Utopianism

10 Key excerpts on "Utopianism"

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  Political Uses of Utopia

  New Marxist, Anarchist, and Radical Democratic Perspectives

  • S. Chrostowska, James Ingram(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Columbia University Press

    (Publisher)

  32 The time, in short, is ripe to reopen utopia as a political question. But for this discussion to be fruitful, it must be conducted on new bases, beyond the impasses and static oppositions outlined above.

  As the postwar antiutopians recognized, a recipe-book conception of the relation between theory and practice, between the ideal and the real, is as unrealistic as it is dangerous. It ignores the fact that politics is perhaps uniquely subject to the law of unintended consequences—that, as Hannah Arendt noted, since it always and only deals with people in the plural, it can never imagine them being subjected to a single dream or vision. The common starting point of the contributions to this volume is dissatisfaction with how the relationship between utopia and politics has for generations been framed—namely, by the assumption that utopia must be viewed either as a political ideal that is impossible to realize by definition, and therefore a mere thought experiment, or as something achievable, a model or blueprint. All our authors agree that neither of these models will do and that the political uses of utopia lie, if anywhere, between—or, better, are something other than—these alternatives. Moreover, although they reflect in different ways on the grand tradition of Western Utopianism, they are interested less in the tradition per se than in its relevance and specific valences within the current situation.

  Utopia as discussed here is always utopia that presupposes plurality and contingency. This observation extends, moreover, beyond textual utopias to their really existing, practical-experimental counterparts (Sargent’s second, “communitarian” face of utopia). Unlike the classic “intentional communities” from Fourier’s phalanstères to Owen’s New Lanark to the communes built to preserve the spirit of ’68, the prefigurative Utopianism associated with contemporary anarchism and the recent Occupy movement, mentioned here by Michaël Löwy and explored by Ruth Kinna, is acutely aware of the danger of reifying rationalistic, unlivable designs. If anything, the utopias tentatively opened up by today’s radical activists are provisional and ephemeral to a fault—utopias of practice, not planning.33

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  Virtuous Imbalance

  Political Philosophy between Desirability and Feasibility

  • Francesca Pasquali(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 4 , a concrete example of realistic political philosophy will be examined and the reliability of such a statement will be tested.

  2.1.2 Utopianism

  Utopianism9 is presented here as the counterpart of realism and most of its distinguishing features emerge through a comparison with realism. First and foremost, whereas realism assigns priority to feasibility and it ascribes a second-order role to desirability, Utopianism attributes absolute primacy to desirability. In building up its principles and models, Utopianism works within a theoretical perspective and it disregards feasibility requirements. This may be interpreted in two ways.

  9 Other expressions – idealism in particular – would fit, even better maybe, for referring to the specific kind of political philosophy labelled here as Utopianism. The term Utopianism is likely to lead to misunderstandings, since, for instance, Utopianism may be associated with traditional utopian theories. The choice of this term is partly due to stylistic reasons: it comes from Rawls’s idea of a realistically utopian political philosophy, which has played a major role in providing the initial hint for the present research. Nonetheless, the choice does not rest on stylistic considerations only: the expressions Utopianism and utopian political philosophy are quite commonly employed and they are attached with a meaning that is similar to the one envisaged here. See, for instance, Nagel 1989 and Lassman 2003 .

  First, this may simply mean that Utopianism is not concerned with, and does not investigate, the feasibility of its theses. On such an account, Utopianism seems very similar to traditional utopian thought. Indeed, utopian thinkers completely disregard the feasibility of their principles and, what is more, they tend to propose models that are apparently infeasible.10 Yet, Utopianism and the modern tradition of utopia should not be confused and they should be kept clearly distinct. On the one hand, traditional utopias usually display their principles in practice: they provide a ‘fully developed and detailed picture of the happy world that is expected to result from the application of particular principles’ (Kumar 2005 : 24; see also Kumar 1991 ). On the contrary, political theories generally remain on a more abstract level.11 On the other hand, the desirability of utopias is not supported by rational arguments meant to show their plausibility and cogency: traditional utopian thinking mainly relies on the immediate desirability of its models, namely on the fact that they ‘would win immediate, almost instinctive approbation’ (Manuel 1973 : vii). Political philosophy, instead, is continuously engaged in offering reasons and in addressing reasons in order to support its principles and models and in order to vindicate their desirability. Similar differences in the strategies Utopianism and traditional utopian thinking employ seem sufficiently crucial to distinguish between them.12

