Thinking Utopia: Steps into Other Worlds (Making Sense of History, 4)

After the breakdown of socialist and communist systems in the East, it had become fashionable to declare the so-called end of utopia (end of history, end of narratives). The authors of this volume do not share this view but think that it is time to rehabilitate utopian thought. The political concept of Utopia that has given its name to these transcendental projections onto the world has been too narrow to describe and analyze the moving forces of the mind perceiving human existence beyond reality. By broadening the perspectives of utopian studies, these essays enable the reader to reconstruct scholarly paradigms and strategies of utopian, complex and holistic thinking in modern cosmology, philosophy, sociology, in literary, historical and political sciences, and to compare traditions and ways of Western utopian thought to the practice in the East. The final bankruptcy of the great socialist experiment in Eastern Europe appeared to sound a death knell for utopian thought. In 'Thinking Utopia' an effort is made to rehabilitate the concept of political utopia, arguing that utopian ideas continue to be relevant in the modern world