A Food Utopia? Italian Colonial Visions of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, 1911-13.

This article explores the uses of utopian rhetoric of food plenty in Italian colonial visions before the First World War. It examines the travel writings of three leading Italian journalists, Enrico Corradini, Arnaldo Fraccaroli, and Giuseppe Bevione, who visited the Ottoman provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica and campaigned for their colonization by Liberal Italy. By reconstructing their utopian rhetoric of food plenty, this article seeks to show the relevance of arguments about food and agriculture produce to early twentieth century colonial visions, shedding light on an aspect of Italian political thought that has been hitherto marginalized in existing historical scholarship.

Failed utopias and practical chemistry: the Priestleys, the Du Ponts, and the transmission of transatlantic science, 1770-1820.

Eighteenth-century events, replete with Dickensian dualities, brought two Enlightenment families to America. Pierre-Samuel du Pont and Joseph Priestley contemplated relocating their families decades before immigrating. After arriving, they discovered deficiencies in education and chemistry. Their experiences were indicative of the challenges in transmitting transatlantic chemistry. The Priestleys were primed to found an American chemical legacy. Science connected Priestley to British manufacturers, Continental chemists, and American statesmen. Priestley's marriage into the Wilkinson ironmaster dynasty, and Lunar Society membership, helped his sons apprentice, and befriend manufacturer-chemist Thomas Cooper. However, ideological persecution forced them from England. Priestley's plans for his sons to inherit Wilkinson's ironworks evaporated; in America, efforts to establish manufactories, colonies, farms, and a college miscarried. Cooper taught college chemistry, but his materialism provoked dismissals. The Du Ponts were unlikely founders of an industrial-chemistry empire. Du Pont's philosophy promulgated that agriculture, not industry, produced wealth. Eleuthère-Irénée apprenticed in France's gunpowder administration, however, plans for his succession died and director Antoine Lavoisier, a family friend, was executed. E.-I. and Du Pont's arrest precipitated relocation to America. Du Pont's utopian colony and schemes proved unrealistic. Nevertheless, E.-I.'s gunpowder manufactory-utilizing transatlantic contacts and privileged knowledge of advanced French chemistry-succeeded through practical application.

Robert Owen, utopian socialism and social transformation.

This paper critically scrutinizes accounts of Robert Owen's life and works focusing on his purported "utopianism" and his supposedly deficient "socialism." It suggests that such positions have relied on questionable assertions about the potential of particular modes of social transformation, and a failure to acknowledge the distinction Owen makes between the practical arrangements necessary to begin the process of transformation, and those arrangements that would ultimately prevail in "the new moral world." It also argues that such accounts may contribute to the development of fatalistic narratives surrounding cooperative values and projects involving strategic compromise. In response, the paper reconsiders the significance of Owen through the lens of a "strategic presentism" that considers how Owen's ideas can be thought of as significant contributions to theorizing social transformation.

[A utopian episode - Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker in the networks of the Max-Planck Society]. / Eine utopische Episode--Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker in den Netzwerken der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft.

Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker was a key figure in the history of the Max Planck Society (MPS). This essay contextualises his work with the development of the MPS, highlighting the institutional and personal networks upon which it was based. Some of the stations addressed in the following are his role in the German Uranium Project, in preparing the Mainau Declaration, the Göttingen Manifesto, and the Memorandum of Tübingen as well as his involvement in the foundation of the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Human Development and his own MPI for the Research of Living Conditions in the Modern World located in Starnberg. The relationship between Weizsäcker and Hellmut Becker, long-time friend and founding director of the MPI for Human Development, will be of particular interest. Another issue broached here is the connection between natural science and the humanities in Weizsäcker's work, and subsequently the relation between these two science cultures in the MPS. Finally, we look at the challenges Weizsäcker's work could present to the MPS today.

[The "utopian" national socialism - a mutual dispute in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker?]. / Der "utopische" Nationalsozialismus--Ein gemeinsamer Fluchtpunkt im Denken von Martin Heidegger und Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker?

In a letter to his wife from October 14, 1943, Werner Heisenberg describes a fierce clash with Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. The sudden conflict raises numerous questions, two of which are tackled here. First: How is now the friendly relationship between Heisenberg and Weizsäcker in the postwar years to be understood? The answer is: as a strategic performance. Second: How are the radical opinions to be explained that Weizsäcker expressed at the time? A thorough reconstruction of the lifelong connection that Weizsäcker maintained with Martin Heidegger and Heidegger's philosophy gives the answer: the young Weizsäcker was fired up by the "utopian" National Socialism with which Heidegger trumped the real existing.

