Gregory Claeys is Professor of History of Political Thought at Royal Holloway, University of London. His main research interests lie in the fields of social and political reform movements from the 1790s to the early twentieth century, with a special focus on utopianism and early socialism. Claeys’s forthcoming book, Utopianism for a Dying Planet, seeks to elaborate a utopian theory that can help us respond to the climate crisis.
Utopianism is often seen as the hopeless pursuit of unrealisable ideals or unattainable goals. Indeed, some activists and radical theorists are quick to deny the charge that their projects are ‘utopian’, perhaps fearing the accusation that their proposals are unworkable or unrealizable. You defend a theory of a realisable utopianism; is this coherent, and can you say a little about how it can help us to respond to our current climate crisis? What does it mean for you to reclaim a utopian politics?
Many of the controversies in this field result from the bewildering variety of definitions attached to “utopia” and “utopianism”, and in particular a reluctance to separate out the three main components of the latter, literary utopias, intentional communities, and utopian ideas or ideologies.
While the term “utopia” means “impossible” or “futile” in common parlance, there is a long tradition of viewing it normatively and positively, which is often linked to the programmatic aspects of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). Typically this involves communal ownership of property, relative social equality and distribution of labour, and strong bonds of belonging and mutual respect. Such societies have existed in various forms, often as small-scale voluntary intentional communities, religious (like the Shakers) or secular (like the Fourierists or Owenites). Opponents contend that their failures, and even more the lack of success in applying similar principles on a much larger, even national scale (the USSR, or Marxism), invalidate what I term utopian republicanism as such. (This needs to be contrasted in particular to neo-Harringtonian republicanism, where property is limited by an agrarian law, utopian republicanism proposes holding it in common.) Supporters at the present day view the extreme individualism typical of neoliberalism as underpinning much of the crisis in modern politics, from immense inequality of wealth to the extreme and unsustainable consumption of the earth’s resources.
A utopian politics today can return to some of More’s precepts, notably greater social equality, while placing sustainability at the centre of the utopian agenda. Crucial here is the recognition that we have only a few short decades to avoid complete environmental catastrophe, with global warming of 3°C or more, and not only the breakdown of civilisation but the cruel deaths of billions of people, if not the earth’s entire population. This scenario has now become alarmingly likely. Once we concede this premise, however, it is possible to envision much more radical solutions than those usually offered under the rubric of a “green new deal”. Conceptually utopia is here useful because it demands that we think in terms of long-term futures, and of ideal societies much better than our own. An inability to think beyond the short term – to “look up”, as we would now say – is one of the greatest barriers to our ability to save the planet. The alterity function of utopia, as I term it, gives us the possibility of a radical “other” – a dramatically different and not merely “better” way of living, which lifts us well beyond our everyday lives and gives us a critical standpoint on them. Works of imagination permit us to ask the question, “what if…”, by refusing to accept the status quo as embedded in stone and valid for all time. At the same time, all of the elements of any future utopia are already present in nascent form in society today. They merely need to be brought to life, and combined in the right ways, in order to function as a solution to environmental breakdown. Utopianism is unlike millenarianism in that it does not rely on a deus ex machina, or external form of intervention, to introduce. It is purely the product of human effort and ingenuity.
There can now be no viable political theory which does not centrally offer an analysis of humanity’s long-term future. And all forms of existing social and political theory which rely on ideas of an indefinite expansion of production, consumption, and population growth, which include most forms of both liberalism and Marxism, are no longer relevant and must be superseded. So we are at a real turning-point in history.
What do you believe is the connection between utopia and action? Does utopia help motivate and mobilize in ways that other kinds of messaging do not? Should we, with Marx, be worried that utopia can be counter-revolutionary?
The image of a vastly better future, in this case of a sustainable society, can act to motivate those who concede the terminal damage implied by our present course of action. The fact that five centuries of utopian thinking has produced such a great variety of schemes for human improvement, and a rich fictional literature in particular, inspires us to move beyond the horizons of the present, and the four to five year electoral and political cycles and short financial cycles which typically dominate our understanding of the future. We must be able to project some decades into the future, to contemplate the long-term effects of our activities. The futurological function of utopia, which first appears in earnest in the late eighteenth century, permits us to do this. The change in our behaviour which is implied by any programme which seeks to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to sustainable levels within a decade – which is what is required – is in itself revolutionary, though not in the Marxian sense. The chief sacrifices required are from the wealthiest 1% of the world’s population, and they may have to be dragooned into reducing their grossly unequal consumption of our resources. Their fortunes will have to be devoted to alleviating the effects of warming, and preventing further destruction. This will entail progressive taxation to end extreme concentration of wealth, and the abolition of tax havens and evasion, for the cost of achieving sustainability will be a substantial portion of the world’s wealth – many trillions of pounds. This burden should not fall unfairly on the lowest producers of emissions in the less developed world. Indeed the latter will require substantial assistance from wealthier nations in order to avoid the worst effects of warming.
