DRAFT: Prosperity & "Utopia": The Moving Target :: History of Economic Growth Lecture Notes 1.5
DRAFT: Why the best-laid plans of philosophers and poets never quite survive contact with history—or the marketplace. From Arkadian simplicity to Sybaritic pleasure, what do ancient utopias teach...
DRAFT: Why the best-laid plans of philosophers and poets never quite survive contact with history—or the marketplace. From Arkadian simplicity to Sybaritic pleasure, what do ancient utopias teach us about the economics of “enough”? & can sufficient prosperity and technological power deliver us to the or at least a “utopia”, or can all it do is to merely sharpen our appetite for new discontents?…
I have never given this “utopia” lecture. In every course I have ever taught, it has been one single slide. Thus it has only been five minutes, a maybe a few more. It would have taken an hour. And I never had an hour.
But I wish I had, at least once.
Behind the paywall for now, as I still have hopes of revising it this summer of 2025…
1.5. Prosperity & "Utopia": The Moving Target
In the process of economic growth, as we visionaries of a future science-based utopia see it, technological research and development is supposed to enlarge the storehouse of human capabilities to master nature and productively organize ourselves, and so lead us towards if not to peace, prosperity and utopia.
But what kind of society would a “utopia” be?
We need references: things we can point to. We need societies if which we can say: if only things were like they were in that society, only if it were more like itself. They can, perhaps, serve as intellectual bencharks—orienting us for dreams that history never delivered.
Spoiler: the answer is as complicated as human desire itself. But we can at least peer into the gap between myth and reality, and asks whether economic growth is the bridge or the barrier to the good life.
1.5.1. Prosperity & “Utopia”: Sparte, Arkadia, & Sybaris
What, exactly, do we mean when we invoke “utopia”? Is it a society defined by perfect order, where every individual is meticulously trained and deployed for their social role, regardless of whether they regard what they experience as personal happiness?
If so, you are describing what the ancient Hellenes imagined as “Sparte.”
In the view of it as seen from classical Hellas’s city of the Athenai, Sparte, the city that was the unwalled grouped villages of the Lakedaimonai, was less a real place than a rhetorical device—a foil constructed by Athenian aristocrats to criticize what they saw as the chaos and decadence of their own city: actual historical Sparte bore only a passing resemblance to this idealized version. The myth served a polemical function more than it did a descriptive one. Do not mistake the Athenian-aristocratic image for the actual on-the-ground reality of life in Laconia, in southern Greece’s Eurotas Valley underneath Mount Taygetos.
The Spartan model of utopia is not about maximizing individual flourishing or personal fulfillment. Rather, it prioritizes collective discipline, martial prowess, and the subordination of individual desires to the needs of the state. The “well-ordered society” here is one in which usefulness and conformity are elevated above all else, and where the lives of citizens—at least the male citizens, women and helots need not apply—are orchestrated in service of a higher communal goal.
If you find yourself drawn to visions of utopia that emphasize structure, hierarchy, and an almost militaristic sense of purpose, you are in distinguished company: Platon’s Politeia, for example, is shot through with Spartan undertones. But before you sign up for the agoge, recall that this vision of order comes at the expense of personal liberty and, often, of basic human joy. The “Sparte” archetype is a cautionary tale as much as a blueprint—a reminder that the pursuit of order, taken to its logical extreme, may crowd out the very things that make life worth living.
(A parenthesis: Why do I say “city of the Athenai”, “Sparte”, “Platon”, “Politeia”, and so forth; rather than “Athens”, “Sparta”, “Plato”, and “Republic”? Because the second set of words are far too familiar to us. We think that they are part of our culture. Maybe mid-1950s Oxford or Harvard students or professors. People like us. They were not. Really, they were not. We need, if we are to see clearly what they were, to distance themselves from us: to make them strangers to us and estranged from us. That is what I am trying to do here.)
Suppose your vision of utopia is not one of rigid order, but rather of people living contentedly in harmony with their environment, unburdened by the pursuit of luxury or excess?
This is the Arkadian ideal—a notion popularized by Virgil, who romanticized a rural Greek backwater into a symbol of pastoral simplicity and happiness. Arkadia, in the classical imagination, was a land where shepherds played their pipes, communities were egalitarian, and existence was untroubled by the corrupting influences of wealth and ambition.
