Abstract
It became a mantra among us. Both of my college roommates and I had been philosophy majors. As a result, when we moved in together, it was like joining a free-floating seminar on just about everything. Night after night we would discuss the fate of the world until six o’clock in the morning. If some idea struck us as particularly inane we would ridicule it, in our superannuated adolescent fashion, by invoking the above injunction against eating beans. One of us had encountered it while reading ancient Greek philosophy and it seemed to epitomize the sort of foolishness that thousands of people take seriously. As we were later to discover, ideals, though they make admirable rallying points, when closely inspected, frequently fail the intelligibility test. Oftentimes downright squirrelly, they are not so much visions of a transcendent epoch to come as cartoon illusions dressed up to look substantial. Purporting to be solid and luminous, they tend instead to be dramatically incomplete and dangerously misleading.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes and References
For an extensive survey of utopianism see: Manuel, F. E. & Manuel F. P. (1979). Utopian Thought in the Western World. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
See: Gorman, P. (1979). Pythagoras: A Life. London: Routledge and Keegan Paul.
For a survey of Plato’s writings see: Edman, I. (Ed.) (1928). The Works of Plato; Jowett Translation. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Stone, I. F. (1988). The Trial of Socrates. Boston: Little, Brown.
Plato (1941). The Republic: Jowett translation. New York: The Modern Library.
The totalitarian aspects of left wing elitism are dissected in: Ellis, R. J. (1998). The Dark Side of the Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism in America. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press.
This seems to be the same attitude as displayed in Proudhon and Rousseau. Both deride property as an artificial invention that discourages sharing. See: Proudhon, P. J. [1840] (1994). What Is Property? Edited and translated by Donald R. Kelly & Bonnie G. Smith. New York: Cambridge University Press; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques [1762] (1913). The Social Contract. In G. D. H. Cole (Ed.), The Social Contract and Discourses. London: Dent.
Looking Backward, one of America’s most enduring Utopian novels, is equally hard on the family, literally predicting its abandonment. See: Bellamy, E. (1982). Looking Backward, 2000–1887. New York: Penguin.
For a sympathetic description see: Spiro, M. E. (1958). Children of the Kibbutz: A Study in Child Training and Personality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Mead, M. (1928). Coming of Age in Samoa. New York: William Morrow.
Watson was extreme. Despite being a psychologist, he seems to have had an emotion phobia. See: Buckley, K. W. (1989). Mechanical Man: John Broadus Watson and the Beginnings of Behaviorism. New York: The Guilford Press.
And a very extensive genre it is: Manuel, F. E. & Manuel F. P. (1979). op cit.
To put More in context read: Ridley, J. (1982). Statesman and Saint: Cardinal Wolsey, Sir Thomas More and the Politics of Henry VIII. New York: Viking Press.
More, T. (1964). Utopia. Edited by Edward Surtz. New Haven: Yale University Press.
For an introduction to the convoluted ways of intellectuals see: Johnson, P. (1988). Intellectuals. New York: Harper & Row.
For this sad tale see: Erickson, C. (1978). Bloody Mary. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
An up to date biography is: Schom, A. (1998). Napoleon Bonaparte. New York: HarperCollins.
A popular account of Hitler’s life is found in: Toland, J. (1976). Adolf Hitler. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Hitler, A. (1972). Mein Kampf. Translated by Ralph Manheim. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
See: Holwerda, D. E. (Ed.) (1976). Exploring the Heritage of John Calvin. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House.
A talented, but troubled man. See: Reimann, V. (1976). Goebbels. Translated by Stephan Wendt. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
For a sympathetic chronicle of Mao’s life, see: Terrill, R. (1980). A Biography: Mao. New York: Harper & Row.
See: Chandler, D. (1992). Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Among the chroniclers of the early church’s veiws on sexuality are: Ranke-Heinemann, U. (1990). Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality, and the Catholic Church. New York: Doubleday; Meeks, W. A. (1993). The Origins of Christian Morality: The First Two Centuries. New Haven: Yale University Press; Straus, B. R. (1987). The Catholic Church. London: David & Charles.
Augustine, St. (1961). The Confessions. Translated by R. S. Pine-Coffin. Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books.
The following account of the Shakers, including its quotes, is drawn from: Desroche, H. (1971). The American Shakers: From Neo-Christianty to Presocialism. Amherst. MA: University of Massachuesetts Press; Horgan, E. R. (1982). The Shaker Holy Land. Harvard, MA: The Harvard Common Press.
Millay, N. (1956). Edna St. Vincent Millay: The Collected Poems. New York: Harper & Row.
A textured and supportive life of Freud is available in: Gay, P. (1988). Freud: A Life for Our Time. New York: W. W. Norton.
Serious in the extreme, Philip Rieff makes it plain that Freud was at heart a moralist. See: Rieff, P. (1961). Freud: The Mind of a Moralist. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor.
Russell, B. (1951). The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell. Boston: Little, Brown.
Russell, B. (1929). Marriage and Morals. New York: H. Liveright.
Although contemporary textbooks on marriage and the family often ignore the evidence, the lack of commitment in trial marriages seems to doom them to greater dissolution. See: Glen, N. (1997). Closed Hearts, Closed Minds: The Textbook Story of Marriage. New York: Institute for American Values.
Hefner, H. (Ed.) (1974). The Twentieth Anniversary Playboy Reader. Chicago: Playboy Press.
The standard social work interpretation is that the historic distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor is invalid. For dissenting views see: Gordon, L. (1994). Pittied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare. New York: Free Press; Olasky, M. (1992). The Tragedy of American Compassion. Washington, D.C.: Regnery.
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1999 Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
(1999). Dreams or Nightmares. In: The Limits of Idealism. Clinical Sociology: Research and Practice. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-585-29601-2_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-585-29601-2_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-0-306-46211-5
Online ISBN: 978-0-585-29601-2
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive