Word: utopianizing
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...March 1968, East German Boss Walter Ulbricht reportedly waved his arms ominously over the other Party leaders, warning: "We will all soon be in danger, if not swept out of office." Soviet tanks, of course, averted that eventuality and ended Dubček's stirring, if perhaps hopelessly Utopian experiment in mingling democracy and Communism...
...revolutionary gesture even if it is totally futile and foredoomed. The revolutionary impulse, though it seems provoked by concrete ills, is often only part of a basic, existential rebellion that man sooner or later carries on against the limits of the human condition. In toiling for a Utopian future, the rebel is often seeking what life itself cannot supply. He welcomes the apocalypse rather than endure imperfection. He conducts what Albert Camus called "a limitless metaphysical crusade." But metaphysics should not be confused with politics...
...insignificant left-wing weekly with a small readership and less clout. Martin drew his Fabian Society friends (G. B. Shaw, H. G. Wells) to the pages of the magazine, made it Britain's foremost intellectual forum, increased circulation to 80,000. His own influential column, "London Diary," was Utopian in thrust, often whimsical in tone, and maddening to the government. Though radicals rallied around him, he refused to be lured into politics. As he once said: "I always preferred to tell the other chap what...
CRITICS ON the outside conceived the "Utopian University" as an answering service for every social and scientific problem. That concept, according to Barzun, has destroyed what limited good the university could do by distracting its energy from teaching. And the notion that higher education should be open to all has skyrocketed the budget, drastically increased the teaching load, and made classroom chores doubly undesirable. The faculty responded by giving up and withdrawing to their offices or laboratories to write books and "do original work." The prevailing belief among scientists, agency heads, business vice-presidents, philanthropists, college publicity directors...
...motivations of SDS. Worse, I think, it cuts one off from one of the fundamental hopes for a decent politics in America, and the world, namely, that the disaffected and the oppressed, whatever their differences, can unite to struggle against the common causes of their oppression. Perhaps that is utopian, but far less so I think than the fantasy that Gene McCarthy somehow changed the structure of American politics. (If you don't believe that that is a fantasy, you might ask Gene McCarthy or contemplate his recent behavior in the Senate...