community at Nashoba in Tennessee. Wright had hoped to demonstrate that free labor was more economical than slavery, but Nashoba attracted few settlers, and the community closed its doors within a year.Transcendentalist InfluenceTranscendentalists of the 1840s believed that the true path lay in the perfection of the individual, instead of reform of the larger society. The individualistic quality of Transcendentalism gave it a more spiritual than social quality, one that also influenced later Utopian movements. Many of the figures of transcendentalism embraced the liberating qualities of Individualism, making man free of the social, religious, and family restrictions of the past. Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, rejected the decaying Puritan lifestyle of New England's past in favor of the Romantic world of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. For transcendentalists, a higher reality lay behind that afforded by the senses; a reality in which people could understand truth and eternity. To reach that world, humankind had to transcend the concrete world of the senses in favor of a more mystical definition of nature. To escape the modern world, transcendentalists fled into model Utopian communities.The most important of these communities was Brook Farm, established in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1841. Residents hoped to free themselves from the competition of the capitalist world so as to work as little as possible, all the while enjoying the fruits of high culture. Unlike their European counterparts, American transcendentalists embraced the quest for a higher moral law. Far from a simple rejection of American society, the creators of Brook Farm, chiefamong them George Ripley, a Unitarian minister from Boston, wanted to create an alternative to the capitalist state, to found a new "city on a hill." The life of the mind that the transcendentalists so valued was one of the most important components of life at Brook Farm. Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Dial editor Margaret Fuller all made regular visits. While the cultural life of Brook Farm blossomed, management of its practical matters languished. Ripley's decision to recruit more farmers over thinkers eventually alienated even Emerson. After a serious fire in 1846, the farm was sold in 1847 and the society dissolved.Not long after the failure of Brook Farm, another transcendentalist community was established at Fruit-lands, Massachusetts. The residents of Fruitlands, originally organized in 1843 by Bronson

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Alcott and Charles Lane, rejected the market economy and chose a life of subsistence agriculture. But Fruitlands attracted the eccentric more than the genuinely alienated, including a number of "body purists"—one of whom advocated nude moonbathing. As a group, they rejected clothing made of cotton (as it was manufactured by slave labor) and that made of wool (as it was taken from sheep without their consent), as well as root vegetables and all animal food products in favor of fruit and corn meal. As in later Utopian experiments, women failed to enjoy the full benefits of the cooperative society. Instead, as Abigail Alcott noted, women did most of the work while the men passed the day in deep conversation. The colony lasted only through the end of 1844 and was eventually sold at auction, with Lane jailed for nonpayment of taxes.As Brook Farm and Fruitlands dissolved, converts to the ideas of Charles Fourier in the United States grew to take the place of the transcendentalists. Fourierists believed that small, highly organized communities (or phalanxes) would allow residents to perfectly develop their talents and inclinations, free from the influence of traditional capitalist society. The standard phalanx consisted of 1,620 people living in common dwellings and working in their natural trades. In America, Arthur Brisbane became the chiefadvocate of phalanxes, hoping that they would complete what, to him, was the unfinished Revolution of 1776 by ending wage slavery. By the 1840s, Brisbane and his disciples had founded more than one hundred phalanxes across the country, from New York to Texas. Although most of these communities failed in short order, their existence underscored the general dissatisfaction some workers felt with industrialization and the triumph of the capitalist order.Other mid-nineteenth century Utopian experiments found some success by organizing themselves around a religious principle or charismatic leader. The Shakers, whose origins dated to the visions of Ann Lee Stanley during the American Revolution, believed that mankind suffered due to the lust of Adam and Eve. Mother Ann favored celibacy as the path to perfection. She and a small group of followers founded a church outside of Albany, New York, in 1774, where they became known as "Shaking Quakers," or Shakers. They withdrew into isolated communities where they could escape from the larger society's wicked nature. They abolished not only property but marriage, demanding a strict commitment to celibacy. By the 1840s, more than twenty Shaker communities had been established in greater New England. Due to their strict rejection of marriage and a reduced number of available converts, the Shaker movement slipped into decline by midcentury and never recovered.OneidaThe Oneida Colony, established in New York in 1848 by John Humphrey Noyes, combined the cooperativist movement of the Fourierists and the marriage taboo of the Shakers to produce a new form of Utopian community. At Oneida, the community practiced the doctrine of complex marriage, where all members of the community were married to each other. The community rejected monogamy and marriage as sources of gender inequality and strictly regulated childbirth and childcare. Unlike previous attempts at self-sufficiency, Oneida's silverware production remained profitable well after Noyes himself had been forced to flee to Canada to avoid persecution for adultery.By the late nineteenth-century, a number of separatist communities were established in the United States. These communities were often constructed on the frontier, where participants could practice their religion free from outside influence. One such group was the Hutterites, an association of German-speaking separatists that established hundreds of communities in the United States and Canada. Unlike the Amish, who rejected the use of machinery, the Hutterites were willing to use modern tools and dress in contemporary clothing, within certain limitations.

