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News from Somewhere: Enhanced Sociabilityand the Composite Definition of Utopiaand Dystopia

GREGORY CLAEYSRoyal Holloway, University of London

AbstractThis article argues that that since utopianism is commonly held to consist of threecomponents, the literary utopia, utopian ideologies and communal movements, the termutopia should not describe only the first of these, the formal, literary genre, as is oftenthe case, without addressing the other two, where utopian content is more central. Norcan dystopia, which has usually been used to describe fictional negative societies. Acomposite definition of both terms, however, addresses the three components as inher-ent to each concept. It is then contended that most utopias are linked by their commit-ment to a form of enhanced sociability, or more communal form of living, sometimesassociated with ideals of friendship, while their dystopian counterparts are substantively

connected by the predominance of fear, and the destruction of society, as a polaropposite of friendship. These definitions imply a spectrum of both utopian and dysto-pian plausibility; that is to say, where enhanced sociability has been maintained forsome period, utopia has existed, and where the opposite has occurred, as in totalitari-anism, dystopia can also be used to describe a real state of affairs. Providing arealistic concept of both terms in relation to each other, however, raises some conten-tious issues about whether, for instance, dystopias are created intentionally, or whetherdystopia ideologies as such exist. The article also attempts to distinguish betweenutopic and dystopic phenomena, and to plot a prehistory of the concepts of utopiaand dystopia.

It is often assumed that the term utopia, commencing with ThomasMore, describes a much better, even perfect, society, while dysto-pia, arriving much later on the scene, depicts a much worse one.1

This article takes issue with these assumptions on four grounds.2 Firstly,

1 The literature on defining utopia is very extensive and not summarized adequately anywhere. Agood starting point theoretically is Lyman Tower Sargent, The Three Faces of Utopianism,Utopian Studies, v (1994), 137, or Sargent, Utopianism(Oxford, 2010). For historical frameworks,

the best study is J. C. Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing15161700 (Cambridge, 1981). In what follows my analysis is confined to western utopian anddystopian traditions.2 This article refines and extends the arguments of my Searching for Utopia: the History of an Idea(2011) [hereafter Claeys, Searching for Utopia], my Malice in Wonderland: The Origins of Dysto-

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it argues that if we presume, as it is now generally conceded we must,that utopianism consists of three components, the literary utopia,utopian ideologies and communal movements, the term utopia shouldnot describe only the first of these, theformal, literary genre, as is often

the case, without addressing the other two, where utopian content ismore central.3 Nor can dystopia, which has not heretofore generallyhad an ism coupled to it, focus solely on the literary dimension of thesephenomena. Secondly, it can be contended that a definition centredupon Thomas MoresUtopia(1516) which also encompasses these othertwo components finds its centre of gravity in an ideal of enhancedsociability, or a modified form of friendship, as the common core of itsthree facets. Thirdly, and consequently, a definition of dystopia whichalso gives priority to content over form can be understood as portraying

a society based upon fear the opposite of friendship. Utopia anddystopia alike, from this perspective, are discourses principally (notexclusively) on the promise and threat, in turn, of intensified sociability.This invites consideration of political despotisms as a characteristicinstitutional form of dystopia, and totalitarianism, in the later modernperiod, as the most invidious form thereof. Here we will have to con-front the charge that the dominant form of modern dystopianism inevi-tably emerged from utopianism, and particularly the secularization ofChristian millenarianism. Fourthly, this gives us a considerably longerpedigree for dystopia than is usually presumed. It invites us to considerthe parallel religious prehistories of both concepts, which in the Chris-tian tradition are dominated by ideas of Eden and Heaven, on the onehand, and Hell on the other. It also necessitates a reconsideration of thefantastic or imaginary aspects of this dual tradition as only one facet ofa mode of organizing societies which also includes actually-existing, orrealized, successful and failed, past organizations. Section I here willconsider how utopia is affected by this definition, and Section II, theprospects for redefining dystopia in terms of the demands of thesethree components.

pia from Wells to Orwell, in The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, ed. G. Claeys(Cambridge, 2010), pp. 10734, and several earlier editions of utopian texts. In so far as its themeis the modern engagement between natural and artificial sociability, however, it goes back toarguments first explored in my Citizens and Saints: Politics and Anti-Politics in Early BritishSocialism(Cambridge, 1989), and which have dominated my research ever since. As Section II laysthe groundwork for extending this project further into that direction, in a book provisionallyentitledDystopia: A Natural History, this part of the present article is more speculative, and hencelonger than the first. Parts of the text have been presented in 201011 at the Universities of

Cambridge, Cyprus, Lublin, and Porto, and the Oxford Literary Festival, and the EdinburghInternational Book Festival. I am grateful to contributors to all of these meetings for theircomments.3 This is now broadly agreed by scholars in the field. See, e.g., The Utopian Reader, ed. G. Claeysand Lyman Tower Sargent (New York, 1999), introduction. For the modern period as a whole thebest general study remains Krishan Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (Oxford,1987) [hereafter Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia].

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I

Utopia has been defined in a bewildering variety of ways, and there is littleinterdisciplinary consensus on how (indeed even whether) we should link its

literary, communal and ideological components. Within the respectivedisciplines of literature, the sociology of intentional communities andintellectual history there are clear foci of interest and interpretation.Literary scholars, who predominate generally in the field, have often beenconcerned with the variety of formal variations assumed by the utopiangenre, and the shifting nature of utopian norms, as well as how both havebeen transmuted into or relate to their dystopian counterparts, and intoscience fiction, in particular, amongst the later modern genres. Students ofcommunal societies have mostly been concerned to map out historical

trends in communitarianism, to explain their relative success or failure, andtheir relations to the broader societies from which they emerge and intowhich they usually again disappear. Intellectual historians, who includestudents of religion, of socialism and Marxism, of popular protestmovements, and of ideas of futures both positive and negative, as well as ofsome earlier thinkers and themes (Plato, More, Bacon and science, theprehistory of modern revolutionism), do not generally see their enquiries asbounded by the utopian literary form. Nor, often, do those who treat theutopian and dystopian dimensions of film, architecture, travel andexploration, empire, gender, nostalgia and a hundred other themes which

have a bearing on the wider topic. The general portrait we can assemblefrom this field, then, is an extraordinarily diverse illustration of trends andphenomena in which the term utopia has come to imply so much that itsmeaning usually collapses under the weight of multiple associations. Theadvantage of this cacophony is that it permits many voices to be heard. Thedisadvantage is that some invariably are not loud enough break through,and we tend to lose a sense of concrete shared meanings across the immenserange of multiple discourses. The common-language sense of the termutopia, then, as an idealized future or past, or non-existent ideal society, is

not likely to be displaced by any single methodological discussion. But it ispossible to propose that a narrower, tighter definition of the term mightfunction alongside popular discussions to furnish a set of meanings whichunite the three major facets introduced above, hence providing acomposite definition which weds the interests of the various disciplineswhich converge here. This discussion is intended to be exploratory,conjectural and provisional. It is admittedly immodest in its scope, andraises numerous problems without solving them. However, it does suggestone means of uniting the disparate strands of this vast and compelling field.

Let me begin by suggesting that there are four things utopia is notwhich it is commonly assumed to be.4 This is not to presume that any ofthese aspects, when proposed as a definition of utopia, are wrong:

4 I here take up arguments offered my The Five Languages of Utopia, in Spectres of Utopia, ed.Artur Blaim (Gdansk, 2012), pp. 2631 [hereafter Claeys, The Five Languages of Utopia].

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they are simply too one-sided, on their own, to tell us much about theother aspects of utopianism. To adopt any of them as a definition ofutopia,exclusively, as such, tends then to ignore too many phenomenawhich arise in other parts of the field.

Firstly, utopia is not an exclusively literary tradition, regardless of itsclose association with Mores Utopia and the many thousands of textswhich have imitated it.5 This is the most common focus in modernscholarship, partly because the genre retains in one form or anothergreater contemporary purchase than many of its earlier historical ema-nations. Despite the assertions of writers like Frederic Jameson, and thedefinitive status of Francis BaconsNew Atlantis (1626), it is moreovernot a branch of that related and immensely more popular genre, sciencefiction.6 Utopia is not therefore reducible to a set of texts as such, to be

subjugated by the imposition of literary technique. Utopianism hasgiven rise to an extraordinarily interesting literary tradition, but it is notitself restricted to, or essentially defined by, its literary form. Withinliterary utopianism, however, we find a rich spectrum of fantastic pro-

jections. Some of these indeed verge on the utterly impossible, throughscientific and technological projection in particular. Such speculationsare themselves indeed a subgenre in some respects of utopia, rather thanthe reverse. But in the degree to which they are implausible, they arealso paradoxically, as we will see, from one viewpoint also unutopian,that is, insusceptible of any definitive realizability. That is to say, if thepremise that utopias are not merely conceived as good places, but canactually be created as such, and indeed have been, is accepted, then themore wildly improbable fantasies of idealized worlds require anothercategorization. Utopia may be, as we will see, within the boundaries ofthe possible, but not everything conceivable is possible. This is, admit-tedly, a counter-intuitive inversion of one common language meaning ofutopia.7 But in this view implausibility remains an important defini-tional barrier between utopia and other forms of imaginative discourse.Here utopia is conceived as having been often realized, somewhere, in

many and varied forms, though it has not always lasted long, nor livedup to the optimistic promises made at the outset of most experiments.Hence the title of this piece.

