Word: utopians
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...promote a set of policies that over the next two decades would save half the oil the U.S. uses, before moving to a hydrogen-based economy that dispenses with oil altogether (save for possible use as a fuel to produce hydrogen.) If that seems hopelessly Utopian, Lovins reminds us that we have done something very like it before. Spurred by the oil price shocks of the 1970s, the U.S. between 1977 and 1985 increased efficiency and cut oil consumption 17% (and net oil imports 50%) while the economy grew 27%. The key to that revolution was a huge increase...
...ghosts that possess Mitchell--James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, Martin Amis--are sturdy ones, and this master of voices knows science and generic utopian Asia, Steven Spielberg and British misanthropy. His language crackles with texture and bite: "Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman" and "[the] sequined gaggle of mantled goslings streamed past me." Mitchell, with typical impenitence, even invents a whole new dialect ("A yarnin' is more delish with broke-de-mouth grinds") for a race in the future. The propulsive zing of his sentences and the unexpected U-turn of his narrative give added fuel...
Hardt and Negri's signature tone is one of rock-anthem optimism, and Multitude is definitely animated by a warmhearted belief in human goodness. But it is, ultimately, a work of Utopian thinking, occasionally shading into utter fantasy. Multitude treats the global populace as if we were all one big, happy, left-wing underground, undivided by cultural differences, eagerly awaiting our chance to sock it to global capitalism. The authors' examples of multitude-style international activism--the World Trade Organization riots in Seattle in 1999 or the G-8 protests in Genoa in 2001--have a wan, quixotic...
...mostly African-American residents of East St. Louis, Ill., fed up with an electoral process that isn't working for them, seceded from the union and declared their city a sovereign state. Fred Fredericks, the mayor turned President of the newly named Blackland, must balance the country's utopian initiatives (adopting hitherto suppressed alternative-fuel technologies) with the difficulties of life in a rogue nation (where federal checks no longer come in). The satire is omnivorous, poking fun at the Bush Administration and Louis Farrakhan...
...from French Huguenots on his mother's side, Hamilton was fluent in French and had served as Washington's liaison with the Marquis de Lafayette and other French aristocrats who had rallied to the Continental Army. The French Revolution immediately struck him as a bloody affair, governed by rigid, Utopian thinking. On Oct. 6, 1789, he wrote a remarkable letter to Lafayette, explaining his "foreboding of ill" about the future course of events in Paris. He cited the "vehement character" of the French people and the "reveries" of their "philosophic politicians," who wished to transform human nature. Hamilton believed that...