Defoe and the Distance to Utopia

By J. H. Pearl

In the wake of recent political shifts and the dystopian flavour they carry for many, Jason Pearl looks to the works of Daniel Defoe and the lessons they can teach us about bringing utopia home. more

Get Thee to a Phalanstery: or, How Fourier Can Still Teach Us to Make Lemonade

By Dominic Pettman

Hot on the heels of the French Revolution — by way of extravagant orgies, obscure taxonomies, and lemonade seas — Charles Fourier offered up his blueprint for a socialist utopia, and in the process also one of the most influential early critiques of capitalism. Dominic Pettman explores Fourier’s radical, bizarre, and often astonishingly modern ideas, and how they might guide us in our own troubled times. more

Lord of Misrule: Thomas Morton’s American Subversions

By Ed Simon

When we think of early New England, we tend to picture stern-faced Puritans and black-hatted Pilgrims, but in the same decade that these more famous settlers arrived, a man called Thomas Morton founded a very different kind of colony — a neo-pagan experiment he named Merrymount. Ed Simon explores the colony’s brief existence and the alternate vision of America it represents. more

Designing the Sublime: Boullée and Ledoux’s Architectural Revolution

By Hugh Aldersey-Williams

As dissatisfaction with the old regime fermented into revolutionary upheaval in late-eighteenth century France, two architects cast off the decorative excesses of the Baroque and Rococo styles and sought out bold, new geometries. Hugh Aldersey-Williams tours the sublime and mostly unrealized designs of Étienne-Louis Boullée and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, discovering utopian ideals crafted in cubes, spheres, and pyramids. more