Secondly, utopia is not a branch of theology. It is, in particular, notan account of the perfect (and hence unattainable) society, as is still socommonly presumed.8 The languages of perfection, totality, salvation,emancipation, wholeness, unity, enlightenment and liberation all share a

5 The literature here is enormous, but a good guide is Interpreting Mores Utopia, ed. John C. Olin

(New York, 1989). More recent trends are summarized in The Cambridge Companion to ThomasMore, ed. George M. Logan (Cambridge, 2011).6 This is the substance of the argument in JamesonsArchaeologies of the Future: The Desire CalledUtopia and Other Science Fictions (2005).7 This argument is defended in Searching for Utopia, pp. 1415.8 For example, C. West Churchman, The Design of a Perfect Society: I will define Utopia asa perfect society, in Utopias, ed. Peter Alexander and Roger Gill (1984), pp. 438, here p. 44.




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common religious origin.9 They are fatefully intertwined with utopia-nism from well before Thomas More indeed for twenty centuries from the time of the Egyptian Field of Reeds to the present, to takeonly the western tradition. The stories of the Creation, of the Garden of

Eden, and of Adam and Eves expulsion from it for partaking of thefruit of the Tree of Knowledge, remain compelling metaphors to many.Christian sectarians have often attempted to implement what they tookto be Christs essential teaching. Most successful forms of communitari-anism have been based upon religion the Amish, Shakers, Moravians,Hutterites and many other groups bear witness here. So have some ofthe more spectacularly unsuccessful, such as Thomas Mnzers Anabap-tists. But the City of God is not that of real people, who are at best onlyrebellious angels, and rarely even that. And the heavenly hereditary

dictatorship is not everyones idea of a model utopia, in any case.10

Utopia is often about perfectibility, thus, but does not genericallyportray the perfect society, even if its failings often seem swept underthe carpet.11 And it is not the millennium.12 In the literary genre, hence,Mores Utopia contains crime, imperialism and a host of other evils.Most communities, too, have acknowledged that imperfections inconduct will be manifested, and attempt to regulate them, rather than toexterminate them utterly.

Thirdly, utopia is not simply a state of mind, a psychological impulseor principle, an aberrant, deviant or pathological form of extremefantasy, or a personality type. The psychology of utopia is of courseextremely interesting. Nations and peoples feel nostalgia for their lostgolden ages of innocence, virtue and equality just as individuals recalltheir youth as the best years of their lives. They look hopefully forwardto an improved version thereof, and when possible alter their worlds tosuit this image. Displacements from the anxieties of the present to thepotentiality of the future are normally gratifying. The desire for socia-bility, and for the safety of the group, too, we will see, is a vital aspectof utopianism. It is plausible to argue that imagining good places, and

particularly more equal societies, functions as a compensatory safety-valve for those suffering under the duress of grievous social inequalityand exploitation. If such places did not exist in reality we would have toinvent them, and so the myths of Sparta, of the Golden Age, of Rous-seaus natural society, or of heaven, are all of a piece. They also, thus,provide a critical perspective on present inequalities, and one whosedissonance occasionally triggers explosive reactions against oppression.

9 A good account of these languages in relation to utopia is Alfred Braunthal, Salvation and the

Perfect Society: The Eternal Quest (Amherst, 1979).10 Heaven and North Korea have been compared in this respect, to the advantage of neither.11 Thus we can envision Condorcet, for instance, as working within a utopian tradition in insistingthat human progress aims at the true perfection of mankind (Sketch for a Historical Picture of theProgress of the Human Mind(1979), p. 173). This is closely linked by Condorcet with the growthof inequality within and between nations.12 The classic text here is Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (1947).

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It is not implausible, either, to describe a utopian mentality whichseeks to impose rational norms of organization upon the world, and toorder it more satisfactorily. In proportion as the present is deficient, wemight say, we invest in the future, or the concept thereof. But to reduce

utopia to its psychology, or to explaining the appeal of the concept, andof a more intensively communal way of life, would be mistaken. ToMannheim the meaning of utopia is limited to that type of orientationwhich transcends reality and which at the same time breaks the bonds ofthe existing order. Utopia is here a wish-image which has a potentiallyrevolutionary function.13 Martin Buber, Ernst Bloch and others haveposited a principle of hope or wish-picture in which utopia functionsas a fantastic longing or urge or desire.14 To Bloch this is moreover apartial substitute for an idea of God which is natural to humanity. Yet

utopia is also a great deal more than this, for the enhanced sociability itseeks is also this-worldly, and vastly harder to concoct than images ofdeities.

Fourthly, utopia should not be merely a synonym for visionary socialimprovement, no matter how far-sighted or exotic such proposals foramelioration may be. This meaning, in the sense of impossible, is aneven more common definition than that linked to the literary genre. Thelong tradition of thinking about ideal cities, in particular, notablyoften includes projections of beautiful, symmetrical and harmoniousdesigns of plazas, towers and squares conceived on a dramatic scale,ecological plans for self-sufficient environments, and so on.15 On thedefinition offered here, however, these are only utopian in so far asthey are married to psychological proposals for modifying humanbehaviouras a consequence ofand/or accompanying such designs.16 Thequintessentially utopian component in any such scheme, then, has toinvolve an expectation of behavioural improvement, that is, in the termshere proposed, enhanced sociability. The reorganization of space assuch, as opposed to its moralization, no matter how extensive, sublimeor awe-inspiring, is not itself sufficient to trigger the utopian label

indeed we see here another instance of the use of the term as synony-mous with bold, ambitious, imaginative, and so on.17 Despitethese common-language associations, such terms embody concepts ofprogress indeed, but not of utopia.18 The same may be said of temporary

13 Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (1936), p.171.14 See Martin Buber, Paths in Utopia (Boston, 1949), and Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (3vols; Oxford, 1986). Ludwig Feuerbachs idea of God as a projection of human desire was of coursetaken up by Marx in the famous Paris Manuscripts of 1844, in order to expound Marxs concept

of alienation.15 A splendid portrayal of this tradition is Ruth Eaton, Ideal Cities: Utopianism and the (Un)builtEnvironment(2002).16 The same argument holds against current proclamations that the internet is somehow utopia.17 A good start with this theme is David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh, 2000).18 A starting point here is Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics(1991).




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or episodic modifications of behaviour, which either intentionally oraccidentally increase sociability. These can occur in a hundred differentcontexts, including the sublime, idealized garden,19 the rural or pastoralidyll, the cloistered Victorian sitting-room, the fervent loss of self in the

religious ceremony or festival, or the carnival,20 the loss of the individualin the crowd in musical or sporting events, or, for longer periods, thesense of community and enforced equality instilled by common struggleduring wartime. These represent what we may term utopic momentsand/or spaces. These events or places share a heightened sense of com-munal belonging or identity, and the merging of the ego in the collec-tive, often in an ecstatic, cathartic manner in which we joyfully fuse withothers, rising above and beyond ourselves to share in the strength,wisdom and longevity of the mass or the whole. These heightened

emotional moments exhibit the tribal or group aspects of our nature, orthe psychology of conformity our desire, sometimes intense, tobelong,to be alike, to wear uniforms, to be uniform, evoking what the nine-teenth century began disdainfully to term the herd mentality21 or later,more neutrally, the group mind, and which eventually became sub-sumed under group psychology.22 Hysteria, or what was once termedenthusiasm, in the sense of moral, political and religious fervour, mayhere be instilled to supersede rationale belief. But the limited temporal-ity and/or extent of such phenomena precludes using the term utopiato describe them, because the creation of newly-socialized beings enpermanence once and (hopefully) for all time is not intended.23 Eventhe mob subsides into sullen resentment once its concentrated passionsare spent. Normality returns after the moment of communal identity.But it remains normality nonetheless.

