T ilE l! EDGEHOC RF.VIF\V i SPR I NG 2008

broader category of political thought.l2 TI1is is to define utopia in terms of form and con-fine it tO a primarily Western tradition- and exclude those descriptions of the good life

and the good society that permeate all cultures, mythologies, and religious traditions.

Alternatively, utopia may be defined in terms of content, such as equality, or har-

mony, but this is problematic since, as is so often remarked, one person's utopia is another's hell. Within the formal literary genre there are white supremacist utopias such

as The Turner Diaries, very different socialist utopias such

But ifnot universal, this

humtln yearning and longing

as Looking Backward and News from Nowhere, and femi-

nist utopias such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland.

Utopia may also be defined in terms of location, in the

future rather than the past. Some writers have also sought

to define utopia in terms of function. For Karl Mannheim,

a utopia is defined by its transformative function: "only

those orientations transcending reality will be referred to

by us as utopian which, when they pass over into con-

and reaching to, a better

life is certainly common and

22

immensely V?lriable .. .

duct, tend tO shatter, either partially or wholly, the order

of things prevailing at the time." 13 This position is directly opposed ro that of Karl

Marx and Friedrich Engels, whose objections to the political movements of Owenism,

Fourierism, and Saint-Simonianism were precisely that they inhibited political change

by distracting the working classes from the real necessity of class struggle.

It is plain, however, that utopias and utopianism may differ in form, content, loca-tion, and function, so that while all these are important aspects of utopianism, they will

not serve for the purpose of definition. Indeed, it is probably better not to attempt ro classify cultural expressions as utopias/n or not utopias/n at all, but to recognize that

there are utopian elements to many cultural forms . That leaves the question of what

that element is. And, broadly speaking, it is the expression of longing for the restoration

of lack, for that which is missing, the expression of the desire for a better way of being

and a better way of living, which is by no means confined to literary descriptions of

ideal societies or political programs. Whether the source of this lies in human nature

itself and an innate propensity to venture beyond, as is argued by Ernst Bloch in his

magisterial The Principle of Hope, is debatable. But if not universal, this human yearn-

ing and longing for, and reaching tO, a better life is certainly common and immensely

variable in both form and content, both where literally described and where existen-

tially implied. l4 Schubert song "An die Musik" is but one example of the latter

mode, with its praise of music for its capacity to transport the self into a better world: that art that "hast mich in eine bess're Welt entruckt."

Verbal descriptions of better worlds are more easily misread in terms of their inten-

tions than Schubert's song. The mistake with the latter might be to understand it only

12 See Krishan Kumar, Utopianism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991) . l3 Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul , 1979) 176. 14 For a fi.dl exposition of this argument, see Ruth Leviras, The Concept of Utopia (London: Philip Allan,

1990).

BE I NG I N UTO PI A I LEV TT;\S

Ruth Levitas.

as metaphor. The error with literary utopias is ro take them too literally and to interpret

them as goals. There may indeed be instances where authors of utopian fictions believe

the society they are describing to be perfect, and/or intend it as a political program.

However) most authors from at least the late nineteenth century do not suffer from this

level of hubris. Reflexivity and the understanding of historical contingency are a product not of postmodernity but of modernity itself. Thus Marx's reluctance ro delineate the

institutional forms of communist society-to "writing recipes ... for the cook-shops of

the fucure" 15-stemmed from the recognition of this contingency both in terms of social

formations and human capacities, needs, and desires. Morris, who in later life was an

active figure in explicitly lv1arxist political organizations, felt the need to say rather more

than simply "food is good at the hope workers cafe" and did set our a uropian vision in

News from Nowhere, published originally in serial form in Commonweal in 1890. News ftom Nowhere was written as a counterpoint to Looking Backward because it

was "essential that the ideal of the new society should be kept before the eyes of the

l5 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed. Frederick Engels (New York: Random House, 1936) 21.

