Abstract

Haven for utopian ideas. An early essay by Irving Howe and Lewis Coser declared that socialism was “the name of our desire,” paraphrasing what Tolstoy had written about God. In 1954 it was utopian to reject every big ideology on offer—Stalinism, McCarthyism, the mild conservatism of Eisenhower and the milder liberalism of Stevenson—in favor of a radical democratic vision with no mass movement behind it. In the very last piece he published, Irving was still naming his desire. Utopianism, he wrote in 1993, “is a necessity of the moral imagination. It doesn’t necessarily entail a particular politics; it doesn’t ensure wisdom about current affairs. What it does provide is a guiding perspective … an understanding that nothing is more mistaken than the common notion that what exists today will continue to exist tomorrow.”

pdf

Share