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  SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture

  Global Utopias in the Formation of Modern Chinese Political Thought, 1880–1940

  • Peter Zarrow(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  Utopianism in the sense I use it here is an optimistic form of egalitarian and cosmopolitan humanism. It is a product of the Enlightenment and modernity. By “humanism” I simply mean an abiding concern with the well-being of humankind as a whole: a sense that all individuals matter and possess dignity and agency. 4 By describing the humanism of modern Chinese thinkers as “cosmopolitan” I do not merely mean to heighten their humanism but also to highlight their engagement with the world: their search for universal truths in a newly interconnected world. At the same time, the Chinese thinkers considered in this book remained deeply commited to the regeneration of China. Indeed, they helped create modern Chinese nationalism. A certain tension arises between cosmopolitan engagement with the world and commitment to nationalism. Yet as Joachim Kurtz notes, “At the same time, this engagement, in line with global trends, became enmeshed with a decidedly nationalist agenda.” 5 Utopian thinkers could reconcile these tensions by looking toward a future where the mutual enmity of nations gave way to a moral world order. Cosmopolitanism thus involved both engagement in the present and a vision of a borderless future. I also take “Utopianism” to refer to a secular belief in the perfectibility (or near-perfectibility) of the world based on respect for human dignity and communitas. I acknowledge that there is much that is arbitrary about this definition. 6 Utopianism in this sense is not concerned firstly with individuals: it is a social vision. Furthermore, the utopian social vision is not mere belief that things can get better but a leap of faith that all the evils of this world can be abolished. Utopianism is thus distinguished from ordinary optimism or, for that matter, mere reformism by its conviction that the ideal future is not only achievable but is close to inevitable and pretty much around the corner

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  Europe's Utopias of Peace

  1815, 1919, 1951

  • Bo Stråth(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  The normative ideal of permanent peace and de-politicization under the dissolution of opposites like freedom and equality, property and poverty, war and peace fails because there is no end of history and no end of politics. Politics requires agreement over certain basic concepts, because without a shared conceptual framework there would be no political community. Everybody agrees on the value of concepts like reform, welfare, peace, freedom, etc. However, when it comes to the precise definitions of such concepts, and filling them with political substance, disagreement emerges; indeed without it there would be no politics. Therefore, the ideal of politics for the final solution is impossible. The ideal is utopian.

  Ideologies such as liberalism and socialism, which proclaim themselves universal in scope, are utopian in the sense of Koskenniemi since that which their adherents proclaim as universal norms are contextual and open to interpretative conflicts clashing with other norms also argued to be universal. Political and legal words are expressed in contexts and their meaning depends on what claims are made by these words in respect to other claims. This fact is a source of change. The ideological prescriptions become in the clashes of norms ex post description of political practices. Natural rights are not given by nature or through birth, but in ideological conflicts. Human agents have constructed these values in specific historical situations and legitimized them by arguing that they are natural. Ideals argued to be universal, such as freedom and freedom of expression, for example, clash with universal ideals of equality and tolerance respectively.37

  In the same vein, the economic practices spoke a language other than the utopian understanding of economic theory in universal terms. At the end of the Napoleonic war Britain represented an imagined universal ideal of industry and trade for wealth and peace. This was in contrast to experiences of economies as deeply involved in warfare, experiences which David Hume referred to as the ‘jealousy of trade’. With every decade of the nineteenth century, the British ideal became more nuanced and the continued persistence of economic warfare was obvious. The prescribing free trade utopia became describing apology of political practices. The tentative search for a model of commerce for peace became a contentious matter of defining a position between free trade and protectionism. It was clear that there was neither a viable single European economic model nor a single European trajectory of development. There were not even national development trajectories, if trajectory is understood in terms of path dependency, developments structurally following a specific track in demarcation to other (national) tracks. The development of Europe’s economies did not follow any intrinsic or historical logic built into the emerging industrial capitalist system or the histories of the European countries.38

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  Ameritopia

  The Unmaking of America

  • Mark R. Levin(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Threshold Editions

    (Publisher)

  PART I

  ON Utopianism

  Passage contains an image

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE TYRANNY OF UTOPIA

  TYRANNY, BROADLY DEFINED , is the use of power to dehumanize the individual and delegitimize his nature. Political Utopianism1 is tyranny disguised as a desirable, workable, and even paradisiacal governing ideology. There are, of course, unlimited utopian constructs, for the mind is capable of infinite fantasies. But there are common themes. The fantasies take the form of grand social plans or experiments, the impracticability and impossibility of which, in small ways and large, lead to the individual’s subjugation.

