DIVThe end of the modern and the emergence of the postmodern in 1960s philosophy, literature, and popular culture./div

An outline for a middle-class community with affordable giving costs to help the average working family to live comfortably and enjoy the services we have. All can expect a wide array of activities and recreations.

The book is a hybrid of fiction and projection, comprehensively including predictions on the future world. Fictional parts of the novel used to vividly portray fictitious figures carrying out national policy to impact on the world order. The prevalent land grab in the Third World now will develop into putting a whole nation on sale if a fortune will be offered to the citizens of target country. Thus, China will use its immense foreign currency reserve to annex a small country like Solomon Islands in the beginning stage, and then expand further into Eurasia. Likewise, other world powers will expand territories by the will of incorporated citizens. In result, political map of the world will differ much from current world. And rivalry in Asia will ignite spread of nuclear arsenals to satisfy their national pride but deep economic integration within the continent will set aside Cold War mentality for mutual prosperity. The gloomy prospect of food & energy will exacerbate the anxiety of contemporaries until awakened leading countries devoting to reverse the nightmare. After the mid-21st century, the haunting effects of climate change and peak oil will capitulate to the ingenuity and will of people, thereby next generation will access closely to a utopian world.

Human beings universally dream of a better world. For centuries they have expressed their yearning for ways of life that are free from oppression, want and fear, through philosophy, art, film and literature. In this concise and engaging book, Mark Jendrysik examines the multifarious ways utopians have posed the question of how human beings might establish justice and realize truly human values. Drawing upon a range of sources, from Plato’s Republic and Thomas More’s Utopia to Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, he argues that, though for many utopia means ‘demanding the impossible’, the goals that seemed out of reach for one generation are often realized in the next. Nonetheless, he shows that, while utopian thought points toward our most noble aspirations, it also illustrates the dangers of totalitarianism, of the surveillance state and of global climate change. This engaging book will be an invaluable guide for anyone seeking to understand how, for good or ill, utopian aspirations shape our lives, even in times that seem designed to close off dreams of a better world.

Short essays by respected architects and theorists around the question: What is an architect in today's society?

Automating technologies threaten to usher in a workless future. But this can be a good thing—if we play our cards right. Human obsolescence is imminent. The factories of the future will be dark, staffed by armies of tireless robots. The hospitals of the future will have fewer doctors, depending instead on cloud-based AI to diagnose patients and recommend treatments. The homes of the future will anticipate our wants and needs and provide all the entertainment, food, and distraction we could ever desire. To many, this is a depressing prognosis, an image of civilization replaced by its machines. But what if an automated future is something to be welcomed rather than feared? Work is a source of misery and oppression for most people, so shouldn’t we do what we can to hasten its demise? Automation and Utopia makes the case for a world in which, free from need or want, we can spend our time inventing and playing games and exploring virtual realities that are more deeply engaging and absorbing than any we have experienced before, allowing us to achieve idealized forms of human flourishing. The idea that we should “give up” and retreat to the virtual may seem shocking, even distasteful. But John Danaher urges us to embrace the possibilities of this new existence. The rise of automating technologies presents a utopian moment for humankind, providing both the motive and the means to build a better future.

In this sweeping challenge to the postmodern critiques of psychoanalysis, Joel Whitebook argues for a reintegration of Freud's uncompromising investigation of the unconscious with the political and philosophical insights of critical theory. Perversion and Utopia follows in the tradition of Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization and Paul Ricoeur's Freud and Philosophy. It expands on these books, however, because of the author's remarkable grasp not only of psychoanalytic studies but also of the contemporary critical climate; Whitebook, a philosopher and a psychoanalyst, writes with equal facility on both Habermas and Freud. A central thesis of Perversion and Utopia is that there is an essential affinity between the utopian impulse and the perverse impulse, in that both reflect a desire to bypass the reality principle that Freud claimed to define the human condition. The book explores the positive and negative aspects of the relationship between these impulses, which are ubiquitous features of human life, and the requirements of civilized social existence. Whitebook steers a course between orthodox psychoanalytic conservatism, which seeks simply to repress the perverse-utopian impulse in the name of social continuity and cohesion, and those forms of Freudo-Marxism, postmodernism, and psychoanalytic feminism that advocate its direct and full expression in the name of emancipation. While he demonstrates the limitations of the current textual approaches to Freud, especially those influenced by Lacan, Whitebook also enlists the lessons of psychoanalysis to counteract the excessive rationalism of the Habermasian brand of critical theory, thus making a substantial contribution to current discussions within critical theory itself. His analysis and interpretation of perversion, narcissism, sublimation, and ego bring new insight to these central and thorny issues in Freud, and his discussions of Adorno, Marcuse, Castoriadis, Habermas, Ricoeur, Lacan, and others are equally penetrating.

In December 1788, in the northern Peruvian city of Trujillo, fifty-one-year-old Spanish Bishop Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón stood surrounded by twenty-four large wooden crates, each numbered and marked with its final destination of Madrid. The crates contained carefully preserved zoological, botanical, and mineral specimens collected from Trujillo's steamy rainforests, agricultural valleys, rocky sierra, and coastal desert. To accompany this collection, the Bishop had also commissioned from Indian artisans nine volumes of hand-painted images portraying the people, plants, and animals of Trujillo. He imagined that the collection and the watercolors not only would contribute to his quest to study the native cultures of Northern Peru but also would supply valuable information for his plans to transform Trujillo into an orderly, profitable slice of the Spanish Empire. Based on intensive archival research in Peru, Spain, and Colombia and the unique visual data of more than a thousand extraordinary watercolors, The Bishop's Utopia recreates the intellectual, cultural, and political universe of the Spanish Atlantic world in the late eighteenth century. Emily Berquist Soule recounts the reform agenda of Martínez Compañón—including the construction of new towns, improvement of the mining industry, and promotion of indigenous education—and positions it within broader imperial debates; unlike many of his Enlightenment contemporaries, who elevated fellow Europeans above native peoples, Martínez Compañón saw Peruvian Indians as intelligent, productive subjects of the Spanish Crown. The Bishop's Utopia seamlessly weaves cultural history, natural history, colonial politics, and art into a cinematic retelling of the Bishop's life and work.

The most comprehensive study of ideology and utopia since Karl Mannheim's work of the 1930s, Utopia and Revolution can be understood as turning classical political theory on its head or, perhaps, inside out. Instead of the usual summary of how English radical theologies contributed to the revolutionary process, Lasky shows how such political theology of the mid-seventeenth century became the backbone of the natural history of revolutionary disasters. In a remarkable feat of scholarship in intellectual history, Lasky charts the course of this historic entanglement over some five turbulent centuries of Western history. In so doing, he traces the ideological extension of the human personality through the writings of political theorists, philosophers, poets, and historians.

Although less famous than Israel's cooperative agricultural settlements, the kibbutzim and moshavim, Israeli urban worker cooperatives have an equally long and rich history. Well over a thousand such organizations have been established in what is now Israel since early in this century. This book provides a historical, social, and economic analysis of contemporary urban worker cooperatives, focusing on processes affecting their formation and dissolution, their use of nonmember labor, and the evolution of their democratic decision-making practices over time. Raymond Russell examines these cooperatives for the light they can shed on worker ownerships and worker cooperatives in general, and on Israeli society in particular. Applying a range of sociological and economic theories to examine the dynamics of these organizations over time, he finds that both their formation and their later development have been strongly influenced by the uniquely utopian social and economic conditions that prevailed in Jewish Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century.