Quotes About Utopianism

Utopianism is probably a necessary social device for generating the superhuman efforts without which no major revolution is achieved.

As Plato:) There is nothing superstitious about forcing bad consequences for the hubris of paternalistic utopianism. Humanity should never be frozen into a vision of the best. A creative society must be willing to tolerate some degree of instability because creativity is inherently unstable.

Utopianism is, as Plato taught us at the outset, the fire with which we must play because it is the only way we can find out what we are. We need to criticize false understandings of Utopia, but the easy way out provided by realism is deadly.

Where possible, this [Foucault's] model of [localized] resistance is not an alternative to, but can compliment, macrological struggles along 'Marxist' lines. Yet if its situation is universalized, it accomodates unacknowledged privileging of the subject. Without a theory of ideology, it can lead to a dangerous utopianism.

Jihadis want to watch the world burn, to bring everything crashing down, to destroy the establishment and rebuild it after their own pitiless vision. This misguided utopianism is what makes them such effective bogeymen.

Three decades ago, Robert Nisbet recognized that environmentalism was poised to become "the third great redemptive struggle in Western history, the first being Christianity, the second modern socialism." Western society, wrote Nisbet, was moving from "the Gospel of Capitalist Efficiency to the Gospel of Utopianism." One need not wade too deeply into the literature of a "steady state" or carbon-free economy to see the wisdom in Nisbet's prediction.

Müntzer, like all utopianists, was divorced from reality and wished to be so divorced, thinking the reality of this world as something to be fled as soon as possible. All political and religious reform movements are tempted in the direction of cultishness and violence, and at the time of Luther, Müntzer was the one who led this charge over the cliff.

This was an age of utopianism. Political leaders had utopian visions, and so did many citizens, especially the younger generation. The spirit is hard to capture in an age of skepticism, since utopianism, like revolution, is so unreasonable.

No doubt some of the euphoria about the Internet's egalitarian promise was overstated, and some advocates did veer into genuine Net utopianism at times. But the people I was interested in were not evangelists for the Internet itself. For them, the Internet was not a cure-all; it was a role model. It wasn't the solution to the problem, but a way of thinking about the problem. One

A virulent form of utopianism has indeed afflicted the Modern Age, but its name is not Marxism. It is the crazy notion that a single global system known as the free-market can impose itself on the most diverse cultures and economies and cure all their ills.

All political ideals, that of making the people happy is perhaps the most dangerous one. It leads invariably to the attempt to impose our scale of 'higher' values upon others, in order to make them realize what seems to us of greatest importance for their happiness; in order, as it were, to save their souls. It leads to Utopianism and Romanticism. We all feel certain that everybody would be happy in the beautiful, the perfect community of our dreams.

Violence, of course, is generally associated with frankly totalitarian forms of anti-political utopianism like Communism, but the Second World War shows that liberal universalists are as capable of violence as Communists. They are just less capable of honesty.

There were hundreds of worlds like it, most of them littered with the usual Elder Culture ruins, the usual secrets waiting to be unlocked. This one had been colonised by an atechnic cult sixty years ago. Maybe they were living the life of pastoral utopianism they'd planned; maybe they had descended into savagery and were roasting and eating prisoners of war captured in tribal wars fought with stone-tipped spears. No one knew nor cared.

the Enlightenment has been held responsible for the evils of the modern age, and much scorn has been directed at its supposed superficial rationalism, foolish optimism, and irresponsible Utopianism.

Utopianism substitutes glorious predictions and unachievable promises for knowledge, science, and reason, while laying claim to them all.

Political utopianism1 is tyranny disguised as a desirable, workable, and even paradisiacal governing ideology.

Present-day culture, social relations, cityscapes, modes of production, agriculture, and transportation have remade the traditional proletarian into a largely petty bourgeois stratum whose mentality is marked by its own utopianism of "consumption for the sake of consumption." We