The nature of culture and cosmologies, the role of utopian thinking in modern societies, and the limits of social change and activism.

A summation of the main arguments of the book.

Chapter 3 details the connection between the utopian novel and vegetarianism. It argues that vegetarianism plays an important role in the two most significant texts in the development of the genre in the late-nineteenth century: Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon. It suggests that while H. G. Wells’s conflicted personal views on vegetarianism means that the subject is treated with a marked ambivalence, ultimately benefiting the fiction, the wholehearted endorsement of vegetarianism in Bellamy’s Equality is one element amongst several that reduces the text to little more than didactic screed. Here the important connection between women’s writing and vegetarianism and veganism is brought to the fore in a discussion of the British writer Mrs George Corbett and the American Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

This chapter opens by pointing to the popularity of utopian fantasies, or ‘prophetic romances’, at the fin-de-siècle, before exploring some of the possible socio-economic and political reasons for this situation, not the least of which was the impact of the Paris Commune on the late nineteenth-century anti-socialist imaginary. The chapter proceeds to an outline of the US journalist Edward Bellamy’s best-selling utopian fiction, Looking Backward (1888), undoubtedly the most influential of these publications on both sides of the Atlantic. In his review of this book, Morris offers a critique of Bellamy’s ‘temperament’ – which he suggests is typical of late nineteenth-century bourgeois ideology in so far as it is decidedly ‘modern’ – as ‘unhistoric and unartistic’. The chapter concludes, then, by claiming that the distinctiveness of Morris’s contribution both to the tradition of utopian fiction and to contemporaneous debates about socialism lies in his characteristic insistence on a future society that is historic, artistic and, finally, erotic.

Often focused on the rapid development of technologies (both scientific and social) and their dangers, American science fiction (SF) novels have highlighted how the twentieth century is characterized by truly global crises and possibilities, from the mass migrations and their various exploitations in the early twentieth century, to the Cold War and the direct threat of global nuclear destruction, to giving voice to those denied rights and silenced both in the earlier SF canon and in the larger body politic, and to the climate emergency. Distancing these political issues from the real, twentieth-century SF novels may risk making specific political moments seem fantastic, but they can simultaneously enable new forms of global and communal visions that are (increasingly) necessary to political action. To discuss these visions, the chapter discusses a range of different traditions running through SF and parallel forms of work throughout the twentieth century, with a particular focus on the role of Black and Afrofuturist writers in the period.

This chapter briefly surveys the intellectual history of modern, western counterinsurgency theory, as conservative, high modernist utopianism. It sets out concise and synoptic evidence for the argument, which serves as context for the later case chapters. I focus on counterinsurgency manuals—applied theoretical texts written by counterinsurgency practitioners, aiming to shape battlefield and political conduct. Manuals link theory and practice, connecting idealized military and political theory to the history of on-the-ground conduct. My approach is primarily contextualist. Proceeding chronologically, I draw connections and contrasts between canonical manuals, from the early modern period to the present. While small wars or counterinsurgency manuals were conservative from early on, high modernism and utopianism emerged only gradually and incidentally, taking multiple forms. I show how ideas cross-pollinated across texts, accumulating scattershot political idealizations and military practices alike. In so doing, I link micro-level individual intellectual change with larger historical processes, at the global level.

The representation of an Amazon queen’s fantasized body turns attention to what is concealed by Amazon dress. These celanda function as a somatized preterition of Amazon customs that incites readerly speculation around their social meaning within an imagined society. Together with unanswered questions about the variantly gendered body and its meanings, the alterity of her physical presence invites the reader to entertain utopian alternative organizations of gendered identity grounded in a sexually variant perspective at the margin of the text’s fictional world. The preteritive attention paid to her experience and the world view of her society thus opens up the possibility of an "Amazon reading" of Alexander himself, and by extension an Amazon reading of the epic that celebrates his exploits. With the possibility of Amazon reading comes as well the possibility of solidarity among those who read like Amazons, a solidarity effected not by any commonality of essential identity, but by their willingness to read the text’s preteritions against the grain of a sanctioned, "straight" interpretation informed by the received cultural values of an "ideal" audience.

The concluding chapter reviews the book’s findings, then considers implications for ongoing conflicts globally. Counterinsurgency and cognate ideas, I argue, are likely to persist, whatever their past failures and ambivalent reception. I consider potential future developments, in a period of reactionary politics and “the empire come home.” Alternatives are nonetheless possible.

This chapter introduces the study and sets out a framework for investigating counterinsurgency’s intellectual history. I argue late twentieth and early twenty-first century counterinsurgency is a form of conservative, high modern utopianism. It is conservative in aiming to protect a given status quo against revolution or other transformative change. Counterinsurgency is “high modernist” in James C. Scott’s sense: it imagines a linear, schematized world, effacing local difference and resistance—in line with modern ideologies of progress. It is utopian in aiming to (re)make not actually existing systems and practices, but instead the idealized preferences of their elites, shorn of compromise, incidental variation, and historical specificity. Counterinsurgencies are thus conservative worldmaking projects: attempts to reimagine and reorder the world, in response to insurrection. The book’s purpose is the explain how this configuration of armed politics arose. To do so, it focuses on counterinsurgency manuals: the military theoretical and instructional texts designed to make counterinsurgency doable in practice.