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Hutterite society was strictly ordered and work schedules centrally planned. Founded by Jakob Hutter in the sixteenth century, the Hutterites embraced pacifism and a communal lifestyle. Each community in the Hutterite Brethren played an important role in the creation of new Hutterite colonies. Once a colony reached between one hundred and one hundred fifty members, the community split and established a new settlement. Hutterites migrated to the United States in the 1860s and 1870s, settling heavily in the Dakotas. Their numbers grew until World War I, when compulsory military service and anti-German sentiment led many to migrate to Canada. The Hutterite Brethren's separatist model, shared by many other religious and secular communities, became common in the following century. Other separatist communes could be found among the Jewish migrants of the Am Olam movement in Louisiana, South Dakota, and Oregon.Religious Utopian CommunitiesThe industrial problems and the power of Darwinism in the late nineteenth century encouraged the formation of a number of religious Utopian communities. Christian Socialists led by Ralph Albertson established the Christian Commonwealth Colony in Georgia in 1896. There they advocated applied Christianity and published The Social Gospel before disbanding four years later due to financial problems. A group of disaffected Methodists, growing out of the Holiness Movement, created the Society of the Burning Bush. Burning Bush established the Metropolitan Institute of Texas in eastern Texas where profits and property were held in common. The community thrived until the agricultural troubles of the 1920s led to a forced sale. Another in the series of the short-lived communes of the 1890s, the Koreshan Unity communes of Cyrus Teed attacked the Copernican system and taught that the earth was hollow. Teed mixed more standard Utopian ideals of community and cooperation with newer Asian religious traditions. They created communities in Chicago and San Francisco. Eventually, the Chicago group established a third community in Estero, Florida—"New Jerusalem," where most of the Chicago group migrated before eventually dispersing in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1900, another Chicago group, led by the charismatic John Alexander Dowie, established Zion City, which eventually had a population of eight thousand. Dowie raged against the intrusion of the secular world into the religious world. Yet Dowie found little wrong in capitalism. He believed business principles were divinely ordained, attacking even the leaders of the Pullman strike of 1894. Dowie kept a tight grip on community life in Zion City before being overthrown in 1906. Still, Zion City served as jumping off point for numerous post-war healing evangelists, many of whom were Pentecostal, including F. F. Bosworth and Mary Woodworth-Etter. Zion was one of more than twenty-five of these religious Utopian communities established between 1865 and 1920.Secular UtopiasSecular Utopian communities were also common at the end of the nineteenth century. Many of these were socialist in nature, and many were inspired by Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000–1887. Published in 1888, Bellamy's novel describes how the capitalism of the late nineteenth century matured to a state-sponsored and centrally planned economy that ensured equal wages and equality. It sold over one million copies and influenced a number of communes. One such colony was Equity Colony in Washington. Founded by Wallace Lermond, the colony served as a model for socialist government, one residents hoped would later convert the United States to socialism. Named after Bellamy's 1894 novel, it too ran short of money and was later placed under the management of the New York anarchist Alexander Horr. Another socialist colony was created outside of Nashville, Tennessee, by Julius A. Wayland in 1895. Publisher of the socialist newspaper The Coming Nation, Wayland purchased eight hundred acres where middle-class urbanites could mix with socialist intellectuals and poor Tennessee farmers. As it

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grew larger, the divisions within the community surfaced and ultimately doomed the experiment. In the 1880s, the Kaweah Co-Operative Commonwealth in Tulare County, California, revived the earlier traditions of Brook Farm. Residents included many artists, musicians, and spiritualists. The group fell into infighting, however. Accused of various criminal activities, they were eventually evicted, and Kaweah became part of Sequoia National Park. Still other communities returned to the Shaker and Oneida positions on sexuality and family. The Dawn Valcour Community, a spiritualist–free love commune in Vermont and New York, rejected the rigid Victorian family structure and challenged traditional Protestant definitions of love and marriage.Anarchist and Other UtopiasIn competition with the socialist Utopias were anarchist versions. Josiah Warren founded one such community in Tuscarawas County, Ohio. It was the first American anarchist community, and members invested in the local sawmill. The community eventually collapsed because of epidemic disease and poor finances. Still other societies embraced Henry George's plan to levy a single tax on land values to counteract the wealth accumulated by rental income. Some socialists attempted to establish Single Tax colonies between the 1890s and the 1930s. Fiske Warren of Massachusetts created several such intentional communities, including Tahanto in Massachusetts and Halidon in Maine. While anarchist communities revolved around local control and grassroots democracy, some businesses in the United States found interest in planned communities. One of the most famous of the period was Pullman, Illinois, founded and funded in the 1880s by George Pullman, who manufactured railway cars. Pullman refused to allow its residents, all of whom worked for him, to buy their homes. Residents were paid in Pullman dollars and had to buy from his company store, often at inflated prices. In 1894, Pullman workers protested a planned wage reduction with a strike that eventually led to a national boycott by the American Railway Union, one that made Pullman a symbol of corporate control.Government CommunitiesUtopian communities waned in the 1920s. The depression of the 1930s, however, led the U.S. government to create a number of similar settlements, though the theory behind those experiments was not quite "utopian." The Resettlement Administration, in particular, created a number of agricultural communities, hoping to address the growing refugee problem among sharecroppers in the South. Dyess Colony and St. Francis River Farms in Arkansas were two such, though both of them reverted to planter control almost immediately. In the 1930s a few private communities held on, but they remained small and less influential. Two exceptions were the Sunrise Community (Stelton, New Jersey) and the Catholic Worker Movement, both of which ultimately failed as Utopian communal movements.In the aftermath of World War II, Utopian communities flourished in the United States, especially during the 1960s and 1970s. The youth counterculture of the 1960s spawned not only the Free Speech Movement and antiwar protests, but a longing for rural communes in California, New Mexico, and as far east as Vermont. These communes, like the Utopians of the 1840s, organized in ways that challenged the economic and sexual standards of the day. They rejected materialism in favor of self-sufficiency and were especially important in their early advocacy of stricter environmental policies. Some were clearly escapist, like The Farm Eco-Village, created in 1971 by hippies from the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco. Based in Summertown, Tennessee, the Farm produced its own food and power and embraced the simplicity and self-reliance common to Utopian communities of the nineteenth century.Still others migrated to new religious communities. The Jesus People Movement grew out of the charismatic revivals of the 1960s. They combined the hippie lifestyle with a deep devotion to

