Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment. … Humanity is in "final exam" as to whether or not it qualifies for continuance in Universe.
We will always have war until there is enough of every essential to support all lives everywhere around earth. [ Utopia or Oblivion. ]
When I die, I want to die in a Utopia that I have helped to build.
We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims. . . . [Our challenge is to] make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone. [ Utopia or Oblivion .]
For man to go from less than 1% [haves] to 40%, living at high standard — despite decreasing resources — cannot be explained by anything other than by doing more than less. [ Utopia or Oblivion. ]
We are not expecting Utopia here on this earth. But God meant things to be much easier than we have made them. A man has a natural right to food, clothing, and shelter. A certain amount of goods is necessary to lead a good life. A family needs work as well as bread. Property is proper to man. We must keep repeating these things. Eternal life begins now. "All the way to heaven is heaven, because He said, "I am the Way." The cross is there, of course, but "in the cross is joy of spirit." And love makes all things easy.
We are operating at an overall mechanical efficiency of only four percent…. Therefore, we find that if we increase the overall mechanical efficiency to only twelve percent we can take care of everybody. That three-fold increase in the overall efficiency can only be accomplished by redesign. [ Utopia or Oblivion. ]
[H]ere is an educational bombshell: Take from all of today’s industrial nations all their industrial machinery and all their energy-distributing networks, and leave them all their ideologies, all their political leaders, and all their political organizations, and I can tell you that within six months, two billion people will die of starvation, having gone through great pain and deprivation along the way. [ Utopia or Oblivion. ] However, if we leave the industrial machinery and their energy-distribution networks and leave them also all the people who have routine jobs operating the industrial machinery and distributing its products, and we take away from all the industrial countries all their ideologies and all the politicians and political machine workers, people would keep right on eating. Possibly getting on a little better than before. [ Utopia or Oblivion. ]
If man chooses oblivion, he can go right on leaving his fate to his political leaders. If he chooses Utopia, he must initiate an enormous education program — immediately, if not sooner. [ Utopia or Oblivion. ]
In the true Utopia, man will rather harness himself with his oxen to his plough, than leave the devil to drive it.
Once sufficiently enforce the eighth commandment, the whole "rights of man" are well cared for; I know no better definition of the rights of man: "Thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not be stolen from." What a society were that! Plato's Republic, More's Utopia mere emblems of it.
U.S. labor leaders will realize that automation can multiply man’s wealth far more rapidly than it is multiplying at present and that automation will leave all men free to search and research…. Realizing the direct competition with foreign industry on a straight labor basis will mean swiftly decreasing wages per hour and longer hours and decreasing buying power of the public…. American labor will realize that its function is not to increase jobs, but to multiply the wealth and to expand the numbers benefited by the wealth at the swiftest possible rate. [ Utopia or Oblivion. ]
Consisting mostly of recirculating scrapped metals, 80% of all the metals that have ever been mined are still at work. [ Utopia or Oblivion. ]
The great failure of the critic of culture, even when his intentions are benign, lies in his inability to recognize that the perfect world of peace, justice, equality, and environmental harmony of which he dreams — a utopia run by enlightened, sensitive, progressive (and preferably multi-degree) philosopher-kings — is a tyranny pure and simple. Philosopher-kings soon must discover a need for bureaucrats and policemen to administer and enforce their notion of the public good. They must also discover, to their chagrin, that the bureaucrats and policemen quickly will become the real power in such a society. This is precisely what happened to communism in its evolution from an intellectual, Marxist, social philosophy to a brutally anti-intellectual, Leninist, political system. [“Critics of Culture” (commentary), Fidelity Magazine, March 1995, p. 14.]
An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia.
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.
Plato, by the way, wanted to banish all poets from his proposed Utopia</p> because they were liars. The truth was that Plato knew philosophers couldn't compete successfully with poets. -- Kilgore Trout (Philip J. Farmer), "Venus on the Half Shell"
Waging war at every summons and every time that Utopia desires it, is not the thing for the peoples. Nations have not always and at every hour the temperament of heroes and martyrs.
