American utopia : literature, society, and the human use of human beings / Peter Swirski.

Includes bibliographical references.

What if you could? -- Little commonwealth -- Defense of poetry -- Enter the chameleon -- East 11th Street -- The shape of things to come -- Earth abides -- You tell me that it's evolution -- Proverbial wisdom -- The islands of the day before -- Do the chronomotion with me -- The imp of the perverse -- Oryx and crick -- The advocate's devil -- Talkin 'bout my gene-ration.

"From the Black Tuesday to the White House, from Plato to Robert Nozick, from Eugene Debs to Richard Nixon, from Peter Cornelis Plockhoy to the hippie communes of the Sixties, from universal basic income to utopian basic income, from proverbial wisdom to multilevel selection, from Big Data to paleomorality, from Prisoner's Dilemma to social-engineering Israeli kindergartens, from time travel to gene engineering, from the pretzel logic of meritocracy to de-aggressing humanity, American Utopia maps the pitfalls and windfalls of prosocial reform in the name of the human use of human beings"-- Provided by publisher.