"What the earliest utopians — Montaigne, Thomas More, Tommaso Campanella — understood was that they fought not for a place but for a new set of ideas through which to recognize what would count as Real: Equality, not hierarchical authority. Individual dignity, not slavish subservience. Our preeminent problem is that we recognize the Real in what is most deadly: a culture of duty to legalities that are, finally, cruel and destructive. We need to work inventively — as Christ did, as Thoreau did — in the spirit of disobedience for the purpose of refusing the social order into which we happen to have been born and putting in its place a culture of life-giving things."
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Sources
Curtis White, “The Spirit Of Disobedience: An Invitation to Resistance" in Harper’s Magazine (April 2006), p. 40
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Michel_de_Montaigne
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Michel de Montaigne
1533 – 1592
französischer Philosoph, Schriftsteller und Politiker
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