Lyman Abbott was an American liberal theologian and a confidant of Theodore Roosevelt. He was a moderate man who sought to re-establish Christian faith among the American people in a period of change. This book, first published in 1893, argued that spiritual experience is always new and therefore every age requires a new expression for it. A believer in the possibility of harmonious coexistence between the Church and evolutionary theory, Abbott proposed a 'more intelligible and credible' religion (...) that endeavoured to sustain faith by expressing it in contemporary terms. He maintained that science and faith were compatible and that both natural and spiritual elements belonged to a shared kingdom governed by the law of progress. Blending faith in historical Christianity with belief in progress and evolutionary theory, Abbott aimed to provide a bridge between religious life and late nineteenth-century philosophical thought. (shrink)

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The living God.--The guest after God.--The hidden presence.--The power of vision.--Pursing God.--Listening to God.--The door.--Christ's yoke.--The fruits of the spirit.--Devout forgetting.--Devout remembering.

Progressive intellectuals at the turn of the last century founded the modern American university, created its disciplines and edited the journals that codified their thoughts. They created the ligaments of the national administrative and regulatory state; they helped legitimate the creation of a national financial and industrial corporate economy. Through the writings of Lyman Abbott, Albion Small, and Simon Patten, three features of progressive thought are underlined: the primacy of a narrative, their hostility to “principled” or abstract-philosophical forms (...) of political and social thought, and their confidence that historical modes of social inquiry would produce “laws”? of progress that would guide practice and anchor values integrating self and society on a democratic basis. Five topics contain these animating features: national patriotism, the new industrial economy, a new democratic ethic, social Christianity, and their critique of the dominance of constitutional jurisprudence and law in American political institutions and practices. (shrink)

This would have been a better book if Sampson had argued his main point, the usefulness of the Simonian principle as an explanation of the evolution, structure, and acquisition of language, on its own merits, instead of making it subsidiary to his attack on ‘limited-minders’ (e.g., Noam Chomsky). The energy he has spent on the attack he might then have been willing and able to employ in developing his argument at reasonable length and detail. He might then have found that (...) argument faulty, or even wrong. Underdeveloped as it is, however, his point about the Simonian principle does seem to have thepossibility of some significance in understanding the empirical issues of this book (and the dichotomy of ‘limited’ and ‘creative’ minds is certainly not one of these).What Sampson has done inMaking Sense has the appearance of science, and theoretical linguistics, and therefore it is somewhat puzzling to find the conclusions that the human mind cannot be scientifically studied (p. 10), and that theoretical linguistics is a “mirage” (p. 210). His statement that It may still seem worthwhile to some to work out the exact implications for present-day linguistic structure of the fact that languages are evolved systems, but I cannot see that there is much glamour or, indeed, much substance in this task (p. 210) would surely be surprising to a geneticist or ethologist. We hope his apparent misunderstanding on this point will not lead him to give up his profession, in which he seems willing and able to make a significant contribution.What in particular is required is a clear indication of how the Simonian principle imposes itself in the ontogenesis of language. Consider Chomsky's example of the rule for forming questions in English. For sentence (1) below, children able to deal with such examples would give (2) but not (3) as the corresponding question (Chomsky, 1975, p. 31).The man who is tall is in the room.Is the man who is tall in the room?*Is the man who tall is in the room?Now compare Sampson's evolutionary explanation for the structure-dependence of rules which is illustrated in (1)-(3): “once a behavior-pattern has become thoroughly established, it will tend to be treated as a fixed given when used as a constituent of a more complex, later-learned behavior-pattern” (p. 183). In order for this to account for Chomsky's example it would have to be the case that children learn relative clauses before they learn questions, which simply isn't true.In conclusion, we wish not to seem unaware of the problems with the position Sampson is attacking, or unaware of the sometimes dogmatic way it too has been presented. Chomsky's hypothesis of innate linguistic ideas seems, fundamentally, to derive from the claimed rapidity and uniformity of language acquisition in the face of limited and degenerate data. Chomsky appears to have been unwilling to argue these points directly or to show their relation to others, for which he has argued, for example, the implausibility of some abstract constraint's having been learned (cf. 1971, pp. 22–44; 1975, pp. 30–33; 1980, pp. 35–52). And almost from his first invoking of rationalism in support of his linguistic method, Chomsky has himself resorted to an unnecessarily polemical attack on empiricism (cf. 1965, p. 58, n. 33). The innateness issue is just not clear or simple enough to justify so much animus, or even conviction. (shrink)