A hospital in Ilkhanid Iran: toward a socio-economic reconstruction of the Rab'-i Rashidi.

In the first decade of the fourteenth century, Rashid al-D?n Fazl Allah penned a remarkable endowment deed in which he meticulously detailed his plans for the creation of a utopian community. He named it the Rab'-i Rashid. In this document, he provides socio-economic data concerning the day-to-day operations of this settlement unparalleled in comparable texts. This article focuses on the hospital ward of the Rab'-i Rashid, and provides a broader historical context for this medieval hospital and its personnel by examining the financial and monetary information in the endowment deed in order to piece together the inner workings of this community. In so doing, we are granted a rare opportunity to explore the daily lives of ordinary people whose endeavors, however significant, often went unnoticed.

Back to the garden: new visions of posthuman futures.

This article examines the contemporary phenomenon of imagining a world from which people have been removed. Such a trend speaks to a utopian impulse, but one that is not comparable to traditional utopian ideas. What does the popularity of books like The World without Us or documentaries such as The Future is Wild, Aftermath: Population Zero, and Life after People say about the current status of utopian ideals, environmental thought, and our cultural understanding of humanity's place in the nature order?

Social individualism: Walter Gropius and his appropriation of Franz Müller-Lyer's idea of a new man.

In 1929, Walter Gropius developed the "High-Rise Steel Frame Apartment Building" that was based on theories about the emergence of a New Man put forward by sociologist Franz Müller-Lyer. In his lecture at the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne conference in 1929, Gropius appropriated Müller-Lyer's sociology in order to promote and prompt the re-development of high-rise tenements and master households. Gropius' 1931 contribution to the Deutsche Bauausstellung in Berlin incorporated a full-scale community lounge and a recreation area with sporting equipment, as well as a model and plans for a "High-Rise Steel Frame Apartment Building" that were designed in accordance with Müller-Lyer's theories. While it shows Müller-Lyer's influence, the boxing equipment found in the recreation area reflects the importance that sport, and boxing in particular, had gained after 1900. Boxing was perceived as a sport that would not only further fitness but also raise the spirits and help the inhabitant to succeed in the modern urban environment. By providing boxing equipment, Müller-Lyer's vision, which envisaged master households as furthering a community of peaceful individuals living in a condition of mutual trust, is weakened. In 1923, the sociologist Helmuth Plessner had regarded utopian visions of ideal communities as antithesis to actual events in the Weimar Republic. The embracing of theories that promised an evolutionary and linear development towards peaceful communities can be regarded as a counterreaction to a present that was perceived as an imperfect and temporary condition. Furthermore, Gropius' appropriation of Müller-Lyer's sociology not only helped to distinguish his position from Marxist and socialist theories but also illustrated the contemporary tendency to accept utopian ideas while simultaneously doubting the practicality of some.

Utopianism in the British evolutionary synthesis.

In this paper I propose a new interpretation of the British evolutionary synthesis. The synthetic work of J. B. S. Haldane, R. A. Fisher and J. S. Huxley was characterized by both an integration of Mendelism and Darwinism and the unification of different biological subdisciplines within a coherent framework. But it must also be seen as a bold and synthetic Darwinian program in which the biosciences served as a utopian blueprint for the progress of civilization. Describing the futuristic visions of these three scientists in their synthetic heydays, I show that, despite a number of important divergences, their biopolitical ideals could be biased toward a controlled and regimented utopian society. Their common ideals entailed a social order where liberal and democratic principles were partially or totally suspended in favor of bioscientific control and planning for the future. Finally, I will argue that the original redefinition of Darwinism that modern synthesizers proposed is a significant historical example of how Darwinism has been used and adapted in different contexts. The lesson I draw from this account is a venerable one: that, whenever we wish to define Darwinism, we need to recognize not only its scientific content and achievements but expose the other traditions and ideologies it may have supported.

A model of consensus formation for reconciling nursing's disciplinary matrix.