What is the relationship between our utopian goals and the tactics we should embrace now? For example, you write that utopia may revolve around increased sociability and community-mindedness. However, climate-driven organizing tactics are often somewhat antisocial: sabotaging deforestation projects, blockading roads, throwing blood at courthouses. How should our utopian principles manifest in our present tactics?
Environmental activism today necessarily involves the key attempt to wake people up to the long-term dangers of our current policies, including passive resistance, demonstrations, and boycotts, but without the use of violence against people. This is the noblest form of political action of this type. The minimal disruption caused is hardly proportionate to the damage to humanity as such which the avoidance of change, and particularly the continued burning of fossil fuels, produces and will continue to produce. At the same time environmentalists continually foment the ideal that humanity shares a common fate and must confront the earth’s problems together. Even billionaires will not survive the scenario we may well face in a few decades – but they still think they will. An intense solidarity binds environmental activists which can be wedded to many other forms of community activism. So the process of changing society and the ideals which will bind future societies are intimately linked. The ultimate goal of both is to promote a sense of common life and common purpose, which I describe chiefly in terms of the concept of belongingness.
What would your utopian society look like? You argue that the content of utopianism has historically been associated with sociability, equality, and sustainability. But is this contingent or necessary to utopianism? To what extent do you think that utopia–in its various forms–belongs to the left? It seems as though we don’t see many right-wing utopias, even though dystopia is utilized by both sides.
A society defined by belongingness cannot be conjured out of nothing, but must rely on precedents of viable human behaviour. For most of us, by contrast to past utopianism, which has often urged a “return to nature” on the land, city life defines our basic existence. But cities are often unliveable, and created or developed largely for profit rather than for human life. In Utopianism for a Dying Planet: Life After Consumerism (Princeton University Press, August 2022) I conjecture that group theory indicates that neighbourhood identity can provide a vital form of belongingness in large modern cities, to counter the sense of alienation which living in large masses often produces. But cities will also have to become much more pleasant and sustainable, even as temperatures rise significantly in the coming decades. They will have to become much greener, with many more parks, outdoor plazas, and public meeting places, free of most automobile traffic, and easier to move around in, by free public transportation. Festivals and subsidised communal activities will need to provide many more opportunities to meet and enjoy the company of others – I term this a neo-Fourierist approach, after the famous French socialist Charles Fourier. The future utopia must be made as “attractive” (one of Fourier’s favourite terms) as possible. These features will allow us to compensate for a decline in attachment to luxuries and unsustainable consumption, and the many attendant difficulties and frugality which transition to a sustainable society will entail, by ensuring greater means of self-expression and forms of communal pleasure.
As a matter of principle we cannot understand utopia without confronting dystopia, for they are intimately interrelated. Much greater social equality is upheld in nearly all utopian visions, whilst extreme inequality is typically associated with dystopia, and with current neoliberal societies like Britain and the US, and kleptocracies like Russia. So we will need a Universal Basic Income, a four-day work-week, the guarantee of universal health care and so on. Right-wing “utopias” typically rely on the labour of the many to support the ideal lifestyle of the few – think of Nazi Germany, but also white supremacy racism generally. Enslavement, pervasive fear, widespread disinformation, and oppression of minority groups typifies these “utopias”, which are dystopias for the minority. So if we accept a modified version of the Morean paradigm of utopian republicanism, greater equality and widespread consent must define any future utopian vision.
You discuss the concern that utopia’s alleged drive towards perfection makes it totalitarian. How do you respond to other arguments that utopia is authoritarian because it requires or enforces a certain type of participation from individuals, e.g., that their behaviour is somehow improved, that they are more community-minded, kinder to one another, etc? Do you think that there is anything to the accusation that utopia is illiberal in this sense? In the context of the climate crisis, do we have the time to be worried about this type of concern?
