Utopias And Politics Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

A utopia describes a positive, but unrealizable, state. In this sense, all positive ideals or images of society that cannot be realized in practice are utopian. In a more restricted and technical sense, utopia designates a literary and political genre devoted to the construction of models of the perfect society.

Forms Of Utopia

The term utopia derives from the homonymous book by Thomas More, which appeared in 1516. More coined this neologism to name the ideal society that he depicts in the book, probably consciously playing on the ambivalence of the term. Commonly used by European Renaissance intellectuals, u-topia derives from ancient Greek, and it can be a contraction of both eu-topos (the good place) and ou-topos (the no place). There is still dispute about the right interpretation, but More’s Utopia allows both meanings: the best place one can possibly conceive is also, at the same time, the “no place” by definition. Irony pervades the entire work, emerging particularly in the names More uses: Amaurot is the city that cannot be seen, and its river is called Anyder, the river without water, and so on. The fact that the meaning of utopia is suspended from the very beginning between the good place and the no place would have enduring consequences.

Together with the definition of a literary and political genre—the restricted meaning of the term—in time, a broader view appeared. Utopia came to generally mean all that is good but nonexistent or even impossible. According to Karl Mannheim, who provided one of the most authoritative definitions of the term, a state of mind is utopian when it is incongruous with the reality within which it occurs, in the sense that it tends to break the bonds of existing social order. As such, Mannheim counterposes utopias to ideologies: The utopian mentality works in opposition to the status quo and aims at its disintegration. Ideology, on the other hand, even when it does not precisely correspond to the status quo, nevertheless tends toward its preservation because it is congruous with it. In other words, utopias are revolutionary because they tend to burst the boundaries of the existing order, whereas ideologies are always conservative.

The two meanings of the term are the two extremes of a spectrum within which different forms of utopias lie. In the first sense, there are the works that followed the example of More’s Utopia. Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun (1602), Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627), and William Morris’s News from No-where (1891) are all examples of the utopian genre. Campanella depicts an ideal city built on a pattern of concentric circles, in which citizens live a life devoted to knowledge and piety; Bacon envisages a perfect society, which is run by enlightened scientists, whilst Morris’s utopia is an idyllic and rural society run on the basis of Marxist principles. In these works, the description of the ideal society often takes the form of a narrative by a traveler who discovers the land of “utopia,” typically an island or a territory separated from other societies.

Parts of this literary genre are also negative utopias such as George Orwell’s 1984 (1949). The book describes a disciplinary society: the no place in this case is not the best possibly imagined, but the worst. The society that Orwell depicts represents the dreadful view of a totalitarian future ruled by the Big Brother and has been interpreted in many possible ways— prophecy, allegory, satire, or parody. These kinds of work are at times also called dystopias insofar as they subvert the literary mechanisms of traditional utopias, transforming the “good places” into the “bad places”—the Greek dys meaning abnormal, faulty, or bad. Some people have also called them inverted utopias. Other examples include Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1925) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932).

Next to utopias as a literary genre, also relevant are works that are not part of this genre, but nevertheless contain significant utopian moments. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract (1762) or, more recently, Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilisation (1955) are such examples. Rousseau’s Social Contract is not strictly speaking a utopia, as it is not the literary narration of the no place and good place. The book aims to set the conditions for the legitimacy of political power, which Rousseau saw in a democratic social contract between citizens who are free and equals. Yet, it contains an important utopian moment insofar as the society resulting from the social contract Rousseau describes is, in many respects, the best society that can possibly be envisaged as civilized human beings. Similarly, Marcuse’s Eros and Civilisation, which is devoted to a critique of the concept of civilization put forward by Sigmund Freud, contains a significant utopian moment in that he opposes to it a model of society where emancipation from domination is achieved through the liberation of repressed instincts and imagination. Marcuse too envisaged the possibility of a “better place” yet to be realized, and therefore again a no place. To sum up on this point, a work contains utopian elements when it expresses the belief that some (or all) social evils can be eliminated and a good place created.

