Being in Utopia

Ruth Levitas
he term "utopia," coined by Thomas More in 1516, is a pun on europia/ out-
apia-the good place that is also no place. The lay meaning of "utopia" has
come to be a perfect but impossible society, and the term "utopian" to refer to
an unrealistic dream or dreamer. In this discourse, one of the most frequent objections
to utopia is chat it demands perfection of its inhabitants, and that this is inconsistent
with the necessarily flawed nature of real human beings. Utopia may also then be seen
as dangerous, for attempts to impose it will mean forcing fallible humans into the
procrustean bed of an externally imposed system, resulting in totalitarian repression
and violence.
A recent example of this is British literary critic John Carey's introduction to The
Faber Book of Utopias, published at the turn of the millennium:
The aim of all utopias, to a greater or lesser extent, is to eliminate real
people. Even if it is not a conscious aim, it is an inevitable result of
their good intentions. In a utopia real people cannot exist, for the very
obvious reason that real people are what constitute the world that we
know, and it is that world that every utopia is designed to replace.
Though this fact is obvious, it is one that many writers are reluctant to
acknowledge. For if real people cannot live in uropias, then the uropian
effort to design an ideal commonwealth in which human beings can
lead happier lives is evidently imperilled. I
1
John Carey, ed., The Faber Book of Utopias (London: Faber and Faber, 1999) xii.
Ruth Levitas is Professor of Sociology at the University of Bristol. She is the author of
The Concept of Utopia (1990) and The Inclusive Society? Social Exclusion and New Labour
(1998; second edition, 2005); and the editor of The Ideology of the New Right (1986),
Interpreting Official Statistics (with Will Guy, 1996), and Poverty and Social Exclusion in
Britain: The Millennium Survey (with Christina Pantazis and Dave Gordon, 2006). She
is a founding member and previous Chair of Utopian Studies Society-Europe and Chair
of the William Morris Society.
19
I' H I H L [) C Ll I < H ; R H I I \\ I S P R I '\J l. 2 1 l 0 :\
Carey then cites Tommaso Campanella's City of the Sun in which selfishness is unknown,
Louis-Sebastien Mercier's The Yt>tzr 2440 in which citizens voluntarily pay more taxes
than they need to, and Edward Bellamy's Looking Backwtlrd in which the shame attached
to deceit is so great that criminal s would rather accept punishment than lie to save
themselves. Carey reflects: "it is clear char if these are human beings, then the people
we have been li ving among all our lives belong to some ocher species." He goes on to
cite Soviet Communism as a vision which "firs precisely (and, as events have proved,
disastrously) into a utopian mould," referring to Lenin's claim that the "higher" phase
of Communism will involve transformed human subjects- leading, in Carey's view, to
cruel and unnecessary punishments and murder.2
Carey's argument can be countered in its details: if those we live among display self-
ishness, there is also a great deal of selfless and cooperative behavior observable in most
societies; in rhe more affluent countries in the world, there is considerable charitable
giving over and above enforced taxation, as well as the donation of time in volunteering;
and indeed, there are people for whom, and circumstances in which, lying is fel t to be
worse than punishment, as dramatized in the fi lm about German resistance to Nazism,
Sophie Scholl: The Final Days. 111e general point is more
But it is characteristic of/Jurnan
nature to require completion by
important than the specifi c examples and is generally
countered by the observation that what we understand
as "human nature" is what seems to be normal among
the human beings we encounter, but that, in fact, that
nature is historically and socially determined and vari-
20
tmd through cuLture.
able. '111e skills, habits, tastes, beliefs, and social prac-
tices of human beings in the bronze age differed markedly from our own, as did the
customary ways of being of pre-conquest indigenous peoples in the Americas, Australia,
and Africa. To say this is nor to claim that there is no such thing as human nature, nor
that it is infinitely malleable. As Marvin Harris says, "a culture-bearing species whose
physiology was based on silicon instead of carbon and that had three sexes instead of
two, weighed a thousand pounds per specimen, and preferred to eat sand rather than
meat [or vegetables] would acquire certain habits unlikely to be encountered in any
Homo sapiens society."3 But it is characteristic of human nature to require compl etion
by and through culture.
