In the seventeenth century British natural philosophers explored the cognitive value of mechanical trades. From the beginning, these explorations of down-to-earth manual processes were expressed in oblique and ironic texts. In utopian fictions by Thomas More, Francis Bacon and Gabriel Plattes, mechanical trades were presented as at once near-at-hand and alien to the world of books and codified knowledge. Bacon’s mid-century followers tried to negotiate these difficulties in plans to compile a comprehensive ‘History of Trades’. In the period’s most widely circulated didactic text, Izaac Walton’s Compleat Angler, the tacit and haptic dimension of a humble pass-time was explored through genial satire and eccentric textual design. Later, one highly literate artisan, the printer and instrument maker Joseph Moxon, gave thought to the difference between the artisanal expertise he employed as a manual technician and the theoretical knowledge he dealt with as a writer and fellow of the Royal Society.

The mock arts written by Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope and their circle touched on issues of mechanical instruction, but their satire depended on its application to incongruously non-mechanical subjects. It was in Gulliver’s Travels that Swift turned more directly to descriptions of material production and mechanical ingenuity. The framing of those descriptions in a travel narrative recalls Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Both texts reduced scenes of human ingenuity and manufacture to a proto-anthropological ground zero in distant and solitary locations. But reading Gulliver and Crusoe from a mock-technical perspective reveals a surprising reversal in their authors’ attitudes to mechanical ingenuity. Defoe, the propagandist for commerce, is sceptical about the value and cognitive significance of handicraft skill. Swift, by contrast, uses his commentary on mechanical technique to depict different richly-imagined ecologies of mind in the four parts of Gulliver’s Travels.

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 proclaimed its goal as the creation of ‘new people’: the transformation of human bodies and minds to correspond to the transformation of society. Literature became a space in which this new model of human life could be explored. This chapter traces the genealogy of the ‘new person’ from the nineteenth century to the figure of the ideal worker in Socialist Realist texts of the 1930s and beyond. The temporal focus of the chapter lies in the decade following 1917, when urgent but often contradictory political imperatives shaped the new person in literary texts. The chapter focusses on three key tensions: the relationship between the individual and collective; competing ideals of spontaneous energy and iron discipline; and the ideal of the transformation of body and mind. It shows how texts explore the relationship between abstract ideals of humanness and their lived reality.

Sanja Perovic’s chapter treats one of the most significant events in French history and an unprecedented period in theatre history. While the Revolution is often overlooked as a ‘dead period’ in French theatre, Perovic describes the scale and ambition of this extraordinary period. Never before had so many newcomers been able to forge successful careers as writers, actors and directors. Artistic innovation peaked, as revolutionary performance was more akin to what today is termed performance art, than to the kind of repertory theatre that preceded or followed it. Covering some of the major events, influential figures and key texts of this extremely fertile period, Perovic shows how theatre addressed the questions key to revolutionary culture: who is the audience? Where is it located? Who speaks on its behalf, and in what (theatrical, artistic) language? She concludes by contrasting two utopian works – Louis Beffroy de Reigny’s Nicodème dans la lune, ou la révolution pacifique (Nicodème Goes to the Moon, or the Peaceful Revolution, 1790) and Sylvain Maréchal’s Le Jugement dernier des rois (The Last Judgement of Kings, 1793) – with Beaumarchais’ La Mère coupable (The Guilty Mother, 1792), an altogether more sombre assessment of the effects of revolution.

This chapter suggests paths along which the futures of international relations as subject matter and International Relations as an academic discipline may develop. First, it stresses that the division between the ‘traditional’ and ‘new’ or ‘non-traditional’ agenda is intended as a device to facilitate learning for new students of international relations. Second, it outlines how novel intellectual developments in the field are shaping its future trajectory, with a specific focus on the continued development of a ‘Global IR’; IR’s increasing intellectual engagement with the sociology of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and STEM subjects as sources of conceptual innovation; and recent attempts to define the International as a condition of interactive multiplicity in an effort to clarify its distinctive contribution to the wider social sciences. Finally, the chapter notes that thinking about the future itself is becoming increasingly central to the discipline, with methods of counterfactual analysis, social imaginaries of future histories and utopian idealisations emerging as important theoretical and political projects.

