The term utopia was coined by the English scholar and Lord Chancellor, Thomas More (1478–1535), and was first used in his Utopia ([1516] 1989). More’s work purported to describe a perfect society supposedly set on an idyllic South Pacific island. Commentators, however, have disagreed about whether his purpose in writing the book was advocacy or satire, or whether his primary concern was religious or political. The word ‘utopia’ is derived from two sources, the Greek ou topos, meaning ‘no place’, and the Greek eu topos, meaning ‘good place’. In everyday language, a utopia is an ideal or perfect society. The ambiguity in More’s term nevertheless lives on. The term ‘utopian’ is often used pejoratively to refer to beliefs that are impossible or unrealistic, linked to unachievably high goals. It is therefore unclear whether utopia as ‘no place’ implies that no such society yet exists or that no such society could exist. A series of further controversies surround utopia and utopianism. For example, does utopian thinking have to conform to a particular structure or have a particular function, or do all projects of political or social enhancement have a utopian character? Moreover, which political doctrines offer the most fertile ground for utopian thinking, and how varied have been the models of a political utopia? Finally, is the utopian style of thinking healthy or unhealthy, and why has it been largely abandoned by contemporary political theorists?
Features of Utopianism
Utopias are, among other things, imagined worlds. Imagined worlds have a long history in literature, religion, folklore and philosophy. Most traditional societies and many religions have been based upon a myth of Golden Age or Paradise. In most cases, these myths conjure up the image of a past state of perfection which gives existing society a set of authoritative values and helps to build a shared sense of identity. In other cases, these myths also embody expectations about the future. For example, the Garden of Eden in Judeo-Christianity represents a state of earthly perfection that existed before humankind’s ‘fall’; however, this idea of the ‘Kingdom of God on earth’ has been kept alive by millenarianism, the belief in a future thousand-year period of divine rule, which will be inaugurated by Christ’s second coming. Plato’s Republic is often seen as the first clearly political utopia. In it, Plato described a society that would combine wisdom, justice and order, in that philosopher-kings, the Guardians, would rule; the military class, the Auxiliaries, would maintain order and provide defence; and the common citizenry, the Producers, would attend to the material basis of society.
However, utopian thinking in its modern form has more specific cultural and historical roots. Utopianism as a style of social and political theorizing is essentially a Western phenomenon, which emerged from the eighteenth century onwards in association with the Enlightenment. Not only did a faith in reason encourage thinkers to view human history in terms of progress, but it also, perhaps for the first time, allowed them to think of human and social development in terms of unbounded possibilities. Armed with reason, humankind could remake society and also itself, and this process was, potentially, endless. The idea of social perfection was, thus, no longer unthinkable. The impossible dream had thus become an achievable goal. This new style of thinking was given powerful impetus by the French Revolution of 1789, which, as a project of wholesale social and political transformation, appeared to suggest that all things were possible. Examples of this emerging utopian impulse can be found in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract ([1762] 1969), which advocated a radical form of democracy based, ultimately, on the goodness of ‘natural man’; Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man ([1791–2] 1987), which defended popular sovereignty and individual rights over hereditary privilege; and Robert Owen’s A New View of Society ([1816] 1972), which advocated a ‘rational system of society’ based upon cooperation and communal ownership.
Utopianism is therefore a very particular style of social theorizing. Its central theme is that it develops a critique of the existing order by constructing a model of an ideal or perfect alternative. As such, it usually exhibits three features. First, it embodies a radical and comprehensive rejection of the status quo; present society and political arrangements are deemed to be fundamentally defective and in need of root-and-branch change. Utopian political projects have therefore tended to be revolu-tionary rather than reformist in character. Second, utopian thought high-lights the potential for human self-development, based either upon highly optimistic assumptions about human nature or upon optimistic assump-tions about the capacity of economic, social and political institutions to ameliorate baser human drives and instincts. Society cannot be made perfect unless human beings are perfectible (if they were perfect already there would be no need for utopianism; utopia would exist already). Third, utopianism usually transcends the public/private divide in that it suggests the possibility of complete or near-complete personal fulfilment. For the alternative society to be ideal, it must offer the prospect of emancipation in the personal realm as well as in the political or public realm. This explains why much utopian theory has gone beyond conventional political thought and addressed wider psycho-social and even psycho-sexual issues, as in the writings of theorists such as Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm ([1955] 1971) and Paul Goodman.