Of course, the historical reality was rather more prosaic: the actual Arkadia was a marginal, mountainous region of Greece, so poor and infertile that it was left largely alone by its more powerful neighbors. Its peace was less the product of a philosophical commitment to moderation than of simple geographic and economic irrelevance. Yet for millennia now, Arkadia has served as a canvas onto which intellectuals project their fantasies of the “natural” good life—a society where happiness comes not from abundance, but from living in accordance with one’s nature, accepting limits, and eschewing the rat race of status and consumption.
In our era of relentless striving and engineered scarcity, the Arcadian model stands as a quietly subversive alternative: utopia as sufficiency, not surplus; as contentment, not conquest. But, as ever, one should be wary of mistaking the myth for the reality.
Are all material desires for comfort, entertainment, and amusement instantly and completely satisfied?
Then we have the city of Sybaris, a well-ordered society in which people do their jobs without friction and all are satisfied, a society in which people have enough that material need is not a substantial distraction from the real business of life, and a society of abundant luxury and blissful and ecstatic civilization.
These three are options for “utopia”:
a well-ordered society in which people do their jobs without friction and all are satisfied (Sparte),
a society in which people have enough that material need is not a substantial distraction from the real business of life (Arkadia), and
a society of abundant civilization, blissful luxury, and ecstatic experience (Sybaris).
1.5.2. Prosperity & “Utopia”: The City of the Athenai & Roma
But those are not the only options.
There is, of course, another vision of utopia—one that departs sharply from the rigid order of Sparte or the bucolic innocence of Arkadia. Here, the ideal is not discipline or simplicity, but openness: a society built on freedom of thought, robust debate, and the contestation of ideas. This is the city of the Athenai, at least in the image that its -400s leader Perikles tried to make its people live up to. And ever since, at least in the imagination of the streams of culture that have flowed from it, Athens has been the polis where free speech (parrhesia—speaking frankly, openly, and boldly; fearless candor as a duty) and democratic participation were elevated, at least for the privileged cohort of male citizens, to the highest civic virtues.
To be clear, this Athenian utopia was not a utopia for most living in the city and the district of Attike. Citizenship, and thus the right to speak and vote in the Assembly, was restricted to a narrow slice of the population—women, metics, and the poor need not apply. Plus the wood for the structures and the grain for the bread of the people of the Athenai arrived at its port of Peiraieus shipped in from Thrake and Makedonia, and Sikelia (Sicily) and Skythia (southern Ukraine), where trees were cut and farms worked by serfs and slaves under the dominion of landlords and horselords.
Yet for those inside the charmed circle, Athens offered a model that has echoed down the centuries: a society where abundance, good order, and a norm of moderation in consumption provided the foundation for a public sphere defined by open argument.
This vision is not without its ironies. Athens, after all, was a city as famous for its demagogues and exiles as for its philosophers and playwrights. Sokrates, the quintessential Athenian gadfly, was sentenced to death by that same democracy for speaking too freely. Still, the Athenian ideal persists: a utopia where the highest good is not order or simplicity, but the freedom to think, speak, and challenge both tradition and authority—a vision that remains as seductive, and as fraught, and as attractive as ever.
Then there is yet another variant of the utopian ideal—one that prizes not just freedom of speech or harmonious simplicity, but the collective, deliberative pursuit of a common purpose. Picture a society where decisions about the direction of the polity are made through broad participation and debate, where the public sphere is dominated by the rituals (and, let’s be honest, the tedium) of civic engagement. Roma. The Romans, or at least the Romans of the Republic, aspired to this model: an endless churn of assemblies, senatorial deliberations, and magistracies, all theoretically open to any male citizen who could elbow his way into the forum.
Of course, as with Athens, the franchise was restricted—women, slaves, and the non-citizen majority were excluded from the deliberative process. Moreover, when the most important votes—election of the highest magistrates and so forth—were taken in the Comitia Centuriata, the assembly by centuries, senators and knights made up 18 centuries, the first-class of the heavy infantry made up 80, the second- through fifth-classes made up 90, the proletarii 1 single century, and then 4 for engineers, musicians, and orderlies (maybe: we really are not sure). 100 senators or knights made up a century. First-class centuries were several hundred each. Second- through fifth-class centuries were larger, up to thousands. And all those without property were in the last, proletarian, headcount century. Centuries voted by wealth. And if a candidate or a vote reached the magic number of 97, the poorer rest of the centuries never got to vote at all.