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Christianity. The "Jesus Freaks" represented the power of the new charismatic Christianity among American youth. New Age movements, ranging from yoga and transcendental meditation to the disciples of Sun Myung Moon and his Unification Church, also attracted a large following in the United States. Still others migrated to more cultic communities. The mass suicide and murder of nine hundred members of the People's Temple at Jonestown, Guyana, in 1977 underscored the danger of ideologically homogenous communities led astray by a charismatic leader. Many of the new cults of the 1970s and 1980s encouraged their members to wall themselves off from larger society, often painting apocalyptic visions of a future filled with totalitarianism, race riots, and communist control. Especially disturbing was the emergence of many neo-fascist and racial-religious communities like Identity Christians, who embraced anti-Semitism and the inevitability of a racial revolution, leading in turn to a popular backlash against such extremism.Internet as UtopiaWhile religious fanaticism had given Utopian communities a bad name by the end of the twentieth century, other forces worked to revive them. The numbers of and faith in technology-based Utopian experiments grew throughout the last half of the century. Some Utopian communities consisted of groups of people spread across the United States fighting for a better and safer world, like the Sierra Club and Greenpeace. Others continued to employ the older Utopian model of visionary settlements isolated from the larger world. One such technological community was Celebration, a corporate-sponsored Utopian dream of the Disney Company to create the ideal twenty-first century community. Modern Utopian communities increasingly cross into the digital world. By the 1990s, some believed the early Internet could become the long-promised Utopian paradise, where class, gender, and racial stereotypes might be stripped away in favor of complete equality. At first the Internet seemed the triumph of the anarchist ideal. In many places small groups came together on bulletin board systems (BBS), among other media, to create online communities modeled closely on the Utopian ideals of the nineteenth century. One of the best of the early BBSes of the mid-1990s was Heinous.net, where mostly young midwestern university students came together to discuss art, politics, and culture in a professionally moderated and intellectually intense environment. Yet, by the end of the decade, most of these boards were in decline. The Internet grew more corporate and mirrored the larger society from which the early Internet pioneers hoped to flee.Many of these communities shared a similar set of assumptions and concerns. The Industrial Revolution had challenged American social institutions, forcing working-class Americans to turn first to labor unions and then to Populism. At the same time, industrial society also challenged the assumptions of the Victorian middle class. Many in the transcendentalist era longed for a free-market Utopia, where government nearly ceased to exist and workers profited from a fair balance between capital and labor. Other technocratic Utopians, like Edward Bellamy, Fiske Warren, and George Pullman, believed that the most capable, in contrast to the most political, should be placed in positions of power. Many others, like John Noyes and the Hutterites, found solace in religion, believing that new religious movements would better protect and structure human society. Still others based their Utopias in nature or technology. Many of these philosophies were certainly at odds with one another. Yet the search for an ideal society remained a constant theme throughout the course of American history, dating from the Puritans to the "Jesus Freaks" of the 1970s. All but the most dystopian of the religious movements believed that American society fell short of the ideal and needed great change to ensure the prosperity of all.

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BibliographyFogarty, Robert S. All Things New: American Communes and Utopian Movements, 1860–1914. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.Halloway, Mark. Heavens on Earth: Utopian Communities in America, 1680–1880. New York: Dover, 1961.Kern, Louis. An Ordered Love: Sex Roles and Sexuality in Victorian Utopias. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981.Shi, David E. The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001.

Thomas More, utopian societyThe utopia society of Thomas More summarized in his novel, Utopia. Compare/contrast his fictional society and modern culture. http://www.essortment.com/all/utopiasocietym_rumm.htmUtopians are religiously tolerant, and there is a penalty of exile or slavery for being too aggressive in matters of religion. They accept all beliefs except those that deny the dignity of humanity, and those believers are scorned. Utopians celebrate death and cremate those who die in peace, confident that their soul will be free and act like a guardian angel. Those who die in fear are buried and prayed for. All Utopians believe in some sort of divine being. Superstition is not taken seriously, but Utopians do believe in miracles as signs of God’s presence. Some focus on performing good deeds, rather than education, to earn eternal happiness.

Priests are elected and are considered the most respected members of society, both in Utopia and abroad. They’re exempt from prosecution for crimes, reasoning that God will judge them later. Their wives are highly respected as well. Priests’ duties include organizing religious services, overlooking the citizens’ morals, and educating the youth. Priests actively pray on the battlefield for peace during wars and intercede on behalf of the enemy as well as the allies to save those who call for mercy.

Churches where the ceremonies are performed are uniformly dark and call for reverence. Services are not denomination-specific, so believers from different faiths can worship together. On scheduled days, wives privately confess their sins to their husbands and children to their parents to remove domestic hostility. Attending church while angered is forbidden, and Utopians must clear their personal disputes before coming.

