Rethinking Utopia and Utopianism

Acknowledgments

Most of the essays were previously published, and I wish to thank the publishers for their permission to reprint them here.

“The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited” was originally published in Utopian Studies 5.1 (1994): 1–37 © Society for Utopian Studies was released to the author.

“The Problem of the ‘Flawed Utopia’: A Note on the Costs of Utopia.” Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination. Eds. Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan. London: Routledge, 2003. 225–231.

“What is a Utopia?” Morus. Utopia e Renascimento, no. 2 (2005): 153–160.

“The Intersection of Utopianism and Communitarianism.” Utopia Matters: Theory, Politics, Literature and the Arts. Eds. Fátima Vieira and Marinella Freitas. Oporto, Portugal: Editora da Universidade do Porto, 2005. 109–118.

“Theorizing Intentional Community in the Twenty-First Century.” The Communal Idea in the 21st Century. Eds. Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Yaacov Oved, and Menahem Topel. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2012. 53–72.

“Utopian Traditions: Themes and Variations.” Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World. Eds. Roland Schaer, Gregory Claeys, and Lyman Tower Sargent. New York: The New York Public Library/Oxford University Press, 2000. 8–17.

“The Necessity of Utopian Thinking: A Cross-National Perspective.” Thinking Utopia: Steps into Other Worlds. Eds. Jörn Rüsen, Michael Fehr, and Thomas W. Rieger. New York: Berghahn Books, 2005. 1–14.

“In Defense of Utopia.” Diogenes 53.1 (February 2006): 11–17.

“Choosing Utopia: Utopianism as an Essential Element in Political Thought and Action.” Utopia Method Vision: The Use Value of Social Dreaming. Vol. 1 of Ralahine Utopian Studies. Ed. Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2007. 301–317.

“Utopianism and National Identity.” CRISPP: Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 3.2&3 (Summer/Autumn ←xi | xii→2000): 87–106. Volume also published as The Philosophy of Utopia. Ed. Barbara Goodwin (London: Frank Cass, 2001), 87–106.

Preface

“Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited,” published in Utopian Studies in 1994, is frequently cited, particularly regarding the suggestion that utopianism has “three faces” and for the definitions used but also in relationship to the questions it raised about the role of utopianism in social and political thought.¹ Of course, it also faced criticisms that required answers, gaps that needed to be filled in, and new questions and subjects that arose as the field grew. This volume brings together the original article with 15 other articles of mine that responded to issues raised in it, including two published here for the first time.

Given the diversity of the field, these articles were originally published in diverse settings, mostly collections of essays. Some of them originated from talks given in Australia, Canada, England, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Poland, Portugal, Spain, and the United States. Others were in response to requests from editors. Two of the articles were first published originally in French. Others have been translated into Arabic, Catalan, German, or Portuguese, with one of the articles given different Portuguese translations, one in Brazil and the other in Portugal.

In this volume, in each chapter I introduce the essays reprinted in a section entitled Reconsiderations 2000–2016 in which I discuss what brought me to write the articles and something of my thinking at the time. Then, after the reprinted articles, in a section entitled Reflections in 2021, I reflect back on what I wrote there. At times I have changed my mind regarding something I wrote, my thinking has evolved as others published their thoughts on the subjects, and, sometimes, I still think I was right in my original statements.

I also discovered that other people were interested in utopianism and were forming what were then called the Conference on Utopian Studies, which became the Society for Utopian Studies, the National Historic Communal Societies Association, which became the Communal Studies Association, and the Utopianism and Utopian Thought Section of the ←xiv | xv→Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom, which was founded by Keith Taylor in the mid-to late 1970s, followed by a period where the group was known as the Utopian Studies Society of the United Kingdom, which at a meeting in New Lanark, Scotland, was absorbed into the Utopian Studies Society of Europe, and I was active in all of them.

CHAPTER 1

The Three Faces

Revisiting “The Three Faces of Utopianism”

The Problem of Definition – When, based on the limited bibliographies available in the late 1960s, I naively decided to write a history of utopian literature in English, I started reading everything I could get my hands on and realized quite quickly that there was much more than I had thought and that I had to find some way of determining what I could reasonably call a utopia and what could be excluded. The conclusions I drew then changed substantially as I read more texts, and, in parallel, read more about what we mostly then called communes, which turned out to have its own definitional issues.