Plus the outcomes, more often than not, were less about the common good than about the aggrandizement of a handful of aristocratic families. Still, Rome’s republican machinery represented a genuine attempt at collective self-government, however flawed in practice.
If you find yourself yearning for a utopia of civic participation and shared purpose, be careful what you wish for. The Roman model is a reminder that collective decision-making can all too easily slide into factionalism, gridlock, and, ultimately, a consensus that the best use of collective energy is to conquer the world.
1.5.3. Dystopias
And then, inevitably, we arrive at the dystopias—those cautionary tales where the utopian impulse curdles into something far more sinister. Consider:
Zamyatin’s We: here, the hyper-ordered society of Sparta is taken to its logical extreme and collapses into a mechanized nightmare, individuality erased in the name of collective perfection.
Huxley’s Brave New World offers a sybaritic dystopia—material pleasure and comfort are ubiquitous, but so are genetic caste systems and psychological conditioning, all deployed to ensure that no one ever thinks to question the system’s underlying emptiness.
And then, of course, there is Orwell’s 1984: the technological apparatus of the modern state is weaponized not for the common good, but for the preservation of power—a boot stamping on a human face, forever.
Each of these works is, in its own way, a meditation on the dangers of utopian ambition unmoored from human complexity. They serve as reminders that the pursuit of the perfect society, if untethered from liberty, dignity, and the possibility of dissent, tends not toward paradise, but toward the abyss.
And then, for those who find even the most dystopian collectivisms insufficiently bracing, there are the “utopias” crafted for the select few—the self-anointed Übermenschen—who see themselves as standing above the herd.
Enter Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, a work best understood as a kind of neo-Nietzschean fever dream, in which the world’s productive elite, tired of carrying the ungrateful masses on their backs, retreat to their own private Shangri-La (Galt’s Gulch) to let civilization collapse under the weight of its own mediocrity. Here, “utopia” is not a shared project but a gated community for the powerful, the creative, the “makers”—a society in which solidarity and mutual obligation are replaced by the iron law of merit (as self-defined by those at the top, naturally).
It is a vision that has proven endlessly seductive to a certain strain of Silicon Valley libertarian and Wall Street titan—a fantasy of escape from the messy realities of democracy, equality, and the claims of the less fortunate. Whether such a world would be livable, let alone just, is left as an exercise for the reader. But one suspects that even Nietzsche, arch-critic of herd morality though he was, might have raised an eyebrow at the spectacle of so many would-be Atlases, all convinced that it is they alone who hold up the sky.
Five kinds of utopia. Sparte, Arkadia, Sybaris, the city of the Athenai, Roma.
Let us be clear-eyed: the historical realities of Sparta, Arcadia, Sybaris, Athens, and Rome bear, at best, a passing resemblance to the utopian ideals their names now evoke. These are not blueprints, but rather intellectual shorthand—convenient markers in the landscape of political philosophy. The actual Sparta was less a paragon of virtuous order than a brutal, oligarchic barracks-state. Arcadia, for all its poetic charm, was more a hardscrabble backwater than a pastoral Eden. Sybaris, Athens, Rome—each, in its turn, has been mythologized far beyond the facts on the ground. The ideals persist because they are useful: they give us a vocabulary for our aspirations and anxieties, not because they were ever fully realized.
And then, as a kind of meta-commentary on the whole exercise, we have Ayn Rand’s Galt’s Gulch—a utopia so idiosyncratic it is barely a society at all, more a thought experiment in radical individualism than a plausible model for collective life.
1.5.4. Utopia & Economic Growth
Which brings us, inevitably, to the economist’s question: what, if anything, does economic growth have to do with any of these visions? Are we to believe that a rising tide of productivity and technological advance will naturally deliver us to Arkadia, or Sybaris, or some as-yet-unimagined utopia? Or does the record suggest that growth merely gives us more resources with which to pursue the same old dreams—sometimes noble, often contradictory, and always, in the end, shaped by the limits of human imagination and the realities of power?
I think the answer, as usual, is: it’s complicated.
