Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age
A frequent reviewer for the Nation and the Los Angeles Times Book Review, UCLA historian Jacoby here follows up on his The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy with a historically nuanced polemic. In four beautifully crafted, highly allusive essays, Jacoby excavates a plethora of utopian movements, with an emphasis on Jewish traditions and thinkers, with the aim of getting readers to dream of a better world. The first chapter immediately confronts the 20th century's giant utopian failure: totalitarianism in its various forms. The second chapter details philosophical (and particularly liberal) objections to utopian thought generally. The next chapter concentrates on Zionism as it was originally envisioned, moving from Mordechai Noah and Theodor Herzl to Martin Buber, Gustav Landauer and Fritz Mauthner. The last chapter, "A Longing that Cannot Be Uttered," treats god as a kind of utopia, looks at a variety of Jewish approaches to the sacred. A tremendous amount of ground is covered along the way, and Jacoby's idiosyncratic connections won't move everyone. But as one person's attempt "to build castles in the sky" (in Lewis Mumford's phrase), the book works beautifully.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.