I’ve gone off the new twenty pound notes ever since I got a paper cut from a particularly pristine one. There’s also something slightly unsettling about having Adam Smith on the other side from the Queen: it’s almost a visual representation of the rule of capitalism. It wouldn’t actually be that bad a metaphor...
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Stemming from the first utopian designs for life, most visions of the perfect state of living share the same fatal flaw: the presupposition that there is some underlying rationality in human nature. As I shall explain, any utopia constructed on this optimistic assumption would stand no chance of ever being attained, leaving only the...
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In his Candide, or: The Optimist Voltaire famously described optimism as the mania to maintain that everything is fine when everything in fact is going badly. Looking at history, one finds that some men have clearly suffered from this manic belief and in our times to be optimistic about the state of the world...
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Close your eyes and picture utopia. Does a vision of paradise spring to mind? Or Elysium, maybe? Or possibly you don’t see a physical environment at all, but feel a sense of relaxation and self-fulfilment. These are just some of the ideals our culture projects onto the term ‘utopia’. It has become a concept...
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