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Dreaming through the Ages: Towards a Global History of Utopian and Dystopian Thought

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GeorgeClaeys, Searching for Utopia: The History of an Idea (London: Thames and Hudson, 2011)
GeorgeClaeys, Dystopia: A Natural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 September 2019

Christos Efstathiou
Christos Efstathiou*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Warwick
*
E-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

For the five hundred years since Thomas More first depicted the island of Utopia, the portrayal of an ideal social system has intrigued generations of authors. The concept served a double purpose: it applied to an ideal place (eutopia) but also an imaginary, unrealizable one (utopia). Although the search for utopia started from the Classical Age, More invented the genre and hundreds of utopian thinkers followed in his footsteps trying to predict how life would unfold and provide a detailed description of an ideal (or nonideal) future society. From H. G. Wells and Aldous Huxley to Arthur C. Clarke and Ursula Le Guin, successful and popular authors showed a deep concern for future living and working conditions. If the past is another country, the growing literature of utopian thought suggests that the future can be a whole continent. Several undiscovered countries lay in waiting and intellectual historians have often been fascinated by the dense explorations of the utopian writers.

Type
Review Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , March 2021 , pp. 275 - 287
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

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References

1 For a concise bibliography of some of the most recent works see Sargent, Lyman Tower, “Bibliography of Secondary Sources,” in Schaer, Roland, Claeys, Gregory and Sargent, Lyman Tower, eds., Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World (Oxford, 2000), 377–80Google Scholar.

2 Cf., for instance, Manuel, Frank E. and Manuel, Fritzie P., Utopian Thought in the Western World (Oxford, 1979)Google Scholar; Kumar, Krishan, Utopia and Anti-utopia in Modern Times (Oxford, 1987)Google Scholar; Jacoby, Russell, The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in the Age of Apathy (New York, 1999)Google Scholar. For an introduction to other interpretations see Mohn, Dunja M., “Transgressive Utopian Dystopias: The Postmodern Reappearance of Utopia in the Disguise of Dystopia,” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 55/1 (2007), 5–24Google Scholar.

3 Claeys follows Solzhenitsyn by characterizing the twentieth century as “the cave man's century” (Dystopia, 113).

4 In particular, the Cold War seemed to be an era in which the gap between utopia and dystopia diminished. According to Booker, early Cold War films and novels “were often filled with ambivalence and contradictions” due to “the rise of late capitalism and its cultural logic, postmodernism [Jameson].” Booker, M. Keith, Monsters, Mushroom Clouds, and the Cold War: American Science Fiction and the Roots of Postmodernism, 1946–1964 (Westport, 2001), 4Google Scholar.

5 It is one thing to analyze Marx's debt to utopian socialism and another one to depict him as a sectarian, if not dictatorial, prophet of progress, such as in Claeys, Gregory, Marx and Marxism (London, 2018)Google Scholar; and Jones, Gareth Stedman and Claeys, Gregory, eds., The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For different recent accounts cf. Musto, Marcello, Another Marx: Early Manuscripts to the International (London, 2018)Google Scholar; Paolucci, Paul, Marx's Scientific Dialectics: A Methodological Treatise for a New Century (Leiden, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sperber, Jonathan, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life (New York, 2013)Google Scholar.

6 In other parts of the book (104, 127, 138, 187), Claeys suggests that Bolsheviks admired the Spanish Inquisition, that Lenin was a neo-Blanquist conspirator, that interwar Ukraine resembled the “Kingdom of Antichrist,” and that Nazi dictatorship proved to be less totalitarian than the Soviet one.

7 Claeys, Gregory, Machinery, Money and the Millennium: From Moral Economy to Socialism, 1815–1860 (Princeton, 1987)Google Scholar; Claeys, , Citizens and Saints, Politics and Anti-politics in Early British Socialism (Cambridge, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 One of the most recent books on the subject has the title Beyond Totalitarianism: Geyer, Michael and Fitzpatrick, Sheila, eds., Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (Cambridge, 2009)Google Scholar.

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13 For a discussion of the parallels between the two works cf., inter alia, Ober, Josiah, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule (Princeton, 2002), 154–5Google Scholar; Rothwell, Kenneth S., Politics and Persuasion in Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae (Leiden, 1990), 9–10Google Scholar.

14 For some counterarguments to his narrative cf. Dreyfus, Michel, Groppo, Bruno, Ingerflom, Claudio Sergio, Lew, Roland, Pennetier, Claude, Pudal, Bernard, and Wolikow, Serge, eds., Le siècle des communismes (Paris, 2000)Google Scholar; Mayer, Arno J., The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton, 2000)Google Scholar.

15 Here one must notice that most histories of utopia do not really focus on the rich Eastern utopian literature, especially that produced in socialist countries.

16 Kanter, Rosabeth Moss, Commitment and Community: Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspective (Cambridge, MA, 1972)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jones, Bryn and O'Donnell, Mike, eds., Sixties Radicalism and Social Movement Activism: Retreat or Resurgence? (London and New York, 2010)Google Scholar.

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18 Claeys focuses on English-language utopias, but it is important to note that other cultures have perpetuated or strengthened their utopian traditions. See Dutton, Jacqueline and Sargent, Lyman Tower, “Utopias from Other Cultural Traditions,” Utopian Studies 24/1 (2013), 1–5Google Scholar.