An alternative to conventional utopian thinking has been developed in the form of ‘dystopias’, inverted or negative utopias whose purpose is to highlight dangerous or damaging trends in existing society. The two best-known literary dystopias are Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four ([1949] 1954). Orwell’s vision of excessive state control, relentless surveillance and pervasive propaganda drew attention to tendencies that were evident in twentieth-century totalitarianism. In many ways, however, Huxley’s vision has proved to be more prescient, in that it envisaged the mass production of human beings in laboratories and the suppression of freedom through the use of drugs and prevalent indoctrination. A further example of a dystopian analysis was Evgeny Zamyatin’s We (1920), which developed a powerful critique of Soviet society by taking some of the implications of the 1917 Revolution to what he believed to be their logical – and inevitable – conclusion.
Political Utopias
Political utopianism is defined more by its structure than its content. Although only a minority of utopian thinkers have set out to describe a utopia, by providing a full and detailed picture of a future ideal society, all of them have employed the idea of at least a radically improved society to draw attention to the deficiencies of existing society and to map out possibilities for personal, social and political development. There is no agreement, however, about what utopia will look like. Each model of the perfect society reflects the values and assumptions of a particular thinker and a particular political tradition. Nevertheless, as all utopias are supposedly perfect, certain common themes tend to recur in utopian thought.
For political and social arrangements to be perfect, what features have to be in place? In the first place, want must be banished. It would be difficult to regard a society as perfect if significant levels of poverty exists. Most utopias are therefore characterized by material abundance and the abolition of poverty. For example, Karl Marx’s conception of communism was based upon the assumption that, no longer fettered by the class system, technology would develop to a point that material need would be eradicated. Communism is, then, a post-scarcity society. How-ever, this does not necessarily mean that all utopias must be materially prosperous; want may as easily be abolished by banishing materialism and greed as by ensuring material abundance. This can be seen in the ecological utopias of the modern Green movement, which are often based upon post-industrial simplicity and significantly scaled-down consumption levels.
Second, utopian societies are usually characterized by social harmony and the absence of conflict. Conflict between individuals and groups, and, for that matter, conflict within the individual between competing values and impulses, is difficult to reconcile with perfection, because it will result in winners and losers. A society characterized by competing interests is doomed to imperfection both because it is unstable and because not all interests can be fully satisfied. In order to sustain the idea of conflict-free social harmony, utopian thinkers have usually had to make highly optimistic assumptions about human nature or highly optimistic assump-tions about particular social institutions.
Third, utopian societies offer the prospect of full emancipation and unbounded personal freedom. Repression and all forms of unfreedom are, by definition, social imperfections, in that citizens are unable to act as they would choose to act. The only exception to this would be in the case of restrictions upon freedom that supposedly serve the long-term interests of individuals, as in Rousseau’s belief that people can be ‘forced to be free’. Most utopian theories therefore envisage only a limited role for govern-ment and perhaps no government at all.
Utopian theories have developed very largely out of the socialist and liberal political traditions, the two traditions that most clearly embody the optimism of the Enlightenment. The utopian impulse is particularly strong in the case of socialism. Socialism is based upon the belief that human beings are essentially sociable, cooperative and gregarious creatures. Greed, competition and anti-social behaviour therefore exist only because humans have been corrupted by society, and in particular by capitalism and its associated evils, poverty and social inequality. For many socialists, indeed, socialism has, in effect, served as a model of a realizable utopia, offering, as it does, the prospect of free, harmonious and equal social development. So-called utopian socialists, such as Charles Fourier (1772–1831) and Robert Owen, carried out practical experiments in socialist utopianism by setting up small-scale communities, organized on the basis of love, cooperation and collective ownership. The Marxist tradition gave this utopianism a supposedly scientific basis, in explaining how class-based societies would collapse under the weight of their own internal contradictions while classless and stateless communism would ensure full and free social development. The utopianism of classical anarchism, as reflected in the work of thinkers such as Proudhon and Kropotkin, was derived largely from the attempt to take socialist collecti-vism to its logical extreme and demonstrate how social harmony could be reconciled with unfettered freedom. Although twentieth-century socialism largely abandoned utopianism, as social democrats sought to forge a compromise between socialism and capitalism, some socialist thinkers turned once again to utopianism in the hope of re-engaging socialism with youthful idealism and radical critique. The explicitly utopian ideas of neo-Marxist thinkers such as Ernst Bloch ([1959] 1986) and Herbert Marcuse influenced the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s and helped to fuse the notions of personal and political liberation.
