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A recurrent challenge for political theorists is to determine what role, if any, utopianism is to play in politics. Here I approach the issue in a negative way, by considering why we object to it, when we do. That is, on what basis do we reject utopianism or, as is more often the case, single out its illegitimate manifestations? Utopias are by definition demanding. Indeed, when we do object to utopianism it is because it demands too much of us in the name of some moral ideal or principle, for example, a utopian ideal of the just society. And
1 John P. Clark Anarchy and the dialectic of utopia The highest aspirations of the imagination are called utopia. But utopia is just as much the enemy of the imagination, and is our nemesis today. We live in the shadow of a terrifying utopia and must search the shadows for those other utopias that have been eclipsed. The dominant utopia is the utopia of endless material progress, based on a fundamental utopian fantasy of infinite powers of production and infinite possibilities for consumption. This utopia inspires the system of superpower that is expanding its
(Originally published in Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (eds), Socialist Register 2000: Necessary and Unnecessary Utopias , Merlin Press, London, 1999) I offer here some reflections on utopia. I make no extravagant claim for them. They do not trace out a history of the concept, nor do they attempt to explore its thematic range and variety. They are simply one person’s thoughts on the subject as we approach a new century and millennium. I have arranged them into ten summary theses. 1. Socialism is utopian As a goal socialism is, and it always has been
small group of like-minded people or, in the most euphoric representative of the genre, L’an 01 , by all the human race. The vast majority construct their Utopias around a small and closely knit group (Serceau 1983a ). The encouraging implication is that even if it has proved impossible to engineer a change in society, all is not lost; one or two people may still succeed in creating within the current society a microcosm of the ideal. This current in the post-’68 cinema may well be introduced in the words of Jacques
14 Uri Gordon Utopia in contemporary anarchism ‘Utopia is on the horizon’, says Fernando Birri. ‘I take two steps towards it, and it retreats two steps. I walk ten steps and the horizon moves ten steps further back. However much I walk, I will never reach it. What then is utopia for? It is for this: for walking’. (Eduardo Galeano, 1997)1 For anarchists, utopia has always meant something more than a hypothetical exercise in designing a perfect society. As an artefact in the collective mythology of a movement for social change, the anarchist utopia is
1 Toward a Stark Utopia Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness. Inevitably, society took measures to protect itself, but whatever measures it took impaired the self-regulation of the market, disorganized industrial life, and thus endangered society in yet another way. It was this dilemma which forced the
, corporatised ‘space’ of the financial centre looming large across the water. 2 Time is money in the city, but in Brooklyn, at least during the ‘slow hours’ at Auggie’s, it is spent a little differently – savoured like a good smoke, or wasted just ‘hanging out’ (21). Figure 1 Auggie’s Photographs. Photo Credit: K. C. Bailey (still photographer), Smoke , Dir. Wayne Wang, Pers. Harvey Keitel, William Hurt (New York: Miramax Films, 1995). Paul starts dating a woman whose doctoral thesis is entitled ‘Visions of Utopia in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction
But this patriarchal and ‘petty-bourgeois utopia’ 97 was also part of an older discourse; if it was accepted that a man was sovereign in his own home, it followed that wives and children were his subjects. A 1922 NAREB pamphlet entitled ‘A home of your own’ had said that buying a home was not just a financial investment but ‘A QUESTION OF LIFE ITSELF’. NAREB’s pamphlet spoke of buying a home as a way of ‘building moral muscle’. Becoming a homeowner ‘puts the MAN back in MANHOOD’. Homeowners were ‘completely self
the tensions between Government discourses of progress and modernity and Río Escondido’s representation of Mexico. At the same time, this chapter takes issue with the idea that this film (along with all Fernández’ films) represents an ‘antimodernist utopia’ antithetical to progress and modernity, and suggests instead that it is firmly rooted in the contemporary moment (and problems) of its
6 Gisela Heffes Utopia, anarchism and the political implications of emotions In 1850, notable Argentine statesman Domingo Sarmiento proclaimed in his utopian treatise Argirópolis (1850) that by raising up cities and sowing them throughout ‘our beautiful land’ one would do away with those ‘uncultivated provinces’.1 Sarmiento’s work set out to offer a political model upon which a post-revolutionary Latin America could be founded. As this passage indicates, he envisioned the city as the potential solution to the continent’s socio-economic woes. Sarmiento’s words