In a number of recent and forthcoming articles and papers, I have argued that while utopia can be dangerous, utopian visions are absolutely essential, that we must choose utopia. Today, I want to try to give you the essence of that argument while also relating it to some new issues. Let me summarize my argument:1.Hope/desire for a better life in this life is a central aspect of the human experience.2.That hope/desire has often been distorted by ideology and religion.3.That hope/desire has (...) often been captured to serve the economic and political ends of the powerful.4.When that hope/desire is distorted or captured, it can become dangerous.5.That danger usually comes about because the hope/desire is warped so that the better life is only for a select few or in-group, thus creating an out-group, an other, who can be neglected, harmed, even killed to achieve the end. Such groups have included members of other religions, indigenous peoples, other ethnic groups, ideologies, and so forth. The boundaries of the other have often been changed to include some formerly in the in-group.6.Even so, that hope/desire for a better life is the only effective means of overcoming such distortion/capture. (shrink)

In 1959, the Charles Darwin Station and the Galápagos National Park were established, formally inaugurating conservation on the archipelago. In the same year, a utopian colony from the United States arrived. Whereas scholars have dismissed the latter and focused on the former, this essay unveils the science-inspired utopianism common to both enterprises. Investing science with the exclusive role of producing all knowledge and steering politics, leaders of the two initiatives aspired not only to protect nature but also to forge a (...) new humanity. Describing how such ambitions burst along lines of race, class, and nationality, I argue that these enterprises consolidated the current understanding of the Galápagos as “pristine”: a site fit for research and tourism but unhospitable to people. Drawing on archival and historical documents, this essay aims to reinvigorate two conversations: one between science and technology studies and conservation, and the other between STS and utopian studies. If recent attempts at bridging the divide between science and imagination have emphasized how powerful actors shape human society, this essay considers the long-lasting effects of scientific imaginaries on a politics of nature. (shrink)

(2000). Isaiah Berlin, William Morris, and the politics of Utopia. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy: Vol. 3, The Philosophy of Utopia, pp. 56-86.

Chang-Rae Lee’s 2014 novel On Such a Full Sea uses the genre of speculative fiction to reflect on longstanding healthcare debates in the United States that have recently crystalized around the Affordable Care Act. The novel imagines the political economy of healthcare in a future America devastated by environmental illness. What kind of care is available and to whom? Who provides it? Who pays for it? What about distribution and access? The different healthcare systems governing each of three geo-social zones (...) in Lee's future society represent exaggerated versions of the scenarios participants in the ACA debate claim their opponents’ health policies would produce. The essay argues that Lee’s novel ultimately favors a version of universal government-funded care over a system based on supposed free-market principles, even as the novel also tries to make room for conservative Americans’ fears about the specter of so-called “socialized medicine.” More broadly, the essay contends that the health humanities should devote more attention to literary and artistic engagements with healthcare as a system: a complex set of financial models, public and private institutions, government policies, and actors whose roles range well beyond patient and care provider. (shrink)

This study investigated people’s ethical concerns of surveillance technology. By adopting the spectrum of technological utopian and dystopian narratives, how people perceive a society constructed through the compulsory use of surveillance technology was explored. This study empirically examined the anonymous online expression of attitudes toward the society-wide, compulsory adoption of a contact tracing app that affected almost every aspect of all people’s everyday lives at a societal level. By applying the structural topic modeling approach to analyze comments on four Hong (...) Kong anonymous discussion forums, topics concerning the technological utopian, dystopian, and pragmatic views on the surveillance app were discovered. The findings showed that people with a technological utopian view on this app believed that the implementation of compulsory app use can facilitate social good and maintain social order. In contrast, individuals who had a technological dystopian view expressed privacy concerns and distrust of this surveillance technology. Techno-pragmatists took a balanced approach and evaluated its implementation practically. (shrink)

The unbridled consumption of clothing threatens the environment. In fashion communities, a discussion is developing around the adoption of new materials and economic models to reduce the impacts of clothing production and use. We discuss these emergent technologies in the wider historical setting of the Anthropocene, a geologic term that denotes the global-scale environmental changes brought about by agricultural and industrial activity. The long history of human-environmental interactions is interwoven with the development of international garment economies that have shaped biological (...) and physical systems. This article provides an account of how changes in clothing manufacturing and consumption patterns have... (shrink)

This article studies the response of the US disability community to the prevalent assumption that disabled people do not have a future, in the form of the disability rights movement. It provides an exploratory discussion of the key role played by utopianism in the response. In doing so, the article adds to critical theorizing on the importance of utopia to the oppression of non-dominant groups and to transcending that oppression. I use utopian studies scholarship to interpret the activities leading up (...) to the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 as a minor utopia, characterized by an ambiguous, grounded, and provisional effort to imagine alternative ways of being. I articulate the central role played by a positive vision of disability and disabled people for this inversion of the historically negative relationship between utopia and disability. The article turns to disability activists to show that the movement countered exclusionary utopian approaches by acting as if it had a right to envision and enact a different, better future for all from the perspective of disability and disabled people. (shrink)

This introduction to a special issue of Thesis Eleven devoted to science fiction begins by exploring the way the genre has been handled by German and French critical theory and their Anglophone equivalents. It proceeds to a discussion of the historical sociology of the genre and, thence, to an account of what it terms the dialectic of science fiction endangerment. Finally, it concludes with a brief overview of the various contributions to the issue.

