Article: Gilded Age Utopias of Incorporation(*).(commercialism)

ONE OF THE MORE PERPLEXING COMPLICATIONS facing scholars of the utopian imagination is the fact that, as Dean MacCannell observes, modern commercial culture is "more revolutionary in-itself than the most revolutionary consciousness so far devised" (12). Krishan Kumar, following Robert Nozick, uses the term "meta-utopia" to signify how America has been a "place which freely allows people to form and re-form themselves into utopian communities of diverse kinds" (81). As such America has encouraged a long history of "pragmatic utopianisms" that complicate the development of "literary" utopian expression. Jean Baudrillard, taking the same observation a step farther, insists ...

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