Can we then still use Mores famous text as an anchor point fordescribing the varied set of phenomena we call utopia or the utopian?We can. Doing so involves seeing Utopia as not merely an imaginaryplace, but a commentary upon the best state of the commonwealthwhich has reference points in both real and imagined better places from

antiquity onwards.24 More famously punned in his title on two words

19 But the proximity of the garden ideal and the small-scale rural utopia presents some interestingproblems; here Henry Thoreaus Walden is germane.20 A particularly important example here; one work which weds some of these themes is Christo-pher Kendrick,Utopia, Carnival, and Commonwealth in Renaissance England (Toronto, 2004).21 A British starting point here is W. Trotter,Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (1926), but theterm is more closely identified with Nietzsche than anyone else.22 For example, William McDougall, The Group Mind: A Sketch of the Principles of CollectivePsychology(Cambridge, 1920). For the later literature more directly related to the themes discussed

here, see C. Fred Alford, Group Psychology and Political Theory (New Haven, 1994).23 The problem whetherRobinson Crusoe can be treated as a utopia is briefly examined in Search-ing for Utopia, ch. 6.24 For a restatement of the seriousness of Mores intent to persuade readers of the viability of theUtopian commonwealth, see Quentin Skinner, Thomas Mores Utopia and the Virtue of TrueNobility, in Visions of Politics, ii: Renaissance Virtues (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 21344 [hereafterSkinner, Thomas Mores Utopia and the Virtue of True Nobility].

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meaning good place and no place, and legions of commentators eversince have pondered whether satire was the Lord Chancellors dominantintention, or whether he believed that something like the societydescribed in his text could or should be created or had ever existed. By

and large it is no place which has predominated in common-languagedefinitions of utopia. But we should not lose sight of its other half,good place, either. Where then might this have lain?

We know that More was reasonably well acquainted with accounts ofthe New World, which had been flowing in for some thirty years; inUtopia, Hythloday points to them, albeit ambiguously.25 Some of theseinsisted that the aboriginal peoples of the Americas lived in a state ofpristine purity akin to that condition of innocence in which the Chris-tian God had supposedly placed his own creation. Indeed the great

Columbus actually believed that the Garden of Eden itself lay some-where in the New World, and that he himself had nearly entered it.Further, More was acquainted with a Christian monastic tradition inwhich much property was owned, and much social life lived, incommon. More was also keen to restate a humanist ideal of whatQuentin Skinner has termed civic self-government, of an active civiclife based on Ciceronian premises, and to outline a vision of how virtue,and particularly justice, could be practised more widely. This involvedabove all a willingness to labour for the common good, and to sharemost things in common.26 More was also aware of a debate about idealsof friendship which had been explored by Plato, Aristotle, Cicero,Aquinas and others.27 He projected peoples being linked by a naturalfellowship based upon mutual good will.28 All of these realist com-ponents Sparta (if semi-mythical),29 the New World, the monastery played a role in Utopia, and were married to various philosophicaldebates concerning the optimal possibilities of human behaviour. Allhad existed or did exist somewhere. The key question for a realistreading of utopianism as a whole is the plausibility, not of the individualcomponents here, but of theircombination.For this might be impossible

25 See Searching for Utopia, ch. 5. An account which pushes this argument is Lorainne Stobbart,Utopia: Fact or Fiction? The Evidence from the Americas (Stroud, 1992).26 Skinner, Thomas Mores Utopia and the Virtue of True Nobility, pp. 22331.27 An incisive introduction to this interpretation of More is David Wootton, Friendship Por-trayed: A New Account of Utopia, History Workshop Journal, xlv (1998), 2847, where a debt toErasmus in particular is noted, and the introduction to his edition ofUtopia (Indianapolis, 1999)[hereafter Thomas More, Utopia, ed. Wootton], esp. p. 8. For the classical background, see, e.g.,A. W. Price,Love and Friendship in Plato and Aristotle (Oxford, 1989). On community of goods, seethe recent account by Peter Garnsey, Thinking about Property: From Antiquity to the Age ofRevolution (Cambridge, 2007).28

Thomas More, Utopia, ed. Wootton, p. 135.29 The existence of the supposed seventh-century bc lawgiver Lycurgus, known to us chieflythrough Plutarchs life, has long been questioned. The exact nature of Spartan equality, and thefabled abolition of gold and silver and introduction of iron currency, may also be questionable.Thanks to Melissa Lane for clarifying this point. What is chiefly important for the argument here,however, is that people believed the account to be founded in fact. On this see Elizabeth Rawson,The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (Oxford, 1960).




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or non-existent, rendering utopia again closer to being nowhere. But wewould want to bear in mind here the basic anthropological observationthat we have lived, in the tribe and village, often under the authority ofthe extended family, far longer under conditions of communal sociabil-

ity, constantly exposed to others, than under the cloak of anonymityprovided increasingly by modern individualism. (Even modern families,indeed, are still usually conducted on the communistical principle. Andthe continuing attraction of armies, where welfare state principlesusually prevail, and similar institutions, needs to be considered heretoo.)

Certainly, however, Utopian sociability is not friendship as such (theAristotelian maxim being that friendship can only rest upon equality).But it is close in many respects: the principles that all things are

common among friends and that friendship thrives only amongst equalsnow hold broadly true for a very large group. Utopian society in thefirst instance is organized around a natural hierarchy based upon age,the eldest ruling each household, wives waiting on husbands, childrenon parents. Yet between adults there is little avarice, greed, or pride, andnatural hierarchy is balanced with equality. When dining, for instance,the older men receive the choicest morsels, and then equal portions aredistributed among the rest, thus heeding the principles of both seniorityand equality. Personal strife is rare, but divorce, for instance, doesoccur. Friends are bound by ties of love, equality and mutual generos-ity. Most utopians are easy-going in general, but strongly bonded bytheir commitment to the commonwealth, their shared beliefs, dress andway of life. Hence they possess greater sociability than what Moreclearly regarded as the norm of his own time. All are not necessarilyfriends as such, all of the time. But they are nonetheless sufficientlylinked by bonds which promote such ideals of fairness, justice andequity to avoid multitudinous quarrels. Their common life is not, thus,necessarily being satirized by More in his comment near the end ofUtopiaabout the apparent absurdity of such arrangements: this can also

be read as a critique of existing luxury, grandeur, pride, greed andfolly.30 A society based on money-getting is juxtaposed to one based onvirtue, and virtue triumphs. Throughout history this is rare. But itsexistence is not unknown, at least temporarily.

We may reasonably surmise, then, that something like the well-ordered society described in his Utopia lay, in Mores own mind, withinthe bounds of possibility. Whether or not he thought that somethinglike it had been discovered in the New World remains a moot point. Sodoes the hope that this type of friendship might be extended to a vast

scale. (Centuries later, the search for a period of primitive communalismwould agitate many socialists, including Marx, who would seek toreproduce its sociability in a state of much higher civilization, in a later

30 Skinner, Thomas Mores Utopia and the Virtue of True Nobility, pp. 2401.

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version of a marriage, so to speak, between More and Bacon.)31 Moredid not perhaps think private property could ever be abolished inUtopian fashion.32 But Utopia thereafter would, more than anythingelse, come to mean a condition of institutionally supported, enhanced

sociability and friendship, resting upon a broadly egalitarian founda-tion, but not necessarily communism.33 This definition unites the threecomponents of the utopian tradition. It does not describe utopia asexisting only imaginarily in texts which project vastly improved societ-ies. It sees utopianism as expressed practically in communalism inparticular, in primitive societies and intentional communities from theancient world to the present, and in the ideas which have underpinnedsuch experiments. Wherever significantly enhanced sociability basedupon greater equality was a demonstrable goal, utopia was, in effect,

sought; wherever it was realized, for some sustained period, utopia wasfound. From this perspective, then, utopia was never quite nowhereand often perceptibly somewhere: this half of Mores pun proposesthat we consider where and when it has been located.

The ideal society after More became less mythological and religiousand increasingly a definitive possibility of human progress, supposedlyattainable on a substantial scale, with a view to creating a regime ofsocial justice and equality. This quest for an ordered equality wouldsubsequently dominate the tradition of writing we associate with theterm utopia, as well as the communal movements linked with it, andthe ideologies which emerged to champion it. Anabaptism was the mostimpressive movement of this type, and was subsequently often heraldedas having commenced modern communism.34 From the sixteenth to thenineteenth centuries these themes moved into ever greater prominence,as utopia became ever less associated with an ideal past a lost Spartaor Atlantis or a present to be discovered across the seas, mountains ordeserts, and ever more something to be forged in the here and now. Atthe end of this period, the American and French revolutions, but par-ticularly the latter, contained marked utopian elements.35 That is, they

31 See Henry Morgan, Ancient Society (1877), and Engelss Origin of the Family, Private Propertyand the State (1884). The debate whether Russia could skip stages, avoiding capitalism entirely byprogressing from the mir to communism, resulted in part from this line of enquiry.32 Skinner, Thomas Mores Utopia and the Virtue of True Nobility, p. 244.33 This generalization is not meant to describe every form of utopia or community, however; achallenging instance might be the mid-nineteenth century Modern Times community conductedalong extreme individualist lines. See Roger Wunderlich, Low Living and High Thinking at ModernTimes, New York(Syracuse, NY, 1992). Anarchist communes in this period and later would alsoenter into this debate. But the proposition that sociability and individuation (the increasing culti-

vation of individuality and the sense of individual uniqueness) are inherently at odds cannot betaken up here.34 For example, Karl Kautsky, Communism in Central Europe at the Time of the Reformation(1897).35 The classic study is Melvin Lasky, Utopia and Revolution (Chicago, 1976). For America, see inparticular Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of Americas Millennial Role (Chicago,1968).




