Thinking Utopia: Steps into Other Worlds

Jörn Rüsen · Michael Fehr · Thomas W. Rieger

jul 2005 · Making Sense of History Libro 4 · Berghahn Books

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After the breakdown of socialist and communist systems in the East, it had become fashionable to declare the so-called "end of utopia" ("end of history," "end of narratives"). The authors of this volume do not share this view but think that it is time to rehabilitate utopian thought. The political concept of Utopia that has given its name to these transcendental projections onto the world has been too narrow to describe and analyze the moving forces of the mind perceiving human existence beyond reality. By broadening the perspectives of utopian studies, these essays enable the reader to reconstruct scholarly paradigms and strategies of utopian, complex and holistic thinking in modern cosmology, philosophy, sociology, in literary, historical and political sciences, and to compare traditions and ways of Western utopian thought to the practice in the East.

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Michael Fehr has been Director of the Karl Ernst Osthaus-Museum of the City of Hagen, Germany, since 1987. Prior to that he was Assistant Professor at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal, and Deputy Director at the Art Museum of the City of Bochum. He has curated numerous exhibitions on contemporary art, cultural history and city planning, and, in the 1970s, created and organized for almost one decade the Kemnade International, a cultural festival for immigrant workers and their families in Germany. He has published extensively on contemporary art as well as on theory of museums. He teaches museology at University of Bonn.