Global Utopias Project Resource Guide

"This book, with its attention to literature and the visual arts as well as traditional non-fiction sources, provides a distinctive, wide-ranging exploration of utopia and education. Utopia is examined not as a model of social perfection but as an active, ongoing, imaginative educational process the building of better worlds" (from WorldCat).

"This book examines Baconian utopias as blueprints for a scientific sociology of knowledge that founded a new social and economic world in the seventeenth century. Looking backward, the author begins with More's Utopia and Shakespeare's The Tempest, static state utopias designed to woo us toward a moral as opposed to a scientific reform. To these he then contrasts the primary subjects of his study--Bacon's New Atlantis, the Commonwealth educational utopias, and the utopianism of Adam Smith and his Utilitarian followers. These later utopias increasingly point to an ideal world to be dominated by a science linked to technology, compelled education, and competitive capitalism" (from WorldCat).

"Focuses on the key ideas in the work of John Dewey and their relevance for the world today. The author does this by imagining continuation of highly evocative article that Dewey published in the New York Times in 1933. Dewey wrote from the posture of having visited Utopia" (From WorldCat).

Free full text on Internet Archive.

"In Searching for Utopia, Hanna Holborn Gray reflects on the nature of the university from the perspective of today's research institutions. In particular, she examines the ideas of former University of California president Clark Kerr as expressed in The Uses of the University, written during the tumultuous 1960s. She contrasts Kerr's vision of the research-driven "multiveristy" with the traditional liberal educational philosophy espoused by Kerr's contemporary, former University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins. Gray's insightful analysis shows that both Kerr, widely considered a realist, and Hutchins, seen as an oppositional idealist, were utopians" (from WorldCat).