19 For an interesting typology of the genre see Balasopoulos, Antonis, “Anti-utopia and Dystopia: Rethinking the Generic Field,” in Vlastaras, Vassilis, ed., Utopia Project Archive, 2006–2010 (Athens, 2011), 59–67Google Scholar.

20 Hudson, Wayne, The Reform of Utopia (Aldershot, 2003), 16Google Scholar.

21 Quoted in Huxley's, Aldous Brave New World (London, 2007), xxxixGoogle Scholar.

22 Forsström, Riikka, Possible Worlds: The Idea of Happiness in the Utopian Vision of Louis-Sébastien Mercier (Helsinki, 2002), 204Google Scholar.

23 Zamyatin, Yevgeny, We (New York, 1924), 33Google Scholar; Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty-Four (New York, 2003), 221Google Scholar.

24 Thompson, E. P., “Outside the Whale,” in Thompson, ed., Out of Apathy (London, 1960), 158–65Google Scholar.

25 For different accounts of the utopian revival in the 1960s, cf. DeKoven, Marianne, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern (Durham, NC, 2004)Google Scholar; Tismaneanu, Vladimir, ed., Promises of 1968: Crisis, Illusion and Utopia (Budapest, 2011)Google Scholar.

26 Cf. Jacoby, Russell, “On Anti-utopianism, More or Less,” Telos 129 (2004), 97–137Google Scholar; Skrimshire, Stefan, “What Is Anti-utopianism? Gray, Jacoby, Jameson,” Cultural Politics 12/2 (2016), 231–48Google Scholar.

27 Cf. Gunnell, John G., “The Technocratic Image and the Theory of Technocracy,” Technology and Culture 23/3 (1982), 392–416CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Segal, Howard P., Future Imperfect: The Mixed Blessings of Technology in America (Amherst, 1994), 126–60Google Scholar.

28 Ferns, Chris, Narrating Utopia: Ideology, Gender, Form in Utopian Literature (Liverpool, 1999), 67–104CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Another important inspiration came from one of the first dynamic and self-transformative utopias, William Morris's News from Nowhere.

29 Wells, H. G., A Modern Utopia (London, 1905), 277Google Scholar.

30 Busch, Justin E. A., The Utopian Vision of H. G. Wells (Jefferson, NC., 2009), 91–129Google Scholar.

31 Nelson, Joel I. and Cooperman, David, “Out of Utopia: The Paradox of Postindustrialization,” Sociological Quarterly 39/4 (1998), 583–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Woolfolk, Robert L. and Richardson, Frank C., “Behavior Therapy and the Ideology of Modernity,” American Psychologist 39/7 (1984), 777–86CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. Other texts, such as Michael Young's The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958), ridiculed the idea of a technocratic society based on liberal principles of education and administrative justice. It is deeply ironic that “meritocracy” and continuous “evaluation of merits” have since been transformed from pejorative terms to positive ideals.

32 Levitas, Ruth, “Pragmatism, Utopia and Anti-utopia,” Critical Horizons 9/1 (2008), 42–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Bagguley, Paul, “Social Change, the middle class and the emergence of ‘new social movements’: a critical analysis,” Sociological Review 40/1 (1992), 26–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Skogen, Ketil, “Young Environmentalists: Post-modern Identities or Middle-Class Culture?”, Sociological Review 44/3 (1996), 452–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Tilman, Rick, “Ideology and Utopia in the Political Economy of Milton Friedman,” Polity 8/3 (1976), 422–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 For an interesting, though controversial, account of Friedman's legacy see Klein, Naomi, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (London, 2008)Google Scholar.

36 Frankel, Boris, The Post-industrial Utopians (Madison, 1987), ixGoogle Scholar.

37 It is not accidental that their theories have been linked to the idea of heterotopia, a utopia of diversity and individual subjectivity. Cf., for instance, Shklar, Judith N., “What Is the Use of Utopia?”, in Siebers, Tobin, ed., Heterotopia: Postmodern Utopia and the Body Politic (Ann Arbor, 1994), 40–56Google Scholar; Vattimo, Gianni, The Transparent Society (Cambridge, 1992), 62–75Google Scholar.

38 Levy, Peter B., The New Left and Labor in the 1960s (Urbana, 1994), 87Google Scholar.

39 James, Simon J., Maps of Utopia: H. G. Wells, Modernity and the End of Culture (Oxford, 2012), 128CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Ibid. Wells had studied zoology (under T. H. Huxley) and geology and was granted a DSc for an “essay upon human ecology” in 1943. Wells to the External Registrar, University of London, 4 Aug. 1943, Senate House Library, Special Collections AL439.

41 James, Maps of Utopia, 128.

42 Ibid., 125–6.

43 Dahrendorf, Ralf, “Out of Utopia: Toward a Reorientation of Sociological Analysis,” American Journal of Sociology 64/2 (1958), 115–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 115.

44 “These prophets claim that mankind, rather than simply producing a new social type, is on the verge of crossing an evolutionary threshold to become something new.” Taylor, Angus M., “Science Fiction: The Evolutionary Context,” Journal of Popular Culture 5/4 (1972), 858–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 864.

45 His disdain for the Soviet space programme was possibly one of the reasons behind his preference for an island utopia. His Brave New World Revisited (1958) proposed actions to be taken to prevent the so-called totalitarian outlook of the future. Here, dystopia turned into a cookbook for future political recipes.