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

This collection of essays by international scholars from various disciplines addressed the theme of technological pessimism-the conviction that technology has given us the means not to achieve unlimited progress but to destroy ourselves and our most cherished values.

HOWARD P. SEGAL, FOR THE EDITORS In November 1979 the Humanities Department of the University of Michi gan's College of Engineering sponsored a symposium on ''Technology and Pessimism. " The symposium included scholars from a variety of fields and carefully balanced critics and defenders of modern technology, broadly defined. Although by this point it was hardly revolutionary to suggest that technology was no longer automatically equated with optimism and in turn with unceasing social advance, the idea of linking technology so explicitly with pessimism was bound to attract attention. Among...

This brief history connects the past and present of utopian thought, from the first utopias in ancient Greece, right up to present day visions of cyberspace communities and paradise.

• Explores the purpose of utopias, what they reveal about the societies who conceive them, and how utopias have changed over the centuries
• Unique in including both non-Western and Western visions of utopia
• Explores the many forms utopias have taken - prophecies and oratory, writings, political movements, world's fairs, physical communities - and also discusses high-tech and cyberspace...