There are two approaches to definition which might be thought of as bottom up or developing definitions based on actual utopias read and top down or defining first and then finding works that fit the definition. My definitions evolved together with my bibliographical work, and as I read more, I realized that utopias were more varied in form and content that I had imagined, and I worked to make sure that the definitions could capture that variety. And then I added sub-categories as my reading pushed at the boundaries and other scholars added variations. My intent was to follow the lead of the texts I read, but as I developed my definitions, some of the other approach became unavoidable, particularly concerning sub-categories.

Except for brief considerations in my 1965 doctoral thesis, most of which was repeated in “The Three Faces of Utopianism” (1967), my first attempt to sort out definitions was in an article in Extrapolation that I submitted in 1972 as “Utopia: The Problems of Definition.” It was accepted in ←1 | 2→1972 but not published until 1975 with the editor dropping the “s,” which clearly changed the meaning. In this article, I focused on the problems of defining the words that had emerged from my bibliographic work and provided simple characterizations of Utopia, Eutopia, and Dystopia. In a footnote, I listed “the types of works included in bibliographies of Utopias or definitions of utopian literature” (145), which was the first version of the taxonomy in “The Three Faces Revisited.” In the first published version of my bibliography in 1979, I corrected, revised, and updated the Extrapolation article. The second version of the bibliography from 1988 includes definitions of Utopia, Eutopia, Dystopia, and Utopian Satire that, while later elaborated, have not changed substantially. Then in “Political Dimensions of Utopianism with Special Reference to American Communitarianism,” a paper given in 1990 and published in 1992, I added Utopianism or social dreaming, the anti-utopia, and Tom Moylan’s “critical utopia,” explored definitions of what I was then calling intentional societies and included taxonomies of each. Revised and elaborated, much of this became “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited.”

The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited²

Oscar Wilde put the theme of this essay rather well: “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of utopias” (Wilde 27). But today the word “progress” bothers us, so, perhaps, William Morris had John Ball say it better – “But while I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name” ←3 | 4→(Morris 46).3 The story of these dreams, their temporary successes and failures, and their continuing resurrection, reconstitution, and renewal is my subject.

The story can be read as tragedy or farce, but it can also be read, and this is my intention, as a tale of hope, hope engendered, hope deferred, and hope renewed. This is a story of the men and women who dreamed of a better life for all of us and of those who tried to create that better life. It is also the story of those who had differing dreams and the conflicts among them. And it is a story of the fainthearted who were afraid to dream themselves and feared the dreams of others. Put another way, I include those who feel that some of the dreams are nightmares. Max Beerbohm neatly caught this feeling:

Some go so far as to reject the whole idea of what I call social dreaming. Macaulay expressed this attitude in his famous aphorism “An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia.” The quotation continues, “The smallest actual good is better than the most magnificent promises of impossibilities” (Macaulay 1943, 3:460). My sympathies are always with the dreamers, but the fears have frequently been justified, so they are truly part of this story.

Before it is possible to tell the stories of people dreaming, it is necessary to be more precise about the types of dreams that interest me. In doing this, I make a number of interrelated arguments about the nature of utopianism that help set the scene for what follows. My arguments also show why I find these dreams so important; as Marge Piercy recently put it, “Dreams are the fire in us” (Piercy 1991, 302).

Having made my assertions, let me now move to the more difficult activity of trying to demonstrate their accuracy. This will involve those tedious but essential processes known as definition and classification, processes frequently ignored by scholars in the field. Most notoriously the Manuels make the unfortunate statement that they do not need to define utopia; they know one when they see one (Manuel and Manuel 1979, 336). Others have followed them by failing to define even when the subject of their study is clearly at the margins of the field.5 Students of utopian literature ←5 | 6→are the greatest sinners in this area. Students of intentional societies are not far behind; there are very few definitions of intentional societies because most scholarship concentrates on those intentional societies about which there is no disagreement.