There are many debates about what constitutes a utopia. Are utopias benign or dangerous? Is the idea of utopianism essential to Christianity or heretical?

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Euthanasia in Utopian LiteratureLyman Tower Sargent (bio)The word euthanasia, meaning a peaceful, gentle, or easy death, has been traced back to Roman times. But the "good" in a good death is obviously open to interpretation. Good for whom? The individual? The family of the individual? The society? And, who decides? The individual? The doctor? The family of the individual? The legal system? These questions are constantly raised throughout the (...) literature with diametrically opposed answers given from the earliest times to the present. And, unfortunately, one word is used for all the positions, with two subcategories, voluntary and involuntary, both of which are perceived as good for someone.Death is universal but whether or not a person should have a choice about when to die or voluntary euthanasia is deeply controversial.1 Inducing such a death, primarily in cases of a painful terminal disease, appears to be largely a nineteenth-century invention while, of course, existing as a concept well before that.2 Also, discussions of voluntary euthanasia raise related issues, suicide, involuntary euthanasia, and how eugenics has determined the criteria for involuntary euthanasia. Also, the fear of someone [End Page 238] being putting to death for the convenience or advantage of the living has been the most prominent issue, and one must wonder if involuntary euthanasia, at least when consent was possible but not given, ever constitutes a "good" death. As simply a peaceful and painless death, the earliest use of the word was by Suetonius in the early first century, where in his life of Augustus he reports Augustus's position on death as that "on hearing that anyone had died swiftly and painlessly, he prayed that he and his might have a like euthanasia, for that was the term he was wont to use."3 In his De Augmentis Scientiarum [Advancement of Learning], Francis Bacon refers to this statement, commenting, "For it is no small fidelity which Augustus Caesar was wont so earnestly to pray for, that same Euthanasia … was not so much like death as like falling into a deep and pleasant sleep." And Bacon continued: "In our times the physicians make a kind of scruple and religion to stay with the patient after he is given up, whereas in my judgment, if they would be wanting in their office, and indeed to humanity, they ought to acquire the skill and to bestow the attention whereby the dying may pass more easily out of life. This part I call the inquiry concerning outward Euthanasia, or the easy dying of the body (to distinguish from that Euthanasia which regards the preparation of the soul)."4The most explicit statement, generally ignored for sixty years, was that made in an 1870 speech to the Birmingham Speculative Club by Samuel D. Williams Jr., about whom little is known. Williams proposed:That in all cases of hopeless and painful illness, it should be the recognized duty of the medical attendant, whenever so desired by the patient, to administer chloroform or such other anæsthetic as may by-and-bye supersede chloroform—as to destroy consciousness at once, and put the sufferer to a quick and painless death; all needful precautions being adopted to prevent any possible abuse of such duty; and means being taken to establish, beyond the possibility of doubt or question, that the remedy was applied at the express wish of the patient.5This was not, though, the usual practice and many doctors saw no need to act. In an 1887 book one doctor contended that "as long as there was proper medical care, there was no need to speed up death to relieve suffering."6 Still, Williams's position is in almost all respects the position taken by advocates [End Page 239] of voluntary euthanasia since then, although it did not get much of an airing again until C. Killick Millard, the Medical Officer of Health of Leicester, gave the Presidential address to the Society of Medical Officers of Health in late 1931. There he said, referring to Bacon, thatthe proposition merely is that individuals, who have attained to years of discretion, and who are suffering from an incurable and fatal disease which usually... (shrink)

