If anyone is interested, many of Wright's works, including chapters from Envisioning Real Utopias, are available on his home page at
<http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~wright/> BTW I attempted to read "Envisioning" and found it very, very tepid stuff. While Wright's methodical skills are great, his message is unlikely to inspire. (And Jacoby was a fire-breather back in his Telos days). For example, the book's final paragraph (in which one normally expects the fist to come crashing down with a dynamic SEE! IT ALL FITS!) "I do not believe that my lack of confidence about the limits of possibility simply reflects a failure of theoretical imagination (although, of course, I could be wrong about this as well). Rather, I think it reflects inherent problems in understanding the ramifications of unintended consequences in complex systems. But it is crucial, really crucial, not to slide from this frank admission of ignorance about future limits of possibility to a belief that socialism is impossible. We simply do not know what the ultimate limits to the expansion of democratic egalitarian social empowerment might be. The best we can do, then, is treat the struggle to move on the pathways of social empowerment as an experimental process in which we continually test and retest the limits of possibility and try, as best as we can, to create new institutions which expand the limits themselves. In doing so we not only envision real utopias, but contribute to making utopias real." - Bill Jim Devine wrote: > Louis Proyect wrote: >> The latest contretemps with Wright has an added dimension. Although you >> might not have figured it out from Jacoby’s review, Jacoby is a >> long-standing utopian socialism theorist so there is a kind of turf >> battle going on. How dare Wright tackle a subject that Jacoby has made >> his own? > > If Wright's contribution to the utopian literature as I understand it > ("look at Mondragon! wow!") is so feeble, it's hard to understand why > Jacoby should see him as an interloper. Ah, these academics! the fight > is so vicious because the stakes are so low? _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
