Utopianism

Forms of Utopianism: “Good-Place” or “No-Place”?

Generally speaking, we can distinguish between two forms of utopianism. The first is the literary genre that followed the example of More's Utopia. Tommaso Campanella's City of the Sun (1602), Francis Bacon's New Atlantis (1627), and William Morris's News From Nowhere (1891) are all examples of such a genre. The description of the good-place often takes the form of a narrative by a traveler who discovers the land of utopia, typically an island or at least a territory separated form the others. Soem works in this genre are negative utopias, such as Orwell's 1984 (1949), which describes the dreadful dream of a disciplinary and totalitarian society ruled by Big Brother. These works are also at times called “dystopias”—from the Greek dys, which means abnormal, faulty, or bad.

The second form of utopianism is that of works that are not part of the literary utopian genre but nevertheless enclose significant utopian elements. Political treatises such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract (1762) or Immanuel Kant's Perpetual Peace (1795) contain important utopian moments in that they depict societies that are good-places but also no-places. The degree to which they are realizable is still a matter of controversy: Rousseau portrayed a direct democracy where human beings stand as free and equal, whereas Kant's Perpetual Peace defined the articles of the hypothetical international treaty that would put an end to the international condition of anarchy and war. In synthesis, a work contains utopian elements when it expresses the belief that some (or all) social evils can be eliminated and a better society created.

While in the case of the literary genre it is relatively easy to determine whether a work is part of it or not, the degree of utopianism of works that contain utopian moments is highly controversial. Things are further complicated by the fact that the concept of utopianism has at times a pejorative connotation. A significant example is Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels's Communist Manifesto (1848). On the one hand, perhaps, no other authors have been as influential in spreading the belief that social evils can be eradicated and a good-place developed. On the other hand, Marx and Engels's prospect of a communist society does not derive from imagination alone but is grounded on a scientific analysis of the historical conditions of the proletariat. In their Manifesto, they strongly criticized former socialists such as Comte de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Robert Owen for their utopianism—used here in the pejorative sense. Having theorized about the emancipation of the proletariat in an epoch when the material conditions for emancipation were not yet ripe, utopian socialists necessarily failed in identifying the economic presuppositions for such a transformation, so that their social criticism remained a merely fantastic picture of an impossible future society. To such utopian socialism, in which personal inventiveness takes the place of historical action, Marx and Engels opposed their scientific communism.

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