News from Somewhere: Enhanced Sociability and the Composite Definition of Utopia and Dystopia

History

Volumn 98, Issue 330, 2013, Pages 145-173

  Claeys, Gregory ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CIVIL SOCIETY; IDEOLOGY; SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION;

EID: 84876118485     PISSN: 00182648     EISSN: 1468229X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1468-229X.12005     Document Type: Article

References (94)

1. The literature on defining utopia is very extensive and not summarized adequately anywhere. A good starting point theoretically is Lyman Tower Sargent, 'The Three Faces of Utopianism', Utopian Studies, v (1994), 1-37, or Sargent, Utopianism (Oxford, 2010). For historical frameworks, the best study is J. C. Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing 1516-1700 (Cambridge, 1981). In what follows my analysis is confined to western utopian and dystopian traditions.
2. This article refines and extends the arguments of my Searching for Utopia: the History of an Idea (2011) [hereafter Claeys, Searching for Utopia], my 'Malice in Wonderland: The Origins of Dystopia from Wells to Orwell', in The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, ed. G. Claeys (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 107-134, and several earlier editions of utopian texts. In so far as its theme is the modern engagement between natural and artificial sociability, however, it goes back to arguments first explored in my Citizens and Saints: Politics and Anti-Politics in Early British Socialism (Cambridge, 1989), and which have dominated my research ever since. As Section II lays the groundwork for extending this project further into that direction, in a book provisionally entitled Dystopia: A Natural History, this part of the present article is more speculative, and hence longer than the first. Parts of the text have been presented in 2010-11 at the Universities of Cambridge, Cyprus, Lublin, and Porto, and the Oxford Literary Festival, and the Edinburgh International Book Festival. I am grateful to contributors to all of these meetings for their comments.
3. This is now broadly agreed by scholars in the field. See, e.g., The Utopian Reader, ed. G. Claeys and Lyman Tower Sargent (New York, 1999), introduction. For the modern period as a whole the best general study remains Krishan Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (Oxford, 1987) [hereafter Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia].
4. I here take up arguments offered my 'The Five Languages of Utopia', in Spectres of Utopia, ed. Artur Blaim (Gdansk, 2012), pp. 26-31 [hereafter Claeys, 'The Five Languages of Utopia'].
5. The literature here is enormous, but a good guide is Interpreting More's Utopia, ed. John C. Olin (New York, 1989). More recent trends are summarized in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas More, ed. George M. Logan (Cambridge, 2011).
6. This is the substance of the argument in Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2005).
7. This argument is defended in Searching for Utopia, pp. 14-15.
8. For example, C. West Churchman, 'The Design of a Perfect Society': 'I will define "Utopia" as a perfect society', in Utopias, ed. Peter Alexander and Roger Gill (1984), pp. 43-48, here p. 44.
9. A good account of these languages in relation to utopia is Alfred Braunthal, Salvation and the Perfect Society: The Eternal Quest (Amherst, 1979).
10. Heaven and North Korea have been compared in this respect, to the advantage of neither.
11. Thus we can envision Condorcet, for instance, as working within a utopian tradition in insisting that human progress aims at 'the true perfection of mankind' (Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1979), p. 173). This is closely linked by Condorcet with the growth of inequality within and between nations.
12. The classic text here is Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (1947).
13. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (1936), p. 171.
14. See Martin Buber, Paths in Utopia (Boston, 1949), and Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (3 vols; Oxford, 1986). Ludwig Feuerbach's idea of God as a projection of human desire was of course taken up by Marx in the famous 'Paris Manuscripts' of 1844, in order to expound Marx's concept of alienation.
15. A splendid portrayal of this tradition is Ruth Eaton, Ideal Cities: Utopianism and the (Un)built Environment (2002).
16. The same argument holds against current proclamations that the internet is somehow 'utopia'.
17. A good start with this theme is David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh, 2000).
18. A starting point here is Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics (1991).
19. But the proximity of the garden ideal and the small-scale rural utopia presents some interesting problems; here Henry Thoreau's Walden is germane.
20. A particularly important example here; one work which weds some of these themes is Christopher Kendrick, Utopia, Carnival, and Commonwealth in Renaissance England (Toronto, 2004).