A society beset by scarcity cannot plausibly claim the mantle of utopia; deprivation is, after all, the antithesis of the good life, however one defines it. But once the baseline of “enough” is established, the path forward fractures into competing visions. For some, the very essence of utopia lies in the Promethean expansion of technological mastery—what Francis Bacon called “the knowledge of causes and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.” This is the utopia of the laboratory, the workshop, the think tank: a society where the frontiers of possibility are not merely explored but relentlessly pushed outward, and where the satisfaction of material wants is only the beginning.
Yet, as the history of ideas (and, frankly, the annals of disappointment) demonstrate, this technological optimism often morphs seamlessly into a more hedonistic aspiration. The line between “mastery over nature” and “the pursuit of pleasure” is, I would argue, vanishingly thin. The sybaritic ideal—ecstatic, sensuous, abundant—becomes the logical endpoint of the technological project, at least for those who see the purpose of progress not in virtue or civic engagement, but in maximizing the sum total of pleasurable experience. The question, then, is not whether economic growth is necessary for utopia (it is), but whether it is sufficient—or whether, as history suggests, it simply delivers us to new and more sophisticated forms of dissatisfaction.
Another school of utopian thought, let’s call it the “Epicurean-ascetic synthesis,” focuses less on the relentless pursuit of material abundance and more on the alignment of human desire with available resources. For some, utopia is achieved simply by ensuring that everyone has enough—that the distractions of want and deprivation are banished, freeing people to pursue whatever higher aspirations they may have. But for others, the real trick lies not in increasing supply, but in curbing demand: teaching people to want less, to dismiss the allure of material goods and sensory pleasures as so much “propertarian” baggage.
This is the vision embodied in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia. Le Guin’s anarchist moon-colony is not a paradise of plenty, but a society that has, quite intentionally, reengineered its citizens’ desires. The inhabitants are socialized to see acquisitiveness as a vice, to treat luxury as suspect, and to find satisfaction in sufficiency and solidarity rather than accumulation. It’s a utopia that, for all its ambiguities, is built on the radical proposition that happiness is as much about the management of wants as it is about the satisfaction of needs. Plus the creation of solidarity, in which without the free development lf all there cannot be the free development of each, or, indeed, of anyone.
One might be tempted to see this as a mere rationalization for poverty, or as the ideological handmaiden of stagnation. But Le Guin’s point is subtler: in a world of finite resources, perhaps the highest form of wisdom is not to chase ever more, but to learn how to want less. Whether such a society would be stable, let alone desirable, is left as an exercise for the reader.
1.5.5. “Foul Is Useful & Fair Is Not”: John Maynard Keynes
There is also a more skeptical strand in the utopian tradition—one that regards the relentless pursuit of prosperity not merely as a distraction, but as a positive impediment to human flourishing. The idea here is that the accumulation of wealth, when elevated to the status of a cultural or personal end in itself, becomes pathological: a treadmill of acquisition that never quite delivers on its promise of satisfaction.
You might be surprised to learn that economist John Maynard Keynes counted himself in this company.
Keynes, in his rather well-known essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” offers a pointed critique of this dynamic. Keynes’s vision of utopia is not one of boundless consumption or ever-increasing GDP, but rather a society that has become so materially secure that it can finally dispense with the “money-motive”—that is, the compulsion to pursue profit for its own sake. He anticipates a future in which humanity, liberated from the struggle for subsistence, can turn its attention to what he calls “the art of life itself”: culture, creativity, relationships, and the cultivation of the self.
Keynes’s optimism, of course, is tempered by his recognition that habits of mind are slow to change. Even in a world of abundance, he worries, we may remain prisoners of our acquisitive instincts, unable to imagine a life not organized around the pursuit of more. His essay stands, therefore, as both a blueprint and a warning: prosperity is a necessary precondition for utopia, but it is not sufficient. The real challenge lies in learning how to live once the economic problem has, at last, been solved:
We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession--as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life--will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semicriminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard…
But Keynes goes on to warn against any premature away from bourgeois accumulative society and mentality, and any premature derogation of the profit motive and of the high status accorded those who win the game of wealth accumulation:
But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight…
1.5.6. “Of the Art of Wealth-Getting… a Detailed… Account… Would Be Crude”: Aristoteles of Stagire
Or consider Aristoteles of Stagire, who believes that a gentleman who wants to pursue philosophy and lead a good life must study and obtain a substantial knowledge of economic affairs in order to properly manage and supply his household.
