Plea for Political Utopias

PLEA FOR POLITICAL UTOPIAS

By Andreas Heyer

[This essay originally published in: Utopie Kreativ, October 2004 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, http://www.linksnet.de/drucksicht.php?id=1377. Andreas Heyer, b. 1974, is a political scientist at Martin Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg.]



Shortly after the collapse of the socialist systems in Eastern Europe, Fukuyama proclaimed the end of history in view of this failure. According to him, the liberal and democratic systems were left as the victors of history. Alongside Fukuyama, Huntington announced the clash of cultures. Little by little the western world on one side will absorb the other cultures and on the other side the independence and resistance potential of these cultures will be strengthened. Both are based on the thesis presented by Popper in the 1950s. Utopias and violence are causally connected. Whoever converts utopias must inevitably maintain these totalitarian systems with force. The only alternative is the democratic and liberal system of the West. One thing is forgotten in this analysis, as Johanno Strasser and Hermann Kleiner have pointed out: that the liberal systems are also organized in a capitalist way and the necessary balance between politics and the market does not function in the long run since the market will always try to absorb the sphere of the political.

Fukuyama and Huntington are the two best-known seers of the 1990s. The liberal democracies that no longer faced state socialism were exposed to other processes. Very different concepts were enforced behind slogans like globalization, European integration and location. Some say the nation states will be abolished. Others say they are too strong. Forrester says capitalism is wretched (or without alternative). Donhoff insisted capitalism has to be civilized. Many have forgotten that empirical reality has decided against these and other theories in different places of the world.

The ability of liberal states to question and criticize themselves is greatly reduced with the collapse of the socialist system. One thing was proclaimed from the most different political positions after 1990: the end of utopia as the by-product of the end of the totalitarian systems of the 20th century. Francois Furet summarized the genesis and failure of socialism in the formula the end of illusion. Michael Winter spoke of the end of a dream, Orlando Figes of the tragedy of the Russian people, Hans Magnus Enzensberger bid farewell to utopian thinking and Ralf Dahrendorf looked passionately into the future given the possibilities of expanding liberal capitalism. What remained was the thesis that political utopia was responsible for socialism and that utopias and socialism should now be rejected. Joachim Fest emphasized these developments and approaches. In his essay “The Destroyed Dream”, Joachim Fest propagated the end of the utopian age and urged people to turn to the agenda of the day and stop chasing after the nightmares of history. This once happened in Italian fascism. [1]

Political utopia can fill the intellectual vacuum of critical relations with one’s age and one’s society. Whoever bids farewell to the political utopia dismisses a central strand of western thought. Criticism of one’s age was formulated in utopias since antiquity and confronted with alternative counter-designs since the 16th century. The political utopia is one of the frameworks (or discussion forums) within which intellectual self-examination about the errors and possibilities of society can and must occur.

A certain skepticism to liberal democracies was increasing shown in the last decade. Political weariness is one of the slogans for comprehending what can hardly be explained today. This weariness with politics is replaced by a well-organized and planned struggle of globalization opponents and other groups against the nation states of the western world and their supra-national organizations. Liberalism maintains a new (old) alternative in the confrontation of centralist and democratic socialism going back to Gustav Landauer and Martin Buber. The collapse of the eastern bloc does not mean the end of utopias or the end of socialism but the breakdown of centralist planning. The alternative to be revitalized can be a democratic socialism. The potential for criticizing the aberrations of socialism already exists in democratic socialism and must be emancipatorally turned to the positive.

Richard Saage emphasized the importance of political utopia in the scholarly realm. Against Ernst Bloch, Karl Mannheim, Hans Freyer, Karl Raimund Popper and Joachim Fest, he redefined and reanimated the modern discourse of political utopia.

The biography of Thomas More demonstrates the high ranking of political utopia as a means of self-assurance and self-examination. More was able to meddle in the conditions of his age in an ordering and regulating way through his state office in the England of the 16th century and his good relations to Henry VIII. His voice had weight in discussing the problems of the age. Still he did not seek this engagement or act in the present but supplemented criticism of his age with an imagined counterfoil of the best community. “Utopia”, More’s political novel, appeared in 1516. More was executed because he rejected the marriage policy of Henry VIII and England’s severance from the Catholic Church in Rome, not on account of “Utopia”. “Utopia” was a European bestseller among humanist circles and was respected both for its criticism and the alternative counterfoil. The powers of the 16th century granted the right to criticism to intellectuals in the case of More.

