The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy by Russell Jacoby Basic Books, 1999 ,236 pp., $26 “If you can’t say anything nice,” my mother used to admonish, “don’t say anything at all.” Presumably Russell Jacoby’s …
In Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy’s classic nineteenth-century utopian novel, Julian West falls asleep on Decoration Day in 1887 and awakens from a deep trance 113 years later at the start of a new millennium. Julian’s trance has kept him from …
The responsibility of intellectuals includes not only “a ruthless criticism of all things existing” (Marx), which is what most people on the left are usually occupied with, but also the imagination of alternatives. Not many writers have made lasting contributions …
Securus iudicat orbis terrarum, says a maxim of Roman law; which means, loosely translated: the New York Times, the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement can’t all be wrong. Isaiah Berlin is a certified sage, an …
The term “scientific socialism” is an oxymoron. Science pertains to the study of what is, whereas socialism is a vision of what can or should be. To deny scientific status to socialism is not to denigrate its central importance. It …
Without an imaginative utopian dimension, socialist thought remains excessively rooted in the present. It ends up as something very worthwhile, that is, the reform of the existing system; but it remains restricted to what is “realistic” within the existing order. …
The catastrophe of historical communism is, literally, before our eyes: the catastrophe of communism as a world movement, born from the Russian revolution, promising emancipation of the poor, the oppressed, the “wretched of the earth.” Its dissolution gathers speed, outdistancing …
“Socialism,” writes Michael Harrington, “is the hope for human freedom and justice under the unprecedented conditions of life that humanity will face in the twenty-first century. Socialism?” he asks in the same breath: “How can a nostalgic irrelevance be the …
From Plato’s Republic to Sir Thomas More’s Utopia to B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two and beyond, many social theorists have tried to design, even to build, an ideal human community. It is a prospect that many view with ambivalence. As …
A familiar story, playing itself out in city after city: skyrocketing housing costs send upscale urban dwellers looking for new areas to “pioneer” (some would say invade) and to reshape to their taste. In Manhattan, it has transformed areas once …
Michael Walzer’s “Notes on Public Space” is a valuable reopening of a debate that in the past has been very important to radical thought. I will here suggest that qualitative and aesthetic issues like this one may have an exemplary …
It is no longer clear whether winning or losing elections is the bigger disaster facing socialists. The British Labour party lost to Margaret Thatcher, Francois Mitterrand’s French Socialist party won unprecedented power, and neither is in especially good shape. When …
Utopia seems deader than a doornail—no better proof than the recent long academic monographs about its history. Yet, the spirit of utopia erupts again and again in the least expected places. While we are sophisticated to the point of scorning …
For 20 days, until December 8, the Jonestown horror story made first-page news in the New York Times. In the course of five hours, 911 adults and children were killed or killed themselves. There had been no threat on their …
For over 40 years, ever since Marquis Childs wrote that best-selling book, Sweden has been known as the land of the Middle Way, which was slowly but consistently moving from a backward state toward its present position as the most …
