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1 results

  • Chapter 13 - Economic Justice

  • Edited by Sherryl Vint, University of California, Riverside
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to American Utopian Literature and Culture since 1945
    Published online:
    09 May 2024
    Print publication:
    16 May 2024, pp 237-253

  • Summary

    This chapter traces the waning of utopian literature in the 1970s following the end of Keynesianism and the rise of neoliberalism. It argues that the downturn in the rate of profit related to production, and the resulting turn to economic growth predicated on financial speculation, resulted in a crisis for the utopian imagination and its ability to conceive of utopian alternatives to the present. As a result, the critical utopianism of the long 1960s gave way to a new wave of dystopian writings. Although these dystopias echoed the turn to weak utopianism and cognitive mapping in critical theory by convincingly illustrating the negative effects of neoliberalism on economic growth, income inequality, and the social safety net, they often struggled to imagine anything outside of these worsening conditions. The chapter culminates in a consideration of new utopian writing following the 2008 financial crash that foregrounds the socialization of debt.