There is much to admire in Duncan Bell and Douglas Mao’s book Utopia, which offers a rich set of analyses of utopianism as a political ideology and literary tradition. The authors exhibit an impressive ability to organize a vast and chaotic field of writing across several genres while at the same time shedding light on recent utopian developments and future prospects. So dexterous do they prove at their task of conceptual organization that we might even begin by attempting to locate ourselves within their framework, in the Morean mode of serious play.
Our own book, Utopia for Our Century: A Manifesto of Hope, participates in what Bell thinks of as a “recursive tradition” of utopianism, returning to More’s origins, as well as a utopian “metatradition” as we draw contemporary political conclusions (6-7). As Mao rightly suggests, we also find the topic of “sentiment” or affect unavoidable in light of political realignments afoot today (67-69). Yet there still remains something of a play of differences between their views and our own perspectives on utopia, which we develop in what follows.
If Bell’s chapters in Utopia address what a utopia is and propose a solution to the conundrums of defining utopianism, Mao’s chapters effectively ask how does utopia work as a literary mechanism. By contrast, our book attempts to ask two different questions: Why do human beings generate utopias in the first place, and where can we see real utopias of different types alive all around us? In what follows, we first respond to Bell’s major conceptual account of utopianism. Then we pose three sympathetically critical questions for Bell and Mao from our own perspective.
Bell is a genealogist of utopia whose erudite and illuminating narrative of the countless deployments of this concept cannot help but recall Nietzsche’s famous dictum that “only something which has no history can be defined.” But Bell is also a philosopher who fashions his own original—and stimulating—definition of utopia. Among the most helpful results of Bell’s genealogical work is his distinction between the thick humanistic utopianism found in Thomas More and a much broader category of utopian aspiration expanded by later thinkers in ways that “would have been baffling not only to More, but also to Edward Bellamy and William Morris” (9).
As Bell shows, utopianism came to include not only an enormous number of rival positive programs for an ideal society but also became entangled in meditations on everything from the universal anthropological aspiration for justice to totalitarian dangers of the overly perfectionist society. In his telling, part of what is bedeviling about utopia as a political moniker is that it comes to contain so many multiplicities of meaning—including its own rejection. As he puts it: “Most politico-intellectual, literary, or philosophical traditions are not conceptualized as encompassing their own rejection … yet this is a conventional framing of the utopian tradition” (9-10). Part of this, as Bell acknowledges, is contained already in More’s original wordplay when he invented the pun on U-topia (the no-place) as Eu-topia (the good-place). That unstable ambiguity allowed uses of More’s neologism to reach a “vertiginous polyphony” of meanings over the centuries that are “a product of the metatraditional stretching of the concept” (14).
Notably, figures like Karl Mannheim would transform utopia into the universal “unrealized and unfulfilled tendencies” of every possible ideological program (12); later Ernst Bloch and Miguel Abensour would find in utopia a perennial human propensity to “desire to live otherwise, to embrace alterity” (19). Meanwhile, in reaction to the rise of Stalinism and Nazism, thinkers as various as Isaiah Berlin, Friedrich Hayek, and Karl Popper managed to stretch utopia instead into the “exceptionally dangerous … pathology of political thinking” (12).
Here Bell the philosopher enters and creates a little more conceptual order. His suggestion is elegant and even daring. What if thinkers of utopia pull the two sides of More’s philosophical wordplay apart? Bell proposes that eu-topias as normative programs or what he calls the “ethico-political” claim of the “good place” be distinguished conceptually from u-topias as the “social-analytical” and “descriptive claim” of the “non-place” (26). Once this fact-value split of More’s utopia has been accomplished, “we can classify something as utopian if, and only if, it invokes or prescribes the radical transformation or elimination of one or more pervasive practices, structures, or ordering principles that shape collective life” (24).
Bell acknowledges that this splitting of utopia in two comes at a philosophical cost. Utopia becomes “a relational concept, its application always relative” such that “in a social world, free market liberalism is utopian” and “in a society established on anarchical principles, state sovereignty is utopian” (27).
