Utopia Is a Promise Worth Fighting For
Karl Marx mocked utopians for writing recipes for the cookshops of the future. But at their best, utopians emphasize hope without guarantees — a position that carves a middle path between blind optimism and the resigned inertia of “realism.”
Hans Holbein the Younger’s 1527 portrait of Thomas More (from The Frick Collection)
The haunting impossibility of a society that lives up to our stated ideals can feel painful when set against the actual societies that fall so far short of them. This is why the dream of utopia, or “no place,” has disturbed the sleep of many thinkers for so long it can feel instead like a nightmare. Given the hypocrisy of a world where cruelty often feels like the point, what business do we have supposing things could be better? How can allegedly wise and intelligent people dream of utopia when wisdom and intelligence all point to its impossibility?
David Albertson and Jason Blakely’s new book Utopia for Our Century: A Manifesto of Hope presents a thoughtful history of those daring souls who have dreamed of better. But more than a history, it attempts to think through the political and ideological value of utopian thinking and push against the line that it is just wishful thinking. Albertson and Blakely find much to admire in utopian authors, seeing them as “virtuoso dreamers, who lived realities at least as bleak and fearsome as our own but did so with indestructible hope.” At their best, utopians emphasized hope without guarantees — a wise position that carves a middle path between blind optimism and the resigned inertia of faux “realism.”
Their archetype is Thomas More, whose Utopia, published in the sixteenth century, christened the concept. For Albertson and Blakely, More gives us insight into the personality of utopians. They are not the naive optimists of caricature.
Far from an airy speculative thinker, More is one of the few major philosophers to have had a genuinely public political career, and during a singularly challenging period. He served as Lord Chancellor of England under the amoral and cruel Henry VIII. This was a tumultuous time for the country. Henry broke with Rome and declared himself head of the Church of England in order to annul his marriage and marry another woman. This produced major pushback, which Henry met with violent repression. That repression eventually caught up with More, a devout Catholic, who was put on trial for refusing to acknowledge Henry’s religious supremacy. More was unwavering in his convictions, leading to his execution in 1535.
Albertson and Blakely understand that More’s tragic immersion in realpolitik is part of what inspired his turn to utopianism. His ironic designation of “utopia” as “no place” isn’t just intended to demonstrate the speculative quality of his thinking. More is drawing critical attention to the fact that no place on earth comes close to embodying justice, even though many ruling elites who have the power to change things claim to care deeply about being just. In a memorable passage, More describes a dialogue between Raphael Hythloday — the traveler to Utopia — and an unnamed lawyer. The lawyer claims to be concerned about law and order, and argues that the only way to preserve it is through brutal punishment. Hythloday notes that Utopia is a much safer place, in no small part because it is a far less unequal society where property is widely shared and there are few poor people. Moreover, their punishments for crimes like theft are far more lenient than in England, further expressing their humanist commitments. With “biting humor,” Hythloday observes that realists like the lawyer trap the poor in an impossible situation, “first making them into thieves and then punishing them for it.” Rather than undertaking reforms to achieve the greater peace and justice the lawyer claims to want and believe in, he doggedly doubles down on the “pipe dream” that “England could incarcerate and execute its way out of the problems of poverty (alas, the ruse still works like a charm).”
In this sense, utopianism isn’t a fantasy about worlds that could never be, but a damning mirror that reflects how little we live up to principles we say we believe in. Moreover, by failing to commit themselves to justice in the name of “realism,” ruling elites are responsible for producing the very corruption they claim is the biggest barrier to doing better. More wanted to expose how this ideological attachment to the way things are, with all its flaws, was one of the major barriers to making things better. “More’s Utopia gradually submits his European contemporaries to the scrutiny of what if and its unmasking force,” as Albertson and Blakely put it. “Common attitudes of his day toward incarceration, private property, education, and medical care are exposed one by one as unworkable, unsustainable, and indeed unrealistic in light of Utopian achievements.”
And yet, in just a handful of centuries, these all changed: “How many self-evident policies of More’s London have endured into our century, whether capital punishment for theft or the divine right of kings? The answer is clear: they have vanished.”
Postmodernity; or, the Cultural Logic of Monstrous Utopias
Contra our reputation for idealism, many of the sharpest left-wing thinkers have expressed deep skepticism about utopianism. This, of course, started with Karl Marx, who famously chastised socialists he disagreed with by disparaging them as “utopian.” In his more hard-edged moods, Marx mocked utopianism as writing recipe books for the cookshops of the future. Such schemes were nothing but a speculative and ahistorical indulgence (though one Marx himself often indulged in). Following in his footsteps, many orthodox Marxists insist socialism must be “scientific,” or it isn’t socialism at all.