This article examines two recent examples of feminist dystopias: Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God and Leni Zumas’s Red Clocks. True to their genre, these novels act as w...

(2000). Utopianism and national identity. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy: Vol. 3, The Philosophy of Utopia, pp. 87-106.

More’s Utopia has been translated a number of times into Turkish and continues to be translated as a classical, significant text. It is taught academically in disciplines such as political science, philosophy, history, sociology, and literature as part of the curriculum for both undergraduate and graduate university levels. In addition to responding to academic demand, different publishing houses continue publishing the novel in the interest of the general reader. Most of the translations are based on English editions such as Ralph (...) Robinson’s translation, Gilbert Burnet’s translation, Paul Turner’s translation, and the Everyman’s Library version. The Turkish translations... (shrink)

This is a personal recollection of Lyman Tower Sargent that stresses his enormous contribution—personal and academic—to the community of utopian studies. After a brief recollection of our academic interactions, the short contribution pays homage to a “social dreamer” who is aware that utopia can be dangerous but is equally sure that it is absolutely essential if we are to survive.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”The predilection for idiosyncratic, arbitrary, or even playful use of key concepts of any discipline, attended by the apparently natural tendency toward “humpty-dumptyism,” makes it possible to produce a plethora of brilliant (...) generalizations, paradoxes, bons mots, and suchlike. All these invariably contribute to the successful autopoiesis of that discipline, as there is always something—to quote Bishop Joseph Hall, the author... (shrink)

We start from the idea that Utopia is a Renaissance alternative to the Medieval Garden of Eden and, consequently, that dystopia, as a failed utopia, continues the theme of Paradise Lost. Inheriting such a rich tradition, the word “utopia” designates a semantic hybrid that encompasses several fields and disciplines. In this paper, we propose a reorganisation of the species of the utopian genre by reusing, with a minimum of violence, the already existing, albeit rather lax terms of utopia, eutopia, dystopia (...) and antiutopia. The main criteria for distinguishing these species are the moral value, the degree of verisimilitude, the constructing procedures. (shrink)

(2000). ‘Nothing is, but what is not’: Utopias as practical political philosophy. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy: Vol. 3, The Philosophy of Utopia, pp. 9-24.

In the history of ideas some researchers have recently coined the term psycho-utopianism, denoting the notion that the ideal society presupposes a “new man,” that is, the psychological nature of man must change before society can change. Cultural studies have noted this line of thinking also within the so-called New Age movement. However, the notion of a New Age is not really new; it occurred already at the beginning of the Modern Epoch; in seventeenth-century Europe. At that time, the educational (...) philosopher J. A. Comenius was writing his canonical work _Didactica Magna_ and other texts on education, science, and philosophy, with the ultimate aim of contributing to a new world order. Comenius was one of the first modern educators to argue for a general education of both boys and girls irrespective of social class. Three hundred years later, B. F. Skinner suggested psychological methods of education and upbringing, also with the ultimate aim to transform society. In this article I will look closer at the similarities and differences between these two thinkers regarding their psycho-utopian notions. I will conclude with similar reflections on psycho-utopian tendencies in present discourses on information and communication technology (ICT) and education. (shrink)

This article merges the intellectual concept of utopia and the material culture of the pie as a metaphor to explore the relative hegemony of Judeo-Christian utopian literature and criticism. Citing Lyman Tower Sargent's contributions to opening up scholarship on comparative utopias, the author underscores his influence on her own thinking and publications on the topic. The study traces parallels between intellectual and material cultures, especially in French, Japanese, and Indigenous Australian contexts. In conclusion, it suggests that contemporary transformations in writing (...) and reading utopias should encourage greater recognition of intercultural imaginaries of the ideal. (shrink)

Despite Emmanuel Levinas’ own ambivalent relationship to utopianism, Levinasian ethics and utopianism have much in common. First, I look at Levinas’ own remarks on utopianism, to underline the said ambivalence. It is clear that Levinas is concerned with utopia’s “totalitarian” potential. Then I turn to the utopian tradition and scholarship to argue that utopia ought to be properly understood precisely as a resistance to a given order, or totality. Utopia is a form of political imagination that positions itself against the (...) dominant forces of its time, giving a voice to those who have “no place” in society. But there is an inherent danger to utopia as well. What if it lends itself to a dangerous “other”? I conclude by looking at Levinas’ politics and the importance of the Third, which politically keeps our singular ethical obligation in check by forcing us to think about our obligation to all other others. (shrink)

Lyman Tower Sargent is one of the few scholars and intellectuals I have met whose research and studies are embodied in their actual life, since for him the values of utopianism constitute the base and foundation of his personal and political choices. My essay is a personal reflection on his life and scholarly work.