To leave the argument there, however, is to miss a central element in the utopian
project. Carey also argues that the "imaginative excitement" of utopias "comes from
the recognition that everything in our heads, and much outside, are human constructs
and can be changed."4 But it is more than that. Utopias take their force nor just from
the assertion that people in other times and places might be different, and rhus happy
in a very different society, bur from their demand that we imagine ourselves otherwise,
2 Carey xiii- xiY.
'
3
Marvin Harris, "Sociobiology and Biological Reductionism," SociobioLogy Ex:amined, ed. Ashley Montagu
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980) 319.
4 Carey xi.
'
BEING IN UTOPIA I LEVITAS
free from the "wounds and scars ... [from] living here, down here, below."5 H. G. Wells,
in A Modern Utopia, meets his double on the planet twinned with earth, in a chapter
called "My Utopian Self' He says,
My Utopian self is, of course, my better self. ... He is a little taller than
I, younger looking and sounder looking; he has missed an illness or so,
and there is no scar over his eye. His training has been subtly finer than
mine; he has made himself a better face than mine. 6
The conversation is not "recorded"-Wells evidently found writing this too difficult-
but it is described as telling the story of hurt, loss, damage, failure, and humiliation
that has made the narrator less than he might have been. It exposes the difficulty of the
damaged self entering into utopia: "Here is a world and a glorious world, and it is for
me tO take hold of it, to have to do with it, here and now, and behold! I can only think
that I am burnt and scarred."7 The chapter ends pessimistically: "We agreed to purge
this State and all the people in it of traditions, associations, bias, laws and artificial
entanglements, and begin anew; but we have no power to liberate ourselves. Our past,
even its accidents, its accidents above all, and ourselves, are one."8 In William Morris's
News from Nowhere, written some fifteen years earlier, the visitOr William Guest is simi-
larly encumbered by having to take his old self with him; he is ominously told: "You
will find it a happy world tO live in; you will be happy there-for a while."9 In Marge
Piercy's Woman on the Edge ofTime, Connie embraces what the change would mean for
her daughter's self, even at the cost of losing her:
Suddenly she assented with all her soul to Angelina in Mattapoisett, to
Angelina hidden forever one hundred fifty years inro the future, even
if she should never see her again .... She will be strange, but she will be
glad and strong and she will not be afraid. She will have enough. She
will have pride. She will love her own brown skin and be loved for her
strength and her work. I 0
Imagining ourselves otherwise is a central element of the utopian project. But to tease
out what that really means, one needs to reflect on the meaning of utopia, and the nature
and function of utopian speculation. A great deal of writing about utopia ignores the
problem of definition and the now quite substantial literature on this question.
11
The
examples above- both Carey's and my own-are from utopian fiction. Some commenta-
tors, such as Krishan Kumar, regard utopia as primarily a literary genre following from
More's 1516 text, making a distinction between utopias as entities and utopianism as a
5 Abbey Lincoln, "Down Here Below," Abbey Sings Abbey, Verve, 2007.
6 H. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (London: Penguin, 2005) 167.
7 Wells 172.
8 Wells 173.
9 William Morris, News from Nowhere (London: Longmans Green, 1891) 152.
10 Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge ofTime (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1976) 141.
11 This is true of Carey himself in The Faber Book of Utopias. See also John Gray, BLack Mass: ApocaLyptic
ReLigion and the Death of Utopia (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2007); and Russell Jacoby,
Picture imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age (New York: Columbia University Press,
2005).
21
T ilE l! EDGEHOC RF.VIF\V i SPR I NG 2008
broader category of political thought.l2 TI1is is to define utopia in terms of form and con-
fine it tO a primarily Western tradition- and exclude those descriptions of the good life
and the good society that permeate all cultures, mythologies, and religious traditions.