. Progress in technology has allowed dynamic research on the development of the human brain that has revolutionized concepts. Particularly, the notions of plasticity, neuronal selection, and the effects of afferent stimuli have entered into thinking about brain development. Here I focus on development from the age of four years to early adulthood, during which a 30 percent reduction in some brain synapses occurs that is out of proportion to changes in neuronal numbers. This corresponds temporally with changes in normal (...) child behavior from the loose‐associative, almost schizoid, thinking and art of the four‐year‐old to the more trained, or disciplined, or acculturated—and restrained—personality of the young adult. I propose that the synaptic changes can best be thought of as a winnowing process likely subject to environmental influences. Acquisition of language and the ability to link linguistic cognition to the plastic development of the brain provide a potentially powerful means of explaining the evolutionally explosive development of human cognition and culture. Schizophrenia, a disease that can be envisioned as representing a derangement of synaptic maturation, may provide an entry into the search for genes controlling the processes mediating the unprecedented development of Homo sapiens over the past 40,000 to 70,000 years. The recently completed mapping of the genome of the chimpanzee provides a new frame of reference that may speed the search. (shrink)

Why are bookstore shelves filled with mysteries, horror stories, romances, Westerns and other genre fiction? Why should one spend time reading narratives that are so similar? Why, for that matter, should one write works that are so similar to those of other authors? One philosopher, Noel Carroll, in fact, refers to the phenomenon as the ?paradox of junk fiction?. Are there works in political theory as well that share characteristics with these genres? And is there also a paradox involved among (...) both these readers and authors? This essay reviews both the criticisms and defenses of popular generic texts focusing on arguments that defend the complexity of genre texts and those that deny the distinction between generic works and others. Utopias are identified as counterparts in political theory and are applied to this genre debate. I conclude by revising the genre paradox. (shrink)

In popular usage both ideology and utopia have negative, and somewhat similar, connotations. Utopia is thought to imply something naively idealistic and, as a result, impossible to achieve due to the constraints of the ‘real world’ or because ‘human nature’ will get in the way. Ideology is also thought to imply being out of touch with the ‘real world’ by being blinkered by a set of beliefs that distorts one’s understanding of that ‘real world’. This chapter examines the recent history (...) of the relationship between the two concepts by examining the way they are treated by their best known theorists, Ernst Bloch, Michael Freeden, Fredric Jameson, Ruth Levitas, Karl Mannheim, and Paul Ricoeur. The chapter argues that while they are closely related and one can become the other, they can also be separated because they reflect different ways of understanding the world. (shrink)

If we are dissatisfied with our situation in life, we often dream of how our life could be improved. Most basically, we want a full stomach, decent clothing and housing, and a sense of security, and millions of people in the world today do not now have these things. Throughout American history, African Americans were kept from achieving this most basic decent life, let alone the more complex needs that become possible for those who fulfill the first needs. All the (...) elements of this fundamental vision are included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted in 1948 but was not ratified by the United States until 1992. Among the rights included in the Universal Declaration are Article 4. No one... (shrink)

There are many debates about what constitutes a utopia. Are utopias benign or dangerous? Is the idea of utopianism essential to Christianity or heretical? What is the relationship between utopia and ideology? In this Very Short Introduction, Lyman Sargent, one of the leading scholars in the field of utopian studies, explores these issues and examines utopianism and its history, discussing the role of utopianism in literature and in the development of colonies and in immigration. The idea of utopia has (...) become commonplace in social and political thought, both negatively and positively. Sargent notes that some thinkers see a trajectory from utopia to totalitarianism, with violence an inevitable part of the mix. Others see utopia directly connected to freedom and as a necessary element in the fight against totalitarianism. In Christianity, utopia is labeled as both heretical and as a fundamental part of Christian belief, and such debates are also central to such fields as architecture, town and city planning, and sociology among many others. Sargent addresses all these issues in this clear, compact introduction. (shrink)

