A Modern Utopia"Well's uncanny ability to highlight the problems which are now most acute and supply tentative solutions that allow a maximum of individual freedom merits serious consideration. Recommended reading for students and teachers dealing with government, science, and the contemporary dilemma of a world facing war, famine, and racial unrest."--Choice A Modern Utopia is one of the first important blueprints for the modern welfare state and an early major statement of Wells's idea of the World State, an idea that is perhaps his greatest contribution to the intellectual history of this century. In this "quintessential utopia," as Lewis Mumford calls it, Wells "sums up and clarifies the utopias of the past, and brings them into contact with the world of the present." The Bison Books edition, with an introduction by Mark R. Hillegas, associate professor of English at Southern Illinois University, brings back into print a work that has stimulated three generations of thinkers. "This is not flight into fancy no voyage into whimsy. It is a sober attempt to imagine what kind of society men would create if they really used their heads and worked at it. The result is one of the most plausible utopias ever written."--Chad Walsh, From Utopia to Nightmare "It is a beautiful Utopia beautifully seen and beautifully thought: and it has in it some of that flavor of airy unrestraint one finds in News from Nowhere."--Van Wyck Brooks, The World of H.G. Wells |
Contents
I | 1 |
CHAPTER THE SECOND | 31 |
CHAPTER THE THIRD | 70 |
CHAPTER THE FOURTH | 113 |
CHAPTER THE FIFTH | 135 |
PAGE | 175 |
CHAPTER THE SEVENTH | 214 |
CHAPTER THE EIGHTH | 247 |
CHAPTER THE NINTH | 258 |
CHAPTER THE TENTH | 318 |
CHAPTER THE ELEVENTH | 352 |
SCEPTICISM OF THE INSTRUMENT 5 | 375 |
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Common terms and phrases
Airolo altogether Aristotle balance of happiness beautiful become botanist Bureau de Change Chinaman citizens civilised classification comes common course double doubt dream dress earth earthly economic emotional energy example face fact feel freedom Frognal generalisations hand houses human idea ideal imagination individual inferior insist intellectual kinetic Knights Templars labour laws liberty live London look Lucerne marriage matter ment mental mind minimum wage Modern Utopia moral mountain natural official organisation pass perfect perhaps philosophy physical planet Plato poietic political population possible present queer question race realise Realp reason regard road Rule samurai seems social sort species sporadic groups suppose talk terrestrial things thought tion turn unique universal Urseren Utopists Wells's Wellsian whole woman women Wordsworth Donisthorpe