But he must not know too much about such things, or be too interested in them:
The business of drawing provision from the fruits of the soil and from animals is natural to all. But… one branch being of the nature of trade while the other belongs to… household [management]… the latter branch is necessary and in good esteem, but the branch connected with exchange is justly discredited (for it is not in accordance with nature, but involves men's taking things from one another)…. Usury is most reasonably hated, because its gain comes from money itself and not from that for the sake of which money was invented…. Whereas the theory of such matters is a liberal study, the practical pursuit of them is narrowing.
The practically useful branches of the art of wealth-getting are… an expert knowledge of… horses or cattle or sheep, and similarly of the other animals… corn-growing and fruit-farming; also bee-keeping, and the breeding of the other creatures finned and feathered…. Of the kind that deals with exchange, the largest branch is commerce… ship-owning, transport and marketing… the second branch is money-lending, and the third labor for hire…. There is a third form of wealth-getting that… mediate[s] an element both of natural wealth-getting and of the sort that employs exchange… the felling of timber and all sorts of mining….
While we have even now given a general description of these various branches, yet a detailed and particular account of them, though useful for the practice of the industries, would be crude…
1.5.7. The Full Range
The full range of classical tropes about utopia is easy to name—Sparte for order, Arkadia for simplicity, Sybaris for pleasure, the Roman Republic for collective purpose, perhaps the Roman Empire for cosmopolitan order.
In Sparte: Here we have what I think is dystopia often mistaken for utopia among the élite—a regime of equality, yes, but equality enforced through terror, slavery (the Helots), militarism, and suppression of individuality. Rousseau admired it. But it was a society where no music could be played save that which the state approved. It aimed for arete (virtue) through discipline and austerity. No flourishing here, only endurance. The sheer scale of the society-of-domination it ran relative to its élite population base required Sparte to be what it was or vanish, but that infected the quality of life for even the élite, severely.
In the city of the Athenai": We have classical liberal’s utopia. A democracy (for male citizens), a marketplace of ideas and goods, an incubator of arts and philosophy. The ideal of Athens often inspires modern utopias—Jefferson’s vision of yeoman farmers, Mill’s liberty-infused society. But it, too, had its limits. And it was also an empire: a soft society-of-domination within the walls, but a hard one outside.
In Sybaris: Here we have the anti-Sparta. A city of luxury, indulgence, and commerce. Think of it as the ideal of pleasure and consumption. Often caricatured as decadent, it nevertheless represents a vision where wealth and abundance are not sins, and where the good life is to be enjoyed rather than merely endured.
In the Roman Republic: Here we have at least the ideal of a utopia of collective purpose. Ctizens—at least those within the privileged circle of male property holders—participated in public life through debate, deliberation, and the shared pursuit of the common good, in a society animated by the rituals (and, yes, the tedium) of public participation, where the direction of the state was, in theory, a matter for collective decision. The image of a people bound together by law, debate, and a sense of shared destiny remains a powerful touchstone for those who dream of a utopia built on civic virtue and collective purpose.
In the Roman Empire: We see a different utopian vision: that of cosmopolitan order. Under the Pax Romana the empire became a vast, albeit hierarchical, and infrastructurally advanced civilization, integrating peoples and markets from Britain to Egypt, from Spain to Syria. Roads, aqueducts, and the rule of law knit together a world where, for a time, urban prosperity and a kind of cosmopolitanism flourished, even as deep inequalities and the realities of a slave-based economy persisted. During the Empire’s third, Antonine, Dynasty, “the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous”, at least in Edward Gibbon’s eyes. Utopia, for some, is not found in the messy business of collective self-government, but in the stability and cosmopolitanism of a well-ordered, interconnected world.
Later utopian visions in Europe were inflected by Christianity’s vision of the City of God—universal brotherhood, peace, and an end to suffering—but deferred to the next world. Then came Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), which mocked and mirrored his own world, and became the template. Property was communal; work was shared; learning prized. But even here, it’s a society of uniformity and little privacy—an echo of Sparte with a Christian gloss.
In the Enlightenment: It gave us more optimistic visions: of reason governing man, of progress as achievable. Diderot and Condorcet imagined futures where science and education lifted all. This was a telos of Enlightenment utopia: progress not as dream but destiny.
