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thehappybooker's review against another edition
2.0
I need some positive spin to the world. I've gotten far too cynical.
tylerrobinson1's review against another edition
4.0
"A CIA study, not usually guilty of hyperbole, concluded 'in terms of the numbers killed the anti-PKI massacres in Indonesia rank as one of the worst mass murders of the twentieth century' (the study added that unlike the Nazi genocide or Stalin's purge, these deaths have gone virtually unnoticed). Or to look at Sub Saharan Africa we find a series of civi l wars, ethnic conglicts and independence struggles, each with tolls abiut a million or more in the postWorld War II years [...] What can be gleaned from this melancholy listing? Perhaps nothing. Or this: the human ocmmunity has much more reason to fear those with an ethnic, religious or nationalist agenda than it has to fear those with utopian designs." (23)
"Without a utopian impulse, politics turns pallid, mechancial, and Sisyphean; it plugs leaks one by one, while the bulkheads give way and the ship founders. To be sure the leaks must be stanched. Yet we may need a new vessel, an idea easily forgotten as the waters rise and the crew and passengers panic." (149)
Russell Jacoby defends the utopian impulse spectacularly in this volume. He does this by 1)identifying the suspicion of utopia presented by prominent intellectuals of the twentieth century (Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper and Hannah Arendt), 2)separating the blueprint utopia from inconoclastic utopianism, 3)defending iconoclastic Jewish utopian thought through an examination of thinkers like Max Horkeheimer, Gustav Landauer and religious thinkers (Gershom Scholem, Maimonedes etc). Jacoby writes perceptively about the failure of many of the models of totalitarianism, the beauty of Jewish utopian intellectual thought, and also the need not for a blueprint, but for the desire for something more, even if we cannot quite state what that thing is ...
"Without a utopian impulse, politics turns pallid, mechancial, and Sisyphean; it plugs leaks one by one, while the bulkheads give way and the ship founders. To be sure the leaks must be stanched. Yet we may need a new vessel, an idea easily forgotten as the waters rise and the crew and passengers panic." (149)
Russell Jacoby defends the utopian impulse spectacularly in this volume. He does this by 1)identifying the suspicion of utopia presented by prominent intellectuals of the twentieth century (Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper and Hannah Arendt), 2)separating the blueprint utopia from inconoclastic utopianism, 3)defending iconoclastic Jewish utopian thought through an examination of thinkers like Max Horkeheimer, Gustav Landauer and religious thinkers (Gershom Scholem, Maimonedes etc). Jacoby writes perceptively about the failure of many of the models of totalitarianism, the beauty of Jewish utopian intellectual thought, and also the need not for a blueprint, but for the desire for something more, even if we cannot quite state what that thing is ...
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