Picture Imperfect

Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age

Russell Jacoby

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780231502979
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

"The choice we have is not between reasonable proposals and an unreasonable utopianism. Utopian thinking does not undermine or discount real reforms. Indeed, it is almost the opposite: practical reforms depend on utopian dreaming."--Russell Jacoby, Picture Imperfect

Utopianism suffers from an image problem: A recent exhibition on utopias in Paris and New York included photographs of Hitler's Mein Kampf and a Nazi concentration camp. Many observers judge utopians and their sympathizers as foolhardy dreamers at best and murderous totalitarians at worst. However, as noted social critic and historian Russell Jacoby argues in this salient, polemical, and innovative work, not only has utopianism been unfairly characterized, a return to an iconoclastic utopian spirit is vital for today's society. Shaped by the works of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Gustav Landauer, and other predominantly Jewish thinkers, iconoclastic utopianism revives society's dormant political imagination and offers hope for a better future. Writing against the grain of history, Jacoby reexamines the anti-utopian mindset and identifies how utopian thought came to be regarded with such suspicion. He challenges standard readings of such anti-utopian classics as 1984 and Brave New World and offers stinging critiques of the influential liberal and anti-utopian theorists Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, and Karl Popper. He argues that these thinkers mistakenly equate utopianism with totalitarianism.

The reputation of utopian thought has also suffered from the failures of, what Jacoby terms, the blueprint utopian tradition and its oppressive emphasis on detailing all aspects of society and providing fantastic images of the future. In contrast, the iconoclastic utopians, like those who follow God's prohibition against graven images, resist both the blueprinters' obsession with detail and the modern seduction of images. Jacoby suggests that by learning from the hopeful spirit of iconoclastic utopians and their willingness to accept new possibilities for society, we open ourselves to new and more imaginative ideas of the future.

1. An Anarchic Breeze

EVERY GENERALIZATION IS FALSE. WE LIVE IN AN AGE of hope and transformation. We also live in age of resignation, routine, and perhaps alarm. We anticipate the world will get better; we fear it will get worse. We exist amid incredible riches and paralyzing poverty. We conduct our lives in peace and we are surrounded by violence. The wealthy in spacious suburbs worry about keeping their shiny SUVs scratch free. The poor in dusty byways dream of clean water, the refugees in endless civil wars of four walls and a roof. On the outskirts of Johannesburg, the wretched seize land with the idea that “with all the space here, you can make a toilet.”¹ Today little can span these realities.

This may, however, speak to both worlds: for both the prosperous and the destitute utopian ideas are as dead as door nails. They are irrelevant for the affluent and immaterial for the hungry—and dangerous for many intellectuals, to boot. To the desperate, utopian ideas seem meaningless; to the successful, they lack urgency or import; to the thinking classes, they lead to a murderous totalitarianism. Yet something must be stated at the outset: the choice we have is not between reasonable proposals and a unreasonable utopianism. Utopian thinking does not undermine or discount real reforms. Indeed, it is almost the opposite: practical reforms depend on utopian dreaming—or at least utopian thinking drives incremental improvements.

Edward Bellamy’s 1888 Looking Backward not only sketched a future society beyond selfishness and inequality but spurred political groups devoted to practical reform. His best-selling novel might be dismissed as airy speculation of a future America, but this would be misleading. It gave rise to a political association, the Nationalist Clubs, and it accelerated reforms as prosaic as the construction of good sewers. With Bellamy at their head calling for “evolution, not revolution,” and “orderly and progressive development,” the Nationalist Clubs pushed for reforms in voting, labor, and municipal services.² The Bellamyites supported the city of Chicago in extending publicly sponsored electrical service, for instance. Chicago demonstrated that elected municipal authorities could provide electricity “cheaper and better than by private corporations,” proclaimed the Club newspaper. “In this ‘practical’ age men demand fact and not theory.” In Chicago they were getting it. In Boston, they were receiving the contrary lesson of private electrical service that was expensive and dangerous.³

Nor is Looking Backward the exception. History is replete with utopias that spurred reforms and utopians who advanced concrete improvements. Consider the marquis de Condorcet, the eighteenth-century French utopian, who dreamt of “the true perfection of mankind” living in complete equality unsullied by “greed, fear or envy.”⁴ He also served as the veritable director of the Société des Amis des Noirs (Society of the Friends of Blacks), the first French organization devoted to the abolition of slavery.⁵ Condorcet forcefully denounced the scandal of slavery, but far from demanding utopian measures, he proposed a series of moderate reforms leading to black emancipation. He feared the call for immediate freedom would stir too much opposition and checkmate any progress.⁶ He authored a founding document of the society that detailed how the group would meet, its yearly costs of membership, and its cautious goals. “Since we intend to concentrate on useful work, we need to repel in advance anyone who attempts to sow suspicion by accusing us of having no fixed aims” or “by presenting us as a dangerous institution.”⁷