At this juncture, we can begin to mark some bigger differences between Bell and Mao’s approach to More’s utopianism and our own attempt at what Bernard Williams calls a “vindicatory genealogy.” Of course, More is writing before any fact-value or prescriptive-descriptive split. But there are important reasons why, on More’s view, the two domains cannot be unbundled, reasons related to his anthropology, which underlies the literary genre of utopia and grounds its ethical vision.
To appreciate this, we must understand how More drew on the political-theological concepts of imago Dei and cosmopoiesis in order to invent Utopia—a move described in greater detail in our own book. In broad brushstrokes, More learned from various sources—patristic authors like Augustine, but also Renaissance humanists like Pico—that the key feature of human agency is our capability and propensity for world-making. For More, humans (like their Creator) are essentially world-makers, and utopias represent the self-conscious fashioning of this plastic, worldmaking power. To his credit, Mao does note in passing the importance of “world-building” in utopian literatures (80).
In this regard, Bell’s suggestion that utopianism later expanded to include attention to human desire is already anticipated by More. Bloch and Mannheim were both right in their own ways that More’s utopianism contains a universal claim about how humans do politics. Namely, homo sapiens dreams and performs worlds that contain sometimes inarticulate, sometimes clearly theorized visions of the best society. When Bell notes that for “Bloch and his followers, utopianism is expressed in a spectacular array of phenomena,” a similar claim could be made about More (18).
That anthropological impulse toward utopia, in More’s view, is the reason utopias can be good or bad. Their normative measure becomes how much they live up to the dignity of sheltering and nurturing the part of the cosmos made in the world-building image of the Creator. In other words, More’s humanism is central not only to his ethical vision but to his social ontology. One might even say that his theological anthropology and consequent social ontology imply his ethical-political vision. This provides a deeper reason why More’s humanism defies or is even logically incompatible with the later scientific forms of reasoning that give us the fact-value dichotomy in the first place. We cannot divide More’s anthropology from the normative features of what Mao calls his “problem solving” without negating Utopia as a project.
Recovering More’s integral utopianism allows us to account for both the diversity of utopian programs as particular political agendas over the centuries as well as the relatively stable humanistic core informing those various projects. For example, this would explain the utopianism of later techno-science which Bell analyzes so dexterously, while also offering a critique of it. This is, in fact, one of the tasks carried out in our own book—to critique a vast array of bad utopias including those of technocracy and techno-science, recognizing in them the original utopian impulse but offering a rival vision more adequate to human flourishing. One criterion for philosophically adjudicating between rival utopian traditions is reflexive: which version of utopia best accounts for the agent capable of dreaming of utopia in the first place? Bad utopias fail to self-narrate because they overlook the anthropology of world-making.
This points toward a second difference of perspective between ourselves and Bell and Mao. In our book, we examine “real utopias” (Erik Olin Wright) both in theory and in concrete practice around Los Angeles. We critique realist, conservative, liberal, and Marxist politics as unrecognized and inadequate utopias. We offer normative judgments about utopias that are closed or open in their horizons, poor or rich in imaginative power, and shallow or deep as they account for moral transformation and revolutionary transition. We see utopianism less as a limited, if complex, array of political and literary discourses than as a ubiquitous human practice or proclivity whenever communities face their future together and engage their imaginations. Utopias may speak of faraway places and future times, but in fact they are already present here and now.
Naturally this begs the question of whether every political project is in some way utopian. To keep hold of a useful concept, Bell proposes this rather generous definition: “utopianism is the imagination of radical ontological difference” (24). From the point of view of our book, we would want to supplement this useful definition in two directions.
On the one hand, the definition threatens to be too formal and universal, unless it is supplemented by More’s anthropological commitments, as we hinted above. Utopianism should not denote just any relative difference of sufficiently radical intensity. Is it utopian to seek radical hierarchy in an egalitarian society? Does the term Utopia lose its meaning if “in a world of immortals, death is utopian” (27)? The missing criterion here is human flourishing, and that entails some minimal anthropological commitments analogous to More’s Christian humanism.
