Word: utopia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Venal Men. Thus Carlos Fuentes, an able and eloquent novelist, though not a subtle one, passionately expounds the dominant Marxist line: the failure of the Mexican Revolution to produce a socialist Utopia must be laid to venal men who betrayed it to capitalist thieves and their attendant priests and police...
...Dutch art movement, whose standard-bearer was Piet Mondrian, made more than rules for good design. It was a heavily Platonic philosophy of art, carried out in mighty Pythagorean paintings, that saw pure beauty as the universal means of reaching Utopia. Wrote Mondrian: "Abstract art is opposed to the raw primitive animal nature of man, but it is one with true human nature...
Lakoff also criticized Negroes such as the Black Muslims for their "utopian fantasies." They want "utopia now rather than a change in their position in real life," he said...
Clearly, though, Russia is no longer the passive pastoral society that quivered before Stalin. The Kremlin will increasingly feel the pressures of an urban culture that is no longer resigned to an indefinitely receding Utopia. Communism's Kafka-and-abacus stage is already being overtaken by its Pasternak-and-hi-fi era. Affluent Communists might not be any easier to live with. But they would certainly have more to live...
...number of people with time on their hands. To do this we "need changes in the whole society: in its work, its political forms and its cultural styles." Such talk is no less revolutionary than what Goodman wants--utopian reforms. Here Riesman's thinking encounters difficulties. Any scheme for utopia requires a comprehensive view of man; otherwise large-scale social reform has no coherence or legitimacy. But, unlike the 18th century ideologues, Riesman has no driving metaphysic; his approach is "one of seeing rather than doing." To a pragmatist, interested in the implementation of ideas, Riesman's detachment would...