With questions raised as to whether or not nursing knowledge should be developed from extant conceptual/theoretical models or from practice-based environments, this paper utilizes Kuhn's disciplinary matrix and Laudan's model of consensus formation to explore the changing nature of the discipline's structural matrix. Kuhn's notion that a discipline's structural matrix includes symbolic generalizations, models and exemplars, and Laudan's view that a maturing discipline embraces factual, methodological, and axiological (goals and aims) knowledge, and that context and discourse are also involved in advancing a discipline is described as a means for reconciling the source of nursing knowledge. This paper posits that shared axiological goals connect both theorists and practitioners, and resolve potential conflicts as to viable sources of nursing knowledge. Through shared goals that include humanization, meaning, quality of life, caring, consciousness, transcendence, and presence, which bridge both theoretical and practice approaches, nursing's charge to contribute to the good of society is fulfilled.

Movement as utopia.

Opposition to utopianism on ontological and political grounds has seemingly relegated it to a potentially dangerous form of antiquated idealism. This conclusion is based on a restrictive view of utopia as excessively ordered panoptic discursive constructions. This overlooks the fact that, from its inception, movement has been central to the utopian tradition. The power of utopianism indeed resides in its ability to instantiate the tension between movement and place that has marked social transformations in the modern era. This tension continues in contemporary discussions of movement-based social processes, particularly international migration and related identity formations, such as open borders transnationalism and cosmopolitanism. Understood as such, utopia remains an ongoing and powerful, albeit problematic instrument of social and political imagination.

[The two (and more) cultures of the "clone". Utopia and fiction in post-war discourses of life sciences]. / Die zwei (und mehr) Kulturen des "Klons". Utopie und Fiktion im biowissenschaftlichen Diskurs der Nachkriegszeit.

Since the late 1950s, "two cultures" has become a catch phrase for describing a deep divide between science and literature. When Charles P. Snow, who initiated this discussion, introduced the notion of "two cultures" in a lecture at the University in Cambridge in 1959, he referred to an incompatibility of scientific and literary worldviews in Western Societies. His thesis of two contradicting cultures immediately received a huge variety of different responses from philosophers, scientists, novelists and literary scholars. However, this article argues that this widespread debate was part of a broader post-war discourse on the impact of modern science on society, in which especially the idea of "scientific progress" was at stake. Central to this debate was the question of how scientific and technological progress could affect the notion of the "human" itself. The paper analyses the emerging discourse on cloning against this background. The constitutive role of fiction and imagination in both fields, science and literature, is explored by tracing the scientific, utopian and literary cultures in which figures of human clones have taken different shapes since the 1960s. At that time, scientists developed utopian views in which the "clone" became a metaphor for future possibilities of transcending and reshaping the human nature. Science fiction writers reacted to this by portraying the human clone as an individual and by depicting human clone figures in a psychological way

Natureza, colonização e utopia na obra de João Daniel / Nature, colonization, and utopia in the works of João Daniel

Este artigo analisa alguns aspectos do Tesouro descoberto no rio Amazonas, obra composta pelo padre João Daniel (1722-1776), missionário jesuíta no Estado do Maranhão e Grão-Pará entre 1741 e 1757, desterrado para Lisboa dois anos antes do banimento da Companhia de Jesus da América portuguesa. A obra, registro singular da Amazônia de meados do século XVIII, oferece um compêndio das riquezas e potencialidades da região. Sobretudo, apresenta um projeto para a colonização crítico ao modelo então em vigor e que se apresenta como um conjunto integrado que considera as condições ambientais, a técnica e as relações sociais na organização da sociedade local. Ao colocar no centro de seu projeto a questão do trabalho, João Daniel recupera, como metáfora, a idéia - marcante na literatura missionária do século XVII e praticamente abandonada no século XVIII - da Amazônia como paraíso terrestre.

The article analyzes certain aspects of "Tesouro descoberto no rio Amazonas" (Treasure discovered on the Amazon River), written by João Daniel (1722-76) during his time in the State of Maranhão e Grão-Pará as a Jesuit missionary between 1741 and 1757; the priest was banished to Lisbon two years before the Company of Jesus was expelled from Portuguese America. This unique record of the mid-eighteenth-century Amazon is a compendium on the region's wealth and potential. Most importantly, it put forward a colonization project that was critical of the model then in place; the new proposal was an integrated whole which took environmental conditions, technology, and social relations into account in the organization of local society. In centering his project on the issue of labor, João Daniel revives, as a metaphor, the idea of the Amazon as an earthly paradise-a notion that had characterized seventeenth-century missionary literature but was practically abandoned in the eighteenth century.