23

Till- HEDCE II O(; Rl:.VI l: \'i/ i 'i l'R I NC 200:-l

24

mass of the working-classes, lest the continuity of the demands of the people should be broken, or lest they should be misdirected."l6 Yet Morris also argued that "it is impos-

sible to build a scheme h)r the society of the future, for no man can really think himself out of his own days."l7 He thought utopias dangerous precisely because they could

only be an expression of the temperament of authors and their times, but risked being

interpreted as goals. And just as News from Nowhere's subtitle is "an epoch of rest," sug-

gesting (as the text does) other epochs to follow, Wells opens A Jll!odern Utopia with the claim that such a work must eschew static perfection and embed change:

The Utopia of a modern dreamer must needs difFer in one fundamental

aspect from the Nowheres and Utopias men planned before Darwin

quickened the thought of the world. Those were ali perfect and static

States, a balance of happiness won for ever against the forces of unrest

and disorder that inhere in things. One beheld a healthy and simple

generation enjoying the fruits of the earth in an atmosphere of virtue

and happiness, to be foliowed by other virtuous, happy and entirely

similar generations until the Gods grew weary. Change and develop-

ment were dammed back by invincible dams for ever. But the Modern

Utopia must be not static but kinetic, must shape not as a permanent

state bur as a hopeful stage leading ro a long ascent of stages. 18

By the late twentieth century, this consciousness of contingency and change had given

rise to utopian writing that typically embedded pluralism, reflexivity, and internal con-

testation-described by Tom Moylan in Demand the Impossible as "critical utopianism," and exemplified by such writers as Marge Piercy and Ursula Le Guin.I9

Utopia is perhaps better undersrood as a method than as a goal. At its core it has the

desire for being otherwise, both individually and subjectively and (sometimes) socially

and objectively. But its expressions are a method of exploring and bringing to debate

the potential contents and contexts of human flourishing. Wells, indeed, argued not

only that utopia was a method, but that it is the essential method of sociology: "the cre-

ation of utopias-and their exhaustive criticism- is the proper and distinctive method

of sociology."20 Rather than refer to a "utopian method," which immediately mobilizes

large amounts of the cultural baggage and misunderstanding surrounding the term '\no-

pia," I now refer to this as the IROS method, IROS being the Imaginary Reconstitution

of Society. This is not the invention of a method, but the naming of what is entailed in

utopian speculation, utopian scholarship, and transformative politics.

IROS has three aspects. The first two of these are an analytical, archaeological mode and a constructive, architectuml one; the third is, for want of a better term, ontologi-

16 \Villiam Morris and . Belforr Bax, Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome (London: Swann Sonnenschein. 1893) 278.

17 Morris and Bax 17. 18 Wells J J. 19 See Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible (London: Merhuen, 1986). 20 H. G. Wells , "'The So-Called Science of Sociology," An Englishman Looks at the Wotfd (London: Cassell,

1914)204.

BE I ;:-..!C 1;:-..1 UTO PI A I I.F.V I TAS

cal, or concerned with the nature of being. The architectural mode is precisely what characterizes the literary form of utopia and gives it its sociological character in Wells's

work: it involves the institutional design and delineation of the good society-and, in the case of intentional communities, its partial concrete instantiation. The archaeologi-

cal mode complements this, for it involves the interpellation of absent or implicit ele-

ments in political, literary, or artistic utopian ''accounts." Its similarity with archaeology

[Utopia's] expressions are

a method of exploring and

bringing to debate the

lies in the excavation of fragments and shards and their

recombination into a coherent whole. The point of such

archaeology is to lay the underpinning model of the good society open to scrutiny and to public critique. And the

ontological mode is concerned precisely with the selves

that inhabit utopia, or that utopia needs to allow-the

inhabitants of the "brave new world/That has such people potential contents and contexts

in't."2 1 These modes or facets of the utopian method are of human flourishing. analyrjcally separable from one another but are also inter-

twined: they do not, for example, break down into literature and communitarianism as

architecture, political discourse analysis as archaeology and psychology, and philosophy and theology as ontology. Rather, the distinctive characteristic of the imaginary recon-

stitution of society is its holism-just as for Wells, this was the distinctive characteristic

of sociology. Wherever we start in the process of imagining ourselves and our world

otherwise, all three modes must eventually come into play.22

Archaeology and architecture are most evidently concerned with the concrete insti-

tutional character of an alternative society. And here the stricture that utopias should

not be taken literally needs to be qualified. For if the purpose of a utopian method is

to bring to debate the potential structure of an alternative society, in a public version

of Wells's exhaustive criticism, then literal criticism is indeed appropriate. The consid-

eration of alternative modes of social organization has never been more necessary. The

global problems that we face include not just poverty, inequity, and violence, but the

potential destruction of the basis of all our livelihoods, the capacity of the planet to

sustain human life at all. The environmental constraints of climate change and resource

depletion mean that how we live will have to change, and it is better that alternatives

be considered and debated rather than emerge in ways that simply protect the interests

of the most powerful.