In this sense, there is great debate as to the extent to which Karl Marx’s thought contains utopian elements. On the one hand, perhaps no other author has been as influential as Marx in spreading the belief that social evils can be eliminated and a better society developed. On the other hand, Marx’s prospect of a communist society does not derive from mere wishful thinking, but is grounded on a scientific analysis of the historical condition of the proletariat. In their Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), Marx and Engels put forward a severe critique of utopian socialists such as Comte de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Robert Owen. Having theorized about the emancipation of the proletariat in an epoch when the material conditions for such emancipation were not yet ripe, utopian socialists necessarily failed to identify the economic presuppositions for such a transformation; their social criticism thus remained a mere fantastic picture of future society. To such utopian socialism, in which personal inventiveness takes the place of historical action, Marx and Engels opposed their scientific communism, in which the prospect of a future communist society is the result of a scientific prediction based on the analysis of the economic conditions of the proletariat. In synthesis, Marx and Engels’s social criticism contains significant utopian elements, despite the fact that their systems of thought are not in the utopian genre.

Another distinction recently proposed for grouping different forms of utopias is that between major and minor utopias. According to Jay Winter, major utopias are those utopias that radically aim at extirpating all social evils from the world and resort to unconditional violence to realize their projects. Stalin and Hitler are examples of such major utopians. Their totalitarian visions and their commitment to the ruthless removal from the world of those malevolent elements blocking the path to a beneficent future, even at the price of extermination, render them major utopians. Minor utopias are instead imaginings of liberation on a usually smaller scale, which also sketch out a world very different from the one in which people actually live, but from which not all social conflicts and evils are eradicated. Examples of such minor utopias are the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) or the ecological movements of the 1970s. Minor utopians are therefore people who envisage good places, but with the awareness that they could remain, to a great extent, no places if the price to be paid for their realization is too high.

Questioning The Functions Of Utopia Beyond Politics

Utopias perform very important functions within society. The primary function of utopia is to exercise a critique of the status quo. By depicting an ideal of good society, utopias reveal where people do not stand and therefore also how far away societies are from such an ideal. This is very clear in More’s Utopia. The first part of the book analyzes the evils affecting the society More lived in, and it is only in the second part of the book that the contours of the new land of Utopia are depicted. Although not all utopias make such explicit social criticism, this remains their primary function. Even if utopians do not explicitly make an accurate description of what they consider to be the evils of society, such criticism is implicit in the radical alternative to the existing order that they put forward. Utopias transcend reality, but only apparently departing from it.

Another way to express this is to say that utopias have a regulative function. As regulative, the capacity of an idea serves as a guiding ideal for human conduct independently of its content of reality. Utopias in this sense are not necessarily blueprints for the creation of a radically new society. They are means to measure the good and bad that existing societies contain. The presupposition of such a critique is the conviction that the current state of affairs is modifiable. This can be the result of a belief in the malleable character of human nature (i.e., its perfectibility), or of the idea that the fundamental structures of the social world are subject to the possibility of change.

Within this more general regulative function, further distinctions can be made between partial utopias and global utopias. Global utopias aim for a radical eradication of all social evils toward the construction of a perfect society in its entirety. The typical example is Plato’s description of the perfect society ruled by philosophers in his Republic. Partial utopias are instead those depicting societies as an alternative to the existing ones in some limited respects only. An example is ecologist utopias, where it is only the relationship of humans with their natural environment that is criticized and remedied.

Some authors have criticized utopias by arguing that their critique is too radical and that they tend to generate totalitarian modes of domination. According to Karl Popper, for instance, utopias such as Plato’s idealized republic endorsed visions of a “closed” society, which anticipates that of modern totalitarian thinkers such as Hegel and Marx and must therefore be repudiated. Utopias can, however, in many ways be defended against their critics. First, the accusation of totalitarianism holds, at best, only for global and major utopias. Partial and minor utopias are by definition alien to any attempt to encapsulate societies in a closed scheme of functioning. But, most important, the majority of utopian thinkers are fully aware that utopias are destined to remain “no places.” This is clear not just in the irony of More’s neologism, but also in the fact that most utopian thinkers did not even think of trying to enforce their schemes of the perfect society. Even those who have actually tried (or thought of trying) to transform their no places into something real have most often favored means such as education and small-scale experiments. Those who have in actual fact tried to realize them through a violent revolution remain a tiny minority.

Together with their regulative function, utopias also help in developing new ideals. Utopias do not only explain where societies stand, but also reveal new directions that societies may take. Utopias are the result of the work of imagination. They disclose alternative scenarios and, as such, they enrich the sense of human possibility. As Victor Hugo once said, “Today’s utopia is tomorrow’s reality.” The aphorism is usually understood in the sense that utopias can be realized, at least to a certain extent. But this can also be reversed, by saying that “tomorrow’s realities are today’s utopias.” Indeed, most important social conquests such as the abolition of slavery or universal suffrage were all utopias once. In a sense, all ideas that contribute to social progress have to go through a utopian stage, one in which they are still no places.

