Utopia is a meta-utopia: the environment in which Utopian experiments may be tried out; the environment in which people are free to do their own thing; the environment which must, to a great extent, be realized first if more particular Utopian visions are to be realized stably.
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Ch. 10 : A Framework for Utopia; The Framework, p. 312Robert Nozick
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There will not be one kind of community existing and one kind of life led in utopia. Utopia will consist of utopias, of many different and divergent communities in which people lead different kinds of lives under different institutions. Some kinds of communities will be more attractive to most than others; communities will wax and wane. People will leave some for others or spend their whole lives in one. Utopia is a framework for utopias, a place where people are at liberty to join together voluntarily to pursue and attempt to realize their own vision of the good life in the ideal community but where no one can impose his own utopian vision upon others.
Robert Nozick
We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian.
Lionel Trilling
We now live in a technologically prepared environment that blankets the earth itself. The humanly contrived environment of electric information and power has begun to take precedence over the old environment of "nature." Nature, as it were, begins to be the content of our technology
Marshall McLuhan
For the environment it is not difficult to think of Clavigo as a deceiver; for it has never loved him, and so there is no paradox; … Nor is it difficult for the environment to erase every memory of him, and hence it demands that Marie shall do the same. Her pride breaks forth in hate, the environment fans the flames, she finds a vent for her passion in strong words and powerful energetic resolutions, and intoxicates herself with these. The environment rejoices. It does not perceive, what she will hardly acknowledge herself, that the next moment she is weak and faint; it does not notice the anxious misgiving that seizes her, as to whether the strength she has in certain moments is an illusion. This she carefully conceals and will admit to no one. The environment continues the theorizing exercises with vigor, but begins to wish signs of practical results. They do not appear. The environment continues to inflame her; her words reveal an inward strength, and yet the suspicion grows that all is not well. It becomes impatient, and ventures upon extreme measures, it drives the spur of ridicule into her side to incite her.
Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
What about the utopian thinkers of all ages, from the Prophets who had a vision of eternal peace, on through the Utopians of the Renaissance, etc.? Were they just dreamers? Or were they so deeply aware of new possibilities, of the changeability of social conditions, that they could visualize an entirely new form of social existence even though these new forms, as such, were not even potentially given in their own society? It is true that Marx wrote a great deal against utopian socialism, and so the term has a bad odor for many Marxists. But he is polemical against certain socialist schools which were, indeed, inferior to his system because of their lack of realism. In fact, I would say the less realistic basis for a vision of the uncrippled man and of a free society there is, the more is Utopia the only legitimate form of expressing hope. But they are not trans-historical as, for instance, is the Christian idea of the Last Judgment, etc. They are historical, but the product of rational imagination, rooted in an experience of what man is capable of and in a clear insight into the transitory character of previous and existing society.
Erich Fromm
Nozick, Robert
Nugent, Ted
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