POS 201: Lecture 9-Utopian Political Thought, Intro to Looking Backward

An introduction to utopian political thought and Edward Bellamy's novel Looking Backward. This video is part of the online course POS 201-Intro to Political Theory taught in the Political Science Department at the University of Maine.

[@roxanashirazi8694]

If everyone thought that reaching a better world results in danger and violence, there would be no suffrage movement or civil rights movement. Sometimes one must take the risk to achieve freedom.

[@joefinn2126]

"Looking Backward" and its sequel, "Equality" are without peer in providing concrete and detailed visions of a near-utopian American society. Bellamy's genius lay in his grounding of this vision in patriotic American ideals enshrined in the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence and the Golden Rule. Recent works such as "Reclaiming the State," by Mitchell and Fuzi, have returned to Bellamy's insight that the cause of national sovereignty must be reclaimed by the left from the right. The goal should indeed be to make America great--not again, but in a way it never has been for ALL of its people. Bellamy has given us an ingenious and functional wheel, in need only of 21st Century updating, especially on environmental issues. Rather than try to reinvent the wheel, today's left would be wise to revise Bellamy's work and roll with it. An interesting connection appears between Bellamy's vision and the increasingly popular Modern Monetary Theory movement. kzbin.info/www/bejne/h2K2fp2bqt55Y7s

[@RadicalShiba1917]

Great lecture, but I'm not sure I see much connection between Bellamy and Marx the way that you do. As you point out, News From Nowhere was one of the many books written as a response to and critique of Looking Backward. It seems to be the work that far more embodies the ideas of Marx, functioning as the Marxist critique of Bellamy.

[@vinapocalypse]

Indeed, Marx's, Engles's et al conception of scientific socialism was one based on having an ideal (post-money, classless, etc) but understanding and using real, existing historical conditions to figure out how to get there. Lenin, Mao, even Deng built on that and furthered their own countries' respective revolutions with their specific conditions in mind. Utopian socialism never offers a road just a picture of a goal (indeed Marx and Morris' visions are much more advanced than Bellamy's)