Technological Utopianism in American Culture: Twentieth Anniversary Edition

by Howard P. Segal

Overview

Featuring twenty-five writers in all, this book includes Howard P. Segal's acclaimed work on utopian visionaries.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780815630616
Publisher:	Syracuse University Press
Publication date:	11/07/2005
Edition description:	Anniversary
Pages:	340
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.78(d)

Editorial Reviews

Technological Utopianism in American Culture is an important contribution to the histories of technical and utopian thought and to the intellectual history of modern organizational society. Appropriately skeptical of its subjects and their ideas, it also furthers the difficult task of demystifying such loaded terms as 'progress' and 'technology.

Business History Review

[Segal] has succeeded better than any other scholar in his attempt to define how a specific type of American utopian writing fits into and reflects important historical contexts and trends.

American Literary Realism

As Segal concludes, our society has constructed the externals of technological utopias here and there, but it has not encouraged the utopian values of selflessness and social cohesion. Still, technological utopianism remains a significant exercise in social thought. For all the limits of their answers, these visionaries raised a basic question we still face: how to relate technological progress to social progress

Technology Review

[Segal's] final chapter . . . on the uses of utopianism today takes him into terrain where platitude usually reigns; but here, in fact, [Segal's writing is] at its most impressive, even as he becomes something of an advocate. He provides a rationale for utopian thinking that is at once intelligent and eloquent, as good as any I have encountered and much better than most-also, far more sophisticated and convincing than anything found in the writings of the technological utopians themselves. . . . All should read and profit from his peroration.

Canadian Review of American Studies