Notwithstanding the two important functions of utopias— that is, to put forward a critique and disclose new ideals— some authors have questioned the political nature of utopias.

First, they consider imagining a radically alternative society as a flight from politics. They observe, for instance, that utopias are often devoted to depicting societies where politics would become superfluous. In a perfect society such as the one envisaged by Thomas More, there would be no need for politics. Similarly, according to some interpreters, a truly socialist society is a society where politics understood as the domination of one part of society over the rest would no longer exist.

By reading the descriptions of utopian societies, which quite often dwell on almost every detail of social life by describing the tasks of all of its inhabitants, one can get the impression that utopias go beyond politics. This view, however, reflects a very limited conception of both politics and utopias. As illustrated, utopias do not only include works in the literary genre of utopia, but also, more generally, all those that express the belief that the evils of society can be remedied by a better social arrangement. Moreover, the charge of dismissing politics reflects a very limited view of politics, as if the latter can be limited solely to the government and administration by the few over the rest of the society. If, by politics, one more generally understands everything concerning the life of the polity, of living-in-common existence, then there is no need to argue that utopias are apolitical. In this sense, they rather constitute an important and vital part of politics.

The Real Or Unreal Prospect Of Utopias

In a sense, utopias—at the same time good places and no places—transcend reality, but do not radically depart from it. Utopias break away from the current state of affairs, but only in order to criticize it. One could therefore even say that they are realistic inasmuch as they reveal where a society is not. By saying how existing societies differ from ideal ones, utopias help explain real conditions in societies, but also point to the possibility to change them.

Of course, utopias can be more or less realistic in this sense. If the literary utopias of the golden age or the paradise lost often have very little grasp on reality, the most significant utopias of modernity have all contributed to the critique of existing societies and the disclosure of new directions for their development. For instance, in the epoch of the French Revolution (1789–1799), many utopias, such as that of a society of free and equal individuals, appeared to a great extent realizable. It was then that ideals such as that of a democratic social contract or form of redistribution (if not abolition) of private property ceased to be perceived as impossible no places.

The degree to which such utopian ideals have been realized in history is a matter of empirical analysis. Inspiring actions and institutions that have been historically acknowledged, some people have directly tried to envision integral utopias. Although this remains a small phenomenon, there are utopias that have inspired the design of experimental communities. These living utopias range from religious communities such as the Oneida community in the United States, first formally established in 1848, to the socialist phalanxes inspired by Charles Fourier that were created in France and the United States in the nineteenth century, to the kibbutz, a form of Jewish settlement that began early in the twentieth century.

Yet, many authors claim that humans live in an epoch of the death of utopia. Despite the fact that the utopian genre is far from vanishing, this only seems to be true of literature and fiction. This is partly due to the high degree of specialization in the social sciences that has rendered global utopias unacceptable to the academic community. Yet according to some interpreters, behind the alleged death of utopias, there are more structural reasons. Marcuse, for instance, observed that the concept of utopia is becoming obsolescent in the contemporary world because any transformation of the technical and natural environment today is a real possibility. On the opposite front are those who consider utopia dead because they see no possibility of a radical alternative to the status quo. In an epoch when many celebrate the end of history, there seems to be no space, but also no need to embark on a journey to the land of utopia. However, the state of societies being far from perfect guarantees that there will always be the possibility and the need for utopias.

Bibliography:

Baczko, Bronislaw. Lumières de l’utopie. Paris: Payot, 1978.
Bloch, Ernst. The Spirit of Utopia. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
Davis, James Colin. Utopia and the Ideal Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Goodwin, Barbara, and Keith Taylor. The Politics of Utopia. London: Hutchinson, 1982.
Kateb, George. Utopia and Its Enemies. New York: Collier Macmillan, 1963.
Mannheim, Karl. Ideology and Utopia. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960.
Marcuse, Herbert. Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia. London: Penguin Books, 1970.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1967.
More,Thomas. Utopia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Popper, Karl. The Open Society and Its Enemies. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1945.
Trahair, Richard C. S. Utopias and Utopians: An Historical Dictionary. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999.
Winter, Jay. Dreams of Peace and Freedom. New Haven:Yale University Press, 2006.

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