Other groups of minds were more serious. In that direction, they sounded principles, they attached themselves to the right. They grew enthusiastic for the absolute, they caught glimpses of infinite realizations; the absolute, by its very rigidity, urges spirits towards the sky and causes them to float in illimitable space. There is nothing like dogma for bringing forth dreams. And there is nothing like dreams for engendering the future. Utopia to-day, flesh and blood to-morrow.
The Utopia which grows impatient and becomes revolt knows what awaits it; it almost always comes too soon. Then it becomes resigned, and stoically accepts catastrophe in lieu of triumph. It serves those who deny it without complaint, even excusing them, and even disculpates them, and its magnanimity consists in consenting to abandonment. It is indomitable in the face of obstacles and gentle towards ingratitude.
This is not a utopian concept….The prospects for unleashing economic development and eliminating “give away” under the technique of [Louis Kelso’s] Second-Income Plan has enormous possibility for developing countries. [ A New Focus on Economic Development , El Universo, Guayaquil, Ecuador, April 1, 1969.]
The Utopian schemes of leveling and a community of goods, are as visionary and impractical as those which vest all property in the Crown. [These ideas] are arbitrary, despotic, and, in our government, unconstitutional. [William V. Wells, The Life and Public Services of Samuel Adams , 3 vols. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1865, 1:154.]
It is always at its own risk and peril that Utopia is converted into revolution, and from philosophical protest becomes an armed protest, and from Minerva turns to Pallas.
Below all these mines which we have just mentioned, below all these galleries, below this whole immense, subterranean, venous system of progress and utopia, much further on in the earth, much lower than Marat, lower than Babeuf, lower, much lower, and without any connection with the upper levels, there lies the last mine. A formidable spot. This is what we have designated as the le troisieme dessous. It is the grave of shadows. It is the cellar of the blind. Inferi.
As Cardinal Fesch refused to resign, M. de Pins, Archbishop of Amasie, administered the diocese of Lyons. The quarrel over the valley of Dappes was begun between Switzerland and France by a memoir from Captain, afterwards General Dufour. Saint-Simon, ignored, was erecting his sublime dream. There was a celebrated Fourier at the Academy of Science, whom posterity has forgotten; and in some garret an obscure Fourier, whom the future will recall. Lord Byron was beginning to make his mark; a note to a poem by Millevoye introduced him to France in these terms: a certain Lord Baron. David d'Angers was trying to work in marble. The Abbe Caron was speaking, in terms of praise, to a private gathering of seminarists in the blind alley of Feuillantines, of an unknown priest, named Felicite-Robert, who, at a latter date, became Lamennais. A thing which smoked and clattered on the Seine with the noise of a swimming dog went and came beneath the windows of the Tuileries, from the Pont Royal to the Pont Louis XV.; it was a piece of mechanism which was not good for much; a sort of plaything, the idle dream of a dream-ridden inventor; an utopia--a steamboat. The Parisians stared indifferently at this useless thing. M. de Vaublanc, the reformer of the Institute by a coup d'etat, the distinguished author of numerous academicians, ordinances, and batches of members, after having created them, could not succeed in becoming one himself. The Faubourg Saint-Germain and the pavilion de Marsan wished to have M. Delaveau for prefect of police, on account of his piety. Dupuytren and Recamier entered into a quarrel in the amphitheatre of the School of Medicine, and threatened each other with their fists on the subject of the divinity of Jesus Christ. Cuvier, with one eye on Genesis and the other on nature, tried to please bigoted reaction by reconciling fossils with texts and by making mastodons flatter Moses.
Having made this reservation, and made it with all severity, it is impossible for us not to admire, whether they succeed or not, those the glorious combatants of the future, the confessors of Utopia. Even when they miscarry, they are worthy of veneration; and it is, perhaps, in failure, that they possess the most majesty. Victory, when it is in accord with progress, merits the applause of the people; but a heroic defeat merits their tender compassion. The one is magnificent, the other sublime. For our own part, we prefer martyrdom to success. John Brown is greater than Washington, and Pisacane is greater than Garibaldi.