This is surprising since More’s critical diagnosis was hardly surpassed in its radicalism in the 16th century. Winstanley with his writings joined More’s social critical tendencies. With the enclosure movement, More criticized the beginning process of the accumulation of capital that is tied to possession of land. The English landowners (gentry) needed pasture for sheep farming and expanded cotton production. As a result, farmers were dispossessed and expelled. The common land was increasingly annexed. An impoverished lower class inevitably came into conflict with the law. More summarized this development by saying that the sheep were now devouring the people. [2]

More did not try to solve these conflicts in the scope of his office in the English state but rather described a place where these problems do not exist. The alternative society on the island Utopia appears as an ideal space that pays a high price for this ideal.

The place Utopia is completely separated from the outside world. In a gigantic project, Utopia’s inhabitants from the former peninsula made an island by digging away the road to the mainland. This seclusion was necessitated by the central premise of cooperative social life: common property. In Utopia, private property, the conflict potential of European society according to More, was abolished The conservative utopia criticism started here. A relative equality in the most different areas of life – from food and clothing to education – implied common property. While the critics of “Utopia” always criticized the individual’s determination by the state and the abolition of property, the forward-oriented, positive and emancipatory implications of equality usually fell into the background. All utopianists have equal rights and duties. The difference between poor and rich is annulled. Everyone has a right to education and culture.

This possible criticism of “Utopia” is annulled by More since he did not recommend the conversion of the imagined counterfoil. The synchronization of utopia, communism and fascism as Fest, Nolte, Popper, Dahrendorf and even Enzensberger argued was already denied by the first classical authors of the genre. More underlined the conflict of private- and public property and that many human crimes and vices result from the European property structure. To realize utopia, a totalitarian state with a happiness strategy as its goal seemed necessary. But if utopia is seen as a critical foil for one’s society of origin and as an intellectual thought-experiment, the importance of political utopia is clear. More drew this distinction by denying the realization of the utopian society in Europe. That the liberal society thinks it can do without these ideas and annul the normative and regulatory principle of equality speaks against liberalism, not against utopias.

Utopia is safeguarded in the essential right to criticism. A special form of totalitarian and centralist rule is lost with socialism, not utopia (Kropotkin, Landauer and Buber). This is not new. The list of failed quasi-utopian projects is long. Plato’s role in Syracuse, the Jesuit missions in Paraguay, the ideal cities that arose out of a long European tradition can be named along with the numerous experiments of the 19th century, above all in America, to move utopian projections into reality. Recognizing this one distinction is vital, not listing and weighing the commonalities between the utopias of the early modern age. Whoever wants to realize utopias de-utopianizes them.

The discourse of modern political utopia understands this. More limited the realization of his community. The development of the utopian genre resulted.

The utopianists of the 18th century confronted the potential of the collective spirit. Authors like La Hontan or Diderot promoted the fiction of the harmony of person and nature in the early periods of humanity’s history against the emerging middle-class society. The anarchist utopia complements the line of alternative thinking. The utopianists resisted a realization of this ideal that was interpreted as the possibility of criticism. Tahiti’s discovery around 1770 triggered a euphoria in Europe. The discovered island Tahiti became the epitome of the harmony of person and nature and the concrete utopian space in Europe’s perception. Diderot wrote the best-known Tahiti utopia in “Postscript to Bougainville’s Travels”. The utopian place is destroyed, Diderot said, in the moment when utopia and Europe confront each other as in Tahiti’s discovery. What remains is progress that at least can realize a better future in scientific, cultural, economic and political areas. For that, society needs visions and action-oriented ideas, that is the fiction of state-free societies.

Utopias may not be converted. The statements of authors like Rousseau, Diderot, Voltaire and d’Alembert refer to this formula. The utopianists of the 19th century denied this position that was added by most utopians since More. The industrialization process with its development potential through machines led to utopianists abandoning this warning. According to Owen, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Cabet and others, such an unbridled industrial process is conceivable. The distribution of profits and partnership in the produced wealth must be changed to realize utopia in the present within a short period of time.