More concludes by affirming the fairness and efficiency of the Utopian system, compared to the greed and wastefulness of other societies. He realizes the importance of laborers and criticizes those who legally and illegally take advantage of the lower, working class. The root of all evil is pride, but in Utopia, these problems are eliminated with the absence of money. Finally, More reemphasizes the power of the Utopian system while expressing his own personal doubts about its success in practice.

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Utopian Thinking - From Plato to Ibsen and O'NeillBy Fatemeh Esfandiari http://ezinearticles.com/?Utopian-Thinking---From-Plato-to-Ibsen-and-ONeill&id=2881156

This research attempts to present a reconstructive interpretation of the utopian thinking as portrayed in Ibsen's and O'Neill's dramas in order to present their era thinking. Utopia has its roots in classical and Christian beliefs. The ideal city based on reason comes from Greeks and the idea of deliverance through a messiah comes from Christians. Most histories of utopia in the west tend to start with Plato and his Republic. To Plato utopia is the form of the ideal city, a perfect one, it fulfils by its political, social, and spatial organization. In Republic, this state is described as a place where goodness and justice are required, some functions and some virtues are more important and higher than others, and some needs take priority. In this state, philosophers are at the top of the social order and it hierarchically comes into the base class sustained by the labor class. So this spatial order of the city is hierarchized. Then he created a state in his "idea" or mind: "Let us begin or create idea a state; and yet the true creator is necessity, who is the mother of our invention" (Plato 61). Then he described it; in fact he gave a picture of primitive life, on the other hand, he asked them to have an eye to poverty and war (Ibid. 62). In this dialogue, Glaucon rejected the state frankly and called it a "city of pigs". "But this is a picture of a city of pigs, yes Socrates and if you were providing for a city of pigs, how else would you feed the beasts?!"(Ibid. 369-72) He called that as the state of luxurious as well. "People who are to be comfortable are accustomed to lie on sofas, and dine off tables, and they should have sauces and sweets in the modern style" (Ibid. 373). Socrates is a representative of Plato and his ideals and ideas, and Glaucon seems to be a representative of the 19th and the 20th century man. He knew what would be going on in future. It looks as if Plato intended to make his ideality closer to the reality of life. He was conscious about both. He himself confessed that "true and healthy" state is just an ideal in the mind. In fact, Plato was portraying a real state. Coming to choose a guardian, he opted a man of nobility, "is not the noble youth very like a well-bred dog in respect of guarding and watching?"(Ibid. 375) the matter of education, then, was considered. As Glaucon shifted Plato's idea of a pig city to luxurious one, Plato began to drift into the deeper issues of mankind. So he paid to educations obviously the most important need to protect the luxurious city and the unpredictable man. It is more likely that Plato is deeped in some thing high, noble and ideal.He gave his famous parable in the 7th book where he portrayed a real state; Greece, Athens, his place of birth, desires, and pride. This parable has been given to the futures, to the man of modernity, to those being away from the ideals of life and much close to the real life. Reality never dies and it can never be ignored. Making a utopia does not mean making a city including the best of conveniences, and guardians of the aristocracy; however, it does mean to make man. All "isms" can not define Man and the reality of his existence. If and only if Man would live the reality of Man which is the biggest truth about man. This is the cry of modern Man.As Renaissance was a return to 'Greek Humanism', Platonic conception had some influence on the thinkers and architects of this era. The classic or Platonic conception of ideal city or utopia was fixed and static, it supposed an immutable order, and the parameters were the same in all eras. The principles of reason were utilized in the rational and scientific arts. However, some writers gradually tended to express human protest to the soulless of the utopia based on reason.

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In the sixteenth century, Thomas More inscribed his famous work entitled Utopia; the modern utopia dates from Thomas More's Utopia (1516). It drew upon both Greek and Christian roots. To More, utopia means the good place that is nowhere (utopia as well as outopia).It seems at all times and in all societies people tend to Paradise or the Golden Age, a place and a time that there is no pain, all live freely and blissfully. There are some folk images of the Land of Cockaygne and Schlaraffenland, places where man would live joyously and fulfills his wishes. There are El Dorados and Shangri Las where people live in peace and harmony. But these are not utopia. To More, utopia should walk with current realities. It looks as if it has sought to create a picture of a good and even a perfect society.In the seventeenth century we encountered certain major utopian works, like Campanella's City of the Sun (1623), Andreae's Christianopolis (1619), Bacon's New Atlantis (1627) and they achieved great fame among European men of letters. However, in the eighteenth century Jonathan Swift satirized and rebutted them by writing Gulliver's Travels (1726), he adds the anti-utopia or dystopia to the utopian tradition. We can trace the influence of the great early utopias. From Swift's Gulliver's Travels to Samuel Butler's Erewhon and Evegeny Zamyatin's We, as Kumar holds in his article it has been " the hubris of human reason"(67).As Kumar mentions in his article entitled "Aspects of the Western Utopian Tradition" in the Renaissance, utopian ideas revived and they had their roots in Greek. Down to the eighteenth century, elements like science and technology were added to the concept of utopia and the theme of the ideal city. In fact in the Age of Reason (1600-1800) Plato lost his popularity and rationalists neglected him and his metaphysics. But then the French and Industrial Revolutions inspired the imminent possibility of utopia. However, it was a kind of utopia based on the scientific analysis, a society created by modern science and modern industry. Utopia remained dormant for a while, because of the rush of the social sciences. They interpreted utopia by means of science and rationale (67). Accordingly, we should consider the classical ideal city invented by Greeks as the "pre-history" or the "unconscious" of modern utopia. The modern utopias, rooted in More, are pagans. They have intended to create a society without the light of divinity, just by human reason and rationale. Republic, however, had a philosophical sketch (Ibid 70).According to this article, Utopia emerged in the form of novel in the eighteenth century. During this era we confront two categories of theory; utopian social theory represented in Rousseau's Social Contract and Owen', Fourier' and Marx' writings and utopian political theory shown in Hobbes's Leviathan and Locke's Two Treatises of Government (Ibid. 73).Some scientists like Charles Darwin and Emil Zola have offered revolutionary theories. Literary naturalism derives from a biological model; its origin owes to Darwin and his theory of evolution. He emphasizes upon theories of heredity and environment. According to Richard Lehan "Darwin created a context that made naturalism a convincing way to explain the nature of reality for the late nineteenth century"(46). However, before Darwin's ideas were available in literary form, they had to be transformed by Emil Zola. Zola believes that a novelist is like a scientist; he observes nature and society and rejects supernatural and the absolute standards of morality. All reality could be explained biologically. Controlled by heredity and environment, man was the product of his temperament in a social context (Ibid. 47). Accordingly, while the naturalistic novel presumes the reality of evolution, it often works in terms of devolution; degeneration and personal decline are rooted in most naturalistic fiction (Ibid. 50). Zola believes that the same forces that determined the individual were at work in society. But the modern man had been displaced from the environment, had lost his contact and relation with his instincts and