Alternatively, utopia may be defined in terms of content, such as equality, or har-
mony, but this is problematic since, as is so often remarked, one person's utopia is
another's hell. Within the formal literary genre there are white supremacist utopias such
as The Turner Diaries, very different socialist utopias such
But ifnot universal, this
humtln yearning and longing
as Looking Backward and News from Nowhere, and femi-
nist utopias such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland.
Utopia may also be defined in terms of location, in the
future rather than the past. Some writers have also sought
to define utopia in terms of function. For Karl Mannheim,
a utopia is defined by its transformative function: "only
those orientations transcending reality will be referred to
by us as utopian which, when they pass over into con-
f m ~ and reaching to, a better
life is certainly common and
22
immensely V?lriable .. .
duct, tend tO shatter, either partially or wholly, the order
of things prevailing at the time."
1
3 This position is directly opposed ro that of Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels, whose objections to the political movements of Owenism,
Fourierism, and Saint-Simonianism were precisely that they inhibited political change
by distracting the working classes from the real necessity of class struggle.
It is plain, however, that utopias and utopianism may differ in form, content, loca-
tion, and function, so that while all these are important aspects of utopianism, they will
not serve for the purpose of definition. Indeed, it is probably better not to attempt ro
classify cultural expressions as utopias/n or not utopias/n at all, but to recognize that
there are utopian elements to many cultural forms . That leaves the question of what
that element is. And, broadly speaking, it is the expression of longing for the restoration
of lack, for that which is missing, the expression of the desire for a better way of being
and a better way of living, which is by no means confined to literary descriptions of
ideal societies or political programs. Whether the source of this lies in human nature
itself and an innate propensity to venture beyond, as is argued by Ernst Bloch in his
magisterial The Principle of Hope, is debatable. But if not universal, this human yearn-
ing and longing for, and reaching tO, a better life is certainly common and immensely
variable in both form and content, both where literally described and where existen-
tially implied. l4 ~ h e Schubert song "An die Musik" is but one example of the latter
mode, with its praise of music for its capacity to transport the self into a better world:
that art that "hast mich in eine bess're Welt entruckt."
Verbal descriptions of better worlds are more easily misread in terms of their inten-
tions than Schubert's song. The mistake with the latter might be to understand it only
12
See Krishan Kumar, Utopianism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991) .
l3 Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul , 1979) 176.
14 For a fi.dl exposition of this argument, see Ruth Leviras, The Concept of Utopia (London: Philip All an,
1990).
BE I NG I N UTO PI A I LEV TT;\S
Ruth Levit as.
as metaphor. The error with literary utopias is ro take them too literally and to interpret
them as goals. There may indeed be instances where authors of utopian fictions believe
the society they are describing to be perfect, and/or intend it as a political program.
However) most authors from at least the late nineteenth century do not suffer from this
level of hubris. Reflexivity and the understanding of historical contingency are a product
not of postmodernity but of modernity itself. Thus Marx's reluctance ro delineate the
institutional forms of communist society-to "writing recipes ... for the cook-shops of
the fucure"
1
5-stemmed from the recognition of this contingency both in terms of social
formations and human capacities, needs, and desires. Morris, who in later life was an
active figure in explicitly lv1arxist political organizations, felt the need to say rather more
than simply "food is good at the hope workers cafe" and did set our a uropian vision in
News from Nowhere, published originally in serial form in Commonweal in 1890.
News ftom Nowhere was written as a counterpoint to Looking Backward because it
was "essential that the ideal of the new society should be kept before the eyes of the
l5 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed.
Frederick Engels (New York: Random House, 1936) 21.