Chapter 2 sets the stage for the analysis of my three cases, by delineating an account of utopianism that manages to withstand the objections raised by anti-utopian critics, both from the Left and the Right. I hold that these detractors miss their target insofar as they fail to acknowledge the actual complexity of utopianism. While utopias can, under specific circumstances, turn out to be impractical or dangerous, it is wrong to assume that this is necessarily and always the case. Drawing on groundbreaking work in utopian studies, I thus claim that anti-perfectionist utopias set into motion forms of social dreaming that productively educate our desire for things to be otherwise. The chapter then continues by investigating what can be considered utopianism’s paramount function: the production of estrangement. In a further step, I scrutinize the other two purposes that utopian visions of the Anthropocene cater to, namely galvanizing (eutopias) and cautioning (dystopias) an audience. Chapter 2 ends with an intermezzo elaborating on utopian practices – social experiments that perform collective life “against the grain.”

Chapter 1 introduces the book's key concepts: utopianism, speculative fiction and the Anthropocene. I start by defining utopianism in terms of the "education of a desire for alternative ways of being." The chapter then shows that the current climate crisis necessitates a fundamental reorientation of our cognitive and affective frameworks. This can only be achieved, I maintain, with the help of various kinds of social dreaming, spurred by theory building and storytelling. In a second step, I discuss the background against which my analysis proceeds – the Anthropocene. In a concise fashion, different interpretations of, and objections to, the basic premise of a "human planet" are reviewed. Third, the chapter outlines the disciplinary perspectives informing this approach: political theory, utopian studies and the environmental humanities. Another section covers the book’s methodology and explains two central ideas behind my case selection: constellation and plot line. The chapter concludes with a synopsis of the ensuing argument.

Two influential contemporary critiques of liberalism call attention to important sources of political polarization. On the one hand we have the claim, most closely associated with the political right, that liberalism promotes an empty, anomic individualism. On the other hand we have the claim, most closely associated with the political left, that liberalism is complicit in the power structures of capitalism and imperialism. In each case a freedom-centered liberalism puts these critics on the horns of a dilemma: they either have to admit that they are also committed to striking an appropriate balance between republican and market freedom – albeit one that is substantially different from the status quo – or else embrace some form of authoritarian or utopianism. I conclude by considering whether and on what terms liberalism so understood can accommodate its contractarian counterpart.

This essay returns to F. O. Matthiessen’s off-handed mention that the book he never wrote was “The Age of Fourier.” The essay reads Harriet Beecher Stowe and Margaret Fuller through this lens, recasting two authors who tend to be used as representative presences on syllabi (Stowe the Sentimentalist, Fuller the Feminist) into a new narrative of radicalization via the utopian socialism of Fourier and US Fourierism. The essay turns to the arts of editorial assemblage, used by both authors to craft their texts, in order to discern the collectivities they wished to build, as well as how they build their texts to propel the ongoing momentum needed in the long durée of movements for social change.

Reading Marcus Garvey as a brilliant popular culture practitioner, this chapter situates Garvey vis-à-vis his Black contemporaries to challenge readings of Garveyism and the UNIA that have tended to repeat limiting narratives of rise and fall, tragedy and farce, and failure. Paying careful attention to the use of uniforms, pamphlets, parades, songs, speeches, and pageantry within Garveyism, Russell analyzes Garvey as a popular cultural artist before such a concept was even conceived. The chapter is particularly sensitive to the affective dimensions of performance within Garveyism. UNIA members across the African diaspora participated in performance as embodied futurity by marching, singing the anthem, and wearing UNIA uniforms, enacting a utopian vision of Black liberation and unity that facilitated the construction of what Benedict Anderson has called an “imagined community”.

This chapter explores the usefulness of neo-Roman liberty – to live free from subjection, deference, and vulnerability to the arbitrary will of others – for our contemporary philosophical debates about human rights. For eighteenth-century republicans such as Wollstonecraft and Price, liberty understood in this way was conceptually linked to rights of humanity, but that link has been severed. Starting from a sense of perplexity about the disengagement between 'republican' liberty and human rights and the curious inability of mainstream human rights philosophy to deal with major political challenges, neo-Roman liberty is used here to push human rights philosophy onto more radically egalitarian terrain. The critique focuses on the naturalistic bias in human rights thinking, a misunderstanding of international human rights law, a tendency to focus on event-based 'local' principles of justice, and a reluctance to challenge structural causes of injustice. The contention is that Skinner’s neo-Roman liberty serves to establish two important normative premises for a human rights philosophy with more bite: human rights should offer the strongest protection for those who are most vulnerable to socio-economic and political marginalisation, and that objects of human rights should be conceptualised in terms of open-ended goals of justice, predicated on a commitment to structural equality.

Scholars of Wallace Stevens have variously represented him as a crafter of poetic utopias, a skeptic of utopian thinking, and a champion of utopian material sufficiency. Mao’s chapter adds to the picture by showing how, in his poetry of the late 1930s and early 1940s, Stevens situates leaders and movements impelled by visions of ideal futures within a conception of political life as an ongoing struggle for dominance between ideas. Reading texts such as “Owl’s Clover,” “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” and “Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas” in relation to Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia and Max Lerner’s Ideas Are Weapons, the chapter shows that Stevens’s view of history as an interplay of imagination and reality partook of important currents in interwar intellectual life.