“The Utopian Origins of Economic Growth”

Here’s an account of the passages that I found particularly interesting in Steven Stoll’s The Great Delusion: A Mad Inventor, Death in the Tropics, and the Utopian Origins of Economic Growth.
I’m interesting in it because Stoll uses John Etzler, the subject of my first narrative chapter, to explain and epitomize the kind of Enlightenment thinking [...]

Utopianism, Etzler, and Technology’s Impact on Democracy

I’m increasingly convinced, as any good biographer should be, that J.A. Etzler was a prophet, a futurist par excellence in a time when futurists were not employed by Nokia. He foresaw, to greater or lesser degrees, plastics, concrete, solar thermal power, synthetic fibers for clothing, apartments with elevators, and pumped storage to smooth out renewable [...]

Etzler Texts and Criticism

Here’s some quick links to Etzler’s works and criticisms thereof.

The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men, Without Labour, by Powers of Nature and Machinery: An Address to All Intelligent Men by J.A. Etzler himself
Paradise (to be) Regained by Henry David Thoreau
John Adolphus Etzler, context and life history by the historian Joel Nydahl
Robert Owen, influential [...]

Starting from The Paradise Within Reach of All Men

John Adolphus Etzler was a first-rate utopian in an era of utopians. Throughout the middle 1800s, all kinds of prophets and projectors, as they were called, started up little communities to literally live out social ideas. If you believed in the Enlightenment ideal of progress in civilization, surely it wasn’t too hard to imagine the [...]