23
Till- HEDCEII O(; Rl:.VI l: \'i/ i 'i l'RI NC 200:-l
24
mass of the working-classes, lest the continuity of the demands of the people should be
broken, or lest they should be misdirected."l6 Yet Morris also argued that "it is impos-
sible to build a scheme h)r the society of the future, for no man can really think himself
out of his own days."l7 He thought utopias dangerous precisely because they could
only be an expression of the temperament of authors and their times, but risked being
interpreted as goals. And just as News from Nowhere's subtitle is "an epoch of rest," sug-
gesting (as the text does) other epochs to follow, Wells opens A Jll!odern Utopia with the
claim that such a work must eschew static perfection and embed change:
The Utopia of a modern dreamer must needs difFer in one fundamental
aspect from the Nowheres and Utopias men planned before Darwin
quickened the thought of the world. Those were ali perfect and static
States, a balance of happiness won for ever against the forces of unrest
and disorder that inhere in things. One beheld a healthy and simple
generation enjoying the fruits of the earth in an atmosphere of virtue
and happiness, to be foliowed by other virtuous, happy and entirely
similar generations until the Gods grew weary. Change and develop-
ment were dammed back by invincible dams for ever. But the Modern
Utopia must be not static but kinetic, must shape not as a permanent
state bur as a hopeful stage leading ro a long ascent of stages. 18
By the late twentieth century, this consciousness of contingency and change had given
rise to utopian writing that typically embedded pluralism, reflexivity, and internal con-
testation-described by Tom Moylan in Demand the Impossible as "critical utopianism,"
and exemplified by such writers as Marge Piercy and Ursula Le Guin.I9
Utopia is perhaps better undersrood as a method than as a goal. At its core it has the
desire for being otherwise, both individually and subjectively and (sometimes) socially
and objectively. But its expressions are a method of exploring and bringing to debate
the potential contents and contexts of human flourishing. Wells, indeed, argued not
only that utopia was a method, but that it is the essential method of sociology: "the cre-
ation of utopias-and their exhaustive criticism- is the proper and distinctive method
of sociology."
2
0 Rather than refer to a "utopian method," which immediately mobilizes
large amounts of the cultural baggage and misunderstanding surrounding the term '\no-
pia," I now refer to this as the IROS method, IROS being the Imaginary Reconstitution
of Society. This is not the invention of a method, but the naming of what is entailed in
utopian speculation, utopian scholarship, and transformative politics.
IROS has three aspects. The first two of these are an analytical, archaeological mode
and a constructive, architectuml one; the third is, for want of a better term, ontologi-
1
6 \Villiam Morris and . Belforr Bax, Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome (London: Swann Sonnenschein.
1893) 278.
17 Morris and Bax 17.
18 Wells J J.
19 See Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible (London: Merhuen, 1986).
20 H. G. Wells , "'The So-Called Science of Sociology," An Englishman Looks at the Wotfd (London: Cassell,
1914)204.
BE I ;:-..!C 1;:-..1 UTOPI A I I.F.V I TAS
cal, or concerned with the nature of being. The architectural mode is precisely what
characterizes the literary form of utopia and gives it its sociological character in Wells's
work: it involves the institutional design and delineation of the good society-and, in
the case of intentional communities, its partial concrete instantiation. The archaeologi-
cal mode complements this, for it involves the interpellation of absent or implicit ele-
ments in political, literary, or artistic utopian ''accounts." Its similarity with archaeology
[Utopia's] expressions are
a method of exploring and
bringing to debate the
lies in the excavation of fragments and shards and their
recombination into a coherent whole. The point of such
archaeology is to lay the underpinning model of the good
society open to scrutiny and to public critique. And the
ontological mode is concerned precisely with the selves
that inhabit utopia, or that utopia needs to allow-the
inhabitants of the "brave new world/That has such people
potential contents and contexts
in't."
2 1
These modes or facets of the utopian method are of human flourishing.
analyrjcally separable from one another but are also inter-
twined: they do not, for example, break down into literature and communitarianism as
architecture, political discourse analysis as archaeology and psychology, and philosophy
and theology as ontology. Rather, the distinctive characteristic of the imaginary recon-
stitution of society is its holism-just as for Wells, this was the distinctive characteristic
of sociology. Wherever we start in the process of imagining ourselves and our world
otherwise, all three modes must eventually come into play.22
Archaeology and architecture are most evidently concerned with the concrete insti-
tutional character of an alternative society. And here the stricture that utopias should
not be taken literally needs to be qualified. For if the purpose of a utopian method is
to bring to debate the potential structure of an alternative society, in a public version
of Wells's exhaustive criticism, then literal criticism is indeed appropriate. The consid-
eration of alternative modes of social organization has never been more necessary. The
global problems that we face include not just poverty, inequity, and violence, but the
potential destruction of the basis of all our livelihoods, the capacity of the planet to
sustain human life at all. The environmental constraints of climate change and resource
depletion mean that how we live will have to change, and it is better that alternatives
be considered and debated rather than emerge in ways that simply protect the interests
of the most powerful.
