Let me try first to clarify the debate around Utopia or, perhaps I should say, around the political uses of Utopia. I imagine most people would agree that the Utopianists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were all essentially progressive, in the sense that their visions or fantasies aimed at ameliorating the condition of the human race. The moment that interests me is one of heightened analysis in which these Utopias and their enthusiastic adherents are denounced as necessarily having baleful outcomes. Later on, this will take the form of suggesting that revolutionary Utopianism leads to violence and dictatorship and that all Utopias in one way or another lead to Joseph Stalin: better still, that Stalin was himself a Utopianist, on the grandest scale.

Now, to be sure, this is already implicit in Edmund Burke’s denunciation of the French Revolution, and in his idea — one of the most genial counterrevolutionary arguments — that it is hubris for human beings to substitute the artificial plans of reason for the slow and natural growth of tradition, that revolution is in and of itself always a disaster. All of this is revived during the Cold War: communism identified with Utopia, both with revolution, and all of them with totalitarianism. (Sometimes Nazism seeps in here: it is not so much its identification with Utopia as the equivalence of Adolf Hitler and Stalin, and the resultant scholastic debates about the winner in the competition for numbers of dead.)

I believe that it was essentially after World War II that younger generations reversed this implication and transformed Utopianism into a slogan and a battle cry. The reversal consists, not in detecting an emergent dystopia hidden away within Utopia, nor in grasping Utopianism as a flowering of the sin of pride, but rather in a new conviction: namely that the opposite of Utopia is the status quo. Now, in some new and menacing sense of stagnation, of the power of institutions and of the state that has been born of wartime need and conditions, Utopia becomes associated with change itself, and the static qualities that often seemed inherent in traditional Utopian structures are ignored in favor of the broken windows and the fresh air that Utopianism seemed to bring with itself. This is the meaning of the ’60s, which was more than any other revolutionary period bound up with the very revival of Utopia in its new form.