On the other hand, Bell’s “radical ontological difference” may not be radical enough. Science fiction utopian literature imagines a version of human community with some radical differences: in bodily suffering, in gender and sexuality, in technological power, in freedom from linear time. But notably Bell and Mao rarely treat the oldest global literatures of radical ontological difference, otherwise known as religions. In Bell’s account, religions all gave way to “technoscience” after the Enlightenment, because (to repeat an unfortunate eighteenth-century trope) they only represented the past, while science represented the future (28). At the same time, Bell himself reaches for the theological concept of “apocalypse” to express a negative radical difference of dystopian annihilation (35-36). The stark choice between salvation and destruction, between heaven and hell, is not only dramatized in utopian science fiction (37-39), but in nearly every religious tradition.
For these reasons, our book deliberately interrogates the proximity between religion and utopianism, or put otherwise, the relevance of More’s Christianity to his utopian imagination. Can utopianism remain a secular politics, or is it always also a political theology? In its imagination of radical ontological difference, is Utopia a species of religious imagination? Is science fiction a post-Enlightenment mask of political theology, which substitutes outer space for heaven and futurism for the eschaton? Is transhumanism and “paradise engineering” in fact a new religious soteriology (44-45)?
This line of questioning suggests that we can now add another layer of normative analysis of utopias. Given the anthropological constant of More’s original configuration, we can evaluate utopias not only with the formal criterion of radical alterity, but the substantive criterion of human flourishing. Now we can also add: when, why, and how do different utopias put limits on the spatial and temporal dimensions of their imagination? More’s Utopia suspends the limits of Europe and invests it with alterity from the undiscovered Americas. Science fiction utopias stretch hundreds or thousands of years into the future and light years away from Earth. But all secular utopias place limits on space and time that fall short of, say, God arriving into time to judge all of history and wipe away every tear.
What limits can utopia admit and still claim to imagine radical ontological difference? What would it mean to maximize imagined ontological difference, if not imagining divine transcendence itself, the Wholly Other? Does not utopia represent, precisely, the nowhere of the most impossible future imaginable, even beyond the narrow bounds of secularity?
From this point of view, More’s Christian utopianism is a feature, not a bug. The theological signature of his anthropological premise—the cosmopoetic human as imago Dei—now appears less a particular relic of his pre-Enlightenment culture than a necessary ingredient in the genesis of Utopia as such. More’s Christian eschatology—witnessed in his own body in his willing embrace of martyrdom—expanded the parameters of his political theology and stimulated his imagination of radical ontological difference, an impossible No-where in which he could be executed by a tyrant yet still remain alive in God.
This brings us to a final difference. We enthusiastically second Mao’s astute critique of the “long-standing marginalization of emotions, affects, and passions in political theory” (90). Mao identifies a curious double-bind of affect in utopian literature: strong feelings can threaten utopia, and they need transformation to achieve utopia, but at the same time they distract from practical utopian problem-solving (68-72). But is this a universal difficulty for all utopianism, or is it a local problem for a kind of utopianism that forgets to consider anthropology and human virtues? Is the affective incoherence of modern utopian literature a symptom of a deeper oblivion of the hard work of ethical transformation, which any revolutionary transition will inevitably require?
In our book, we attend to one particularly dangerous emotion that forecloses the future and returns violently to the past: the destructive, often dystopian sentimentality of nostalgia, a kind of perverse utopianism in reverse gear. But we also invoke a virtue—in More’s still scholastic parlance, a theological virtue—that counteracts both nihilistic “realism” and resentful nostalgia and opens up every horizon for the world-making creature. This is a virtue scarcely mentioned in sci-fi and technocratic utopias, whether in recent literature or among today’s Silicon Valley utopians: the quintessentially utopian virtue of radical hope.