The objective critique of institutional proposals needs, however, to be tempered
by the understanding that utopian speculation, whatever its form, operates also on
another level-and one that is equally necessary to transformative politics. Taken liter-
21 William Shakespeare, The Tempest, 5. 1.
22 In the fim published accounc of the IROS method writ ten in 2002, I identified only the first cwo of these
modes: see "The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society: Society a.<:; Method" in Utopia Method Vision: The
Use Value ofSocial Dr-eaming, ed. Tom Moylan and Rafaella Baccolini (Berne: Peter Lang, 2007) 47- 68.
1he third mode was fi rst added in my Inaugural Lecture at the University of Bristol, "The Imaginary
Reconstitution of Society or Why Sociologists and O thers Should Take Utopia More Seriously," <http:/ I
www. bristol.ac. uk/ sociology/ staff/ ruthlevi tas. htmb.
25
TI-ll-. HIJ)(; I I It)(, Rl \II \Y./ I \PRI I'C 2U OH
ally, even if one does not agree with Roger Scruton that News from Nowhere is a piece
of pie-eyed sentimentality, it would be hard not co endorse Raymond \Villiams's com-
ment that any future socialist society will be more complex rather than simpler than
our own. For Miguel Abensour, glossed by Edward Thompson, the point of utopia is
its disruptive function and the opening up of a space in which we can experience the
possibility of being otherwise-of having different wants, needs, and satisfaction: "And
in such an adventure two things happen: our habitual values ... are thrown into disarray.
And we enter into Utopia's proper and new-found space: the education of desire."
2
3
In this process, we come to desire in a different way- or rather, where the literary text
is concerned, it provides a space in whi ch we are able at least to imagine ourselves
desiring differently. Herbert Marcuse addresses the utopian project in its political and
psychological rather than literary form, in terms of the transformation of needs, wants,
and desires: his new reality principle demands the end of introjected compulsions
to consumption and domination. Such claims are directly concerned with the third
aspect of the utopian mode, the transformation of self and the imagination of ourselves
otherwise.
1his is always a utopian project in the sense of envisioning a better way of being and
a subj ective transformation, although it is not always utopian in the sense of implying
objective social transformation. And where both are present, the connection may be
differently construed. In the kind of ideal society that CoUn Davis describes as a per-
fect moral commonwealth, social harmony flows from individual perfection and mora1
restraint. Conversely, for Robert Owen, character is a product of circumstance: social
. .. the point of utopirl is its
disruptive function and the
harmony and right education produce happy and coop-
opening up of a space in which
erative people. Imagining ourselves otherwise is both
common and complex; pace Carey, real people do it
all the time. Anthony Giddens coined the term "nar-
ratives of self" to refer to the process of reflecting on
who we are, might have been, and might be. He linked
this tO the condit ion of late modernity, in which, "the
self becomes a ' refl exive project,' sustained through a
revisable narrative of self identity"- the beginnings of
tPe can experience the possibility
26
ojbei11g otherwise . ..
which are apparent in Morris and Wells. 24
The stories that we tell ourselves about who we are, how we have come w be .so,
and what our options are for the future are not necessarily liberatory. Indeed, they may
bring to mind Bloch's comment that the wishes of che weak are often only those that
the powerful wish them to be. Thus there is the overwhelming cultural pressure to
monitor and control our bodies through diet and exercise, which involves imagining
the perfectly honed and healthy- and especially not obese-self; health and longevi ty
are an individual responsibility, and physical imperfection, illness, and death itself a
23 In Edward 'lhompson, William Monis: Romantic to Revolutionary (London: Merlin, 1976) 790- l.
24 Anrhony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self rmd Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 199 I) back cover.