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associated the causes of liberty and equality and of a universality ofrights claims manifestly a utopian strategy36 at times quite closelytogether, and took Mores central target, plutocracy (oligopoly wasMores term), or the oligarchy of wealth, as their own. From the mid-

nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth, it was Marxism whichwould come to epitomize this world-view. Having flirted with the(mostly Fourierist) image of people being hunters, herdsmen and criticalcritics throughout the working day, without ever being forced to do onetask, Marx and Engels famously denied being utopians, describing theirown socialism as scientific compared to the fatuous utopianism of theirsocialist predecessors.37 But if utopia at heart means the egalitarianreordering of society to achieve stronger communal bonds, principallyby collective property ownership, Marx and Engels are the greatest, or

at any rate the most ambitious, as well as temporarily successful, of allthe modern utopians. Amongst other consequences, the description oftheir key predecessors (Owen, Fourier, Saint-Simon) as utopian social-ists is no longer tenable (it never was), the differences between the viewsof this group being as great as their similarities.

We have argued, so far, then, in favour of a definition of utopiabased upon content rather than form, and focussed upon an enhancedidea of sociability or friendship.38 A composite definition, as it will betermed here, envelops all three dimensions of utopianism, andattempts to establish their shared core values. Let us turn now to theconcept of dystopia to see what light this proposition casts uponutopias evil twin.

II

Ironically, given the much smaller literature on dystopia compared toutopia (that is, chiefly, the literary dystopia), we encounter still greaterproblems attempting to reconceptualize this concept. Dystopia isusually supposed to be an inverted, mirrored or negative version ofutopia, the imaginary bad place as opposed to the imaginary goodplace.39 Dystopias are typically defined as literary accounts of places

36 See my Socialism and the Language of Rights, in Revisiting the Origins of Human Rights:Genealogy of a European Idea, ed. Miia Halme-Tuomisaari and Pamela Slotte (2014, forthcoming).A move in this direction is described in Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History(Cambridge, Mass., 2010).37 Friedrich Engels, Socialism Utopian and Scientific (New York, 1972).38 For a summary of related debates see Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (Syracuse, NY, 1990)

[hereafter Levitas, The Concept of Utopia], pp. 17999.39 For discussions of the term and its domains see Chad Walsh, From Utopia to Nightmare (1962);Constantinos A. Doxiadis,Between Dystopia and Utopia (1966); Mark R. Hillegas, The Future asNightmare: H. G. Wells and the Anti-Utopians (Carbondale, 1967); Alexandra Aldridge, TheScientific World-View in Dystopia(Ann Arbor, 1978) [hereafter Aldridge,The Scientific World-Viewin Dystopia];Between Dream and Nature: Essays on Utopia and Dystopia, ed. Dominic Baker-Smithand C. C. Barfoot (Amsterdam, 1987); M. Keith Booker, The Dystopian Impulse in Modern

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worse than the ones we live in.40 Besides being anti-utopias, some aredescribed as critical dystopias or flawed utopias, and various othersubcategories are possible.41 Here, much more than with utopia, fewaccounts of the literary form stray far into political theory, psychology

or religion. Few studies of totalitarianism, the chief modern form ofdystopian reality, affect much interest for its literary diffractions, either.The disciplines of literature, sociology, politics and philosophy oftentalk past each other when they engage at all, and the history of ideasusually fails to bridge the chasms evident between their variousapproaches. This section will propose a composite definition of dysto-pianism in which the dominant motif wedding the disparate segments ofthe phenomenon is governance or behavioural regulation through fear,mirroring the utopian core theme of friendship. In the argument devel-

oped below, utopias function chiefly as models which demonstrate asociety based upon enhanced friendship and trust, while dystopias alien-ate individuals from each other, and destroy society by undermininginstitutions of mutual support. We will see, here, however, that con-structing the dystopian half of a composite definition raises some per-plexing issues about structural parallels between the two halves of theequation.

Although utopia and dystopia are thus, after a fashion, polar psy-chological opposites which describe both fictional, imaginary societiesand real, existing regimes, it is not proposed here to reduce eitherphenomenon to any psychological essence. This was a key problemwith Blochs famous approach, but produces an essentialism as mislead-ing as its literary counterpart. Instead it is useful to indicate the presenceof certain general psychological postulates or assumptions, particularlyrespecting order and sociability, which define each concept in bothliterature and history. This approach has the virtue of removing thelimitations imposed by definitions of both terms which are based uponpurely literary criteria.

Like utopia, literary dystopianism clearly possesses a mythical pre-

history, namely the description of imaginary spaces, or what are some-times called dystopic myths42 (hell, monstrous domains and so on)where fear inhibits our activity. Some of these repressive or fear-inspiring spaces are more real than others in the sense of being rootedin genuinely harmful living phenomena (snakes and other predatorywild animals). In more primitive societies, however, the domain of the

Literature (1994); M. Keith Booker, Dystopian Literature: A Theory and Research Guide (1994);Erika Gottlieb, Dystopian Fiction East and West (Montreal, 2001); Tom Moylan, Scraps of the

Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (Oxford, 2000); Dark Horizons: Science Fictionand the Dystopian Imagination, ed. Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini (2003) [hereafter, DarkHorizons, ed. Baccolini and Moylan].40 Dark Horizons, ed. Baccolini and Moylan, p. 1.41 See Lyman Tower Sargent, The Problem of the Flawed Utopia: A Note on the Costs ofEutopia, in Dark Horizons, ed. Baccolini and Moylan, pp. 22531.42 Aldridge, The Scientific World-View in Dystopia, p. 5.




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magical, and the phenomena inhabiting it, may well be as real to mostas more empirically demonstrable locations.43

In Europe, classical traditions of imaginary places inhabited by evilbeings (extortionate sirens, devouring monsters, predatory sorcerers and

the like) existed beside various older religions, eventually giving way toChristian conceptions of evil spaces (hell, chiefly) and times (the Flood,the Apocalypse). As heaven is the archetype for much of the Christianidealism fuelling the western utopian tradition, so hell functions as animaginary counterpart of malevolence writ large. If the progress ofreligion accompanies the decline of magic, the differentiated evil spacesin the magical world are now replaced by a uniform focus of evil inChristianity. The magnitude of fear (as well as the degree of its efficientorganization) thus seems to expand as Christianity develops. To judge

by Dantes or Boschs portrayal of it, hell is hence a vastly more fright-ening place than, for instance, a copse inhabited by irritated fairies, ora forest haunted by malevolent spirits. It represents endless, inescapablepain, and is ever-growing, as multitudinous evildoers crowd in to suffertheir fate. Here endless tortures await the wicked, the damned, theheretical, the infidel. Yet Satans kingdom also extends into real timeand space, for witches were often believed to commune with or beagents of the Devil, a belief which occasioned mass panic at variouspoints in early modern history, and the murder of several hundredthousand people, mostly women, in acts of extraordinary massmisogyny. In primitive societies the shaman or sorcerer often benefitsfrom beliefs in such forms of evil. Later organized religion assumes mostof the profitable side of this business. A non-believer might contend thatthe point of hell is to frighten people into obedience to a theological,and usually also a secular, order. But such concepts also serve a vitalpsychological purpose. Pending empirical evidence of such a place, andgiven the abundance of evidence of its having been invented,44 we mayat least temporarily treat hell in the manner that Ludwig Feuerbachtreated the Christian god: as a psychological projection designed to

serve as a focal point for human hopes of a better hereafter, or in thecase of hell, the fears of a far worse one.45

Taking the real and the imaginary together, it is astonishing toconsider, indeed, how much of human life has been dominated byfears real and imagined.46 Yet perhaps not: for there is so much to beafraid of.47 Besides the obvious forces of nature, fear of the Other, the

43 The classic study is Lucien Lvy-Bruhl, Primitives and the Supernatural (1936). It is necessaryhere, clearly, to separate religion as a moral practice from, on the one hand, religion as a belief in

god(s) and imaginary places such as heaven or hell, and from, on the other hand, fear of genuinelyevil people.44 See, e.g. Eric Maple, The Domain of Devils (1966).45 Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (New York, 1957).46 The starting point for assessing its cultural development is Joanna Bourke, Fear: A CulturalHistory (2005).47 A helpful start here is Yi-fu Tuan, Landscapes of Fear (Oxford, 1980).