  Karl Popper, a philosopher who eloquently deconstructed the false assumptions and scientific claims of Utopianism, arguing it is totalitarian in form and substance, observed that “[a]ny social science which does not teach the impossibility of rational social construction is entirely blind to the most important facts of social life, and must overlook the only social laws of real validity and of real importance. Social sciences seeking to provide a background for social engineering cannot, therefore, be true descriptions of social facts. They are impossible in themselves.”2 Popper argued that unable to make detailed or precise sociological predictions, long-term forecasts of great sweep and significance not only are intended to compensate for Utopianism’s shortcomings but are the only forecasts it considers worth pursuing.3 (Although Popper differentiated between “piecemeal social engineering” and “utopian social engineering,” it is ahistorical, or at least a leap of faith, to suggest that once unleashed, the social engineers will not become addicted to their power; and Popper never could enunciate a practical solution.)

  Utopianism is irrational in theory and practice, for it ignores or attempts to control the planned and unplanned complexity of the individual, his nature, and mankind generally. It ignores, rejects, or perverts the teachings and knowledge that have come before—that is, man’s historical, cultural, and social experience and development. Indeed, Utopianism seeks to break what the hugely influential eighteenth-century British statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke argued was the societal continuum “between those who are living and those who are dead and those who are to be born.”4 Eric Hoffer, a social thinker renowned for his observations about fanaticism and mass movements, commented that “[f]or men to plunge headlong into an undertaking of vast change, they must be intensely discontented yet not destitute, and they must have the feeling that by the possession of some potent doctrine, infallible leader or some new technique they have access to a source of irresistible power. They must also have an extravagant conception of the prospects and potentialities of the future.… [T]hey must be wholly ignorant of the difficulties involved in their vast undertaking. Experience is a handicap.”5

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  Hope and Education

  The Role of the Utopian Imagination

  • David Halpin(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  On the other hand, we need to beware of what Louis Marin (1984) cryptically refers to as ‘degenerative utopias’—that is to say, forms of spatial play that sanitize and mythologize the limitations of the past so as to make it acceptable in the present. All forms of ‘golden ageism’ fall into this category, as do the futuristic utopias mirrored in some of the exhibits found in such heterotopia as Disneyland and the former Millennium Dome in Greenwich, London, and in cultural theme parks generally. In each case, we are offered no critique of the past or existing order of things, but rather a comfortable and comforting account of a historical epoch in which its contradictory and dysfunctional features are obscured, or a neutralized assessment of the possibilities and inevitability of technological change.

  Utopia and politics

  Because they express competing desires for and images of the good society, utopias are inescapably political. Michael Ignatieff puts this more poetically than I ever could, remarking that ‘utopian thought is a dream of the redemption of human tragedy through polities’ (1994, p. 19). Equally, to the extent that absolute hope transcends the world which is immediately experienced—in Vaclav Havel’s words, is ‘anchored somewhere beyond its horizons’ (1990, p. 181)—its counterpart utopia always ‘pushes to the limit’ (Walsh, 1993, p. 53), generating political argument as a result rather than obsequious consensus. Consequently, utopian ‘elsewheres’, as Terry Eagleton reminded us earlier, offer us an important means of taking stock politically of where we are now and of where we may want to go; that is to say, they evoke a future possibility by helping us to escape the constraints of the present.

  Objections to utopia

  This very positive account of the nature and potential of Utopianism, of course, begs a number of major questions. Terry Eagleton, as I mentioned in the Preface, anticipates many of them, drawing attention to the need to make a sharp distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ utopias—the former being grounded in practical possibility (what I will later define as ‘utopian realism’), the latter in mere wistful thinking.

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  Utopianism for a Dying Planet

  Life after Consumerism

  • Gregory Claeys(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  Socialism and the Social Movement (J. M. Dent, 1909), 38–39.

  54 . Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1936), 36. For a reconsideration of the main concepts here, see Lyman Tower Sargent’s “Ideology and Utopia”, in The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, edited by Michael Freeden, Sargent, and Marc Stears (Oxford University Press, 2013), 439–51.