Or take Enfantin, the nineteenth-century follower of the utopian St. Simon, who looked forward to a future Golden Age. Enfantin possessed more mystical goals than his mentor—and more practical ones. He wanted to link East and West, the female and male principles. He divined how to do this. In 1833 he traveled to Alexandria, Egypt, with a crew of engineers with the idea of building a canal to connect the two realms. It is easy to mock Enfantin’s florid language and metaphysical goals, observes Zachary Karabell in his recent history of the Suez canal, but he shared an idiom and sense of destiny with many late-eighteenth-century visionaries, including founders of the United States. Enfantin worked on plans for the canal and assembled work crews to excavate it. After three years of intermittent progress, he quit Egypt, but not before he made his most “avid convert,” Ferdinand de Lesseps, who successfully saw through the building of the Suez Canal.⁸

Down-to-earth reforms or feasible social changes coexist with utopianism and are often fed by it. At the beginning of modern utopianism Thomas More described an island community without money or private property. Yet the first section of his 1516 Utopia protested injustices of the day; he damned England for its endemic poverty, the theft it gave rise to, and the executions that ensued. Thieves were being hung “all over the place,” sometimes “twenty on a single gallows.” Why? Because they stole out of hunger. “In this respect you English,” comments the reporter from Utopia,

remind me of incompetent schoolmasters, who prefer caning their pupils to teaching them. Instead of inflicting these horrible punishments, it would be far more to the point to provide everyone with some means of livelihood, so that nobody’s under the frightful necessity of becoming first a thief and then a corpse.”⁹

Was this utopianism—this call to provide citizens with “some means of livelihood”? Little sounds more reasonable.

Over a fifty-year period (1805–1855), almost a hundred utopian communities were founded in the United States. Their founders and members did not generally run from but rather toward society; they saw themselves creating and promoting viable models for how people could live better. This was the belief, for instance, of Victor Considerant, the French founder of a Texas community. How will old Europe gain from our community? he asked. He saw his association as “the nucleus of the new society” that will lead to “thousands of analogous organizations.” “It is not the desertion of society that is proposed to you, but the solution of the great social problem on which depends the actual salvation of the world.”¹⁰

Or listen to Nathaniel Hawthorne, who fictionalized his brief experience at one utopian community, Brook Farm. “We had left the rusty iron frame-work of society behind us; we have broken through many hindrances … we had stept down from the pulpit; we had flung aside the pen; we have shut up the ledger; we had thrown off that sweet, bewitching, enervating indolence.” And for what? “It was our purpose—a generous one, certainly, and absurd … to give up whatever we had heretofore attained, for the sake of showing mankind the example of a life governed by other than the false and cruel principles on which human society has all along been based.”¹¹

To be sure, the intention of “showing mankind the example” rarely ended well. The history of utopian communities is largely a history of failure. John Humphrey Noyes, himself a founder of a utopian community (Oneida), marveled that these associations “started so gaily and failed so soon.”¹² Yet it wrongs history to ignore failure, as if nothing positive or humane comes out of it. Conversely, victory can testify to the configuration of force or power, rather than to truth or validity. This may seem obvious, but it runs against deep-seated beliefs or prejudices. Success needs no defense; it is its own advertisement. However, the questions tabled by success may be decisive: Success succeeds, but for how long and at what cost? To study only the world’s victors keeps thought locked to a narrow reality. Out of defeat emerges ideas, changed people, and new movements.

Even when they failed, utopian communities radically altered people and perceptions. In nineteenth-century America, Hawthorne was but one of the literary and political figures who took away lessons from utopian experiments. Frederick Law Olmsted, for instance, the landscape architect credited with New York’s Central Park, visited a New Jersey Fourierist community, the North America Phalanx. He was struck by “the advantages of cooperation” in labor and culture. While he admitted that he was “not a Fourierist for myself,” he came away with a belief in making “knowledge, intellectual and moral culture, and esthetic culture more easy—popular.” He learned the force of “democratizing religion, refinement and information.” In such an association, he believed, all people would “live more sensibly, be happier and better.”¹³

Today, however, the utopian vision has flagged; it sparks little interest. At best, “utopian” is tossed around as a term of abuse; it suggests that someone is not simply unrealistic but prone to violence. I offer at least three reasons for the fate of utopian thought: the collapse of the communist states beginning in 1989; the widespread belief that nothing distinguishes utopians and totalitarians; and something more difficult to pinpoint, but essential: an incremental impoverishment of what might be called Western imagination.

