Explore "The Story of Utopias" by Lewis Mumford on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
How we reckon up accounts with the one-sided utopias of the partisans.
There have been many periods when men did not think it possible to make life in the community reach much higher levels than it had attained, without working a change upon human nature. The working of this change has been one of the chief preoccupations of religion; but no one can pretend that it has met, during the historic period, with any overwhelming success. In the eighteenth century men became impatient with the ministrations of institutional religion, and sought to effect an improvement in the common life by a different method -- by improving the political, economic, and social mechanisms of society.