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Enemy, the foreign, the unknown, are ubiquitous and can be all-consuming. Death leads the way here. The prince of darkness cannotbut inspire respect, even in disguise (the dragon as slain by St George,the snake in the Garden of Eden). But so too darkness itself, the

bogeyman, the graveyard, the parent, the sibling, the malformed, thelunatic, the village elder, the despot, and then trolls, malicious fairies,demonic forces.48 Evil words, the curse, haunt us. And as if these arenot enough, we are afraid of ourselves as well: devils lurk inside aswell as out. We are apprehensive of our dark side, the degeneration ofage, our potential insanity, our real animality, the unsated desirespossibly lurking within, the vividness of the nightmare, even theaugury of the dream. We can become obsessively afraid of ourpassions: men may hide or swaddle their women, and have

commonly restricted their public movements, if not actually enslavingthem. So too we sometimes cover our hair, and/or theirs, and wearbland clothing (or hairshirts, like Thomas More) in order to enforcemodesty and dampen lust.49 Adultery and wanton sexual activity haveoften been punished, frequently with death. So too we may hide (orsmash) our wine-casks or hashish and opium pipes for fear of theresults of indulgence. We have not trusted ourselves, historically, veryfar at all. Liberty is, from this viewpoint, a concept surprisingly aliento the human experience.

As we move into the later modern period we might anticipate ourfascination with monstrosity to decay, but in fact the contrary is thecase. As with our passions, part of the monstrous now comes to be seen(Jekyll and Hyde-like) as an emanation of our inner evil potential, nowalso to be mistrusted. The discovery of the un- and subconscious is ofcourse vital here. But older myths are also reincarnated in variousmodern forms, and the monsters within and those without seem to growinto an uncomfortably close relationship. The scientific hubris evident inthe nineteenth-century Frankenstein tale,50 so distant from the benevo-lence of Bensalems natural philosophers, and even the alchemists of

Bacons era, coexists besides an enduring fascination with vampires,werewolves and zombies, to provide a constant trope in the imagining ofdystopic spaces.51 By the twentieth century older myths, fairy tales,52

and legends give way in the modern period to new mythologies of gothic

48 A good introduction here is Eric Maple, The Domain of Devils (1966). For the devil, see, e.g.,Robert Muchembled, A History of the Devil (Cambridge, 2003).49 Sumptuary laws respecting clothing in particular are vital to this theme. For starters see AlanHunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Law (1996).50

But this can be read as an anti-utopia: Mary Shelleys monster is in some respects a response tothe philosophy of her father, William Godwin. See generally Anne Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life,her Fiction, her Monsters (1988).51 A helpful survey of this domain is David Gilmore, Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, andAll Manner of Imaginary Terrors (Philadelphia, 2003).52 For the important sphere of fairy tales, see Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: TheMeaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York, 1977).




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and other horrors, which coexist beside a bewildering variety of aliens,robots and other new life-forms. Old and new forms sometimes emergetogether: the National Socialists portrayed the Jews and feeble-mindedalike as variations on the monstrous, invoking a folk-memory of ancient

fears. And the number of monsters appears, paradoxically, not todiminish but to proliferate. Indeed, in proportion as our beliefs in theplausibility of a real hell decrease, we seem to thrive on reinventing themonstrous, exhibiting perhaps a disappointment with rationalism, anincapacity to live with disenchantment, and an addiction to the adrena-line rush which fright induces. On one level, then, we seem to needandeven to thrive on fear. Just as having an enemy usefully strengthens theimmediacy and purpose of our own existence, we thrill to disasterbecause it reinforces our immediate sense of safety. Yet at another level

we may ask whether it is not immature to consider that we can orderour social existence only by believing in imaginary beings. Is secularsociability really so flimsy or so unattainable?

If we turn from myth to literature, we see that dystopia is a muchyounger concept than utopia, achieving semantic maturity and paradig-matic status only gradually from the late nineteenth century onwards.53

It has some literary prehistory in a partly satirical tradition which datesfrom Aristophanes play about Greek imperialism, Cloudcuckooland,which would be rejuvenated by Swift and others in the early eighteenthcentury. A much more robust, often satirical discourse about theimpending collapse of civilization through moral degeneration and cor-ruption by luxury also flourished by the eighteenth century.54 This wasreinforced by the Malthusian critique of radical Enlightenment opti-mism, which affected all utopian thought from the early nineteenthcentury onwards. Worries over Britains decline, then Americas, andthen that of other nations, were increasingly linked to a sense of degen-eration, decadence and collapse from the late nineteenth centuryonwards. And there was much ambiguity about the optimal outcomeof social, economic, technological and scientific developments in this

period. Eugenics, in particular, was often regarded in the late nineteenthcentury (on both left and right) as a generally positive scientific strategywhich would ultimate aid the species as a whole.55 Only later, particu-larly after the Holocaust, did it come to be seen as overwhelminglynegative, though the promise of benefits from genetic manipulation

53 In 1868 John Stuart Mill used dys-topia to describe projects which are too bad to be practi-cable (Collected Works, xxviii (1988), p. 248), a usage clearly at odds with later conventions.

Earlier instances of the term have been noted, but it emerges into meaningful general usage only inthe early twentieth century.54 This argument is developed in Utopias of the British Enlightenment, ed. G. Claeys (Cambridge1994), and in my Passion and Order in 18th- and 19th-century British Utopianism, in UtopiaMethod Vision: The Use Value of Social Dreaming, ed. Tom Moylan and Raffaela Baccolini(Oxford, 2007), pp. 87112.55 This is explored in the introduction to my Late Victorian Utopias, i (2008).

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inherits some of the optimism of the original positive eugenicsproject.56

Dystopia did not become linked to a series of texts or a discernibletradition, then, until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,

through the works of Wells, Zamyatin, Bogdanov and others. Thereaf-ter it came to supplant the utopian tradition overwhelmingly in popu-larity and impact, racing past the resurgent utopianism of the periodfrom 1880 to 1920, and the success of Bellamy, Morris and others, andleaving it far behind by 1950 as an atmosphere of cultural pessimismand political scepticism about Bolshevik-style regimes began to takehold. These in turn were supplanted by the end of the twentieth centuryby dystopias cast in the most popular form of all, science fiction, andthose based upon ecological and military projections (in the 1960s and

1970s especially atomic war) and, most importantly after the 1980s,space exploration. Population pressure, imperialism, war, and moreparticularly science and technology, then, thus underpin much of themodern dystopian vision. Within literature, however, several subsets ofdystopias also emerge; we can discriminate at the outset, for instance,between dystopias which overtly take utopian thought as their target,and are sometimes called anti-utopias in consequence, and those whichenvision catastrophe as emerging from other sources than the utopianimpulse.

But is dystopia then only a literary description? The term itself isindeed typically used to represent an image or representation, not aphenomenon.57 But if there is to be symmetry in the composite defini-tion of utopia/dystopia, we should also encounter dystopian ideologiesand dystopian communal movements. This, however, is puzzling: it isthe intentional aspects of utopias which here seemingly provide theirdistinctiveness, and the wedding of the three components under onerubric. We create utopias, fortuitously (or not), based upon a need toenvision a more hopeful future; dystopias happen, unfortunately. Surelyno-onesets outto create a dystopia?58 Yet we will see that this is not an

insurmountable objection. For the gap between utopia and dystopia ismuch narrower than a seemingly polar semantic juxtaposition indicates.The rest of this section takes up this problem by exploring three dimen-sions of or variations upon dystopia. As in the case of utopia, my aim

56 In late nineteenth-century terminology, positive eugenics was concerned with improving evo-lutionary chances by improving genetic stock, negative eugenics with eliminating unfit charac-teristics in specific groups.57 This is true of the major interpretations (Levitas, The Concept of Utopia; Kumar, Utopia and

Anti-Utopia), as well as many other works, e.g., Alexandra Aldridge, The Scientific World View inDystopia(Ann Arbor, 1984). But there are exceptions; Darko Suvin, for instance, terms dystopiansocieties organized according to a radically less perfect principle than an authors present time(Dark Horizons, ed. Baccolini and Moylan, p. 189).58 Thanks to Joan Bakewell for asking me exactly this question. One of the few accounts to explorethis perspective is Constantinos A. Doxiodis, Between Dytopia and Utopia (1966), where the focusis upon the creation of bad cities. Even here, however, the issue of intention is contentious.