I can add little to the story of the fall of communism. To many observers, Soviet Marxism and its knockoffs symbolized the utopian project. The failure of Soviet communism entailed the end of utopia. Who can challenge the verdict of history? Of course, over its lifetime Stalinism engendered generations of critics who protested the identification of the Soviet system with human emancipation. But when the Soviet ship went down, it also capsized, willy-nilly, the row boats of dissenters paddling in its wake. It seems unjust that the Victor Serges, Emma Goldmans, Gustav Reglers, and even Leon Trotskys, who fought against authoritarian communism—and suffered the consequences—should share its fate, as if no distinction could be drawn between the accuser and accused. When Soviet communism thrived it silenced critics by its putative success. When it failed, it silenced critics by disappearing. Those who resisted the spell of Soviet success have been unable to escape the pull of its collapse.¹⁴

This is unfair, but who says the judgment of history is fair? It consists not of an anonymous Weltgeist but of countless individuals—writers, scholars, politicians, and ordinary people. Today they more or less agree; utopian thinking is finished. The sixteenth century gave us a new term, “utopia,” and the twentieth gave us “dystopia,” or negative utopia, the universe of Huxley’s Brave New World or Orwell’s 1984, where utopia has gone amuck. Perhaps this says it all. The movement from utopia to dystopia ratifies history.

The word “utopia,” coined by Thomas More, breathed of possibility, spurred by the recent “discovery” of the New World. “I don’t know, Madam,” said the narrator in Fontenelle’s eighteenth-century Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, “if you grasp the surprise of these Americans” as they encountered the ship-borne explorers. “After that,” what is not possible? “I’ll bet … against all reason, that some day there might be communication between the Earth and the Moon.” “‘Really,’ said the Marquise, staring at me. ‘You are mad.’”¹⁵ This optimism and excitement found its way into utopian visions. Their willingness to learn, reported More’s Raphael of the utopians, is the reason they are “so much ahead of us politically and economically.” This news warmed his convivial audience. “In that case, my dear Raphael, for goodness’ sake tell us some more about the island in question.” They break to dine and return in fine spirits to hear his tale.¹⁶

Almost five centuries later the world has grown weary. We have come and gone to the moon. In the mid-twentieth century, J. Max Patrick, a coeditor of an anthology of utopian writings, coined the term “dystopia” as the contrary of utopia.¹⁷ He referred to a satirical utopia as the “opposite of eutopia, the ideal society: it is a dystopia, if it is possible to coin a word.”¹⁸ Without doubt, the twentieth-century dystopias look and smell very differently from classic utopias, even those created as recently as the end of the nineteenth century. “My first feeling,” reported the voyager as he awakes in William Morris’s 1890 utopian News from Nowhere, “was a delicious relief caused by the fresh air and pleasant breeze.”¹⁹ An opening sentence of Orwell’s 1984 reads: “The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats.”²⁰

Yet a critical problem arises. Is dystopia the opposite of utopia—in the same way that slavery is the opposite of freedom or cold is the opposite of hot—or does dystopia grow out of utopia? The epigram by Nicolas Berdyaev that Huxley used for Brave New World puts it well: “We used to pay too little attention to utopias, or even disregarded them altogether, saying with regret that they were impossible of realization.” Things have changed. “Now, indeed, they seem to be able to be brought about far more easily that we supposed, and we are actually faced by an agonizing problem of quite another kind: how can we prevent their final realization?”²¹ For Berdyaev it is utopias themselves that are the threat.

Few would claim that freedom leads to slavery or that frigid water will boil, but many do argue that utopia leads to dystopia—or that little distinguishes the two in the first place. The blurred border between utopia and dystopia compresses the historical judgment. Dystopia does not relate to utopia as dyslexia does to reading or dyspepsia to digestion. The other “dys-” words, derived from a Greek root meaning diseased or faulty, are disturbed forms of something healthy or desirable, but dystopia is judged less as an impaired than as a developed utopia. Dystopias are commonly viewed not as the opposite of utopias but as their logical fulfillment. No one suggests that dyslexia signifies we should renounce reading, but many believe dystopias invalidate utopias.

Why? The short answer has to do with the blood bath of communism—Stalinism, Maoism, Pol Pot, and the rest—and alludes, again, to the great twentieth-century dystopian novels that apprehend that experience. Fair enough—or is it? This judgment raises questions about the popular, not the scholarly, reading of texts. From Brave New World or 1984, generations of high school and college students learn the lesson that utopias in general, and communism in particular, are not only doomed, but destructive. Yet the twentieth-century dystopic novels were not emphatically anti-utopian—and certainly its authors were not. Years after Brave New World, Huxley wrote Island, a novel rarely assigned to students but that praises a utopian so...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. An Anarchic Breeze
• 2. On Anti-Utopianism: More or Less
• 3. To Shake the World off Its Hinges
• 4. A Longing That Cannot Be Uttered
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index