BEIN<.; IN UTOPIA I LEVITAS
lofollow
ones dream
illusion and
the dream
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mark of failure. There are end-
less managerial texts that essen-
tially present technologies of
self, prescribing conformity to
models of personal behavior and
response promising financial and
social success, with titles such
as The Seven Habits of Highly
Effective People; The Rules of
Management; The Rules of Work;
and The Rules of Life. These are
modes of imagining that are not,
in Mannheim's terms, utopian,
for they offer us only a more
comfortable fit between our dis-
ciplined selves and the demands
and satisfactions offered by the
world we currently inhabit. The
(( Mind, Body, Spirit'' sections of
bookstores are replete with pre-
scriptions for being otherwise.
co Ruth Levitas. Most of the self-help literature
that offers solace for abounding
human misery does not currently
connect with a project for social
change. You may not be able to change a bad situation, but you can change how you
respond tO it. And in some guises, if you change how you respond to the world, every-
thing your heart desires will come to you.
Religion also offers ways of being otherwise. Arguably theology has paid more atten-
tion to the human condition and its possibilities than has social science. Again, much
institutional religion prescribes ways of being that do not challenge the status quo. But
its appeal lies in the offer of release from existential struggle, whether it be through the
Christian promise of unconditional love and grace or the Buddhist practice of medita-
tion and mindfulness that produces acceptance of the impermanence of everything,
including our own lives. For Marx, religion was not only the opium of the people,
but the heart of a heartless world, the spirit of spiritless conditions. Bloch took this
wholly seriously, understanding religion as the repository of alienated aspects of human
longing and power- aspects that needed to be repossessed. In many ways, the quest
for utopia can be seen as a secularized quest for human and social redemption. It thus
necessarily embraces the question of what human beings might become- not just as
creatures of the societies in which they live, but as their crearors.
On the opening page of The Principle of Hope, Bloch wrote, ((the emotion of hope
goes out of itself, makes people broad instead of confining them .... The work of this
emotion requires people who throw themselves actively inro what is becoming, ro which
27
r I I I II r [) C E H 0 C fU: \ a \V I \I' R I N t; 2 0 0 R
they themselves belong."25 Just such a process is set out in the work of Roberto Unger.
What Unger sees out in the key texts Dem()cracy Realized and The SeljAwakened is a par-
ticular form of the utopian method rooted in social practice, and entailing both insti-
tutional and existential transformation. Democracy Realized, subtitled The Progressive
Alternative, is a summary statement of Unger's hopes for a gradual move from the
global neo-li beral status quo to a world that is more democrati c and more economi-
cally just, through a process he describes as democratic
Utopifl is shtlped by the double
experimentalism. Here Unger's arguments are pitched in
terms of the institutional structures of society and a pro-
cess of change of those economic, social, and poli tical
structures and processes through step-by-step improvisa-
tion and collective learning. Hope and imagination are
central tO chis. Imagination is needed in the short term
(for institutional improvisation) and in the long term,
pressure of what it is possible to
imagine and what it is possible
18
to imagine tlS possible.
to provide a sense of direction and "a larger vision of society and history that can help
inform and inspire its work."26 Unger argues that chis active process of improvisation
creates possibility, both objectively and in the capacities of human beings to change
themselves and their circumstances. Democratic experimentalism is perhaps the "archi-
tectural" mode of IROS-alchough Unger would find this coo rigid a metaphor: "pro-
grammatic thought is sequence, not bJueprinr, music, not architecture," echoing both
Bloch's claim that music is the most quintessentially utopian form and David Harvey's
contrast between spatial and processualutopianism.27
Unger describes his approach as radical pragmatism, sharply distinguished from
the pragmatism of, for example, Richard Rorty, which regards the perfection of the
institutions of American democracy as the goal of the good society. Unger's critique
applies to resistance to institutional change more widely-and to the consequences
of this for identity: "The source of the denial of the alterability of social life is a spe-
cies of institutional fetishism," and "institutional dogmatism ... amounts to a species of
idolatry. It nails our interests, ideals, and collective self-understandings to the cross of
contingent, time-bound institutions."2l:! Part of the role of imagining alternatives is to
resist the forces working in favor of conformity by contradicting the taken-for-granted
character of the real. And if what we understand as human nature is simply what we are
like now, shaped by present circumstances, we are, in Unger's view, always more chan
this- always more than Carey's "real people." "We never completely surrender," writes
Unger.