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here is to establish a core set of values which weds the disparate ele-ments of dystopia, focusing on fear as a principle of rule. Here again, aswith myth, we will find much to be afraid of, for in the last two centurieswe have become remarkably adept at terrorizing each other. Yet here

my principal concern is with how much these efforts have hinged uponthe desire to create an enforced sociability to compensate for what hasbeen lost with the passing of traditional societies, and for what has notbeen recreated in a more desirable form in modernity. Both utopia anddystopia, in this sense, are discourses about community, good, bad andindifferent, and about our relative failure to balance natural and artifi-cial sociability. That is to say, both utopia and dystopia are centrallyconcerned with both our desire and our need to get along, and tobelong, and our apparently near-temperamental incapacity to get the

balance between sociability and humane toleration right. This has pro-duced a propensity to swing wildly in various directions, and we havecertainly failed as often as we have succeeded. As a wart-removal pro-gramme dystopia, we might say, has failed. But alerting us to the risksinherent in the operation is valuable. Some warts can be removed, andsome crooked timber can be straightened without breaking.

As with utopia, we should emphasize at the outset that the questionof degree also qualifies the term dystopia. If utopia means any faintlydramatic effort to improve our lives, as we have seen, the term loses anymeaningful significance. If dystopia means any manifest evil, real orliterary, no matter what its intensity or duration, it, too, lacks concep-tual utility. To account for these variations in time, space and intensity,we have here designated as utopic those moments and/or spaces whichinvolve only temporary or episodic modifications of behaviour andwhich either intentionally or (less commonly) accidentally increasesociability.59 Similarly,dystopicmoments or spaces exemplify or portrayspatially or temporally limited rather than all-pervasive evils, real aswell as imagined. In the pre-modern period, as we have seen, this mighttypically involve haunted, witch- or spirit-ridden places, or (for

instance) a Minotaurs lair, whose inhabitants usually require propitia-tion. Later instances might include the prison,60 the Inquisitorial torturechamber,61 or other spaces calculated to inspire fear in any societysinhabitants, as well as moments of intensified, localized malevolence(pogroms, wars, witch-hunts, the imposition of martial law, mass insan-ity, mob violence and the like). Such examples are not generallyintended to achieve a permanent modification of behaviour, but possessa general regulatory function, propping up particular forms of order.

59 I here draw upon Claeys, The Five Languages of Utopia.60 The key work here is Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Har-mondsworth, 1977).61 Stalins torturers actually studied the techniques of the Inquisition in order to understand itssuccesses.

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regimes aims. Totalitarianism, then, aims at permanent psychologicaltransformation through the process of revolutionary struggle.

Yet a key query that arises here, of course, is whether the fearemployed to engineer this transformation is intended to become a per-

manent aspect of the regimes collective psyche, or merely a temporarytool to be abandoned once the revolutions goals have been achieved.That fear was used on an enormous scale as a means is undoubted. Thescale of sheer murder was unprecedented in the Soviet Union between1917 and 1953. Most of this is usually attributed to Stalin, but it wasLenin who first described Bolshevism as a social system based onblood-letting.67 After murder, the regime employed universal suspicion,paranoia, resentment, and hatred and the omnipresent threat oftorture and violence in order to destroy all friendship deliberately. The

result was alienation, estrangement,68

and what the Bolshevik NicolaiBukharin called everlasting distrust,69 engendering what Orlando Figeshas aptly termed a nation of whisperers.70 In Nineteen Eighty-FourOrwell rightly expressed this in terms of OBriens dictum that in thefuture there would be no friends or family: ownlife, the sanctum ofprivate life, was as such a threat to order. Dystopia, in other words,can in certain circumstances be a deliberate strategy for social improve-ment, not merely the historical residue of a despotic regime resting uponthe principle of universal fear compelling obedience. But this leavesopen the question whether dystopia, once deliberately created, remainsonly as a temporary expedient. Is terror here merely a means, or is it anend as well?

The distinction often expressed (at least in the late twentieth century)in terms of a juxtaposition of authoritarian to totalitarian regimeshere remains a vital one for utopian/dystopian scholarship. Some wouldalso want to include in this discussion other forms of despotism, notablythe institution of slavery, where substantial numbers of forced labourersare denied civil and political rights, often hereditarily. This was ofcourse prevalent from the ancient world to the early modern period.

Some forms of modern colonial regime (e.g. the Belgian Congo) arerightly categorized as despotisms based upon both slavery and terror.(But so of course for the majority would an ancient antecedent like thatcradle of democracy, the Athenian city-state, where about 30 per centof the population were slaves.) It might be argued, however, that neitherancient despotisms nor slavery aimed at the eradication of individualityas such, while, by contrast, modern totalitarianism proved far moreall-encompassing in its ambitions. This is a difference not of degree but

67 Quoted in Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (2003), p. 88.68 A rich irony, amongst many here, considering Marxs treatment of these themes in the 1844Paris Manuscripts.69 Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin (2008), p. 249.70 Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalins Russia (2007).

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of kind, not of quantity but of quality.71 Yet Sparta, of course, is animportant prototype for the totalitarian ideal, for here both private andfamily life were indeed subordinated more to the state than was trueelsewhere.

Totalitarian dystopias have thus generally been far more all-encompassing in their aims than traditional despotisms. Both types havefear as their governing principle, but the purpose of fear is often dis-similar. Whatever the rationale of the regime, the good of the many wasnever per se the goal of traditional despotisms. By contrast it is thewell-being of the people, at once sovereign, supreme, virtuous, whichbecomes a vital reference point in modern despotisms. To become anenemy of the people was to face near-certain ruin under Robespierreand Stalin, to become a spiritual outsider akin to the heretic or witch in

early modern Europe. Here the quality of or aspiration towards totalityis enhanced by the fusion of the spiritual and temporal realms. Inquasi-religious terms the parallel is inescapable the people bothembody the good, and define it, thus coming to stand as the ultimatearbiter of value (supplanting religion), with various prophets and sav-iours occupying lesser intermediary roles, often as interpreters of thesacred texts. The people do worship accordingly, first the Goddess ofReason, then their leaders and founding fathers, some of whom, virtu-ally deified, achieve quasi-mythical status.72 The bonds the people areencouraged to cultivate, and may come to share, are dictated at leastinitially by a fierce desire for equality, which often quickly translatesinto (uniformed and militarized) uniformity,73 an intense antipathytowards luxury, and growing demands for individual self-sacrifice. Thecommunity created by these phenomena also possesses consensual ele-ments usually lacking in earlier forms of despotism; hence the descrip-tion of totalitarian democracy sometimes applied here. Slavery existshere, as in traditional despotisms, but for the majority it must bedressed up as something else. For most, the regimes power is legiti-mated by an ideal of popular unity, where the bonds of nation, class,

and party are intended to create a higher, purer and more enduringform of sociability.

Explaining totalitarianism in light of utopianism produces severalvariant propositions. The first of these sees the totalitarian dystopia aslinked to what has here been described as the religious misinterpretationof utopia itself. The core of the allegation here is that much of modernutopianism is quintessentially an extension of the millenarian or chili-astic thrust of Judaeo-Christianity. History possesses a particulartelos,

71

There are, it might be noted, cases in which nations portraying themselves as essentiallyutopian come to be seen as dystopian; this has been argued to have been true for the United Statesin the age of Bellamy (Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia, pp. 978).72 Again Orwell is pertinent: it is not important that Big Brother exists, merely that we believe hedoes.73 For a start on this issue, see Richard Wrigley, The Politics of Appearances: Representations ofDress in Revolutionary France (Oxford, 2002).