Utopia is often wrongly identified with “perfection”, although we find crime, war, slavery and divorce in More’s paradigmatic text. To my mind “perfection” is a concept inherited from theology which ought not to be identified with utopianism, though we do occasionally encounter it in Christian utopianism. (Think of John Humphrey Noyes “Perfectionism” or “Bible Communism” and the Oneida community.) There are some secular equivalents: Condorcet writes of “true perfection of mankind” being achieved when all humanity had achieved a high level of civilisation. But utopias typically take human fallibility into account, and attempt to regulate behaviour without expecting that anyone can ever be “perfect”. They may be “perfectibilist” in the sense of striving for much better societies. But they never end in “perfection”. The psychology of the small group is central here to regulating behaviour without requiring stringent policing and physical punishment. We consent voluntarily to join groups and maintain their norms where we see benefit in so doing. We do not seek to evade the rules or become free riders where we accept that when everyone keeps to the rules the society functions much better. At the same time, our education systems must attempt to foster more co-operative behaviour. Competition has its place, but we must have a much stronger sense of communal ethos if we are to make the sacrifices necessary to creating a sustainable planet.
The best way to achieve these sacrifices – say limiting flying in the next few decades, or ceasing to eat meat – is to acknowledge the severity of the threat, and the need for such sacrifices in principle. Our situation is analogous to a war, and we need emergency measures to ensure our survival. Then we can make democratic choices about how to implement such restraints. All forms of society involve some coercion in principle, and many “democratic” societies are ruled by parties which achieve as little as a third of the vote, especially in first-past-the-post systems, thus leaving the majority effectively coerced by a minority. More authoritarian interventions can be avoided by the common recognition of the need for such sacrifices. Of course the wealthiest 1% will resist such solutions. But the environmentalist movement must persuade the public of their necessity.
In addition, daily life in utopia ought in my view to be regulated by some variant on John Stuart Mill’s “harm” principle, where all behaviour is permitted which does not explicitly harm others. While the concept is hardly uncontroversial, it allows us to imagine much greater toleration than has historically been the norm, especially where religious intolerance (one of Mill’s key examples) has predominated. So utopia rightly understood also implies the expansion of our capacities for freedom, creativity and individuality. (Mill was by the by a self-proclaimed utopian, and the first liberal to make the crucial break from the modern idea of progress by viewing the “stationary state” as a desirable condition. He also believed that feminism was an indispensable prerequisite for human progress. My book tries to wed his perspectives on this process to Marx as well as many other utopian writers.)
In what way is utopianism distinct from the broader categories of hope, wishful thinking and the imagination?
A complex question! – and one which is usually answered by reference to the foremost modern theorist of utopia, Ernst Bloch, whose famous The Principle of Hope (begun in 1938 and revised as late as 1959) describes utopia as one amongst a variety of forms of daydream, most of which are however not utopian, but function to distract and compensate us for the drudgery and exploitation of everyday life. Most such daydreams, notably as fostered by the entertainment industry, offer fantasies of a better life for the individual, rather than the collective or entire societies. People rarely dream of improving everyone’s else’s lot in life. Hollywood’s demand for an eternal “happy ending” and news outlets insistence on feel-good or “good news” stories to sell papers and advertising do this job all too well. Some of Bloch’s followers have fetishised hope and rendered the term practically identical with utopia, in part with the aim of bringing religion back into utopianism. In my view it is not: utopia has a specific content, and is a social concept. Where hope is a synonym for faith, it is counterproductive and archaic. As mere hopium it merely dulls our sense of anxiety. It is pointless to say “we hope for a better world” or “a better world is possible” without specifying what we mean by these terms, and discussing the specific content of utopia. Bloch’s system is moreover closely aligned to Marxism, his addition of a theory of human rights notwithstanding. It is liable to many of the same objections as some of Marx’s key theories, particularly the inevitability of a proletarian revolution to issue in the new world. His plea for introducing messianism and mysticism into Marxism – effectively going back to Thomas Müntzer – is also to my mind misplaced.
Finally, what are your favourite utopian texts?
There are so many! For its elegance, subtlety, simplicity, and unnervingly satirical twists, and because it forms our starting point for understanding the tradition, More’s Utopia. For the programme, suitably updated, Marx’s Communist Manifesto (1848). For its bold critique of industrial modernity, William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890). For its outline of an urban utopian vision, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward 2000-1887 (1888). For the sheer elegance of the satire, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). As a sweeping historical narrative which first charts the rise of consumer society, The Travels of Hildebrand Bowman (1778). For its French counterpart, Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’an 2440, rêve s’il en fut jamais (1771), which Koselleck terms the “first futuristic novel”. (The English translation is Memoirs of the Year 2500). As anticipating our present situation, Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975). A current favourite: Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry of the Future (2020). And if we include dystopias, the starting points remain Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).