The Place of Joy in a World of Fact

The solution of environmental problems is presupposed in all utopias. For example, every family is to enjoy free nature under Marxian communism. “In a communist society,” Marx says in a famous passage in The German Ideology (1970), “nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can be accomplished in any branch he wishes. Society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow: to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, tend cattle in the evening, engage in literary criticism after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming a hunter, fisherman, shepherd, or critic.”