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which is some form of salvation, and is supposed to culminate in somevariant on a secular millennium. In this argument, utopianism seekssecular perfectibility, and is thus by definition doomed to dismal, indeedcataclysmic, failure, for you could, to adapt a well-known metaphor,

break all the eggs in this revolution and still not make an omelette.Communism, on this reading, sought to recapture or realize some formof social essence, or primeval sociability, and a renunciation ofbourgeois egotism. For Marx this was early on described in LudwigFeuerbachs concept of species-being, which was repackaged as a pleafor human emancipation or universal emancipation.74 In this viewMarxism becomes the last and greatest millenarian movement. (One ofmany paradoxes here, of course, as we have seen, is that Marx, despitehis pursuit of human emancipation, did not view himself as a utopian

and in this sense he may have been correct: he was on this account lessa utopian, at least at this time, than a perfectibilist.)75 Writ large, on thisview, utopia is the predecessor of totalitarianism, particularly of theMarxist type; such was the essence of the influential von MisesPopperTalmon line of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.76 In its most extreme form,social democracy and the idea of planning as such are claimed to engen-der serfdom, a fate avoidable only by maximizing free market activityand minimizing state interference, a theme prefigured by Herbert Spen-cers warning of the coming slavery of socialism.77 In this view utopia-nism almost inexorably produces totalitarianism. Foes of the Levellershad warned that fantastic eutopian commonwealths (which some wittymen . . . have drawn unto us), introduced among men, would prove farmore loathsome and be more fruitful of bad consequences than any ofthose of the basest alloy yet known.78 In later modernity such conse-quences would bear fruit first, in this view, in 1789. Thereafter theFrench Revolution becomes the harbinger of Bolshevism: Danton,Robespierre and the French Terror of 17934 foreshadow Dzherzhyn-ski, Beria and the Terror of 1937, who are succeeded by Mao and Pol

74 Clearly there was some retreat from this position after the enunciation of the materialistconception of history, but this remains a plausible interpretation of the Marxian project as awhole, and one which moreover dominated for much of the subsequent century or so.75 See the comments of David Leopold, The Young Karl Marx (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 28292.76 Ludwig von Mises, Socialism (1936); J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy(1953); Karl Popper,The Open Society and its Enemies (2 vols., Princeton, 1962). Lately John Grayhas notably taken up this particular cudgel in Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death ofUtopia (2007).77 Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago, 1945); Herbert Spencer, The Man versus theState (London, 1902). Within democracy itself, too, the theme of the consequences of intensiveand increasingly intolerant and militant mass conformity had been explored first in detail by

Tocqueville, and later elaborated by Ortega y Gasset, amongst others. See Alexis de Tocqueville,Democracy in America (2 vols., 183540); Jos Ortega Y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (1930;2nd edn. 1951).78 J. Philolaus, A Serious Aviso to the Good People of this Nation, Concerning that Sort of Men,called Levellers (1649), p. 5, quoted in Keith Thomas, The Utopian Impulse in Seventeenth-Century England, in Between Dream and Nature: Essays on Utopia and Dystopia , ed. DominicBaker-Smith and C. C. Barfoot (Amsterdam, 1987), p. 44.

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Pot.79 Collectively these movements produced the hyperpoliticization ofindividual and social relations; the privileging of conformity overdissent, and of the group over the individual; leader-worship as a quasi-religious observance; systems of surveillance which superseded any such

efforts previously; the debacle of labour and extermination camps, andthe Spartan militarization of society generally. These are the results of aquasi-millenarian perfectionism, which becomes disastrously dystopianwhen it seeks alterations in human nature beyond any we might rea-sonably expect.

It is not necessary to accept all of this argument to concede part of it.The parallels between Marxism-Leninism and religion have been oftennoted. We might overlook Stalins formative seminary training or PolPots early endurance of a monastic regimen, for the still more impor-

tant Lenin and Mao were never subjected to such discipline. But wecannot disregard the parallels between certain types of revolutionismand that form of utopianism, misdescribed in terms of perfectibility,which demands a quasi-millenarian spiritual rebirth, or return to origi-nal purity, a state of grace or absence of sin (but indebted to historicalnecessity rather than God), often during the revolutionary process. Herehuman nature is remade, ostensibly permanently for the better. A racial,ethnic, national, class or ideological purity is supposedly attained duringthis process which demarcates the new human nature, Soviet Man, theReal Khmer, or whatever, from the old. But as we know too well, thisall-too-temporary surge in virtue is always succeeded by a lapse back-wards, by moral failings which become inevitable in so far as the idealaimed at is impossible to attain in the first place. In this variation of theNoble Savage ideal, the romanticized proletariat and peasantry proverather more savage than noble. Yet this may, too, only be an extraor-dinarily powerful and aberrant form of group psychology, sharingcertain features with religious experience, but rather more with a col-lective group mentality. This line of argument has nineteenth-centuryroots, notably in the idea of crowd psychology of Thomas Carlyle,80

Charles Mackay81 and Gustave Le Bon.82 Even the aspiration to massegalitarian enthusiasm, the desperate desire to belong to the wholecathartically and without emotional reservation, does not require a

79 For the nineteenth century this argument is developed at greater length in Claeys and ChristineLattek, Radicalism, Republicanism, and Revolutionism: From the Principles of 89 to ModernTerrorism, inThe Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought, ed. Gareth StedmanJones and Gregory Claeys (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 20054.80 Carlyles famous theory of the hero being the obverse of his discovery of the crowd, as withNietzsche. See, e.g., Eric Bentley, The Cult of the Superman: A Study of the Idea of Heroism in

Carlyle and Nietzsche (Boston, 1957).81 Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions (3 vols., 1841).82 Notably The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind(1896), The Psychology of Socialism (1899),and The Psychology of Revolution (1913). The growth of this literature is treated in Jaap vanGinneken,Crowds, Psychology, and Politics 18711899 (Cambridge, 1992). Respecting fascism, themass psychology hypothesis was explored in particular by Wilhelm Reich in The Mass Psychologyof Fascism (New York, 1970).




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religious explanation as such. For we are a sociable species, and eventhe most aberrant forms of our sociability express some facet of ournature.

The crucial question that remains is how far all utopian efforts are

tarred by association with totalitarianism, either by intent and design,or by the necessity of historical development. The identification oftotalitarianism with utopianism leaves open to some degree the questionwhether the quest for utopia necessarilyaimsat a dystopian outcome, orwhether it results from historical necessity. There are reasonable argu-ments on both sides here. Terror, certainly, becomes part of the perma-nent maintenance of a privileged elite, and as such endemic to theregime. Orwell, again, portrayed this brilliantly in Nineteen Eighty-Four.83 But many factors contribute to its centrality. Enemies of the

people who fall short of expectation, political heretics, class enemies(the bourgeoisie, intellectuals, rich peasants), merit harsher punishmentsthan mere criminals. Failures are explained in terms of enemies, sincethe system cannot be wrong, so imprisonment and execution by quotafollow logically. Judgements are often rashly and hastily made, andmistakes multiply. The rush to modernize compounds the possibility oferror, as does the constant promotion of uneducated but politicallyreliable persons red as opposed to expert. The concentration ofpolitical and economic power makes opposition unlikely. Paranoia,hatred, terror and criminality easily combine. A bald distinctionbetween good and bad, worthy and unworthy types soon comes topervade revolutionary discourse. Murder becomes clinical and dispas-sionate; the body politic is purged of impurities. The elimination of theunworthy itself becomes a means of upholding and promoting theworthy. Unfortunately, as in the case of natural selection (Lenin had astatue of Darwin and a monkey on his desk when in power), the less fitultimately turn out to be a shockingly large proportion of any society,by the logic of the theory itself rather than any natural human failings.And so the blood-letting goes on and on and on: as many as 100 million

may have died under twentieth-century communist rule.84This is one of the most disturbingly violent moments of the whole of

human history. It is also one which, given these accusations, students of(even more those enamoured of) utopia are specially charged toexamine. There are several lines of rebuttal possible here, however. Thefirst is that many forms of modern utopianism did not become totali-tarian, including most forms of communitarianism. From Owenism andFourierism to the present day virtually all intentional communities haveattempted a voluntary, cooperative, non-coercive withdrawal from the

wider society to practise their own beliefs. Most have been harmless

83 Here, of course, the inner party enjoys utopian plenty at the expense of the rest of thepopulation.84 About 70 million under Mao; about 25 million under Stalin. These figures include famine as wellas murder.