21. A British starting point here is W. Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (1926), but the term is more closely identified with Nietzsche than anyone else.
22. For example, William McDougall, The Group Mind: A Sketch of the Principles of Collective Psychology (Cambridge, 1920). For the later literature more directly related to the themes discussed here, see C. Fred Alford, Group Psychology and Political Theory (New Haven, 1994).
23. The problem whether Robinson Crusoe can be treated as a utopia is briefly examined in Searching for Utopia, ch. 6.
24. For a restatement of the seriousness of More's intent to persuade readers of the viability of the Utopian commonwealth, see Quentin Skinner, 'Thomas More's Utopia and the Virtue of True Nobility', in Visions of Politics, ii: Renaissance Virtues (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 213-244 [hereafter Skinner, 'Thomas More's Utopia and the Virtue of True Nobility'].
25. See Searching for Utopia, ch. 5. An account which pushes this argument is Lorainne Stobbart, Utopia: Fact or Fiction? The Evidence from the Americas (Stroud, 1992).
26. Skinner, 'Thomas More's Utopia and the Virtue of True Nobility', pp. 223-231.
27. An incisive introduction to this interpretation of More is David Wootton, 'Friendship Portrayed: A New Account of Utopia', History Workshop Journal, xlv (1998), 28-47, where a debt to Erasmus in particular is noted, and the introduction to his edition of Utopia (Indianapolis, 1999) [hereafter Thomas More, Utopia, ed. Wootton], esp. p. 8. For the classical background, see, e.g., A. W. Price, Love and Friendship in Plato and Aristotle (Oxford, 1989). On community of goods, see the recent account by Peter Garnsey, Thinking about Property: From Antiquity to the Age of Revolution (Cambridge, 2007).
28. Thomas More, Utopia, ed. Wootton, p. 135.
29. The existence of the supposed seventh-century bc lawgiver Lycurgus, known to us chiefly through Plutarch's life, has long been questioned. The exact nature of Spartan equality, and the fabled abolition of gold and silver and introduction of iron currency, may also be questionable. Thanks to Melissa Lane for clarifying this point. What is chiefly important for the argument here, however, is that people believed the account to be founded in fact. On this see Elizabeth Rawson, The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (Oxford, 1960).
30. Skinner, 'Thomas More's Utopia and the Virtue of True Nobility', pp. 240-241.
31. See Henry Morgan, Ancient Society (1877), and Engels 's Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). The debate whether Russia could skip stages, avoiding capitalism entirely by progressing from the mir to communism, resulted in part from this line of enquiry.
32. Skinner, 'Thomas More's Utopia and the Virtue of True Nobility', p. 244.
33. This generalization is not meant to describe every form of utopia or community, however; a challenging instance might be the mid-nineteenth century Modern Times community conducted along extreme individualist lines. See Roger Wunderlich, Low Living and High Thinking at Modern Times, New York (Syracuse, NY, 1992). Anarchist communes in this period and later would also enter into this debate. But the proposition that sociability and individuation (the increasing cultivation of individuality and the sense of individual uniqueness) are inherently at odds cannot be taken up here.
34. For example, Karl Kautsky, Communism in Central Europe at the Time of the Reformation (1897).
35. The classic study is Melvin Lasky, Utopia and Revolution (Chicago, 1976). For America, see in particular Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America's Millennial Role (Chicago, 1968).
36. See my 'Socialism and the Language of Rights', in Revisiting the Origins of Human Rights: Genealogy of a European Idea, ed. Miia Halme-Tuomisaari and Pamela Slotte (2014, forthcoming). A move in this direction is described in Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, Mass., 2010).
37. Friedrich Engels, Socialism Utopian and Scientific (New York, 1972).
38. For a summary of related debates see Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (Syracuse, NY, 1990) [hereafter Levitas, The Concept of Utopia], pp. 179-199.
