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Utopia 9/11: A Plea for a New World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Nicole Schwartz-Morgan
Nicole Schwartz-Morgan*
Affiliation:
Collège militaire royal du Canada, Ecole militaire de St-Cyr, Coëtquidan, France
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Abstract

Thomas More's Utopia is made up of two books. Book One, quickly skimmed over by those who dream of the future and are bored by history, tells us about Europe in 1515 at the dawn of a revolution in every field of knowledge dominated by a political power that uses religion, fear and ignorance to satisfy an insatiable appetite for hegemony, infinitely corrupt but in public promoting moral, family values. Book Two gives us a glimpse of a future on a human scale using new techniques, reason and good management of its resources to reconcile the common good with the pleasure of the individual. That book is the founding text for our modernity. It is the pagan bible adopted by the Enlightenment, which we have inscribed in the charter of our epoch's institutions. Five hundred years later the books are being rewritten in reverse: the great human dream set in train by Book Two in 1516 is bogged down in the reality of 2005. The new promises of free-choice economism in 2005 are just a nightmare journey back in time to the postulates of Book One.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 53 , Issue 1 , February 2006 , pp. 44 - 61
Copyright
Copyright © ICPHS 2006

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