By Adam Etinson.
“Rather than worry about how we might preserve the utopian status of human rights into the future, we ought to worry about how to rescue utopia from the clutches of human rights. “
A plea for substantive utopias.
By Samuel Moyn.
“There is a risk that human rights will be called on to do so much, precisely because no powerful imaginative alternatives exist, that they will lose even the minimal promise of transformation that allow the norms to inspire so many.”
A response to Adam Etinson.
By Jeremy Kessler
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“In taking to the streets with their peculiar brand of leadership and organization, the Occupy Wall Street movement taps into a deep American tradition of outdoor politics: for much of American history, the motor of progressive political change was the assembly of the people out-of-doors, coming together to debate and organize beyond the prescribed avenues of official political reform.”
By Timothy Stanley.
“Ask a Conservative what kind of society they’d like to live in and they’ll generally identify the 1950s. This is highly ironic, because the faithful, decent national community that we imagine the 1950s to have been was also economically highly regulated and strongly wedded to the postwar consensus that Margaret Thatcher tore up.”
By Sheri Berman.
“Particularly in the West, what seems striking about the current period is the widespread sense of the need for change combined with the lack of any coherent plans for it.”
On discontent and its failure to effect transformation.
“What populism necessarily denies is the pluralism of contemporary societies: in the populist imagination there is only the people on the one hand and the illegitimate intruders into our politics, from both above and below, on the other.”
An account of what populism is, and why it is dangerous.
By Timothy Stanley.
“Most voters are conservative in that they want peace in the streets yet liberal in that they don’t want to use water cannons to get it.”
What Britain can learn from America’s reaction to the riots of the 1960s.
By Alexander Lee.
“If there is a single underlying cause for the riots, it is to be found in the shocking social problems in Britain’s depressed suburbs and in the gradual abandonment of social questions by mainstream political discourse.”
By Charles Petersen.
Will there ever be a persuasive staging of Lear, or is the aging king condemned forever to remain most at home in the theater of the mind?
By Martin Eiermann.
“If you are confused”, Amado assures me, “you are on the right track. Everyone in Egypt is confused.”
A Letter from Cairo.
By Mac McAnulty.
“Blight guts houses and, in the case of New Orleans, whole neighborhoods. Estimates say the city contains over 50,000 blighted properties, battered remnants, most of them left behind during Hurricane Katrina.”
A letter from New Orleans.
By Mark Chiusano.
“Like everyone else, someone had come up to me, put a pointer finger in the center of my chests, and said, serve your country. Make us the Gadget, they said, and your name will be forever.”
A short story.
By David Hayes.
“In case of rams and horses, Kurnus, / We seek the highest class, / And select the finest specimens / Of ass to breed with ass.”
A new translation of Theognis 183-92.
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The Utopian is a critically acclaimed, cutting-edge magazine on philosophy, politics and culture.Our past contributors have included Jürgen Habermas, Michel Houellebecq and Michael Walzer, among many others.
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