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experiments. At best they have been salutary reminders to the rest ofsociety of our potential for social innovation. Sectarianism assumesmany forms. But clearly we would want to separate out, say, the Amishor Kibbutz experience, from the more destructive and demeaning cults,

some of which, like Jonestown, ended so disastrously.85 Yet even Jon-estown began well, as the reflections of its participantsaspirations. Anddystopia does not commence simply as a result of the obsessive devotionto a charismatic leader. More importantly, many forms of socialism andsocial democracy, even under conservative governments, have playedand still play a large role in European democracies. Here the balance ofpublic and private, individual and communal, has often been strikinglymore successful at the state level, where we can attempt the quantitativemeasurement of satisfaction, than in more individualist societies.86

Moreover, even the Marxist utopia is not of course perceived by itssupporters as dystopian in intent, and many have justified its sacrificesby the ends aimed at in terms of a more just, fair and equal society.Some Marxists have thus regarded the Soviet Union in particular asonly a perverted Marxist state. On this view totalitarianism presents amisreading of Marxism, which has discernible democratic elements (e.g.the Paris Communes organizations).87 Dictatorship of the party overthe working class, and of an individual over the party, are here seen asdistinctly un- or anti-Marxian practices. Stalin, here, is usually assignedthe principal blame for derailing Marxism from its goal of fulfillingMarxs early humanist aims. Other types of socialists, too, regardMarxism only as a perverted form of socialism. The utopian impulse,then, has produced a wide variety of social models, and the differencesbetween the more extreme and the more moderate are considerable. Theproposal that dystopia is inherent within the utopian concept as suchprovides what we might term the identity definition of dystopia.88 Herethe snake (the Devil) is not accidentally present in Paradise: he is centralto the story. A variant on this theme is that the leading attributes ofboth utopia and dystopia are so similar that just as one persons

freedom fighter is anothers terrorist, one persons utopia is anothersdystopia, and necessarily eventuates in some form of enslavement. Agood modern literary example is B. F. Skinners Walden Two (1948),which is a utopia to some readers and a dystopia to others.89 Yet this

85 A summary of cult experiences is given in Shirley Harrison, Cults: The Battle for God(1990).86 See Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies AlmostAlways Do Better (2009).87

See Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (New York, 1940).88 In a forthcoming work Margaret Atwood proposes the term ustopia to entail combiningutopia and dystopia because each contains a latent version of the other (In Other Worlds: SF andthe Human Imagination, Virago, 2011), as described in The Guardian, 15 Oct. 2011, Review, pp.24.89 This might, however, also be said of classic texts like Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave NewWorld, whose ruling groups enjoy a utopian existence.




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identification is not ultimately a conclusive one. The most extremeforms of utopianism may well tend to produce dystopia. But manyvarieties of utopia do not.

The first two political forms of dystopia, then, are despotism and

totalitarianism. The two main variant interpretations of totalitarianismproduce, in relation to utopianism, an identity hypothesis, and a per-version hypothesis. Adopting the latter interpretation (but not theformer) dystopia is not inevitably connected with utopia. This permitscontemporary defences of the utopian principle (from, for instance, asocial-democratic rather than a communist standpoint).90 These can bemounted from several directions, including the response that the societyportrayed by More was relatively free and vastly more democratic thanmost in contemporary Europe, and lacked most of those elements we

associate with modern totalitarianism. (But some literary utopias,utopian ideologies and communes do possess such elements.) We mightconsider, too, the positing of a sustainable economy without furtherpopulation growth but with considerably greater social equality as theoptimal outcome of our present developmental trajectory. In this sensethe closest polar opposite of utopia both conceptually and historically isplutocracy, or exploitative rule by the rich, which was indeed Moreschief target.

If we now move beyond more politically centred definitions, a thirdapproach to or variation on dystopia uncouples the concept from theMorean tradition, and yokes it instead to negative visions of thedestiny of humanity generally, and secular variations on Doomsday,the Apocalypse and the end of the world.91 These outcomes mayemanate from various forms of social and political oppression; fromhumanitys domination by machines, monsters or aliens; from theimposition of norms derived from specific scientific and technologicaldevelopments, such as eugenics or robotics; or from environmentalcatastrophe. These themes extend the traditional starting point ofdystopia conceived in the turn from utopia at the end of the

nineteenth century, and epitomized by works like H. G. Wellss TheIsland of Dr Moreau and The War of the Worlds.92 Now science fictionfinally overwhelms the utopian genre, and henceforth, most dystopiasare scientific and technological in orientation.

Here we have a panoply of nightmarish scenarios to heighten theanxiety of pessimists and doom-mongers everywhere. From the originalbiblical Flood to the spectre of global drowning, planetary vaporizationthrough solar storms or colliding meteorites, pandemics, volcanic erup-tions, post-nuclear warfare winter, divine retribution and human folly

and stupidity on the most epic scale; there is something here to stoke

90 I stress this in particular given the discussion of totalitarianism here.91 A good start here is W. Warren Wagar, Terminal Visions: The Literature of Last Things(Bloomington, 1982).92 Though Wells of course went on to write many utopian novels thereafter.

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even the most whimsical form of paranoia.93 These scenarios are gener-ally plausible future speculative projections of actual existing trends andpossibilities, not spaces imagined to exist in real time. Some have arealistic component lacking in most of the earlier versions of the mon-

strous: they are increasingly sophisticated in their approach to scienceand technology. Some, like Stevensons Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, suggestthat the monstrous lies within the human psyche, rather than in anyexternal product. Collectively they represent an inversion and often atleast tacit rejection of the dominant ideal of progress which has weddedtogether so many components of modern intellectual history during thepast five centuries. The best-known early literary instance of this type isof course Aldous Huxleys Brave New World (1932), a complex satireat least as interested in capitalist behavioural manipulation as the evils

of eugenic extremism. Here, arguably, behaviourism, particularly asadapted to advertising technique, capitalisms weapon of mass distrac-tion, supplants the role earlier provided by myth, and then religiousinstitutions, in earlier ages. We remain puppets, though both the endsand means have been modernized. In occasional moments of fantasy the superhero endowed with miraculous powers we break free, andgood for a moment overpowers evil. But, as with Feuerbachs God, themore powers we project the more evident is our real collective weakness.

Despite some novelties, what links these three variations on dystopiais their description of societies where human volition has been super-seded or eroded by an authoritative imposition of control from outside;from the leader, party, the advertising agency, the alien race and so on.In this sense dystopia is antithetical to the idea of popular control, ordemocracy, in particular. The mass have lost control over even the mostrudimentary aspects of their own destinies; they are putty in the handsof fate, their fellows, or of the Leader. It is difficult to resist seeingtheocratic authoritarianism (either real or imaginary) as the chief para-digm of such a context; if utopia embodies ordered freedom, dystopiaembodies unfreedom, and exposure to the constantly capricious rule of

a supremely powerful force, which may be human, natural, superhumanor utterly artificial. From this perspective dystopia is quintessentially apost-political or anti-political (perhaps ante- or pre-political, naturalis-tic) state. Modern politics, we suppose, is intended to give us delibera-tive and executive authority, or some semblance of collective controlover our conditions of life. The ideology of modernity trumpetsautonomy, independence, an endless litany of variations on freedom,self-empowerment, personal value and self-fulfilment. What is deliveredfalls far short of all this. The mirages, the smoke and mirrors, the hype

and glitter, cannot disguise the wizard lurking behind the screen, pullinglevers. Dystopia represents a loss of control, often finally and

93 A good starting point here is provided by the essays in Imagining Apocalypse: Studies in CulturalCrisis, ed. David Seed (Basingstoke, 2000).




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absolutely. We are not lost in the woods, prey to evil spirits. We go tohell, on a one-way ticket.

III

This article has set out the grounds for offering new definitions of theterms utopia and dystopia. It has contended that once we acknowl-edge that neither term indicates a purely literary tradition, we must seekkey features linking literature, ideology and historical communities. Wehave distinguished between four common conceptions of utopia, andoffered a schematic outline of three variations on the theme of dystopia.It has been argued both that the millenarian-totalitarian identity defi-

nition of dystopia permits a closer association between the two termsthan any semantic juxtaposition would indicate, but also that the per-version variation on this argument preserves some utility for theutopian concept, useable, perhaps, even by those who are optimists ofthe will but pessimists of the intellect. We have provided what has beentermed a composite definition of both terms, in an effort to findcommon concepts in the three major aspects of each.

We see here, then, that dystopia too can assume the same three formsas utopia: ideologies exist which intend to instil fear in large numbers;communities created largely as a result of such ideologies successfully doso, and fictional descriptions of both thrive accordingly. Utopia anddystopia are not polar opposites, because their proximity is much closerthan their semantic juxtaposition indicates. Yet there are also importantdifferences between the expressions of each phenomenon. The literaryutopia, in particular, is sometimes a satire upon utopian speculation(Swift), but sometimes an expression thereof. By contrast, dystopianfiction is nearly always a satire or attack upon dystopian ideologies andmovements (Orwell, Huxley, Zamyatin), when it deals with the socialand political causes of human malaise.

It is often supposed that the golden age of utopian speculationstretched from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, to be sup-planted by increasingly pessimistic prognoses on the human condition,with the future as nightmare scenario emerging realistically withtwentieth-century totalitarianism, and prospectively with ecological col-lapse. This implies some type of turn towards a more pessimisticportrayal of the human condition, commencing in the late nineteenthcentury. We have seen, however, that such warnings and premonitionsin fact antedate the concept of dystopia, and are in fact as old, if we

consider the mythological prehistory of both concepts, as utopia itself.Though it is not as yet a twenty-first-century theme (at least in the mostdeveloped countries), humankind have often lamented, and sometimesseriously nostalgically pined for, their lost golden age of innocence,or some original state of nature implying primitive virtue and rela-tive social equality and cohesion. It does not require a crystal ball to

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