American scholar and theorist David M. Halperin convincingly reveals the correlations between gay subjectivity and the Broadway musical and shows how the aesthetic form of the genre is in itself prototypically queer. Additionally, musicals can impart a sense of shared identity and cultural connections that ease the coming-out process, and they may confer common bonds within gay communities. Examining key historical eras and significant productions, this chapter builds on the work of D.A. Miller and Halperin and explores the sociological linkages between U. S. gay male culture and the musical, asking how the theatre became associated with male homosexuality. The study analyzes five musicals, Show Boat (1927), West Side Story (1957), La Cage Aux Folles (1983), Fun Home (2013), and A Strange Loop (2019). Each was originally produced in a notable moment in queer history and implicitly or explicitly manifests the tensions of its time. These five musicals reflect distinct ways musicals appeal to gay consumers and suggest opportunities for imagining possibilities of the gay genre as a queer utopia.

This essay revisits Emerson’s iconic transparent eyeball passage to rethink it as a moment of crossing over into queer embodiment and sensory expansion. If “trans” is “to move across” and “scandre” to climb, the point is not to rise above the physical world, but to move into it in such a way as to be in touch with its divine energies. To do so was to climb out of the enclosure and isolation of subjectivity and inhabit something much more capacious. Expanding the scope of Transcendentalism proper, the essay tracks this queer “I” into a number of other texts in which a similar experience or phenomenon of ecstasy opens onto novel social, sexual, and gender understandings. Margaret Fuller, Margaret Sweat, women trance writers, Walt Whitman, and Harriet Jacobs animate the “trans-” in Transcendentalism in their critical crossings and dynamic reassemblages of body and soul, self and other, and sex, gender, and race.

This article unpicks William Morris’s relationship to Marxism and the influence of Marxism on Morris’s social and political thought. It looks at Morris’s political activities in the 1880s and 1890s, including his membership of the Social Democratic Federation, the Socialist League and the Hammersmith Socialist Society, as well as his political speeches and journalism. Morris was clearly a socialist and described himself as a communist, had read and was influenced by Marx, and was also an active participant in socialist and Marxist debates both in Britain and Europe. But Marxism did not harden into an orthodoxy until the 1890s and has been contested ever since. It is thus very difficult to distinguish Marxist from other socialists in the period of Morris’s political engagement, as many themes were either shared or cut across this distinction. A key issue has been Morris’s utopianism, in particular News from Nowhere, written for the socialist paper Commonweal in 1890. Morris’s utopian method permeates his political essays: this is how it is, this is how it could/should be. This, perhaps, renders Morris more than Marxist, rather than less, in his insistence on keeping the vision of a better world active as an inspiration to political change.

This chapter tracks Morris’s biographical involvements with Oxford across his lifetime, and examines the role of Oxford, as both city and university, in prompting the radical political commitments of his later years. On his arrival there as an undergraduate in 1853, he was deeply disillusioned with the official teaching of the university, but made a number of formative friendships which opened to him new cultural and social horizons. The intellectual influence of John Ruskin interacted with Morris’s own intense response to Oxford’s ancient architecture to propel him further in the direction of social critique. In later years, as activist for the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, Morris threw himself into campaigns to protect key Oxford sites. As a socialist activist from 1883, he regarded Oxford as an important city to capture for the cause, lecturing there on socialism no less than six times (ably assisted by his old friend Charles Faulkner, who founded the Oxford branch of the Socialist League). We can also trace links between the Bodleian Library’s holdings and Morris’s own publishing venture, the Kelmscott Press; and Oxford plays a significant role in both the local imagery and overall geography of his utopia News from Nowhere.

Anamorphic, or distorted, images problematized the idea that viewing was a neutral act. Anamorphic images in print frequently took portraiture and topographic renderings as their subject matter, the same content around which visual acuity was being developed in printed books.

This chapter explores queer theatre’s continued preoccupation with history, arguing that its persistent attention to the past is part of a broader cultural project of recuperation. By attending to the legislative and social landscape that has criminalised and excluded LGBT+ people in Britain alongside historic moments of political change, the chapter illuminates how queer theatre has been configured by the historical conditions of its production. The chapter traces both the emergence of queer theatre and the sites it continues to move across, from fringe venues and queer arts festivals to national cultural events. It then examines the multiplicity of ways that histories have been produced, remade, or recovered in performance, drawing on the work of queer theatre makers including Gay Sweatshop, Emma Frankland, Nando Messias, David Hoyle, Drew Taylor-Wilson, Elgan Rhys, Rosana Cade, Jo Clifford, Milk Presents, DUCKIE, and Mojisola Adebayo. In continuing to return to the past, queer theatre recovers previously excluded marginalised lives and experiences in Britain, disrupts linear narratives of progress that accompany LGBT+ politics, and makes space for reimagined futures.

