Utopia gets a bad rap. For a generation of scarred scholars, including Hannah Arendt, Karl Popper, Isaiah Berlin, and others, Auschwitz was Utopia's inevitable omega point. For them, Utopia was the implacable enemy of pluralism, freedom, and individualism-the very core of liberalism. After Hitler and Stalin, the Utopian virtues of harmony, leisure, peace, prosperity, pleasure, health, cooperation, freedom, and love seemed simply part of a rhetoric of deception and delusion, values that could not be produced by-were, indeed, antithetical to-Utopian styles of desire. This anti-utopianism was an attack not simply on a mode of thought but on the horrifying political project to realize "utopia," which they had all witnessed.
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