39. For discussions of the term and its domains see Chad Walsh, From Utopia to Nightmare (1962); Constantinos A. Doxiadis, Between Dystopia and Utopia (1966); Mark R. Hillegas, The Future as Nightmare: H. G. Wells and the Anti-Utopians (Carbondale, 1967); Alexandra Aldridge, The Scientific World-View in Dystopia (Ann Arbor, 1978) [hereafter Aldridge, The Scientific World-View in Dystopia]; Between Dream and Nature: Essays on Utopia and Dystopia, ed. Dominic Baker-Smith and C. C. Barfoot (Amsterdam, 1987); M. Keith Booker, The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature (1994); M. Keith Booker, Dystopian Literature: A Theory and Research Guide (1994); Erika Gottlieb, Dystopian Fiction East and West (Montreal, 2001); Tom Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (Oxford, 2000); Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, ed. Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini (2003) [hereafter, Dark Horizons, ed. Baccolini and Moylan].
40. Dark Horizons, ed. Baccolini and Moylan, p. 1.
41. See Lyman Tower Sargent, 'The Problem of the "Flawed Utopia": A Note on the Costs of Eutopia', in Dark Horizons, ed. Baccolini and Moylan, pp. 225-231.
42. Aldridge, The Scientific World-View in Dystopia, p. 5.
43. The classic study is Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Primitives and the Supernatural (1936). It is necessary here, clearly, to separate religion as a moral practice from, on the one hand, religion as a belief in god(s) and imaginary places such as heaven or hell, and from, on the other hand, fear of genuinely evil people.
44. See, e.g. Eric Maple, The Domain of Devils (1966).
45. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (New York, 1957).
46. The starting point for assessing its cultural development is Joanna Bourke, Fear: A Cultural History (2005).
47. A helpful start here is Yi-fu Tuan, Landscapes of Fear (Oxford, 1980).
48. A good introduction here is Eric Maple, The Domain of Devils (1966). For the devil, see, e.g., Robert Muchembled, A History of the Devil (Cambridge, 2003).
49. Sumptuary laws respecting clothing in particular are vital to this theme. For starters see Alan Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Law (1996).
50. But this can be read as an anti-utopia: Mary Shelley's monster is in some respects a response to the philosophy of her father, William Godwin. See generally Anne Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, her Fiction, her Monsters (1988).
51. A helpful survey of this domain is David Gilmore, Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors (Philadelphia, 2003).
52. For the important sphere of fairy tales, see Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York, 1977).
53. In 1868 John Stuart Mill used 'dys-topia' to describe projects which are 'too bad to be practicable' (Collected Works, xxviii (1988), p. 248), a usage clearly at odds with later conventions. Earlier instances of the term have been noted, but it emerges into meaningful general usage only in the early twentieth century.
54. This argument is developed in Utopias of the British Enlightenment, ed. G. Claeys (Cambridge 1994), and in my 'Passion and Order in 18th- and 19th-century British Utopianism', in Utopia Method Vision: The Use Value of Social Dreaming, ed. Tom Moylan and Raffaela Baccolini (Oxford, 2007), pp. 87-112.
55. This is explored in the introduction to my Late Victorian Utopias, i (2008).
56. In late nineteenth-century terminology, 'positive' eugenics was concerned with improving evolutionary chances by improving genetic stock, 'negative' eugenics with eliminating 'unfit' characteristics in specific groups.
57. This is true of the major interpretations (Levitas, The Concept of Utopia; Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia), as well as many other works, e.g., Alexandra Aldridge, The Scientific World View in Dystopia (Ann Arbor, 1984). But there are exceptions; Darko Suvin, for instance, terms 'dystopian' societies organized according to a radically less perfect principle than an author's present time (Dark Horizons, ed. Baccolini and Moylan, p. 189).
58. Thanks to Joan Bakewell for asking me exactly this question. One of the few accounts to explore this perspective is Constantinos A. Doxiodis, Between Dytopia and Utopia (1966), where the focus is upon the creation of 'bad cities'. Even here, however, the issue of intention is contentious.
59. I here draw upon Claeys, 'The Five Languages of Utopia'.
60. The key work here is Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Harmondsworth, 1977).
61. Stalin's torturers actually studied the techniques of the Inquisition in order to understand its successes.
62. E.g., Joseph H. Wellbank, 'Utopia and the Constraints of Justice', in Utopia/Dystopia, ed. Peyton E. Richter (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), pp. 29-43, here p. 34.
63. As Montesquieu famously observed, 'Has it ever been known that kings were not fond of monarchy or that despotic princes hated arbitrary power?' (Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (1748), trans. Thomas Nugent (New York, 1975), i. 34).