Mediation- and transformation strategies are often added to the utopias of the 19th century on how the mistakes of European society, above all the division in poor and rich, could be repaired within a few generations. Through its enormous crisis potential, the French revolution deterred the utopianists from bringing about utopia’s realization through revolution. Rather inducing the upheaval with the permitted means in the industrial society is vital. What was planned for Europe could be tested in a microcosmic community in America. However the ideal settlements in America (like Owen’s “New Harmony”) often broke down in the structure of human conduct.

In the 19th century, the different utopian projects of these authors were subjected to sharp criticism. The aesthetic conception represented by Wilde can be named along with the well-known writings of Marx and Engels. Wilde referred to the conflict between passions and utopian rule thematicized in the 18th century. However since he was a member of the industrial society and affirmed mechanical progress, he did not proclaim return to nature. Rather he used the machine to liberate people from the humiliating drudgery of labor. The machine guarantees constant progress so people could use their time for aesthetics, that is reading, playing, going to the theater etc. For Wilde, people should be raised to the aesthetic level. In his essay, “The Soul of the Person under Socialism”, his goal was clearly an aesthetic socialism distinguished from the cultural pessimism around 1900 by the advance into an emancipatory future. Unlike Owen, Fourier and Saint-Simon, Ruskin, Morris and Wilde supported individuality while the former preferred collective solutions.

The authors of the 20th century started from that tension. Whoever has read Samjatin’s “We” and his radical future prognosis discovers that utopian discourse can critically question its positions. With Samjatin and later Orwell and Huxley, criticism was positive in Owen and others. The anonymous rule over people is made possible by technology, uniformity and surveillance. Nevertheless Samjatin does not criticize the utopias in themselves; he criticizes the attempt at converting utopias in general and Bogdanow’s utopian designs in particular. [3]

The technological fascination of political utopias, above all of the 19th century, culminates in Bogdanow. The earth is burst open so a group of elect can begin the establishment of a new community on another planet. Samjatin’s utopia and his other works are central for the necessary distinction between political utopias and the totalitarian systems of the 20th century. In his “Letter to Stalin”, Samjatin describes in detail the inner life of the writer. Whoever prohibits a writer’s free and unattached creative process kills him. Samjatin defends on principle the right of the intellectual to criticism. As a utopianist, he sues for what More could still presuppose: that the state, society and their representatives should have an interest in critical accompaniment of their policy and decisions. [4]

A second critical line to the archaic (archistischen) utopias reached its climax parallel to the dystopian novels. This was the conflict with dogmatic Marxism by Proudhon, Kropotkin and Landauer. The works of Landauer (“Call to Socialism”, “The Revolution”) make clear that the possibility of realizing socialism against the dogmatism of Marx and Engels existed for many thinkers. Kropotkin’s and Landauer’s thought can be summarized in the concise formula “socialism instead of Marxism”. In the 1940s, Martin Buber simultaneous with Popper revitalized this line of socialist and utopian thinking with his treatise “Paths in Utopia”. At the same time he contrasted the conception of a democratic and individualist socialism as an alternative to the state socialist and liberal and capitalist systems of the western world.

If political utopia was dismissed or declared dead in the last ten years, this happened against Samjatin’s criticism. As the “victor of history”, the liberal society thinks it can manage without criticism. A so-called “new middle” should absorb the two poles left and right little by little in the political sphere and denounce the unabsorbed remnant as extremist. In this sense the liberal society of the last years was characterized by one thing: new scapegoats were sought to find its way back to self-reflection. This clearly cannot function in the medium term.

Political utopia as an element of western culture already contains this self-reflective potential. Whoever grapples with utopias emphasizes the essential right to criticism (even of the best society or with Leibnitz the “best of all possible worlds”) while anchoring intellectually in the society of origin. A liberal society that renounces on visions and utopias has actually reached the end of history with Fukuyama or the point that Spengler described prophetically and polemically as the decline and fall of the West. Therefore the so-called post-modern is only more modern than the modern age because there is a past.

Oscar Wilde has the last word. In his essay “The Soul of the Person under Socialism”, he wrote: “A world map where the land utopia is not noted does not deserve a cursory glance because the land that humanity has sought since time immemorial is missing.”