The objective critique of institutional proposals needs, however, to be tempered

by the understanding that utopian speculation, whatever its form, operates also on

another level-and one that is equally necessary to transformative politics. Taken liter-

21 William Shakespeare, The Tempest, 5.1. 22 In the fim published accounc of the IROS method writ ten in 2002, I identified only the first cwo of these

modes: see "The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society: Society a.

TI-ll-. HIJ)(; I I It)(, Rl \II \Y./ I \PR I I'C 2U OH

ally, even if one does not agree with Roger Scruton that News from Nowhere is a piece of pie-eyed sentimentality, it would be hard not co endorse Raymond \Villiams's com-

ment that any future socialist society will be more complex rather than simpler than our own. For Miguel Abensour, glossed by Edward Thompson, the point of utopia is

its disruptive function and the opening up of a space in which we can experience the

possibility of being otherwise-of having different wants, needs, and satisfaction: "And

in such an adventure two things happen: our habitual values ... are thrown into disarray.

And we enter into Utopia's proper and new-found space: the education of desire."23

In this process, we come to desire in a different way- or rather, where the literary text

is concerned, it provides a space in which we are able at least to imagine ourselves

desiring differently. Herbert Marcuse addresses the utopian project in its political and

psychological rather than literary form, in terms of the transformation of needs, wants,

and desires: his new reality principle demands the end of introjected compulsions

to consumption and domination. Such claims are directly concerned with the third

aspect of the utopian mode, the transformation of self and the imagination of ourselves

otherwise.

1his is always a utopian project in the sense of envisioning a better way of being and

a subjective transformation, although it is not always utopian in the sense of implying

objective social transformation. And where both are present, the connection may be

differently construed. In the kind of ideal society that CoUn Davis describes as a per-

fect moral commonwealth, social harmony flows from individual perfection and mora1

restraint. Conversely, for Robert Owen, character is a product of circumstance: social

. .. the point of utopirl is its

disruptive function and the

harmony and right education produce happy and coop-

opening up of a space in which

erative people. Imagining ourselves otherwise is both

common and complex; pace Carey, real people do it

all the time. Anthony G iddens coined the term "nar-

ratives of self" to refer to the process of reflecting on

who we are, might have been, and might be. He linked

this tO the condit ion of late modernity, in which, "the

self becomes a ' reflexive project,' sustained through a

revisable narrative of self identity"- the beginnings of

tPe can experience the possibility

26

ojbei11g otherwise . ..

which are apparent in Morris and Wells. 24

The stories that we tell ourselves about who we are, how we have come w be .so, and what our options are for the future are not necessarily liberatory. Indeed, they may

bring to mind Bloch's comment that the wishes of che weak are often only those that

the powerful wish them to be. Thus there is the overwhelming cultural pressure to

monitor and control our bodies through diet and exercise, which involves imagining

the perfectly honed and healthy- and especially not obese-self; health and longevi ty

are an individual responsibility, and physical imperfection, illness, and death itself a

23 In Edward 'lhompson, William Monis: Romantic to Revolutionary (London: Merlin, 1976) 790- l. 24 Anrhony G iddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self rmd Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford: Stanford

University Press, 199 I) back cover.

BEIN

r I I I II r [) C E H 0 C fU: \ a \V I \I' R I N t; 2 0 0 R

they themselves belong."25 Just such a process is set out in the work of Roberto Unger.

What Unger sees out in the key texts Dem()cracy Realized and The SeljAwakened is a par-ticular form of the utopian method rooted in social practice, and entailing both insti-

tutional and existential transformation. Democracy Realized, subtitled The Progressive

Alternative, is a summary statement of Unger's hopes for a gradual move from the

global neo-liberal status quo to a world that is more democratic and more economi-

cally just, through a process he describes as democratic

Utopifl is shtlped by the double experimentalism. Here Unger's arguments are pitched in

terms of the institutional structures of society and a pro-

cess of change of those economic, social, and political structures and processes through step-by-step improvisa-

tion and collective learning. Hope and imagination are

central tO chis. Imagination is needed in the short term

(for institutional improvisation) and in the long term,

pressure of what it is possible to

imagine and what it is possible

18

to imagine tlS possible.

to provide a sense of direction and "a larger vision of society and history that can help

inform and inspire its work."26 Unger argues that chis active process of improvisation

creates possibility, both objectively and in the capacities of human beings to change

themselves and their circumstances. Democratic experimentalism is perhaps the "archi-

tectural" mode of IROS-alchough Unger would find this coo rigid a metaphor: "pro-

grammatic thought is sequence, not bJueprinr, music, not architecture," echoing both

