Where are the Utopian Visionaries?

Where are the Utopian Visionaries? PDF Author: Hansy Better Barraza
Publisher: Periscope
ISBN: 9781934772799
Category : Architectural design
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book fits the era of Obama and financial meltdown. It contains essays by mostly young architects who have gone grass roots to work with people, materials, and building types way off radar for earlier generations of architects. There is an eye-opening essay on bamboo. Jean Chae discusses her work using materials form Home Depot to build communal buildings in villages of Central America. Balkrishna Doshi introduces a "housing development" that its inhabitants, following a few guidelines, built from debris. The point throughout is a reversal of the usual flow of power and ideas. The architects have all endeavored to learn from people who, if noticed by mainstream authorities, have had buildings imposed on them. 175 illustrations

The Last Utopians

The Last Utopians PDF Author: Michael Robertson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691202869
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
The Last Utopians delves into the biographies of four key figures--Edward Bellamy, William Morris, Edward Carpenter, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman--who lived during an extraordinary period of literary and social experimentation. The publication of Bellamy's Looking Backward in 1888 opened the floodgates of an unprecedented wave of utopian writing. Morris, the Arts and Crafts pioneer, was a committed socialist whose News from Nowhere envisions a workers' Arcadia. Carpenter boldly argued that homosexuals constitute a utopian vanguard. Gilman, a women's rights activist and the author of "The Yellow Wallpaper," wrote numerous utopian fictions, including Herland, a visionary tale of an all-female society. These writers, Robertson shows, shared a belief in radical equality, imagining an end to class and gender hierarchies and envisioning new forms of familial and romantic relationships. They held liberal religious beliefs about a universal spirit uniting humanity. They believed in social transformation through nonviolent means and were committed to living a simple life rooted in a restored natural world. And their legacy remains with us today, as Robertson describes in entertaining firsthand accounts of contemporary utopianism, ranging from Occupy Wall Street to a Radical Faerie retreat.

Utopian Visionaries

Utopian Visionaries PDF Author: Thomas Streissguth
Publisher: The Oliver Press, Inc.
ISBN: 9781881508472
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
Discusses efforts to create perfect societies by such individuals as: Ann Lee and Joseph Meacham and the Shakers, Christian Metz and the Amana Colonies, George Rapp and the Harmony Society, Robert Owen and New Harmony, George Ripley and Brook Farm, John Humphrey Noyes and Oneida, and Katherine Tingley and the Point Loma community.

Political Ideas of the Utopian Socialists

Political Ideas of the Utopian Socialists PDF Author: Keith Taylor
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135165696
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
First Published in 1982. In this book, Taylor has selected for special attention the work of Saint-Simon and his disciples (the SaintSimonians), Owen, Fourier, Cabet, and Weitling - those thinkers who made the most important contributions to the development of early socialist theory. The author discusses the designation of 'utopian' which entered into the conventional vocabulary of the history of ideas, and is now used almost without question. This title argues that these thinkers were certainly utopian in the sense that they sought to describe the structure of an ideal future society.

The Limits of Policy Change

The Limits of Policy Change PDF Author: Michael T. Hayes
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
ISBN: 9781589014497
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Michael Hayes offers a vigorous defense of incrementalism: the theory that the policymaking process typically should involve bargaining, delay, compromise, and, therefore, incremental change. Incrementalism, he argues, is one result of a checks-and-balances system in which politicians may disagree over what we want to achieve as a nation or what policies would best achieve shared goals. Many political scientists have called for reforms that would facilitate majority rule and more radical policy change by strengthening the presidency at the expense of Congress. But Hayes develops policy typologies and analyzes case studies to show that the policy process works best when it conforms to the tenets of incrementalism. He contends that because humans are fallible, politics should work through social processes to achieve limited ends and to ameliorate—rather than completely solve—social problems. Analyzing the evolution of air pollution policy, the failure of President Clinton’s health care reform in 1994, and the successful effort at welfare reform in 1995-96, Hayes calls for changes that would make incrementalism work better by encouraging a more balanced struggle among social interests and by requiring political outcomes to conform to the rule of law. Written for students and specialists in politics, public policy, and public administration, The Limits of Policy Change examines in detail a central issue in democratic theory.