The relationship between liberalism and utopianism is more ambiguous. The stress within liberal theory upon egoism and self-interest has usually kept the utopian impulse at bay. Indeed, the social-contract theories that underlie much of liberal thinking about the state and government are based precisely upon the need for a compromise between pursuit of freedom and the maintenance of order. A society of unrestricted freedom, a ‘state of nature’, is from this point of view, a recipe for strife and barbarity. On the other hand, the liberal belief in reason, and the associated faith in education, creates a potential for utopianism based on the potential they create for human self-development and social better-ment. A social-contract theorist such as John Locke could therefore express a near-utopian idealism when discussing the issue of education. The link between rationalism and utopianism was developed very clearly in the work of the pioneering anarchist William Godwin. Godwin turned social-contract theory on its head, in that he argued that education and enlightened judgement would ensure that people in a stateless society would live in accordance with truth and universal moral laws. In other circumstances, liberal utopianism has drawn heavily upon the idea of a self-regulating market, taking Adam Smith’s idea of the ‘invisible hand’ of capitalism to its logical conclusion. Thus, although human beings are essentially self-seeking creatures whose economic interests conflict, the workings of the market deliver equilibrium and general prosperity because people can only satisfy their interests by, unwittingly, satisfying the interests of others. In the writings of thinkers such as Murray Rothbard and David Friedman (1989), this has led to the construction of anarcho-capitalist utopias in which unrestricted market competition reconciles economic dynamism with social justice and political freedom. ‘End of history’ theories, such as those associated with Fukuyama (1992), are also underpinned by a form of market utopianism.
End of Utopia?
Enthusiasm for utopian thinking has peaked during very particular periods: the late eighteenth century, particularly in the years following the 1789 French Revolution; the 1830s and 1840s, a period of early industrialization and rapid social change; and the 1960s, coinciding with an upsurge in student radicalism and the emergence of new social movements. However, utopianism has always been a minority political concern, and it has attracted, at times, fierce criticism. Most political doctrines are non-utopian and some are explicitly anti-utopian.
Anti-utopianism in fact grew steadily during the twentieth century, fuelled in particular by disillusionment with ‘actually existing’ socialist utopian-ism in the form of orthodox communism, what began to be portrayed as ‘the god that failed’. Some commentators, indeed, traced the seeds of totalitarianism back to the structure of utopian thought. Moreover, since the late twentieth century, it has become increasingly fashionable to see the future less in terms of hope and expectation and more in terms of impending crisis, even doom. Has utopia been finally removed from the map of possible human futures?
Critics of utopianism have attacked it in various ways. For example, although Marxism has clearly utopian features, Marx and Engels dis-missed anarchism and the ideas of ethical socialists such as Owen and Fourier as examples of ‘utopian socialism’ rather than ‘scientific socialism’. According to Marx, the former amounted to mere wishful thinking, the construction of morally attractive visions of socialism without considera-tion being given to how capitalism was to be overthrown and how socialism was to be constructed. By contrast, ‘scientific socialism’, or Marxism, was based upon a theory of history that supposedly demon-strated not only that socialism is desirable but also that it is inevitable. The danger of utopianism, from this perspective, is that it channels the political energies of the proletariat away from the only strategies which can, in the long run, bring about social emancipation. By this standard, Marx’s clearly utopian early writings, such as the Economic and Philosophical Manu-scripts ([1844] 1968), which stress the moral benefits of communism, can be distinguished from his mature ‘scientific’ work, which is grounded in historical materialism.
A more thoroughgoing critique of utopianism, however, has been advanced by conservative thinkers. Conservatives oppose utopianism on two grounds. In the first place, they view human nature as imperfect and unperfectable, rejecting one of the foundation stones of utopian theory. People are innately selfish and greedy, driven by non-rational impulses and desires, and no project of social engineering is going to alter these stubborn realities and establish universal ‘goodness’. All human societies are there-fore characterised by imperfections such as conflict and strife, delinquency and crime. Second, utopian projects invariably suffer from the arrogance of rationalism: they claim to understand what is, frankly, incomprehen-sible. As all models of the desired future are doomed to be defective, political projects that aim to establish a perfect society are destined to produce outcomes quite different from the ideals that inspired them. This can, for example, be seen in the mismatch between Marx’s model of communism and the realities of twentieth-century communism. As Oake-shott put it, conservatives will always wish to ensure that ‘the cure is not worse than the disease’.
The most damning criticisms of utopianism have been produced by liberal thinkers such as Karl Popper (1963) and Isaiah Berlin, both of whom were influenced by the experience of twentieth-century totalitarianism. For Popper, utopianism was dangerous and pernicious because it is self-defeating and leads to violence. He defined the utopian method as a way of reasoning in which, rationally, means are selected in the light of an ultimate political end. Rational political action must therefore be based upon a blueprint of an ideal state and of a particular historical path. This form of reasoning is self-defeating because it is impossible to determine ends scientifically: whereas means may be rational or irrational, ends are not susceptible to rational analysis. Moreover, this style of reasoning will result in violence because, lacking a scientific or rational basis for defending ends, people with conflicting ends will not be able to resolve their differences through debate and discussion alone. Political projects that are linked to ultimate ends are thus destined to clash with other such political projects.