More thoughtful Marxists take a different approach. In his seminal Archaeologies of the Future, the late, great Fredric Jameson notes how utopian science fiction has often been a constructive genre for progressives to imagine what better futures might look like, the better to realize them. The genre, of course, began with More himself, whom Jameson describes as a broadly progressive satirist of power offering a damning “point by point commentary on English affairs and the English situation.” Utopian literature carried on in various forms as authors from Edward Bellamy to Ursula K. Le Guin used science fiction as a means of both criticizing the status quo and hypothesizing about what a better future might look like. But ultimately Jameson expresses wariness of the utopian genre’s transformative power and suggests it may well have been exhausted by the postmodern twenty-first century. He notes how today the utopian genre has all but evaporated, giving way to bleak depictions of the future where it is easier to imagine the end of the world than an end to capitalism. In a telling sign, even works that start by presenting utopias usually end by revealing them to be not all they’re cracked up to be. The seemingly idyllically pink world of Barbie (2023) turns out to be riven by suppressed existential dread and gender animosities. The more recent Star Trek series like Picard and Discovery take the bright cosmopolitan future promised by Gene Roddenberry’s United Federation of Planets and show that it has secretly depended on covert manipulation, exploitation of the marginalized, and much else.
Contra Jameson, Albertson and Blakely see the utopian genre as very much alive but not well. This is a dire problem since the need for “constructive” utopias is urgent. Albertson and Blakely are very critical of right-wing populism and the havoc it is wreaking, but they argue that much of this flows from the Right’s own (frequently disavowed) utopian aspirations. These include the nationalist dream of a unified ethnos, which Albertson and Blakely describe as a “peculiar kind of failed utopia.” Nationalists conjure an “imagined spirit of the nation that creates an illusion of cultural unity” — one that purports to draw on real history even as they constantly downplay or militantly resist historical facts that don’t gel with the patriotic myths they want to spin. Albertson and Blakely wryly note that nationalists constantly have to “prop up the obvious falsehood that the make-believe geist [national spirit] remains pure from overlapping, constituent, or neighboring cultures, and that it never changes in time.”
They also see many of the same fantasies at work in the Right’s “most feverish utopian hope”: that we might one day achieve the “most pristine, geometrical, frictionless vision of the ‘free market.’ Entire generations of Americans have lived as though the market were the only tolerable utopia.” Albertson and Blakely are scathingly critical of this vision, and rightly so, calling this a “monstrous utopia” for asking little of people and giving less in return, all while the money system is treated like a “minor deity.”
I would go still further than Albertson and Blakely and suggest that the meritocratic conception of capitalism, that each will be rewarded according to what they deserve, is not just a bad utopian vision — it is the most pie-in-the-sky utopian vision ever conceived. Ancient philosophers had the wisdom to accept that only the very visible and omniscient hand of God could reward people based on what they deserved, and then only in a perfect realm beyond this one. Only American conservatives have ever imagined a world so fantastic that the invisible and mindless hand of the market would reward people based on what they deserved, and in this life. Compared to meritocratic capitalism, even the most rosy-eyed communist is a clear-eyed realist, since they only imagined it was possible to give people what they needed while keeping it an open question what they deserved.
Is Utopia Possible Today?
By contrast, Albertson and Blakely are more sympathetic to utopias on the Left but think they remain constrained by certain fundamental limitations. They express some sympathy for liberalism, while highlighting how “postwar liberalism stalled” due to a regression into “right libertarianism, sometimes called neoliberalism.” This regression into neoliberalism “betrayed the [liberal] tradition’s original ideals” of achieving liberty, equality, and solidarity for all. Albertson and Blakely are also critical of the Marxist tradition for failing to recognize how true revolutions never start in the economic sphere. Instead we need a transition in values by aiming for higher ethical standards. They don’t spell out what this would entail in detail, but their approving references to humanist and left-wing Christians like More himself, Martin Luther King Jr, and the late Alasdair MacIntyre provide many clues.
What makes Albertson and Blakely’s position interesting is the extent to which they call for a utopian vision that will be at once liberal, anti-capitalist, and deeply spiritual. Needless to say, this is a challenging combination to achieve — though one might ask what good is an unambitious utopian vision? Unfortunately, the authors don’t make much of an attempt to spell this out in any kind of detail, even if they provide a suite of moving examples in the lives of More and King. My own Marxist instincts kick in here, leading me to suspect that individual acts of grace simply will not be enough. The lack of a clear theory of power — something to complement the fiery condemnations of injustice and the critique of ideological straitjackets — is a real limitation to their vision.
But for all that, Albertson and Blakely are to be commended for the strength and boldness of their vision, even their audacity. They are no doubt right that a kind of utopianism may well be more realistic than a thoughtless adherence to a status quo that isn’t working. Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results isn’t wisdom, after all. It’s insanity.