Les utopies ne sont souvent que des verites prematuriees=--Utopias are often only premature truths.
The particularities of the worship, its minute and truly ingenious re-adaptations of sacraments, prayers, reverent signs, down even to the invocation of a New Trinity, need not detain us. They are said, though it is not easy to believe, to have been elaborated by way of Utopia. If so, no Utopia has ever yet been presented in a style so little calculated to stir the imagination, to warm the feelings, to soothe the insurgency of the reason. It is a mistake to present a great body of hypotheses--if Comte meant them for hypotheses--in the most dogmatic and peremptory form to which language can lend itself. And there is no more extraordinary thing in the history of opinion than the perversity with which Comte has succeeded in clothing a philosophic doctrine, so intrinsically conciliatory as his, in a shape that excites so little sympathy and gives so much provocation. An enemy defined Comtism as Catholicism _minus_ Christianity, to which an able champion retorted by calling it Catholicism _plus_ Science. Comte's Utopia has pleased the followers of the Catholic, just as little as those of the scientific, spirit. Entry: A
From 1812 we have notes of two courses on practical philosophy, _Rechtslehre_ (_Nach. Werke_, vol. ii.) and _Sittenlehre_ (_ib._ vol. iii.). A finished work in the same department is the _Staatslehre_, published in 1820. This gives the Fichtean utopia organized on principles of pure reason; in too many cases the proposals are identical with principles of pure despotism. Entry: FICHTE
The speculations of Lull are now obsolete outside Majorca where his philosophy still flourishes, but his more purely literary writings are extremely curious and interesting. In _Blanquerna_ (1283), a novel which describes a new Utopia, Lull renews the Platonic tradition and anticipates the methods of Sir Thomas More, Campanella and Harrington, and in the _Libre de Maravelles_ (1286) he adopts the Oriental apologue from _Kalilah and Dimnah_. And as a poet Lull takes a prominent position in the history of Catalan literature; such pieces as _El Desconort_ (1295) and _Lo Cant de Ramon_ (1299) combine in a rare degree simple beauty of expression with sublimity of thought and impassioned sincerity. Entry: LULL
In many respects, however, More's views on the labour question were vastly in advance of his own time. He repeats the indignant protest of the _Republic_ that existing society is a warfare between rich and poor. "The rich," he says, "desire every means by which they may in the first place secure to themselves what they have amassed by wrong, and then take to their own use and profit, at the lowest possible price, the work and labour of the poor. And so soon as the rich decide on adopting these devices in the name of the public, then they become law." One might imagine these words had been quoted from the programme of The International (q.v.), so completely is their tone in sympathy with the hardships of the poor in all ages. More shared to the full the keen sympathy with the hopeless misery of the poor which has been the strong motive power of nearly all speculative communism. The life of the poor as he saw it was so wretched that he said, "Even a beast's life seems enviable!" Besides community of goods and equality of conditions, More advocated other means of ameliorating the condition of the people. Although the hours of labour were limited to six a day there was no scarcity, for in Utopia every one worked; there was no idle class, no idle individual even. The importance of this from an economic point of view is insisted on by More in a passage remarkable for the importance which he attaches to the industrial condition of women. "And this you will easily apprehend," he says, "if you consider how great a part of all other nations is quite idle. First, women generally do little, who are the half of mankind." Translated into modern language his proposals comprise universal compulsory education, a reduction of the hours of labour to six a day, the most modern principles of sanitary reform, a complete revision of criminal legislation, and the most absolute religious toleration. The romantic form which Sir Thomas More gave to his dream of a new social order found many imitators. The _Utopia_ may be regarded as the prototype of Campanella's _City of the Sun_, Harrington's _Oceana_, Bacon's _Nova Atlantis_, Defoe's _Essay on Projects_, Fénelon's _Voyage dans l'Île des Plaisirs_, and other works of minor importance. Entry: COMMUNISM