Berlin’s critique of utopianism associated it with monistic tendencies he believed were embodied in the Enlightenment tradition. The Enlight-enment belief in universal reason resulted in the search for fundamental values that would be applicable to all societies and all historical periods. Rationalistic doctrines therefore tend to advance a single true path to perfection, thereby denying legitimacy to alternative paths and rival theories. In practice, this leads to intolerance and political repression. Berlin asserted that conflicts of values are intrinsic to human life; not only will people always disagree about the ultimate ends of life, but each human being struggles to find a balance between incommensurable values. Such a view demonstrates that utopia is, in principle, impossible. From this perspective, the purpose of politics is not to uncover a single path to perfection but, rather, to create conditions in which people with different moral and material priorities can live together peacefully and profitably.
Quite apart from attacks on utopianism, there has been an unmistakable turning away from utopianism since the 1960s and early 1970s. This period saw a proliferation of utopias, with, for instance, the construction of radical feminist models of the post-patriarchal society and the growth of ‘New Age’ thinking among ecological theorists. The decline in such thinking, however, has been associated with a general process of de-radicalization which has had a particular impact upon socialism. It is notable that modern protest movements, such as the anti-globalization or anti-corporate movement, devote most of their energies to highlighting the failings of existing society, and give far less attention to analysing the nature of the desired future society. Growing dystopian pessimism about the future has been shaped by a variety of factors. One of these has undoubtedly been the emergence of globalization in its various forms. Globalization, for instance appears to have removed the idea of a viable alternative to capitalism and the market, narrowing economic options to, at best, a choice between alternative forms of capitalism. This has had profound implications for utopianism because socialist collectivism, tra-ditionally the most fertile ground for utopian thinking, is no longer regarded as practicable. Moreover, in creating a web of interconnectedness that pays little attention to traditional geographical and political bound-aries, globalization has created a world of uncertainty and risk. So-called chaos theory has emerged in an attempt to make sense of this intensified ‘connectivity’, explaining how relatively minor events in one part of the world can have potentially catastrophic consequences in another part of the world. This has created a heightened vulnerability and powerlessness, as the fate of individuals, communities and even nations seems to be shaped by forces outside their control and, often, beyond their understanding.
An additional source of pessimism about humankind’s prospects stems from a growing sense of impending ecological disaster. As corporate power has been strengthened in relation to government and industrialization has spread to new parts of the globe, the pace of resource depletion and the rate of pollution have accelerated. Problems such as ‘global warming’ create the impression of a world out of control. The spectre of a growing divide between humankind and nature has, once again, reversed one of the key themes found in utopian thought. Much dystopian gloom in the twenty-first century has focused upon the impact of science upon humankind and society. Once one of the foundation stones of utopianism, science has come to be seen by many as a growing threat, creating the prospect of a ‘post-human’ future. Francis Fukuyama (2002) expressed such concerns about the consequences of the biotechnological revolution. In particular, he warned that the ability to manipulate the DNA of one’s descendants would have profound implications for what it means to be human and will, potentially, have terrible consequences for the political order. John Gray (2002) has used these and other developments to argue that humans should be viewed in the same way as any other animal. Free will is an illusion and, as with animals, the destiny of humans is determined by factors quite beyond their control. Indeed, he went as far as to suggest that humankind’s inclination towards genocide has been significantly enhanced by scientific and technological advance. Since the human species has become a threat to Gaia, the planet itself, it may, quite simply, have become dispensable.
Summary
1 Tradition refers to a desire to resist or perhaps reverse historical change. It can take one of three different forms: conventional traditionalism or the desire for continuity with the past; reactionary traditionalism, the wish to ‘turn the clock back’, reclaim a past Golden Age; or enlightened traditionalism, the belief that a flexible attitude to change can help in the long run to preserve a governmental or social system.
2 Much of Western political thought is underpinned by the idea of progress, the belief in human advance and development, reflected in the spread of material affluence and the growth of personal freedom. Reform and revolu-tion can be contrasted as means of bringing about progress. Reform holds out the prospect of change through consent and respects the virtues of cau-tion and pragmatism. Revolution, on the other hand, has the capacity to bring about fundamental, root-and-branch change.
3 Utopianism is a style of social theorizing which advances a critique of exist-ing society by developing a model of a perfect or ideal alternative; it is usual-ly based upon highly optimistic assumptions about human nature. Most utopian theories have been developed within the socialist and liberal tradi-tions. However, utopianism has been criticized as wishful thinking and some-times as implicitly totalitarian. The utopian impulse in political theory has weakened significantly in recent years, a trend associated, among other things, with concern about globalization and the impact of science.
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