There is little quarrel about the poor state of leadership in the West at the moment. There has been for some time an alarming drift towards the anti-democratic and increasingly centralized abuses of power. Leadership has, frankly, begun to take on many of the characteristics of the cruel use of authority in dystopias such as Zamyatin’s We (1920), Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). The solution (one direction democracies could take) is to examine seriously the ideas about successful leadership in utopian thought especially as expressed in Plato’s Republic (ca 375 BCE), More’s Utopia (1516), Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), and Huxley’s Island (1962) as well as the insights from intentional communities (Tennessee’s The Farm and Virginia’s Twin Oaks among others). The lessons are there for the taking. All it requires (and this is a big requirement, I know) is common sense and courage. Much of the presentation will be focused on putting flesh on the bones of the first two paragraphs of this proposal as presented above. The rest of my time will be given over to trying to answer this question: "How might we get from now to markedly better leadership in the near future?" Or to put it another way, "How do embody utopian thought in the real world?" The solution lies somewhere between Huxley’s simple choric statement in Island, "Attention", and a complex and disruptive revolution: political, social, economic, and existential.

Authors:
Toby Widdicombe, University of Alaska Anchorage, United States

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Toby Widdicombe is Professor of English at the University of Alaska Anchorage. His major research fields are utopianism, American literature, Tolkien, textual studies, and Shakespeare. He is currently working on a study of Shakespeare and death.

See this presentation on the full schedule – Sunday Schedule

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