HAYWOOD, ELIZA (c. 1693-1756), English writer, daughter of a London tradesman named Fowler, was born about 1693. She made an early and unhappy marriage with a man named Haywood, and her literary enemies circulated scandalous stories about her, possibly founded on her works rather than her real history. She appeared on the stage as early as 1715, and in 1721 she revised for Lincoln's Inn Fields _The Fair Captive_, by a Captain Hurst. Two other pieces followed, but Eliza Haywood made her mark as a follower of Mrs Manley in writing scandalous and voluminous novels. To _Memoirs of a certain Island adjacent to Utopia, written by a celebrated author of that country_. _Now translated into English_ (1725), she appended a key in which the characters were explained by initials denoting living persons. The names are supplied to these initials in the copy in the British Museum. _The Secret History of the Present Intrigues of the Court of Caramania_ (1727) was explained in a similar manner. The style of these productions is as extravagant as their matter. Pope attacked her in a coarse passage in _The Dunciad_ (bk. ii. 11. 157 et seq.), which is aggravated by a note alluding to the "profligate licentiousness of those shameless scribblers (for the most part of that sex which ought least to be capable of such malice or impudence) who in libellous Memoirs and Novels reveal the faults or misfortunes of both sexes, to the ruin of public fame, or disturbance of private happiness." Swift, writing to Lady Suffolk, says, "Mrs Haywood I have heard of as a stupid, infamous, scribbling woman, but have not seen any of her productions." She continued to be a prolific writer of novels until her death on the 25th of February 1756, but her later works are characterized by extreme propriety, though an anonymous story of _The Fortunate Foundlings_ (1744), purporting to be an account of the children of Lord Charles Manners, is generally ascribed to her. Entry: HAYWOOD
Apart from these state occasions, Bossuet seldom appeared in a Paris pulpit after 1669. In that year he was gazetted bishop of Condom in Gascony, though he resigned the charge on being appointed tutor to the dauphin, only child of Louis XIV., and now a boy of nine (1670). The choice was scarcely fortunate. Bossuet unbent as far as he could, but his genius was by no means fitted to enter into the feelings of a child; and the dauphin was a cross, ungainly, sullen lad, who grew up to be a merely genealogical incident at his father's court. Probably no one was happier than the tutor, when his charge's sixteenth birthday came round, and he was promptly married off to a Bavarian princess. Still the nine years at court were by no means wasted. Hitherto Bossuet had published nothing, except his answer to Ferry. Now he sat down to write for his pupil's instruction--or rather, to fit himself to give that instruction--a remarkable trilogy. First came the _Traité de la connaissance de Dieu et de soi-même_, then the _Discours sur l'histoire universelle_, lastly the _Politique tirée de l'Écriture Sainte_. The three books fit into each other. The _Traité_ is a general sketch of the nature of God and the nature of man. The _Discours_ is a history of God's dealings with humanity in the past. The _Politique_ is a code of rights and duties drawn up in the light thrown by those dealings. Not that Bossuet literally supposed that the last word of political wisdom had been said by the Old Testament. His conclusions are only "drawn from Holy Scripture," because he wished to gain the highest possible sanction for the institutions of his country--to hallow the France of Louis XIV. by proving its astonishing likeness to the Israel of Solomon. Then, too, the veil of Holy Scripture enabled him to speak out more boldly than court-etiquette would have otherwise allowed, to remind the son of Louis XIV. that kings have duties as well as rights. Louis had often forgotten these duties, but Louis' son would bear them in mind. The tutor's imagination looked forward to a time when France would blossom into Utopia, with a Christian philosopher on the throne. That is what made him so stalwart a champion of authority in all its forms: _"le roi, Jésus-Christ et l'Église, Dieu en ces trois noms"_, he says in a characteristic letter. And the object of his books is to provide authority with a rational basis. For Bossuet's worship of authority by no means killed his confidence in reason; what it did was to make him doubt the honesty of those who reasoned otherwise than himself. The whole chain of argument seemed to him so clear and simple. Philosophy proved that a God exists, and that He shapes and governs the course of human affairs. History showed that this governance is, for the most part, indirect, exercised through certain venerable corporations, as well civil