In Marx: For all his protestations about not being a utopian, he was. gave us a utopian horizon—classless, stateless communism where “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” It was supposed to arise inevitably from history. But we know what happened when Lenin and Stalin tried to shortcut the dialectic. Here, utopia—like Sparta—became a justification for dystopia.
Post-WWII Western Europe gave us a more plausible, less totalizing utopia: social democracy. Think: universal healthcare, mass education, high wages, low inequality. It was, in the words of one of my book chapters, “Thirty Glorious Years.” Not perfect. But close, perhaps, to what many today would consider utopian.
In the Silicon Valley Variant: Today’s aspirants in tech—especially in the Valley—envision a future of abundance: universal basic income, eternal life, AI-enhanced minds. This is Sybaris updated for the age of Moore’s Law. Yet it too runs the risk of deepening inequality rather than dissolving it.
1.5.8. Conclusion
Sparte for order, Arkadia for simplicity, Sybaris for pleasure, the city of the Athenai for freedom, Roma for collective purpose—even though it is impossible to realize in this Fallen Sublunary Sphere that is the world. But each does stand for a different vision of the good life for humanity.
And then there is Yerushalayim—the city of peace, or is it the foundation-stone, the bedrock, of dusk, of work finished, of the time of rest, of things completed?
What we can do is question the myths, assess the realities, and wonder whether abundance leads to happiness or just new forms of dissatisfaction. Sparte was a brutal, oligarchic barracks-state; Arkadia, a hardscrabble backwater; Sybaris, Athenai, and Roma, each more myth than model, even in its day, even to its residents. Yet these names persist, functioning as intellectual shorthand for our aspirations: order, simplicity, pleasure, freedom, purpose.
And, along the way, we also meet dystopias, plus Galt’s Gulch, whatever that ia. And we meet the ghosts of John Maynard Keynes of Cambridge and Aristoteles of Stagire.
Can economic growth finally deliver us to the promised land, or does it only move the goalposts? The real lesson may be that, in the end, with the power of the scientific method and of humanity as an anthology intelligence, the problem of scarcity is easier to solve than the problem of what we truly want.
References:
Aristoteles. 1984. Politics. Trans. Carnes Lord. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. <https://archive.org/details/aristotlespolitics01984aris>.
Huxley, Aldous. 1932. Brave New World. London: Chatto & Windus. <https://archive.org/stream/ost-english-brave_new_world_aldous_huxley/Brave_New_World_Aldous_Huxley_djvu.txt>.
Keynes, John Maynard. 1930. “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” In Essays in Persuasion, 358–373. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. <https://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf>.
Le Guin, Ursula K. 1974. The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia. New York: Harper & Row. <https://files.libcom.org/files/Le%20Guin%20-%20The%20Dispossessed.pdf>.
Orwell, George. 1949. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Secker & Warburg. <https://www.george-orwell.org/1984>.
Platon [Aristokles son of Ariston of the Athenai]. -380 [2016]. Politeia. Trans. C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. <https://archive.org/details/republicofplato00platiala>.
Rand, Ayn. 1957. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House. <https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.458873>.
Virgilius Maro, Publius. -39 [2009]. Eclogae. Trans. Guy Lee. New York: Penguin Classics. <https://archive.org/details/ecloguesofvergil00virgrich>
Zamyatin, Yevgeny. 1924. We. Trans. Clarence Brown. New York: Viking Press. <https://archive.org/details/we-by-yevgeny-zamyatin>.
As long as we are human beings and confined to planet Earth, there will never be a utopia for everyone. Ray Kurzweil's vision of the near future offers me the best hope for humanity's survival. The diversity of human wants and needs is so great that no one place could ever fulfill all of our dreams. Even as we learn how to live in space and colonize the moon and planets, I don't believe there is enough variation in living spaces to accommodate all the desires of humanity. Granted, we are still only small children, crawling on the ground, and perhaps if we live long enough and gain the maturity to live in harmony with each other, we may be able to create some type of utopia. However, I am not confident that we can survive that long. Perhaps Arthur C. Clark's vision in Childhood's End comes true, but in my darker moments, I am afraid Rod Serling's vignette, where the book "How To Serve Humanity" comes true, and it really is a cockbook.
This is great. I wish I’d had the opportunity to take this course as an undergrad.