1st Edition

The Utopian Dilemma in the Western Political Imagination

By John Farrell Copyright 2023
236 Pages
by Routledge

236 Pages
by Routledge

236 Pages
by Routledge

In this volume, John Farrell shows that political utopias—societies with laws and customs designed to short-circuit the foibles of human nature for the benefit of our collective existence—have a perennial opponent, the honor-based culture of aristocracy that dominated most of the world from ancient times into early modernity and whose status-based competitive psychology persists to the present... Read more

Introduction: Imagining a World Without Heroes

1/ The Hero and the City: Homer to Diogenes

2/ Thomas More’s Imaginary Kingdom

3/ Francis Bacon and the Heroism of the Age

4/ Jonathan Swift and Utopian Madness

5/ Voltaire’s Garden Retreat

6/ Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Land of Chimaeras

7/ Adam Smith and the Utopia of Commercial Society

8/ Karl Marx and the Heroic Revolution

9/ Fyodor Dostoevsky and the Ungrateful Biped

10/ Edward Bellamy’s Invisible Army

11/ William Morris and the Taming of Art

12/ H. G. Wells and the Samurai

13/ Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Mothers’ Utopia

14/ Yevgeny Zamyatin and the Scythian Horde

15/ Aldous Huxley and the Rebels Against Happiness

16/ George Orwell’s Dystopian Socialism

17/ B. F. Skinner’s World Without Heroes

18/ Anthony Burgess and the Revenge of the Dandy

Conclusion

Biography

John Farrell is the Waldo W. Neikirk Professor of Literature at Claremont McKenna College, where he has been teaching since 1990.