Word: utopianism
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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Only five years ago, there were perhaps a hundred "intentional communities" in the U.S., founded mostly by religious fundamentalists, Utopian socialists or conscientious objectors. Today, as an outgrowth of the hippie movement, there are about 3,000, a third of which are in rural settings. "There are farms everywhere now, and we might go in any direction on compass to find warm bread and salt," writes Raymond Mungo in Total Loss Farm. Although Vermont, Oregon, California and New Mexico are still the favored states, some new commune clusters are cropping up in what Mungo calls "the relatively inferior terrain...
...this is not to say that Movement Toward a New America pictures the movement as a simple glorious struggle which will lead to the creation of a utopian society. Much of the text and pictures are devoted to conveying the feelings of frustration, despair and hopelessness that characterize any revolutionary struggle. And the book is at its best in the "comprehension" sections which serve as a sort of "auto-critique" for the movement...
...Gaulle's place in French history are already evident, years must pass before a conclusion can be reached on such questions as whether Europe was actually better served by keeping Britain out in the cold a while longer. Harvard Political Scientist Stanley Hoffmann, for one, believes that if Utopian federalists had managed to achieve some sort of European unity ten or 15 years ago, it would have been "a merger of confused peoples not knowing what they were doing. The kind of Western Europe that is emerging now is a very pragmatic Europe, cooperating step by step in areas...
Mumford's vision is as Utopian as the "higher and farther" dreams of the technocrats. True believers are free to choose between the two. More skeptical readers may feel that Mumford, over the years of piling book upon book, has created something of a pyramid himself. If the view from the top is chilly, it makes more impressive those moments when Mumford climbs down and fixes his eye on his enduring earthly dream: humanity in intimate, loving touch with nature...
...purports to support. Beneath their cool New England exteriors, Alonso hints, Emerson and Thoreau-and Bronson-were as gloriously crazy as his own Don Quixote. He knows how consciences can cramp under strain, how idealism can gnarl the mind. He is not joking when he compares the 19th century Utopian experiment at Brook Farm with a Massachusetts mental hospital of today...