An intense solidarity binds environmental activists which can be wedded to many other forms of community activism. Festivals and subsidised communal activities will need to provide many more opportunities to meet and enjoy the com A vast new apparatus will be needed to introduce the necessary changes in energy production and consumption, and to ensure climate justice, and that a fair distribution of the very substantial costs of the transition to sustainability does not fall unduly on those less responsible for the incipient catastrophe. Their fortunes will have to be devoted to alleviating the effects of warming, and preventing further destruction.

Women, who possess considerably more power than men in disposing of household budgets, need full choice over their reproductive capacities, which will reduce family sizes. Gregory Claeys is Professor of the History of Political Thought, Royal Holloway, University of London. A fourth phase occurred in the late twentieth century, with dystopian fears about the Anthropocene supplanting utopianism. Globally the richest 10% generate 50% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and the richest 1%, 80% of that total. In the face of Earth’s environmental breakdown, it is clear that technological innovation alone won’t save our planet.Claeys maintains that utopianism proper is not, contra its legion of critics, a perfectionist or millenarian doctrine. Sixthly, we must reduce our sense of self-identity as a reliance on having a choice of consumer goods. luxury in the eighteenth century" In Utopianism for a Dying Planet: Life after Consumerism, 222-276. Seventhly, we must begin to displace techno-centred personal encounters, like sitting at a café with our friends, all of us staring at our phones, with human encounters in which technology is sidelined if not banned.

This book is a milestone in his career-long quest to make sense of utopianism, its past and its future, its dangers and its possibilities. The McDonaldization of Society (9th edn, Sage Publications, 2019)] places a premium on quantity over quality, and haste (‘fast food’) and instant gratification over sociability and delayed satisfaction. He surveys the development of these themes during the eighteenth and nineteenth century before examining twentieth- and twenty-first-century debates about alternatives to consumerism. Gregory Claeys is professor emeritus of the history of political thought at the University of London. g., that their behaviour is somehow improved, that they are more community-minded, kinder to one another, etc?

Margaret Atwood is a more awkward case, because she long denied – implausibly – that her work was science fiction, even as it was widely read and analyzed as a prominent example of it). Gregory Claeys unfolds his argument through a wide-ranging consideration of utopian literature, social theory, and intentional communities.

Duncan Bell is Professor of Political Thought and International Relations at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Christ’s College.Eighthly, we can reduce our working hours, particularly as new machines are introduced, once demand for output is reduced. But cities will also have to become much more pleasant and sustainable, even as temperatures rise significantly in the coming decades.

Many of the controversies in this field result from the bewildering variety of definitions attached to “utopia” and “utopianism”, and in particular a reluctance to separate out the three main components of the latter, literary utopias, intentional communities, and utopian ideas or ideologies. Claeys’s account of the historical development of utopian thought, which occupies the bulk of Utopianism for a Dying Planet, is excellent. These are the key utopian values, portrayed in thousands of ideal worlds from the Renaissance to the present. Utopianism for a Dying Planet is the book I would recommend to scholars and students seeking to understand the historical development of modern Euro-American utopian political thought.All forms of society involve some coercion in principle, and many “democratic” societies are ruled by parties which achieve as little as a third of the vote, especially in first-past-the-post systems, thus leaving the majority effectively coerced by a minority. The excision of science fiction leads to an overly narrow account of the development of the utopian tradition in the twentieth century. Louis Menand on the American culture of the Cold War — “I believe that if you do what you want, and believe in doing things for yourself, without worrying about what everybody else seems to want from you, at some point the world will meet you halfway. This lack of conceptual precision colours their selection and coverage, which at times seems arbitrary (Hobbes, for example, is accorded considerable space, without an adequate account of why he should be considered a utopian thinker). An inability to think beyond the short term – to “look up”, as we would now say – is one of the greatest barriers to our ability to save the planet.