  55 . Frances Theresa Russell, Touring Utopia (Dial, 1932), 70.

  56 . Harry Ross, Utopias Old and New (Nicholson and Watson, 1938), 122.

  57 . Marie Louise Berneri, Journey through Utopia (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1950), 207–9.

  58 . John Humphrey Noyes curiously uses the term “utopian” only once in his classic study, originally entitled History of American Socialisms (1870), in reference to Adin Ballou (Strange Cults and Utopias of 19th-Century America (Dover Publications, 1966, 131).

  59 . George Jacob Holyoake, The History of Co-operation in England, 2 vols (Trubner, 1875), 1: 22–51, 155.

  60 . Morris Hillquit, History of Socialism in the United States, 5th ed. (1903; Dover, 1971), 18–19.

  61 . Barbara Goodwin, Social Science and Utopia: Nineteenth Century Models of Social Harmony (Harvester, 1978), 4.

  62 . Some recent trends in literature are examined by David M. Bell in Rethinking Utopia: Power, Place, Affect (Routledge, 2017).

  63 . Another major contribution to this debate, Ruth Levitas’s The Concept of Utopia (Syracuse University Press, 1990), offers the best survey of definitions based on form, content, and function, though its conclusions vary considerably from those defended here.

  64 . Sargent, Utopianism, 3, 5, 8–9. Sargent’s “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited” (Utopian Studies 5 (1994): 1–37), first presented in 1975, is the most comprehensive attempt to clarify the definitional problem and provide a taxonomy of the various types of each “face”. On current definitional disputes, see further Gregory Claeys and Lyman Tower Sargent’s The Utopia Reader

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  Islams and Modernities

  • Aziz Al-Azmeh(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Verso

    (Publisher)

  7

  Utopia and Islamic Political Thought

  It is easy to underestimate the complexity of utopia in Islamic political thought, the diversity and variety of elements it calls forth to the mind with and without justification. It is easy not fully to appreciate the problems attendant upon ascribing to Islamic political thought a utopian element, not least because the notion of utopia is itself problematic and easy to banalize, and because in Islam utopian elements are elusive and difficult to disentangle from mythological, eschatological, legal and didactic contexts. More important, in addressing the question of utopia and the state in Islamic political thought, one has to confront the problematic status of political thought in Islam, and one must try to approach it in a way other than by analogy with modern political thought. Islamic political thought is a topic much addressed, but very little understood, and the general impression one gains from modern studies is one of essentialism, recursivity and repetitiveness1 – there are exceptions of course. So one must reflect, in however preliminary a form, upon the notion of Islamic political thought, which is really not so much a coherent, deliberate and disciplined body of investigation and inquiry concerning a well-defined and delimited topic, but is rather an assembly of statements on topics political, statements dispersed in various discursive locations; there is no ‘political theory’ as such in Islamic political thought.

  This contribution will therefore scan a period of over a thousand years and probe the edges and boundaries of its subject matter; it hopes to offer a number of specifications, distinctions and notions which are essential if one were to be able to begin thinking about utopia in Islamic political thought. Impressing upon the reader the importance and necessity of these preliminary distinctions and specifications will, in itself, be a worthwhile task. Of these specifications I will start with one which I have already elaborated elsewhere.2 This concerns the state – dawla in Arabic. Both lexically and in terms of actual usage until modern times, the term denoted a particular kind of patrimony, the proprietorship of command and authority within a specific line. Very rarely is the state, dawla, actually discussed – as distinct from being mentioned – in works that concern politics, be they works of public law, of ethics, or Fürstenspiegel. The precise field of use and elaboration of the term and the notion dawla is historical literature.3 In historical writing, dawla refers to the continuity over time of power exercised by a string of successive sovereigns, and to the facility by which single sovereigns exercise exclusive power: thus we have the dawla of the Abbasids, and the dawla of Hārūn al-Rashīd. This abstract dawla is constituted of a body politic, in the original sense: a sovereign, his troops, his bureaucrats. What must be stressed is that this concrete body is distinct from a body social and from what later came to be known as civil society. This is absent from Islamic political thought except as an abstract locus of order and disorder which receives the action of dawla, and is only implicitly conceived in Islamic law. Dawla only relates to that which stands apart from it in a very abstract fashion; in this connection the sovereign, sultān, is the sole political subject, whose action upon society is univocal.4 The exclusivity and totality of sovereign power is habitually compared to that of God, not unlike the practice in pre-modern European traditions. In Mamluk times, for instance, the jurist Ibn Jamā’a (d. 1333) carried through an interesting transposition which elevated the force of this analogy: whereas dogmatic theologians had previously demonstrated the unicity and omnipotence of God by, among other things, analogy with the unicity and omnipotence of royal power, he demonstrated these same characteristics of royal power by analogy with the divinity.5