After evaluating the different elements explaining the power structure, the final chapters of the book are devoted to policy strategies. As an introduction to these, the chapter considers ethical issues: the individual-society opposition, the notion of the common good, the debate concerning the notion of justice (deontological versus consequentialist conceptions, meritocratic versus equalitarian views, equality of starting points versus equality of points of arrival), the different notions of freedom (such as positive versus negative freedom. Rossellis liberal socialism is illustrated, together with Croces criticism. Finally, a distinction is drawn between fanciful and realistic utopias.

Smiths analysis of the relationship between division of labour and the wealth of nations interpreted as per capita income is illustrated, through their connection with productivity. The division of labour also explains the existence and characteristics of social stratification and alienation. The classical tripartition in social classes – capitalists, landlords and workers – is discussed, considering both its explanatory value and its limits. Division of labour evolves through time: Babbages laws, Taylorism, the production chain, mechanization. The international division of labour and international value chains are considered. Marxs communist utopia with the disappearance of compulsory labour is recalled and confronted with less unrealistic utopias concerning the command structure within the firm or Ernesto Rossis labour army.

This chapter argues that an analysis of the racial capitalist state cracks open a subterranean archive of anarchism. Drawing on the queer utopianism of José Esteban Muñoz and the other-worldly space-jazz of Sun Ra, I theorise the antipolitical as a utopian worldmaking project which exists beyond bourgeois modernity and its ideas of science, rationality, and linear progress. I contrast this with recent attempts to ‘decolonise’ and ‘globalise’ anarchism, which largely have focused on radical labour and trade union movements in the global periphery. Unlike these traditions, the antipolitical is a promise of liberation whose source exceeds the profane and material, and which finds inspiration in dreams and fantasy, the magical and the divine.

This chapter begins with examples of experiments of building new universities or investing significant new resources in old universities in India and China to make the point that there seems to be more dynamism in the higher education sector these days in Asia than in America. The chapter moves from this to considering some of the core ideas of the university – to borrow the title of Cardinal Newman’s famous nineteenth-century book The Idea of the University – focusing on the ideas behind the liberal arts. I look at the relationship of the liberal arts to the humanities and consider some of the debates over both curricular requirements and canons as well as more broadly the way the humanities have often been narrowly identified with western civilization and specifically with departments of European language and literature (with a little history, philosophy, and classics thrown in). I consider the tensions and divides between the “arts” and the “sciences” as well as the residual investments of religious belief and values in many understandings and depictions of the liberal arts. I use this to consider issues related to free speech and open inquiry more broadly, as well as the residual tensions between teaching and research.

Victorian science fiction, imperial romance, sensation fiction, and utopian fiction helped readers cope with the immensity of the evolutionary time scale by stories that featured the progressive improvement of the species through the inheritance of acquired characteristics or by planned programs of eugenics. Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race, Haggard’s She, Collins’s The Legacy of Cain, and other works of Victorian genre fiction demonstrate some of the consequences of neo-Lamarckian thinking and serve as a warning to commentators on epigenetics who have suggested that it supports Lamarck’s views. In the hands of novelists, neo-Lamarckism buttressed notions of the inherited character of criminality, the progressive nature of evolution, and the tendency to “blame mothers” for degeneration of the species.

This chapter argues that it is difficult to think about Afrofuturism without considering diaspora. At the same time, it shows how speculative writing reimagines diasporic paradigms derived from historical trauma. It begins with the search for an alternative epistemology in early twentieth-century African American speculative writing, where a turn to an African utopia promises relief from anti-Black historical violence, figured as the healing of a scattered Black family reunited after a long estrangement. Such diasporic fantasies are frequently challenged by African thinkers, who refuse to let their homelands become fodder for imaginative projection alone and underscore fractures in transnational encounters. Tracing the flourishing of Afrofuturist paradigms since the 1990s, devoted to visions of a future where race neither magically disappears nor becomes all-encompassing, this chapter identifies currents of alienation and prophecy, dismemberment and remixing in a range of Afrofuturist projects, ending with the recent boom in African-centered perspectives.

This chapter analyses in detail the major part of Socrates’ long and complex discussion with Critias about the nature of temperance. Central to the discussion is Critias’ proposal that temperance is knowing oneself. It is argued that this discussion brings out several important ways in which Socrates and Critias differ from one another. One is in their respective attitudes towards interpretation: while Socrates is negligent of interpreting the words of others, Critias shows a keen interest in the interpretation of texts. A second difference is in the pair’s conception of self-knowledge. It is argued that Critias’ conception is based on what I call a social authority model, while Socrates’ is based on what I call a reflective model. It is shown that, despite the heavily aporetic nature of the discussion, a substantive conception of temperance can be gleaned from critical engagement with that discussion.