as ecclesiastical, all of which demand implicit obedience as the immediate representatives of God. Thus all revolt, whether civil or religious, is a direct defiance of the Almighty. Cromwell becomes a moral monster, and the revocation of the edict of Nantes is "the greatest achievement of the second Constantine." Not that Bossuet glorified the _status quo_ simply as a clerical bigot. The France of his youth had known the misery of divided counsels and civil war; the France of his manhood, brought together under an absolute sovereign, had suddenly shot up into a splendour only comparable with ancient Rome. Why not, then, strain every nerve to hold innovation at bay and prolong that splendour for all time? Bossuet's own _Discours sur l'histoire universelle_ might have furnished an answer, for there the fall of many empires is detailed. But then the _Discours_ was composed under a single preoccupation. To Bossuet the establishment of Christianity was the one point of real importance in the whole history of the world. Over Mahomet and the East he passed without a word; on Greece and Rome he only touched in so far as they formed part of the _Praeparatio Evangelica_. And yet his _Discours_ is far more than a theological pamphlet. Pascal, in utter scorn for science, might refer the rise and fall of empires to Providence or chance--the nose of Cleopatra, or "a little grain of sand" in the English lord protector's veins. Bossuet held fast to his principle that God works through secondary causes. "It is His will that every great change should have its roots in the ages that went before it." Bossuet, accordingly, made a heroic attempt to grapple with origins and causes, and in this way his book deserves its place as one of the very first of philosophic histories. Entry: BOSSUET
JAURÈS, JEAN LÉON (1859- ), French Socialist leader, was born at Castres (Tarn) on the 3rd of September 1859. He was educated at the lycée Louis-le-Grand and the école normale supérieure, and took his degree as associate in philosophy in 1881. After teaching philosophy for two years at the lycée of Albi (Tarn), he lectured at the university of Toulouse. He was elected republican deputy for the department of Tarn in 1885. In 1889, after unsuccessfully contesting Castres, he returned to his professional duties at Toulouse, where he took an active interest in municipal affairs, and helped to found the medical faculty of the university. He also prepared two theses for his doctorate in philosophy, _De primis socialismi germanici lineamentis apud Lutherum, Kant, Fichte et Hegel_ (1891), and _De la réalité du monde sensible_. In 1902 he gave energetic support to the miners of Carmaux who went out on strike in consequence of the dismissal of a socialist workman, Calvignac; and in the next year he was re-elected to the chamber as deputy for Albi. Although he was defeated at the elections of 1898 and was for four years outside the chamber, his eloquent speeches made him a force in politics as an intellectual champion of socialism. He edited the _Petite République_, and was one of the most energetic defenders of Captain Alfred Dreyfus. He approved of the inclusion of M. Millerand, the socialist, in the Waldeck-Rousseau ministry, though this led to a split with the more revolutionary section led by M. Guesde. In 1902 he was again returned as deputy for Albi, and during the Combes administration his influence secured the coherence of the radical-socialist coalition known as the _bloc_. In 1904 he founded the socialist paper, _L'Humanité_. The French socialist groups held a congress at Rouen in March 1905, which resulted in a new consolidation; the new party, headed by MM. Jaurès and Guesde, ceased to co-operate with the radicals and radical-socialists, and became known as the unified socialists, pledged to advance a collectivist programme. At the general elections of 1906 M. Jaurès was again elected for the Tarn. His ability and vigour were now generally recognized; but the strength of the socialist party, and the practical activity of its leader, still had to reckon with the equally practical and vigorous liberalism of M. Clemenceau. The latter was able to appeal to his countrymen (in a notable speech in the spring of 1906) to rally to a radical programme which had no socialist Utopia in view; and the appearance in him of a strong and practical radical leader had the result of considerably diminishing the effect of the socialist propaganda. M. Jaurès, in addition to his daily journalistic activity, published _Les preuves; affaire Dreyfus_ (1900); _Action socialiste_ (1899); _Études socialistes_ (1902), and, with other collaborators, _Histoire socialiste_ (1901), &c. Entry: JAURÈS