Proposed Roads to Freedom

The attempt to conceive imaginatively a better ordering of human society than the chaos in which mankind has existed, is by no means modern - it is at least as old as Plato, whose 'Republic' set the model for the Utopias of subsequent philosophers. Whoever contemplates the world in the light of an ideal - whether what he seeks be intellect, or art, or love, or simple happiness, or all together - must feel a sorrow in the evils that men allow to continue, and - if he be a man of force and vital energy - a desire to lead men to the realization of the good which inspires his creative vision.