the only thing that sets us apart from the animals. The organized struggle for power and authority conditions our lives and our societies. Second, if Aristotle is also correct that the good state is based on friendship (1996: 75), then politics becomes the art of working together and moving toward some realization of the common good. No state can be fully legitimate unless it is based on the actions of those who are equal, since true friendship is based in equality.
The political animal, then, is an autonomous individual who is able to think and act freely as a person. The political animal is not an individualist, valuing personal goals above all else. But the political animal is able to think and act and, most critically, decide whether or not to accept the values and goals of an existing society. Obviously, the extent of an individual’s autonomy cannot be fixed. It will vary depending on many circumstances. But, to address honestly the central problem in utopian thought, the place of the individual in the perfected community, utopian thinkers must come to grips with the political animal.
Taming the dangerous and self-destructive tendencies of the political animal becomes the critical task of all forms of politics. Taming becomes even more important in utopia, since utopia strives for a kind of justice, order and societal well-being far beyond the somewhat ramshackle arrangements that have characterized most of human political history. Utopian thought demonstrates a revulsion against political forms arising from what the American constitutional framer Alexander Hamilton called “accident or force” (2003: 1). The utopian mindset questions everything, not simply to tear things down but to make us look at the world in new and exciting ways. The utopian asks how we can create a community in which authority, whether exercised by something we can recognize as a government or through social norms, is accepted as legitimate and good. So, utopian thought questions all social and political organization. As Plato said in his Seventh Letter, all existing states are “bad – nothing can cure their constitution but a miraculous reform assisted by good luck” (1973: 114). His contempt for the imperfect political systems of his own times led him to create a model for many future utopias, the community of total commitment, subsuming individual desire to the good of the whole.
Utopia is a humanistic enterprise. It is based in the belief that society can be understood by human beings and changed for the better. Any utopian theory worth discussing must recognize the value of our fellow beings and our moral relation to them. Recognizing a common good extending beyond the self, the family, or a particular religious or ethnic community remains the greatest and most utopian aspiration of all.
Defining Utopia/Utopianism
“Utopia” is a contested term for which “no fixed definition as such is attainable” (Claeys and Sargent 2017: 2). But in order make the systematic study of utopia and utopian thought possible, the term must be defined in a manageable way, keeping in mind there are exceptions to any rule. The idea of utopia is highly plastic and can be made to fit almost any political, economic or social system. It extends in all directions and can encompass any human endeavor. As Ernst Bloch said in his classic work on utopian theory The Principle of Hope, “so far does utopia extend, so vigorously does the raw material spread to all human activities, so essentially must every anthropology and science of the world contain it” (1986: 624). The danger here should be obvious: we can make utopia mean almost anything and attach utopian ideas to almost any human action. We must beware of a utopianism that is “watered down to the point that it can be found everywhere and nowhere” (Ingram 2016: xx). In that light, it is absolutely necessary to provide a rigorous definition of the concept to avoid confusion. However, creating an overly narrow definition risks removing much of the richness inherent in the study of utopia.
Utopianism might be described as a continuum. On one side, we see efforts at reform, exemplified by the “realistic utopia” advocated by the great philosopher of liberalism John Rawls (2001). At the other extreme, we find bold visions of the complete overhaul of society, first seen in Plato’s (possibly) perfect community delineated in Republic. Gregory Claeys says utopia “generally represents … a guided improvement in human behavior towards a substantially better condition, usually where society is considerably more equal and people are much better behaved” (2017: 265). The idea of a better, more just world seems to be a natural human aspiration. Utopianism is the desire to attain that better world here and soon, not in some distant future or after-death state.
In all its many forms, utopia critiques the existing order and, in doing so, “contributes to the open space of opposition” (Moylan 2014: 1). Utopia can be ambiguous, questioning its own very possibility. Utopian writers can demonstrate the dangerous potentials of utopia in dystopian works. Utopian ideas contribute to feminism and queer theory. Utopia may be found in small spaces outside of social norms, as in the heterotopia described by Michel Foucault.
Lyman Tower Sargent defines a utopia as:
A non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space. In standard usage utopia is used both as defined here as an equivalent for eutopia or a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably better than the society in which that reader lived. (2010: 6)
Ruth Levitas provides a definition that helps explain the place of utopia in political thought:
The core of utopia is the desire for being otherwise, individually and collectively, subjectively and objectively. Its expressions explore and bring to debate the potential contents and contexts of human flourishing. It is thus better understood as a method than a goal – a method elaborated … as the Imaginary Reconstruction of Society. (2013: xi)
Utopia provides a platform to criticize our times and to work toward something better. Any utopian work or theory provides an alternative to present social, economic and political organization. The “Imaginary Reconstruction of Society” must be followed by efforts to really reconstruct society. It is not enough to criticize; we must also provide answers to our seemingly insurmountable problems. But simply reading More’s second book of Utopia, where he gives the reader a report on the close to perfect society of the Utopians, without reading the first book, where he delineates the injustice and imperfection of England in his own times, misses the point. The mixed critique at the heart of utopia remains its critical feature, even when, in the present, dystopian speculations seem to have replaced utopia. Utopian dreams still insinuate themselves into our current dystopias. As Lucy Sargisson has noted, contemporary works mix “eutopian and dystopian possibilities for the human race” (2012: 12).
Types of Utopia
Krishan Kumar suggests that four primary elements constitute utopia. First, he says that utopia contains the “element of desire,” which he describes as an “escape from toil and suffering.” Second, utopia means “harmony.” In utopia, “everyone is at peace with himself and with other men.” Third, all utopias provide “hope.” Utopia is the “promise of a new dispensation” where “justice and freedom reign.” Finally, utopia is organized by self-conscious “design.” Kumar says that these four elements combine to give us “a map of quite different possibilities for speculating on the human condition” (1991: 18–19).
Kumar and Sargent, among others, link these elements to several enduring features of utopian dreaming. All societies seem to have Golden Age stories, tales of a time when people lived in harmony with one another, with the gods (or God) and with nature. But these stories inevitably delineate the beginning of the current age of oppression and violence. The Garden of Eden is the most obvious such example, but similar stories can be found in the myths of the Greeks, Romans, Hindus and Chinese. During the so-called Age of Discovery, European explorers sought an earthly paradise in the “new world.” Others in this period searched in Africa and Asia for the legendary kingdom of Prester John, a mighty Christian monarch who ruled a just state and would join with the kings of Europe to drive back the threat of Islam. Other