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  Ideology and Utopia

  • Karl Mannheim(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Wherever the idea of freedom had to make concessions to the concomitant idea of equality, it was setting up goals which were in contradiction to the social order which it demanded and which was later realized. The separation of the ideological elements in the dominant bourgeois mentality from those capable of subsequent realization, i.e. the truly utopian elements, could only be made by a social stratum that came later upon the scene to challenge the existing order.

  All the hazards that we have pointed out as being involved in a specific definition of what is ideological and what utopian in the mentality of a given time, do indeed make the formulation of the problem more difficult, but do not preclude its investigation. It is only as long as we find ourselves in the very midst of mutually conflicting ideas that it is extremely difficult to determine what is to be regarded as truly utopian (i.e. realizable in the future) in the outlook of a rising class, and what is to be regarded as merely the ideology of dominant as well as ascendant classes. But, if we look into the past, it seems possible to find a fairly adequate criterion of what is to be regarded as ideological and what as utopian. This criterion is their realization. Ideas which later turned out to have been only distorted representations of a past or potential social order were ideological, while those which were adequately realized in the succeeding social order were relative utopias. The actualized realities of the past put an end to the conflict of mere opinions about what in earlier situationally transcendent ideas was relatively utopian bursting asunder the bonds of the existing order, and what was an ideology which merely served to conceal reality. The extent to which ideas are realized constitutes a supplementary and retroactive standard for making distinctions between facts which as long as they are contemporary are buried under the partisan conflict of opinion.

  2. WISH -FULFILMENT AND UTOPIAN MENTALITY

  Wishful thinking has always figured in human affairs. When the imagination finds no satisfaction in existing reality, it seeks refuge in wishfully constructed places and periods. Myths, fairy tales, other-worldly promises of religion, humanistic fantasies, travel romances, have been continually changing expressions of that which was lacking in actual life. They were more nearly complementary colours in the picture of the reality existing at the time than utopias working in opposition to the status quo

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  Democracy, Lifelong Learning and the Learning Society

  Active Citizenship in a Late Modern Age

  • Peter Jarvis(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  outopia ) to cross the infinitely small but infinitely great distance which separates the geographical fiction from a political and social one; where the permutation of a ‘p’ and a ‘t’ (potia/topia) makes time and space equivalent. Displaced letters, displaced names (displacing their significations) – a displaced map displacing all maps and really finding none – Utopia as process is the figure of all kinds of frontiers, displacing, by the practice of it travels, all representations, secretly duplicating any kind of real geographical voyage and any kind of historical and temporal change.

  And so utopia is nowhere and in no time – it is a hope, an answer to a very prevalent question about how do we create a better society and an answer to an unasked question about the meaning of humankind to which religion had provided an answer, but as a hope it can be conceptualised into an ideology which people endeavour to enact in the real world and at a specific historical time. As ideology, as Marin (1993, p. 13) makes clear – it becomes a totality and ‘when political power seizes it, it becomes a totalitarian whole’. This we have seen both in Soviet communism and American imperialism – among so many other endeavours – but which we have also argued in this book has occurred as a result of global capitalism. In almost all of these endeavours it is ruthless power that has brought it about and education has often been a significant tool in the process.

  In its broadest and least controversial meaning – utopia is the vision of the good society that human kind has always had but the vision varies from people to people and culture to culture – it is a plurality which is itself a negation of the liberal ideas that have prevailed in the West and, as such, an implied criticism of modernity. However, the word has carried disparaging meanings, such as something being unrealistic, when criticising one or other of the ideologies that have been futuristic in nature, and so on. One of the reasons why Marx criticised religion was because its utopian ideology distracted the working classes from realistic political activity:

  Religious distress is at the same time the expression of and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sign of the oppressed creature, the heart of the heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium

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