STUDENT POLITICAL organizations in the United States have in recent years projected themselves into national politics with a fervor and effect unknown in this country for years. The present chapter deals with one aspect of a larger study of four student political activist groups of national importance: the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), the Young Democrats (YD), and Young Republicans (YR). While the first two groups are relatively new and radical, the latter are venerable and generally reformist. We shall be interested mainly in the SDS and YAF and references to the YD and YR will be for comparative purposes only. The reason for this is the focus of the chapter, which may be stated as the nature of the utopian conceptions of radical student political groups, and their distribution within such groups.

Radical student organizations such as YAF and SDS see themselves as potential agents of social change. Such groups represent both a critique of existing societal arrangement and a crystallization of conceptions of the future of society in terms of socially transcendent ideas—the “utopias” analyzed so incisively by Mannheim. Mannheim's conception of utopian thought embraces two main characteristics: (1) it transcends the present and is oriented to the future in terms of actions that do away with present unbearable conditions; and (2) it distinguishes between the particular substantive programs or content of political ideas and the forms in which these are cast. For example, utopian socialist thought, as Mannheim describes it, is always a set of socially transcendent rationalizations for smashing the existing structure of economic and political power through revolution. Such utopias are, for Mannheim writing in his time, anchored in society's class structure, and provide the only available “perspectives” for viewing and interpreting reality.

Distinct from the “official” utopias of such groups as SDS and YAF are the expectations their members actually hold concerning the possibility or probability of their beliefs actually becoming institutionalized as principles of social order—that is, of the nature of future history. While all or nearly all of the members of such groups may be true believers in the moral worth and necessity of their utopias, it does not follow that they actually expect them to come into being. Perhaps the utopias analyzed by Mannheim could be considered fully utopian, but today matters are more complex.