Environment and Change: The Next Fifty Years Edited by William R. Ewald Jr. Indiana, $10.00 Beyond Left and Right: Radical Thought for Our Times Edited by Richard Kostelanetz Morrow, $7.95 Utopianism is a numbers racket. We have more good ideas and less chance to implement them than ever before. The reasons for our abundant utopian theory and our abundant impotence are related: we live in an age of sociological plenitude. Or, rather, of sociological excess. Good ideas are legion. Each good idea— or, certainly, every other one—has a pressure group to support it. Every genius has his determined band of supporters, ardent and well-financed.
But genius has always been a difficult thing to handle, as Galileo and the Church found out to their mutual displeasure. In the Sixties, genius rises to the top with a vigor that belies the social homogenization dominating our history since 1930. Cream collects. The developed nations, East and West, have difficulty accommodating their good minds.
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