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self. Lehan in his article argues that money and bureaucracy had replaced the workings of nature and natural feelings. As civilization became more and more pronounced, society became more and more corrupted. Realism/ naturalism as a literary movement depended upon showing how a new commercial/ industrial process had interrupted the old rhythms of the land and put in motion a social process (Ibid. 61). A question arises whether realism/naturalism had an American equivalent or not. There is a connection between Zola and Norris, Balzac and Dreiser. They shared historical moment and they were setting their novels in an industrial world. As a literary way of presenting reality, naturalism dominated in Europe from 1870 to 1890 and in America from 1890 to the end of World War II (62).Technology has been a central feature in the history of Western modernization. As Pippin argues there has been "an increasing reliance on technology in the production of goods, in services, information processing, communication, education, health care, and public administration"(185). This reliance, Pippin further argues, was anticipated and embraced by the early founders of modernity (Bacon and Descartes), and finally became a reality in the latter half of the nineteenth century (185). Such an increasing dependence on technology has created a number of political problems.As it is mentioned in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, when the two world wars broke out, they changed the world. World War I broke out in 1914 in which England and France were fighting against Germany. The United States in 1917 entered the war on the side of England and France. The majority of the population of The United States was of English and German ancestry and after the war they encouraged the nation to come back to the prewar modes of life. However, to the others this collapse of Europe demonstrated the inadequacy of old social life. In 1929 because of the crash of the stock market an economic depression emerged. It did not end till the World War II. In this war Japan and Germany fought against The United States. The war ended in 1945. it made The United States become both an industrial society and a major global power. The United States consequently became a modern nation. In these decades American literary men registered all struggles and debates over the wars and recorded the history. Some anticipated future utopias. They were hopeful to construct an ideal city; although others believed that "old forms would not work for new times"(1071). They were thinking of creating something new. In fact, in the twenty and thirty decades, the pace of urbanization, industrialization, and immigration speeded up. The pace of technology and science speeded up; morality, justice, virtue, and good were crushed under the wheels of them.According to The Norton Anthology of American Literature, communism and the other forms or radical politics so common in the interwar decades took their ideology from the writing of the German Karl Marx (1818-1883). Marx identified the root of human behavior in economics. He claimed that societies which were industrializing divided into two classes: capitalists versus laborers. To him, the ideas and ideals of any society had a direct relationship with the interests of the dominant class. It seems that Marx intended to construct a society based on communist ideals. Americans like Europeans were affected by Marx's view. Those who thought of themselves as Marxists in the 1920s and the 1930s were related to this issue. Like socialists, anarchists, union organizers, these communists opposed American free market place competition. The United States also wanted to have its stated ideals which were guaranteeing liberty and justice. In these decades The United States happened to construct an ideal state (Franklin 1073). However a question arises that whether living on ideals was possible or not.Technology played a vital role in these events. Without new production, transportation, and communication, the modern America could not have existed. We can not dissociate technology