In a number of recent and forthcoming articles and papers, I have argued that while utopia can be dangerous, utopian visions are absolutely essential, that we must choose utopia. Today, I want to try to give you the essence of that argument while also relating it to some new issues. Let me summarize my argument:1.Hope/desire for a better life in this life is a central aspect of the human experience.2.That hope/desire has often been distorted by ideology and religion.3.That hope/desire has (...) often been captured to serve the economic and political ends of the powerful.4.When that hope/desire is distorted or captured, it can become dangerous.5.That danger usually comes about because the hope/desire is warped so that the better life is only for a select few or in-group, thus creating an out-group, an other, who can be neglected, harmed, even killed to achieve the end. Such groups have included members of other religions, indigenous peoples, other ethnic groups, ideologies, and so forth. The boundaries of the other have often been changed to include some formerly in the in-group.6.Even so, that hope/desire for a better life is the only effective means of overcoming such distortion/capture. (shrink)

In a number of recent and forthcoming articles and papers, I have argued that while utopia can be dangerous, utopian visions are absolutely essential, that we must choose utopia. Today, I want to try to give you the essence of that argument while also relating it to some new issues. Let me summarize my argument:1.Hope/desire for a better life in this life is a central aspect of the human experience.2.That hope/desire has often been distorted by ideology and religion.3.That hope/desire has (...) often been captured to serve the economic and political ends of the powerful.4.When that hope/desire is distorted or captured, it can become dangerous.5.That danger usually comes about because the hope/desire is warped so that the better life is only for a select few or in-group, thus creating an out-group, an other, who can be neglected, harmed, even killed to achieve the end. Such groups have included members of other religions, indigenous peoples, other ethnic groups, ideologies, and so forth. The boundaries of the other have often been changed to include some formerly in the in-group.6.Even so, that hope/desire for a better life is the only effective means of overcoming such distortion/capture. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Brisbane: Utopian Dreams and Dystopian Nightmares by William (Bill) MetcalfLyman Tower SargentWilliam (Bill) Metcalf. Brisbane: Utopian Dreams and Dystopian Nightmares. Brisbane History Group Studies no. 11. Tingalpa: Boolarong Press, 2022. 297 pp. Australian $30.00 ISBN: 9781922643445.Bill Metcalf, the foremost scholar on Australian intentional communities, has discovered and written about a number of Australian utopias. In Brisbane: Utopian Dreams and Dystopian Nightmares he focuses on a subset of Australian (...) utopias, those written by people who lived in Brisbane plus one Brisbane architect who made designs for a future utopian Brisbane. One of the books, A Workingman’s Paradise: An Australian Labour Novel (1892), is well known, particularly in Australia. A second novel, The Adventures of Halek: An Autobiographical Fragment (1882) by John H. Nicholson, will be familiar to some readers. The others will be unfamiliar to most readers both in Australia and in the rest of the world. I learned of many of them through Metcalf ’s previous work and correspondence with him. Given this situation and the fact that a few of the books are only available in Australia, I have said something about all of them.The book begins with “A Brief Overview of Utopianism” (1–6), an introduction suitable for those unfamiliar with the subject, followed by “Overview of Brisbane in the 1880s and 1890s” (7–12), which gives all readers an initial context. The entire book is strong on context, particularly local context. The following nine chapters are on authors or coauthors of utopian texts and one artist. All the chapters begin with substantial biographical information about the authors, as well as their activities and the Brisbane context within which they lived, followed by a presentation and discussion of their utopias. [End Page 158]The first authors mentioned are William and Annie Lane, which immediately raised a question in my mind. The two works discussed, the racist “White or Yellow? A Story of the Race-war of A.D. 1908” by Sketcher (serialized in The Boomerang in 1888), and the socialist A Workingman’s Paradise by John Maurice Miller, have always been identified as written by William Lane—with no mention of Annie. Metcalf suggests, but with minimal discussion, that while “White or Yellow” was by William, Annie was the unacknowledged coauthor, perhaps even author, of A Workingman’s Paradise. So, I asked Metcalf about the attribution and in a substantial email of October 5, 2022, he laid out the argument, which is based in part on the work of a former student, John Kellett, published as “One-Woman-One Vote: Annie Lane, ‘Lucinda Sharpe,’ and the Female Franchise in Late-Nineteenth Century Queensland” (Hecate 30, no. 2 [2004]: 37–52).Lucinda Sharpe was the nom de plume of a weekly contributor to the newspapers published by William Lane. It has been believed that he wrote all the articles. Kellett, however, makes a strong case that Annie, who was a working journalist in Canada when she met William (also a working journalist), was Lucinda Sharpe. In particular, Kellett notes the extreme differences between William’s usual style and that of Lucinda Sharpe and compares it to material known to be written by Annie. Kellett concludes, based on the similarities between Lucinda and Annie and other evidence, that Lucinda was Annie. But Kellett is only concerned with the Lucinda Sharpe works and the way they presented the case for the franchise; he does not mention either of the works that Metcalf discusses.In his email to me, Metcalf expands on Kellett, saying thatWhile researching for this book I re-read The Workingman’s Paradise and again I was struck by how the sentence structure and language differs from William Lane’s usual work. Then I compared it to “Lucinda Sharpe,” and it was similar. I discussed this observation with John Kellett, now retired and living in Armadale, and he agreed. That led me to conclude that Annie Lane probably wrote The Working Man’s Paradise. Perhaps/probably with William’s input. The real giveaway is when William tries to write in a female voice, as in White or Yellow with the Cissie character, it is very stilted, “twee” and demeaning. When... (shrink)

