ion of every human passion or motive; except those which may be regarded as perpetually antagonizing principles to the desire of wealth, namely, aversion to labour, and desire of the present enjoyment of costly indulgences. (Mill, 1967a,

A companion to the history of economic thought

Cities grow like some sort of plant. Some of them, including some very beautiful ones like the medina of the Maghreb, seem to have been stuck together randomly like great corals. But is it truly random? Isn’t it actually the result of strong local, historical and technological constraints? On the other hand, Greek and Roman cities were designed with rigid plans. Though the overall shape and the road and waterway networks were tightly constrained, each unit had considerable freedom, allowing the city to accommodate the unexpected and adapt itself to new things. Naples, for instance, formerly known as Neapolis - the “new city” - has kept its antique grid pattern. How can structure be given without causing rigidity? The city is a spatial translation of the rights that govern the collective and the individual. Berlin is a contemporary example of this dialectic.

The Ideal City

Literary utopias, i.e. designs for the theoretically perfect society, have been common in Western literature since Plato's The Republic . A variation on this genre which emerged in the nineteenth century is the anti-utopia, or dystopia, in which an author depicts the worst of all possible societies. Dystopias usually exaggerate contemporary social trends and in doing so, offer serious social criticism. This essay examines the treatment of leisure in four widely-read dystopian novels. The leisure described in these novels we call anti-leisure. It is not leisure's opposite, work, but leisure perverted to achieve the perpetuation of tyranny. Such leisure regulates identity, prevents individual thought, impedes self-sufficiency, encourages immoderation, and distracts citizens from social injustice through various compulsory activities. Such novels encourage the re-examination of theories of leisure from a humanistic standpoint.

Anti-leisure in dystopian fiction: the literature of leisure in the worst of all possible worlds

Thomas Dixon, Jr.'s novel, The Clansman (1905), typically is described as a boorish example of white racism. In this essay, I argue that the significance of The Clansman is a consequence of the novel's description of post‐Civil War Southern Reconstruction, where a dystopic social and political order was overthrown by the determined action of racially unified Anglo‐Saxons. The negation of this dystopia also anticipates Dixon's vision of Utopia, where Aryans North and South unite to protect their racial heritage. This study (a) reveals the limitations of extant generic guidelines for identifying Utopian discourse and (b) reconsiders the conventional categories (e.g., “radical,” “reactionary") frequently used to describe public discourse. The implications of this argument should be of particular interest to students of social movements.

Thomas Dixon's the clansman: Radicals, reactionaries, and the anticipated utopia

The completion of the volumes planned for the Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More, the fortieth‐first year of the publication of the Bulletin of the Amici Thomae Mori (Moreana) and other serials, such as Sixteenth Century Journal, the International Thomas More Congress held every three years, along with other meetings, and the Tyndale Quincentennary—all these venues and others have combined to inspire scholars to write the numerous articles, monographs, collections of essays, festschrifts, and books considered in this study. Although studies of More's life, Utopia, the polemical works, and Richard III predominate, the essay also examines the increased interest scholars have taken recently in the Latin poems, devotional works, and English poems. In spite of the plethora of recent scholarship which, at first glance, would seem to exhaust what could or should be said, the essay concludes that much work, particularly on More's early life, his theological perspective, Utopia, and the ...

Recent studies in more (1990–2003)

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Paul G. Haschak

Papers

Utopian/Dystopian Literature: a bibliography of literary criticism