Looking Backward Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Warren J. Samuels

Critical Essay by Warren J. Samuels

SOURCE: Samuels, Warren J. “A Centenary Reconsideration of Bellamy's Looking Backward.” The American Journal of Economics and Sociology 43, no. 2 (April 1984): 129-48.

In the following essay, Samuels analyzes some of the main concepts in Looking Backward and concludes that they are still relevant 100 years later because society continues to face the same systemic economic and social problems and beliefs.

If, therefore, I nevertheless conclude that I believe that the Welfare State, like Old Siwash, is really worth fighting for and even dying for as compared to any rival system, it is because, despite its imperfections in theory and practice, in the aggregate it provides more promise of preserving and enlarging human freedoms, temporal prosperity, the extinction of mass misery, and the dignity of man and his moral improvement than any other social system which has previously prevailed, which prevails elsewhere today, or which, outside Utopia, the mind...
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