2
9 His description of living for the future as "a way of living in the present as a
being not wholly determi ned by the present conditions of its existence" is akin to the
25 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986) 3.
26 Robeno Mangabeira Unger, Democracy Realized: The Progressive Alternative (London: Verso, 1998) 15.
27 Roberto Mangabeira Unger, The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2007) 117. See David Harvey, Spttces of Hope (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2000).
28 Unger, The Seij'Awakened, 49, 23.
29 Unger, The Self Awakened, 40-1.
BF.ING li\ UTOPIA I l.EVITAS
Christian claim to be citizens of one kingdom while dwelling in another.3 But Unger,
like Bloch, re-ascribes grace to the human subject, and the Kingdom of God to a pos-
sible human future.
The single idea that resounds on every page of this book is the idea of
the infinity of the human spirit, in the individual as well as in humanity.
It is a view of the wonderful and terrible disproportion of that spirit to
everything that would contain and diminish it, of its awakening to its
own nature through its confrontation with the reality of constraint and
the prospect of death, of its tenor before the indifference and vastness
of nature around it, of its discovery that what it most shares with the
whole of the universe is its ruination by time, of its subsequent recog-
nition that time is the core of reality if anything is, of its enslavement
to orders of society and culture that belittle it, of its need to create a
world, a human world, in which it can be and become itself even if to
do so it must nevertheless rebel against every dogma, every custom, and
every empire, and of its power to realize this seemingly impossible and
paradoxical program by identi fying, in each intellectual and political
situation, the next steps. 31
For Unger, this is necessarily a gradual process. He looks to "the intimation of a
different world, in which we would become (slightly) different people, with (slightly)
revised understandings of our interests and ideals."32 The idea that the imagination of
ourselves as somewhat different is commonplace, something that real people do, and
that can be encouraged through social and political engagement, runs directly counter
to the view that "human nature" makes radical transformation and utopian hope "unre-
alistic." Utopia is shaped by the double pressure of what it is possible co imagine and
what it is possible to imagine as possible. Consequently, Fredric Jameson has suggested
that an imagined world whose inhabitants would be radically other is one in which we
would not be ourselves, and this evokes the terror of annihilation. For utopia not tO
risk rejection as contrary to human nature, Unger's gradual opening of institutional and
human change may be critical.
One reason why it is important to "keep society open to alternative futures and
inspire in politics and culture a contest of visions" is that this in itself allows people
to understand their own potential to change. 33 It enables the emergence of "prophetic
identity," that is, self-understanding in terms of who we might become (both individu-
ally and collectively) rather than who we now are, and in particular where we come
from. Philip Pullman makes a similar point about the dangers of fixi ng a sense of self
in terms of religious "identity," which is only one aspect of our origins and complex,
30 Unger, The Self Awakened, 40.
31 Unger, The Self.Awakened, 26- 7.
32 Unger, Democraq ReaLized, 12.
33 Unger, Democracy ReaLized, 168.
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shifting being in the world. 34 In particular, we should also educate our children to be
prophets, through the development of their capacities, which- like all education-
entails hope, transformation, and a move beyond what now is and what we now are.
"lbe point, says Unger, is simply this: to "raise up our humaniry."35 We have the poten-
tial to become real people who can live in utopia; potentially, we already are those
people. utopian project is not imperiled by our incapacity to change and become
otherwise, but impelled by our capacity, need, and desire to do so.
34 Philip Pullman, "Against Identity," Free Expression Is No Offince, cd. Lisa Appignanesi (London: Penguin,
2005) 105- 15.
35 Unger, The Self Awakened, 2.