ABSTRACT The Art of Real Pleasure by Calvin Blanchard focuses on sexual pleasure in the context of a significantly improved society as essential for the good life. This essay examines Blanchard's life and works and places them in a often neglected thread of the Western utopian tradition.

This book is a study of three intentional communities established with government support in the 1890s in Queensland, Australia. All three were short-lived, and as the title suggests, although there is considerable information on the communities, the focus of the book is on the settlers rather than on the communities. In fact, and extremely unusual in studies of intentional communities, there are extensive biographical dictionaries on the members of all three communities. And these dictionaries include information on the men involved (...) from before they joined to after they left, with, as available, information on their wife or wives and their children, in some cases to the near present. As is to be expected, much... (shrink)

Although the title Dreamstreets and the use of the word utopias in the subtitle strongly suggest a focus on the utopian, there are only a few references to utopia in the book, which is about the author’s responses to some of the model villages established in Britain in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The author says that there were about four hundred such villages, and she has visited many I have not visited and know little about; she is particularly (...) good on some of the less well-known model towns. While the table of contents suggests that she visited ten of them, she discusses quite a few more, all of which she has visited.I found the discussion of New Lanark (which is one of those not in the table... (shrink)

Abstractabstract:An overview of the importance of religion, particularly Christianity, has had in American life from the earliest explorations and settlements to the present day and the way that importance has been reflected in numerous religious utopias and dystopias. Positive utopias have been inspired by Christ's teachings and by Eden, heaven, and the millennium. Dystopias, found mostly in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, reflect, on the one hand, a fear that Christianity is under threat, and, on the other hand, the fear (...) that fundamentalist Christians will impose their beliefs on the country. There have also been a number of Jewish utopias and anti-Semitic dystopias as well as a few Islamic utopias and a growing number of anti-Islamic dystopias based on the belief that Muslims want to impose Shari`a law on everyone. (shrink)