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from Science. Because of scientific inventions, the world changed; we encountered the development of technology in whole America and Europe. On the other hand, scientists did not believe the literary men. They knew them some "careless thinkers". The literary men also belittled the capacity of scientists to entail some important human factors like moral issues and subjective experience (Ibid.1073). Accordingly, in the late nineteenth century, O'Neill was against capitalism; the exploitation of the individual worker and the unequal distribution of wealth were its products. From the early 1910s into the 1920s, he saw the utopian goals of anarchism as a possible answer to capitalism (Ibid.1152).If we want to consider Marx's view of utopia, it is a good idea to mention his concept of self because utopian thinking has something to do with self, and the way it relates to itself, to others, to human nature, to technology and to the natural world. Marx's intention is supposed to overcome alienation. To him, this is an important issue in political theory and reconstructing Marxian utopia. Johan Tralau in his article "The Effected Self in the Utopia of the Young Karl Marx" mentions that "the human being will no longer dominate nature, but will live in harmony with it" (394). He states that the utopian world is completely industrialized. To Marx man should be active; he believes that human is human just by its production. He continues that "through technological activity the self turns nature into its own, and thus into itself; this why utopia means the end of conflict between man and nature"(397). Thus there is no difference between man and nature. Then Marx discusses that "natural science has invaded and transformed human life through the medium of industry" (398) he considers industry as natural science in relation to man. So subjectivity is destroyed in human society. As Tralau holds in his article "in utopia there are no differences between different people"(399). In chapter IV, I will illustrate the symbolic characters of Larry and the anarchists portraying the caricatures of this utopian thinking in The Iceman Cometh.Joshua Nichols in his article entitled "Lacan, the City, and the Utopian Symptom: An Analysis of Abject Urban Spaces" states that "utopia is a fictive representation of an ideal social structure"(460). It seems that utopia is somewhere which is not anywhere except in myths and fictions. He considers utopia as a mirror held up in the society; it actually reflects "the current city's lack of rationality"(461). As he believes, in the recent century, "utopian city lies outside of the divinity' it is significant just in relation to the profane city"(460). Idealism is any doctrine having something to do with philosophy and it holds that "reality is fundamentally mental in nature"; this is a kind of definition Simon Blackburn gives in the Dictionary of Philosophy, the second edition (177). Modernity refers both to a historical category and to a philosophical and civilizational ideal. If you consider first the historical category, classic Enlightenment positions are stood out. According to Robert B. Pippin's Idealism as Modernism, these positions are:the new conception of nature required by modern science; the post-Cartesian notion of mind as subjective consciousness; a political world of passion-driven but rationally calculating individuals, or a post-protestant world of individually self-reliant, responsible agents; a new political language of rights and equality; and, most of all, a common hope: that a secular, rational basis for moral and political order could be found and safely relied on, could inspire the allegiance and commitment necessary for the vitality and reproduction of a society (Pippin 2)Now we can consider philosophical modernism which has something to do with the German Idealist modernism, especially Kantian and Hegelian ones, and especially their discussions of "agency, self-determination, and rationality". Pippin claims that it is very controversial to assert that some early-nineteenth-century German philosophers had realized the real intellectual

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sources of a modernist break with the prior religious and intellectual tradition. They believe that reality, modern social reality has become rational. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant refers often to the mind. Later German idealists were convinced that Kant had not destroyed the classical metaphysical tradition, but had begun a new kind of philosophy of subjectivity. He claims that, in philosophical knowledge, "reason is occupied with nothing but itself"(qtd. in Pippin, 39). His controversial issue is the concept of "apperception"; Kant states the claim that " It must be possible for the 'I think' to accompany all my representations"(Ibid.), "The principle of apperception is the highest principle in the whole sphere of human knowledge"(Ibid.). Pippin argues that according to Kant," whenever I am conscious of anything, I also apperceive that it is I who am thus conscious" (Ibid.).At that time, Hegel also gave his own theme in his account of modernity; he stated that the modern age is the realization of human freedom, of absolute freedom. He stresses that this freedom is possible if you just experience a great loss; the experience that God himself is dead, as it is noted in his article "Belief and Knowledge".In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the new seemed suddenly old, outdated. According to Jurgen Habermas, Nietzsche's thought represents the entry into post modernity. Nietzsche renounces a renewed revision of the concept of reason and bids farewell to the dialectic of enlightenment (Habermas, 85-6). As Pippin holds this farewell to the hopes of the Enlightenment is seen as the decisive European turning point , the European dissatisfaction with the Enlightenment comes down to the failed attempt of Hegel and the post-Hegelian at a dialectical reformulation and completion of such hopes, and a Nietzschean inauguration of irrationalism (Pippin 330)Pippin further argues that for Nietzsche there is something different about the post-enlightenment period in western history; something which is not just the repetition of Platonism and Christianity (Ibid. 335). However, Modernity just represents his repetitive descriptions; as Pippin argues, it wants to complete the ancient will to truth. He believes that Modernity's dream of Enlightenment is so extreme and that makes its failure. His analysis of the institutions of modernity is directed to the Christian-moral interpretation; he asks his major question and replies it: "What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devalue themselves" (Ibid.335). In his book Pippin argues that Heidegger attacks on the ancient philosophy and Germen Idealism. He asserts that man is free and his being is determined only in his liberation, commerce and economy turn into their powers, art becomes the manner of self-development of human creativity. The idea of sovereignty brings a new formation of the state and a new kind of political thought (Ibid. 395).When the utopian society comes to be portrayed in literature, we see a fully developed picture of a happy world in which we experience a good life in a new society; we see people at work, at home, in society, we experience their personal and social lives, however, we see a good life, a good day in utopia. But a question arises if it is a real life, whether it is persuasive to portray just a far-fetched life and society. A modern man can not stand it, because he has experienced and seen the real life and the bitter truth is that what he sees is completely different from what he reads in literature. Among the nineteenth century men some come to react against utopian thinking; in their works we can trace anti-utopian thinking. Some like Henrik Ibsen and Eugene O'Neill have portrayed real life in their writings and questioned Plato and his principles of state. It seems the early utopians as Kumar holds in his article, tended to "blend utopian and anti-utopian elements"(70), like Plato and More. But from the late nineteenth century, utopia and anti-utopia tended to pull apart. The anti-utopia expresses some fears; it offers the threat of