Bloch's claim that music is the most quintessentially utopian form and David Harvey's

contrast between spatial and processualutopianism.27

Unger describes his approach as radical pragmatism, sharply distinguished from

the pragmatism of, for example, Richard Rorty, which regards the perfection of the

institutions of Am erican democracy as the goal of the good society. Unger's critique

applies to resistance to institutional change more widely-and to the consequences

of this for identity: "The source of the denial of the alterability of social life is a spe-

cies of institutional fetishism," and "institutional dogmatism ... amounts to a species of

idolatry. It nails our interests, ideals, and collective self-understandings to the cross of

contingent, time-bound institutions."2l:! Part of the role of imagining alternatives is to

resist th e forces working in favor of conformity by contradicting the taken-for-granted

character of the real. And if what we understand as human nature is simply what we are

like now, shaped by present circumstances, we are, in Unger's view, always more chan

this- always more than Carey's "real people." "We never completely surrender," writes

Unger.29 His description of living for the future as "a way of living in the present as a

being not wholly determined by the present conditions of its existence" is akin to the

25 Ernst Bloch , The Principle of Hope (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986) 3. 26 Robeno Mangabeira Unger, Democracy Realized: The Progressive Alternative (London: Verso, 1998) 15. 27 Roberto Mangabeira Unger, The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 2007) 117. See David Harvey, Spttces of Hope (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000).

28 Unger, The Seij'Awakened, 49, 23. 29 Unger, The Self Awakened, 40-1.

BF.ING li\ UTOPIA I l.EVITAS

Christian claim to be citizens of one kingdom while dwelling in another.3 But Unger,

like Bloch, re-ascribes grace to the human subject, and the Kingdom of God to a pos-

sible human future. The single idea that resounds on every page of this book is the idea of

the infinity of the human spirit, in the individual as well as in humanity.

It is a view of the wonderful and terrible disproportion of that spirit to everything that would contain and diminish it, of its awakening to its

own nature through its confrontation with the reality of constraint and

the prospect of death, of its tenor before the indifference and vastness

of nature around it, of its discovery that what it most shares with the

whole of the universe is its ruination by time, of its subsequent recog-

nition that time is the core of reality if anything is, of its enslavement to orders of society and culture that belittle it, of its need to create a

world, a human world, in which it can be and become itself even if to

do so it must nevertheless rebel against every dogma, every custom, and

every empire, and of its power to realize this seemingly impossible and

paradoxical program by identifying, in each intellectual and political situation, the next steps. 31

For Unger, this is necessarily a gradual process. He looks to "the intimation of a

different world, in which we would become (slightly) different people, with (slightly)

revised understandings of our interests and ideals."32 The idea that the imagination of

ourselves as somewhat different is commonplace, something that real people do, and

that can be encouraged through social and political engagement, runs directly counter

to the view that "human nature" makes radical transformation and utopian hope "unre-

alistic." Utopia is shaped by the double pressure of what it is possible co imagine and

what it is possible to imagine as possible. Consequently, Fredric Jameson has suggested

that an imagined world whose inhabitants would be radically other is one in which we

would not be ourselves, and this evokes the terror of annihilation. For utopia not tO

risk rejection as contrary to human nature, Unger's gradual opening of institutional and

human change may be critical.

One reason why it is important to "keep society open to alternative futures and

inspire in politics and culture a contest of visions" is that this in itself allows people

to understand their own potential to change. 33 It enables the emergence of "prophetic

identity," that is, self-understanding in terms of who we might become (both individu-

ally and collectively) rather than who we now are, and in particular where we come

from. Philip Pullman makes a similar point about the dangers of fixing a sense of self

in terms of religious "identity," which is only one aspect of our origins and complex,

30 Unger, The Self Awakened, 40. 31 Unger, The Self.Awakened, 26- 7 . 32 Unger, Democraq ReaLized, 12. 33 Unger, Democracy ReaLized, 168.

29

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30

shifting being in the world. 34 In particular, we should also educate our children to be prophets, through the development of their capacities, which- like all education-

entails hope, transformation, and a move beyond what now is and what we now are. "lbe point, says Unger, is simply this: to "raise up our humaniry."35 We have the poten-

tial to become real people who can live in utopia; potentially, we already are those

people. ~The utopian project is not imperiled by our incapacity to change and become

otherwise, but impelled by our capacity, need, and desire to do so.

34 Philip Pullman, "Against Identity," Free Expression Is No Offince, cd. Lisa Appignanesi (London: Penguin, 2005) 105- 15.

35 Unger, The Self Awakened, 2.