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.
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Ch. 10 : A Framework for Utopia; The Framework, p. 311Robert Nozick
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Though the framework is libertarian and laissez-faire,individual communities within it need not be, and perhaps no community within it will choose to be so. Thus, the characteristics of the framework need not pervade the individual communities. In this laissez-faire system it could turn out that though they are permitted, there are no actually functioning "capitalist" institutions; or that some communities have them and others don't or some communities have some of them, or what you will.
Robert Nozick
You are a guardian and protector of liberty. You may be the only thing that stands between freedom and slavery. And if you can, join those who are willing to take a stand in Washington, DC on 9-12. If not, stand together somewhere in your community on 9-12. Get involved. They're very well organized in their communities, and I didn't realize how many socialist communities there were.
Glenn Beck
Mannheim notes that utopia not only shares with ideology a noncongruence with reality, but that utopia offers a perspective critical of the given reality, thus exposing the gap between what is and an ideal of what should be. Utopia, in challenging the existing order, is always a projection into possible futures; whereas, ideology, in legitimating the existing order, is directed toward perpetuating the past. Utopia tends to be the tool of social groups seeking ascendancy; while ideology tends to be the tool of dominant groups seeking to assuage their own sense of failing and justify the inadequacy of the status quo. Ideology and utopia are about power.
Karl Mannheim
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.
Robert Nozick
There are two kinds of freedom to be found in our world: the freedom of desires, and the freedom from desires. Our modern Western culture only recognizes the first of these, freedom of desires. It then worships such a freedom by enshrining it at the forefront of national constitutions and bills of human rights. One can say that the underlying creed of most Western democracies is to protect their people's freedom to realize their desires, as far as this is possible. It is remarkable that in such countries people do not feel very free. The second kind of freedom, freedom from desires, is celebrated only in some religious communities. It celebrates contentment, peace that is free from desires. It is remarkable that in such abstemious communities like my monastery, people feel free.
Ajahn Brahm
Nozick, Robert
Nugent, Ted
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