© Columbia University Press
Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age
Paper, 240 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-12895-7
$24.95
/ £16.95
March, 2005
Cloth, 240 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-12894-0
$75.00
/ £52.00
"In four beautifully crafted, highly allusive essays, Jacoby excavates a plethora of utopian movements...with the aim of getting readers to dream of a better world." — Publishers Weekly
"Like all of Russell Jacoby's books, Picture Imperfect is a timely, passionate, bravely unfashionable intervention. . . . this is a book to be treasured." — Terry Eagleton, Nation
"A timely collection of essays...Essential." — Tikkun
"In Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age Jacoby... asks the big, subversive questions." — Michael Hirsch, Dissident Voice
"Jacoby offers a provocative, concise, and well-researched book-length essay about traditional utopian thinking... Recommended." — Choice
"By attuning our ears to the distant murmur, Russell Jacoby has performed an invaluable service in Picture Imperfect." — Douglas W. Texter, H-Net Reviews
"Like most of Jacoby's work, Picture Imperfect is sui generis. It is an erudite polemic, spirited and consistently engaging. The writing is epigrammatic and the scholarship broad-ranging." — James Miller, New School of Social Research, author of The Passion of Michel Foucault
"Russell Jacoby challenges the all too common wisdom that utopian dreams breed dystopian political nightmares. His passionate brief for a distinctively non-totalitarian strand of utopian thought indicts a contemporary failure of imagination. Writing on the sharp edge of the divide between utopians and anti-utopian liberals, he cuts through much of the pretense of a generation of political philosophers who famously regarded passionate hope and totalitarian genocide as issuing from the same source. His spirited, indeed utopian essay, restores the “anarchic breeze” that informed those iconoclastic thinkers for whom neglected, spurned, and new ideas were not anathema." — Anson Rabinbach, Princeton University, author of In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals Between Apocalypse and Enlightenment