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Technology, Science, and material progress and considers it as the greatest threat to human values. We see that in this century the portrayal of the society becomes more detailed and realistic as you see in Ibsen's The Wild Duck and O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh.Ibsen is looking forward to something new, the creation of a transformed world. This is an age of becoming. There is not any definite line, as Plato implied in his parable of the cave in order to divide truth and reality. It looks as if Ibsen is playing with the concepts. There is no line between the old and the new, the illusion and the fact, the reality and the truth, the physics and the metaphysics. He wants to define them again. The man of Plato's era is completely different from the 19th century man. However, both intend to construct an ideal world with an ideal concept.But Ibsen is not only a great thinker, he is a great artist. His works show us the true meaning of the word realism. According to Arthur Symons, "a word which has unhappily come to be associated with pictures of life which are necessarily sordid, frequently unclean (97). Realism is a picture of life as really it is. In his article" Ibsen's Modernity" he argues that Ibsen's realism stifles nothing;" it is daring to discuss matters over which society draws a veil"(97), but it is never gross, never unhealthy, it "sees life steadily, and sees it whole"(97). Ibsen paints ordinary life; his people are the people we meet on the streets, painters, lawyers, and teachers.In 1890, the American popular theater began slowly to change, along with the Norwegian Ibsen, whose work was first produced in America in 1889. According to Brenda Murphy's American Realism and American Drama, before 1890 the realistic ideas were coming from novelists who had not fully learned the language of the theater (85). The years between 1890 and 1915 were crucial for the establishment of realistic principles in American drama. "The turn-of-the-century playwrights who had ambitions toward writing drama that was good literature as well as good theater were the generation who grew up with the sense of realism as avant-garde"(Ibid. 86). When he started writing plays in 1913, O'Neill was aware of what had been happening in the American theater. As the son of a prominent actor, he had grown up with some knowledge about the theater. From the realist's perspective, his whole career was a development of these two early impulses:" the search for a dramatic structure that would give an appropriate shape to the illusion of reality in his dramatic action, and the search for theatrical ways to depict the deepest reality of his characters within the dramatic structures he discovered". He wanted to fulfill the two impulses of realism in his masterpiece, The Iceman cometh(1939) and A long Day's Journey into Night(1940).In many of his experiments he intends to pursue realistic structure and deeply psychological characterization in order to represent his notion of truth (Murphy,114).They both seem to develop a great understanding of humanity in all its shades. Ibsen gets his doubts about utopian thinking and that ideal state imagined by Plato and so does O'Neill. He is also against the American dream. Through the history we can diagnose the trace of old in new. Humankind from his birth has been looking for an ideal place based on his ideas. However, in track of history man's ideas have been fulfilled by innovation of technology, science, philosophy, human morality, and so many other factors. Utopia to Ibsen and O'Neill and many other thinkers is not the one which was to Plato. It tends to change into Dystopia, a place where instead of all being well, all is not well. The nineteenth and twentieth-century thinkers like Henrik Ibsen and Eugene O'Neill made an attempt to construct a utopia based on the realities of the life.

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Works CitedAbrams, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms/ seventh edition. The United States of America: Earl McPeek, 1999.Cunliffe, Marcus. The Literature of the United States. Great Britain: Richard Clay (the Chaucer Press), 1967.Egan, Michael .Ibsen: The Critical Heritage. London: Rutledge, 1997.McFarlane, James. Henrik Ibsen. Australia: Penguin Books, 1970.Murphy, Bernard. American Realism and American drama. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1987.Pippin, Robert. Idealism As Modernism .Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1997.Spiller, Robert. The Cycle of American Literature. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1956.Franklin et al. The Norton Anthology of American Literature / sixth edition. Vol. C,New York: NY 10110, 2003.Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Fatemeh_Esfandiari

Plato and Aristotle: Searching for an Ideal Political Systemby DJLhttp://learnsomethingnewtoday.us/2008/02/03/plato-and-aristotle-searching-for-an-ideal-political-system/Numerous experts in modern time regard Plato as the first genuine political philosopher and Aristotle as the first political scientist. They were both great thinkers in regards to, in part with Socrates, being the foundation of the great western philosophers. They each had ideas of how to improve existing societies during their individual lifetimes. To compare political theories of two great philosophers of politics is to first examine each theory in depth. It is also necessary to look at several areas of each theory to seek the difference in each. Plato was the prized pupil of Socrates. From a wealthy and powerful family, his actual name was Aristocles; Plato was a nickname referring to his broad physique. In his early twenties, Plato decided to devote himself to philosophy. Plato lived during the Peloponnesian War which consequently led to the end of Athenian democracy. He had an eyewitness account of his mentor’s (Socrates) trial and execution. Devastated by Socrates’ death, he wandered around Greece, Egypt, Italy and the Mediterranean. In Egypt, he learned of a water clock and later introduced it to Greece. In Italy, he learned of the work of Pythagoras, and came to appreciate the value of mathematics. While on his journey, Plato was enslaved. His friends and family raised money to ransom him from slavery, but when he was released without it, they bought him some property called Academus to start a school, the Academy, founded in 386 B.C. Aristotle, who was born in Macedonia, received traditional education in the arts, music, gymnastics, and other subjects especially in Homer who was the basis of all Greek education. The turning point in his life for intellectual development however, was his entrance into the Academy of Plato. In 343 B.C. Aristotle was invited by Phillip, King of Macedon, to begin a

