Mountain of Paradise challenges conventional taxonomies of world civilizations by introducing a new and formidable candidate: the civilization of Greater California presently incubating as the evolution of California into a veritable -nation-state- or -world commonwealth- according to contemporary commentators and scholars. Through a series of reflective essays it clarifies the momentous implications of this claim by a thorough account of the genealogical origins of -California-, permutation into its speculative moment of self-identity thanks to prolonged creative interchange with European...

Shortly after the middle of the eighteenth century a number of thinkers from the German-speaking lands began to create a paradigm drawn from their impressions of a distant historical reality, ancient Athens; added to it a new mode of thought, modern dialectics; and at times even paid homage to the ancient Greek deity Dionysos, to materialize their longing for an ideal. The influence of these forces came to permeate modern German consciousness, deifying the concept and activity of art, reviving the Platonic (and Sanskrit) vision of the cosmos as play and aesthetic creation, and projecting a...