ZusammenfassungDer vorliegende Beitrag erläutert anhand ausgewählter Beispiele das Potential von Dystopien für die Bioethik. Hierfür werden bestehende Ansätze narrativer Ethik kritisch rekonstruiert und erweitert. Mittels eines Theorieangebots aus der Literaturwissenschaft wird vorgeschlagen, moralische Überzeugungen, die Dystopien motivieren, in kohärentistische Reflexions- und Begründungsverfahren einzubeziehen. Weiterhin wird systematisch herausgearbeitet, welches Potential Dystopien durch sozio-kulturell dichte Szenarien, einen zeitgeschichtlichen Kontext und durch eine Sensibilisierung für die moralische Relevanz der Sprache für die bioethische Forschung bieten. Die dargestellten methodologischen Überlegungen bieten zum einen praktische Bezugspunkte (...) für didaktische Ansätze und zum anderen für die öffentliche Deliberation. Die Analyse zeigt jedoch auch, dass Dystopien jenseits einer Illustration oder Warnung eigene moralische Positionen zur Diskussion stellen. (shrink)

The main idea of the article is that there is a complementary link between utopia and law. Thus, the purpose is to show, through a conceptual and historical analysis, that denying such a link, at least, means the existence of an unclear and biased view of the concept of utopia and its historical development. For this purpose, it presents a provisional definition of utopia along with two assumptions underlying such definition: an economical and an anthropological one. It also presents a (...) typology of utopias. Based on this, the idea that utopia is both subversive and perfectionist is rejected by acknowledging two different models of utopia: closed and open utopias. It is concluded that possible tensions between utopia and law are overcome by means of an open model of utopia. (shrink)

The paper offers a new approach to utopia in early and classical Greek texts from Homer to the fifth century. The model is based on four motifs regularly occurring in ‘utopian texts’, that is, descriptions of places that are distant in time and/or space. A comparative analysis of such texts and of how they manipulate the four motifs sheds new light on specific problems and encourages more nuanced readings of famous texts, such as Homer's account of Scheria.

Orwell, as he himself remarked, came from a lower, professional-service fraction of the English and imperial ruling class that was ‘simultaneously dominator and dominated’ (Raymond Williams), so that a combination of state and monopoly power became his abiding nightmare. His horizon was, as of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, a revolutionary socialism committed to freedom and equality, opposed both to Labourite social democracy and to Stalinist pseudo-communism. In this article, I concentrate on Nineteen Eighty-Four, drawing on narratology (its agential (...) system, spacetime descriptions, and composition – ‘the Winston story’, the ‘Goldstein excerpts’, and the Appendix on Newspeak) and history. I conclude that Nineteen Eighty-Four has an interesting, but limited, ‘Tory anarchist’ stance and horizon: in revolt against the rulers, but not believing that the revolt can succeed (in direct polemic with the Communist Manifesto). In Orwell’s view there are ‘three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle and the Low’, but the mindless and passive Low reduce this to the Middle against the High, or intellect and impotence versus cynical power. ‘No economics’ entails here ‘no class struggle’, and a fair amount of misogyny. Orwell’s textural skill was penetrating, but his thematics very limited. Still, he was one of the first to notice the long-duration slide of politics toward fascism, even if he drew a mistaken consequence from it, as evident in his early conflation of Stalinism and Nazism into an untenable ‘totalitarianism’. Nineteen Eighty-Four remains a concerned, appealing, and in some ways useful text, albeit one that ultimately lacks wisdom. (shrink)

The symbols of the Feminine throughout the dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale are the object of study of the article. It is argued that feminine symbology is a unifying thread that makes possible an analysis of the main features of dystopian societies and the possibility of a critical dystopia. The category of analysis is the symbol understood from the perspective of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of symbols, which proposes that the understanding of a text should be based on what they pretend to (...) say. Therefore, the symbols of the Feminine make possible the resistance within dystopian regimes, and without resistance there is no dystopia. As a result, it is possible through the symbols of the Feminine to interpret the main features of dystopias and, particularly, to develop the possibility of a feminist critical dystopia. (shrink)

Ever since I encountered Lyman Tower Sargent's writing, he has signified to me a scholar whose lifelong dedication to utopian thought and literature has nurtured generations of students, critics, and practitioners of utopia. It is for this reason that my birthday wishes briefly place Lyman's work alongside that of William Morris—a writer, critic, designer, and activist whose inspiration was the past.

The novels of contemporary French author Michel Houellebecq are notorious for their critique of late capitalist society, offering a vitriolic portrayal of humanity that at times borders on the pornographic, the racist and the nihilistic. However, beyond the depiction of Western decline, one of the driving themes of Houellebecq’s writing is the question of how to imagine a way out of our current bind. This paper investigates the subjectivity of utopian desire in Houellebecq’s 1998 novel Les Particules élémentaires. Focusing on (...) the representation of a futuristic neo-human species in the prologue and the epilogue of the novel, it examines how Houellebecq’s writing uses the portrayal of scientific progress to highlight the ethical dilemmas of our social world and, moreover, of our own utopian imagination. (shrink)