MUSICAGE

MUSICAGE PDF Author: John Cage
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819571865
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 411

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Book Description
The pioneering composer and music theorist makes his final on the totality of his work and thought in these three wide-ranging dialogues. “I was obliged to find a radical way to work ― to get at the real, at the root of the matter,” John Cage says in this trio of dialogues, completed just days before his death. This quest led him beyond the bounds of convention in all his musical, written, and visual pieces. The resulting expansion of the definition of art earned him a reputation as one of America's most influential contemporary artists. Joan Retallack's conversations with Cage explore his artistic production in its entirety. Cage's comments range from his theories of chance and indeterminate composition to his long-time collaboration with Merce Cunningham to the aesthetics of his multimedia works. In her comprehensive introduction, Retallack describes Cage’s lifelong project as “dislodging cultural authoritarianism and gridlock by inviting surprising conjunctions within carefully delimited frameworks and processes.” Consummate performer to the end, Cage delivers here just such a conjunction ― a tour de force that provides new insights into the man and a clearer view of the status of art in the twentieth century.

California's Utopian Colonies

California's Utopian Colonies PDF Author: Robert V. Hine
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520048850
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description


The Politics of Human Nature

The Politics of Human Nature PDF Author: Thomas Fleming
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 1412838401
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
The effort to understand human nature in a political context is a daunting challenge that has been undertaken in a variety of ways and by a myriad of disciplines through the ages. From Plato to Hobbes and Burke, to Wallas and Oakeschott in our era, efforts have been made to provide some organic framework for the political study of mankind. What has added greatly to the complexity of the task is the increasing denial, even rejection, in the positivist and behaviorist traditions, of the very notion of a human nature. The work can be described as a series of interlocking propositions: the proverbial view of human nature can be explained by evolutionary theory. Biological differences between men and women are responsible for family, community and group life. Social evolution goes through stages which are recapitulated in the moral life of individuals. A well-defined federal system mirrors human development. And finally, for Fleming, most problems in social and political life stem from violations of this federalist system. Fleming's volume takes up a variety of issues: sex and gender differences, democracy and dictatorship, individual and familial patterns of association. He does so in the context of showing how forms of legitimate authority such as families, communities and nations establish such authority by appeals to human nature, and that these appeals, while presumably resting on empirical evidence, also confirm the existence of normative structures. Fleming's work is an effort of synthesis that is sure to arouse discussion and debate. It represents a serious addition to a literature retrieved from the historical dustbins to which it has been repeatedly consigned.

Utopias

Utopias PDF Author: Howard P. Segal
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118234316
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
This brief history connects the past and present of utopianthought, from the first utopias in ancient Greece, right up topresent day visions of cyberspace communities and paradise. Explores the purpose of utopias, what they reveal about thesocieties who conceive them, and how utopias have changed over thecenturies Unique in including both non-Western and Western visions ofutopia Explores the many forms utopias have taken – propheciesand oratory, writings, political movements, world's fairs, physicalcommunities – and also discusses high-tech and cyberspacevisions for the first time The first book to analyze the implicitly utopian dimensions ofreform crusades like Technocracy of the 1930s and ModernizationTheory of the 1950s, and the laptop classroom initiatives of recentyears

Exploring the Utopian Impulse

Exploring the Utopian Impulse PDF Author: Michael J. Griffin
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783039109135
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
A series of essays by an international and trans-disciplinary group of contributors which explores the nature and extent of the utopian impulse. Working across a range of historical periods and cultures, the book investigates key aspects of utopian theory, texts, and socio-political practices.