This was first posted July 31, 2014 at Real Economics as The Higgs boson and the purpose of a republic.

Philosophical innovation from, say, the Enlightenment (i.e. from the mid-18th century) to the Seventies has focused upon a set of concepts which I've been calling, for the sake of brevity, utopia. Sure, calling it "utopia" means that, when I suggest that the historic period cited above was the Age of Utopia, I need to clarify what I mean by utopia if I am to have an audience at all. Utopia, as discussed here, is the intersection of human desire and human world-picture.

I'd Love to change the world
But I don't know what to do,
So I'll leave it up to you.
"Ten Years After, I'd Love to Change the World, 1971"

[video:https://youtu.be/LnP3IlW3kbY]