64. The 'Oriental Despotism' hypothesis can be used to extend this analysis to Asian conditions. See Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven, 1957).
65. On a more positive note, the utopian aspects of the Revolution are fruitfully explored in Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford, 1989).
66. See Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography (2000), p. 139.
67. Quoted in Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (2003), p. 88.
68. A rich irony, amongst many here, considering Marx's treatment of these themes in the 1844 'Paris Manuscripts'.
69. Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin (2008), p. 249.
70. Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia (2007).
71. There are, it might be noted, cases in which nations portraying themselves as essentially 'utopian' come to be seen as dystopian; this has been argued to have been true for the United States in the age of Bellamy (Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia, pp. 97-8).
72. Again Orwell is pertinent: it is not important that Big Brother exists, merely that we believe he does.
73. For a start on this issue, see Richard Wrigley, The Politics of Appearances: Representations of Dress in Revolutionary France (Oxford, 2002).
74. Clearly there was some retreat from this position after the enunciation of the 'materialist conception of history', but this remains a plausible interpretation of the Marxian project as a whole, and one which moreover dominated for much of the subsequent century or so.
75. See the comments of David Leopold, The Young Karl Marx (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 282-292.
76. Ludwig von Mises, Socialism (1936); J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1953); Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies (2 vols., Princeton, 1962). Lately John Gray has notably taken up this particular cudgel in Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007).
77. Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago, 1945); Herbert Spencer, The Man versus the State (London, 1902). Within democracy itself, too, the theme of the consequences of intensive and increasingly intolerant and militant mass conformity had been explored first in detail by Tocqueville, and later elaborated by Ortega y Gasset, amongst others. See Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (2 vols., 1835-1840); José Ortega Y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (1930; 2nd edn. 1951).
78. J. Philolaus, A Serious Aviso to the Good People of this Nation, Concerning that Sort of Men, called Levellers (1649), p. 5, quoted in Keith Thomas, 'The Utopian Impulse in Seventeenth-Century England', in Between Dream and Nature: Essays on Utopia and Dystopia, ed. Dominic Baker-Smith and C. C. Barfoot (Amsterdam, 1987), p. 44.
79. For the nineteenth century this argument is developed at greater length in Claeys and Christine Lattek, 'Radicalism, Republicanism, and Revolutionism: From the Principles of '89 to Modern Terrorism', in The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought, ed. Gareth Stedman Jones and Gregory Claeys (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 200-254.
80. Carlyle's famous theory of the hero being the obverse of his discovery of the crowd, as with Nietzsche. See, e.g., Eric Bentley, The Cult of the Superman: A Study of the Idea of Heroism in Carlyle and Nietzsche (Boston, 1957).
81. Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions (3 vols., 1841).
82. Notably The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1896), The Psychology of Socialism (1899), and The Psychology of Revolution (1913). The growth of this literature is treated in Jaap van Ginneken, Crowds, Psychology, and Politics 1871-1899 (Cambridge, 1992). Respecting fascism, the mass psychology hypothesis was explored in particular by Wilhelm Reich in The Mass Psychology of Fascism (New York, 1970).
83. Here, of course, the inner party enjoys utopian plenty at the expense of the rest of the population.
84. About 70 million under Mao; about 25 million under Stalin. These figures include famine as well as murder.
85. A summary of cult experiences is given in Shirley Harrison, Cults: The Battle for God (1990).
86. See Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (2009).
87. See Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (New York, 1940).
88. In a forthcoming work Margaret Atwood proposes the term 'ustopia' to entail 'combining utopia and dystopia' because 'each contains a latent version of the other' (In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, Virago, 2011), as described in The Guardian, 15 Oct. 2011, Review, pp. 2-4.
89. This might, however, also be said of 'classic' texts like Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World, whose ruling groups enjoy a utopian existence.
90. I stress this in particular given the discussion of totalitarianism here.
91. A good start here is W. Warren Wagar, Terminal Visions: The Literature of Last Things (Bloomington, 1982).
92. Though Wells of course went on to write many utopian novels thereafter.
93. A good starting point here is provided by the essays in Imagining Apocalypse: Studies in Cultural Crisis, ed. David Seed (Basingstoke, 2000).
94. R. Buckminster Fuller, Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity (1970).