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tutorship with Alexander the Great, who was then thirteen years old. In 335 B.C. He returned to Athens where he founded his own school of philosophy known as the Lyceum. The main focus of Plato is a perfect society. He creates a foundation for a utopian society, in his book The Republic, out of his disdain for the tension of political life (Hacker, 24). This blueprint was a sketch of a society in which the problems he thought were present in his society would be eased (Hacker, 24). Plato sought to cure the afflictions of both human society and human personality (Hacker, 24). In his thinking about politics, Plato wanted to get away from the prevalent idea that government could only be formed through a muddle of “fear and faith, indolence and improvisation” (Ebenstein, 2). Plato’s regard, in fact, was to achieve a perfect society. Plato’s perfect society would consist of three distinct, non-hereditary groups. The Guardians (Gold), which consist of ruling Guardians and non ruling Guardians. The non rulers are a higher level of civil servants and the ruling is the society’s policy makers (Hacker, 32). The Auxiliaries (Silver) who are soldiers and minor civil servants (Hacker, 32). Finally the Workers, also called Artisans (Bronze), are composed of farmers and craftsmen, most commonly unskilled laborers (Hacker, 32). The Guardians are to be wise and good rulers. It is important that the rulers who emerge must be a class of craftsmen who are public spirited in temperament and skilled in the arts of government areas (Hacker, 33). The Guardians are to be placed in a position in which they are absolute rulers. They are supposed to be the select few who know what is the best for society (Hacker, 33). Unlike Plato, Aristotle was not concerned with creating a perfect society, but rather improving on the existing one. He also disagrees with the idea of one class holding discontinuing political power (Hacker, 85). Instead of producing a blueprint for the perfect society, Aristotle suggested, in his work The Politics, that the society itself should reach for the best possible system that could be attained (Hacker, 71). Plato relied on the deductive approach, while Aristotle is an example of an inductive approach (Hacker, 71). Utopia is a solution in abstract, a solution that has no concrete problem (Hacker, 76). There is no solid evidence that all societies are in need of such drastic reformation as Plato suggests (Hacker, 76). Aristotle believed that the failure to allow circulation between class excludes those men who may be ambitious, and wise, but are not in the right class of society to hold any type of political power (Hacker, 85). Aristotle looks upon this ruling class system as an ill conceived political structure (Hacker, 86). He quotes “It is a further objection that he deprives his Guardians even of happiness, maintaining that happiness of the whole state which should be the object of legislation,” ultimately saying that Guardians sacrifice their happiness for power and control. Guardians who lead such a strict life will also think it necessary to impose the same strict lifestyle on the society it governs (Hacker, 86). Aristotle puts a high value on moderation (Hacker, 81). He felt that utopia was abstract and superficial. It wouldn’t allow for realistic problem solving solutions. He felt that Plato’s view of a strict overhaul of society in general wasn’t necessary. There is so much of Plato’s utopia that is undefined and it is carried to extremes that no human being could ever fulfill its requirements (Hacker, 81). Aristotle believes that Plato is underestimating the qualitative change in human character and personality that would have to take place in order to achieve his utopia (Hacker, 81). In the Republic, Plato tells of how men would act and what their attitudes would be in a perfect society. Aristotle tries to use real men in the real world in an experimental fashion to foresee how and in which ways they can be improved (Hacker, 81).

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Plato and Aristotle both agree that justice exists in an objective sense: that is, it dictates a belief that the good life should be provided for all individuals no matter how high or low their social status (Hacker, 91). “In democracies, for example, justice is considered to mean equality, in oligarchies, again inequality in the distribution of office is considered to be just,” says Aristotle (Hacker, 91). Plato sees law and justice as the two items that set guidelines for society’s behavior. Aristotle places emphasis on the institution of the polis, or civilized community. The polis was structured to allow the average individual in society to participate in political matters. This institution is not the state or society, merely the larger unit of the two (Hacker, 77). Neither Plato nor Aristotle found it to be necessary to distinguish between the state nor society and therefore it is difficult to define polis (Hacker, 77). The polis contradicts Plato’s theory of one ruling class controlling the political power and all decisions that effect society. The theory of Democracy that Aristotle derived states that democracy is a “perversion” form of government of “polity” (Hacker, 92). Aristotle said, “The people at large should be sovereign rather than the few best” (Hacker, 92). Plato would never allow participation in government by the public as Aristotle would. According to Plato, public judgments of approval and disapproval are based on belief and not on knowledge (Hacker, 59). Plato believes that if a revolution were to occur it would be a palace revolution (Hacker, 64). To define, a palace revolution is when power transfers from one holder to the next. Aristotle views the cause of revolutions originating with either the rich or the poor (Hacker, 102). He feels that the means of preventing revolutions is to anticipate them (Hacker, 107). Plato believed that in a utopian setting, a disgruntled group of Guardians will emerge and break from the rules, and that in an oligarchy, two things may happen to cause a revolution: the first would be the ruler and the rulers offspring growing to be sympathetic and weak, and the second is that the numbers of the poor population grows larger and suffer exploitation from those in power. Aristotle states that to know the causes which destroy constitutions is also to know the causes which ensure their preservation (Hacker, 107-108). In summary, Plato and Aristotle alike were philosophers concerned with the current setting of society, and invented theories to improve on it. Plato, a political philosopher, was in the pursuit of the philosophical truth (Hacker, 114). Aristotle was concerned with the citizen and the design of political institutions (Hacker, 114). They both had well thought out ideas and plans on how to build upon and improve society. Both have had a profound impact on modern day political scientists. Aristotle had a large part in the development of some of today’s democratic beliefs. Both of these men were great thinkers and their opinions on society and its functions were quite different, but each had the same intention: to build a better way of life for society as a whole, whether past, present or future.

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