Utopian Moments: Reading Utopian Texts ed. by Miguel A. Ramiro Avilés and J. C. Davis (review)

Utopian Moments is an edited volume of essays with an exceptionally wide reach, covering 250 years of the utopian canon, from More's archetype (1516) to Le Guin's The Dispossessed (1974). The editors, Miguel A. Ramiro Avilés and J. C. Davis, clearly favor the classics, or what Lyman Tower Sargent, in his contribution, calls "exemplars of the mainstream of utopian writing" (142). All the usual suspects are here—Campanella, Bacon, Harrington, Fourier, Owen, Bellamy, Wells, and others—plus a few "wild cards" thrown in to keep things interesting. True, similar projects have been done before. Claeys's excellent Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature (2010) and Claeys and Sargent's comprehensive Utopian Reader (1999) spring immediately to mind. But Utopian Moments is not without its innovations. Rather than surveying the field in broad brushstrokes or cataloging an ever-expanding canon, Utopian Moments adopts a pointillistic approach. Each of its essays begins with a specific extract drawn from a specific key work, or with what the series editors (J. C. Davis and John Morrow) dub a textual moment. Textual moments are an intriguing hermeneutic device. In some instances, they act as illustrative snapshots, capturing an emblematic aspect of the text; in other instances, they draw attention to some contradiction or odd detail that is then used to cause trouble. In general, though, they operate as entry points into a document. The task of every essayist is to contextualize their moment, first within the oeuvre of its author and then within the wider stream of historical events and ideas. In perhaps unexpected ways, then, Utopian Moments provides us with a master class in conducting close and contextualized readings. This is only fitting since, as Davis and Morrow write in their series forward, the question "How shall I read this text?" is at the "heart of the serious study of the history of political thought."¹

The twenty-one substantive essays that make up Utopian Moments are ordered according to the chronology of their cases. This may seem like a trivial detail, but it is not. Such organization reinforces the mandate of the book series, which is to trace the influence that political ideas exert on one another and to explore the dynamic and dialectical role they play in history. Moreover, because the authors of utopian tracts are also the readers of other/older utopian works, by chronologically ordering these cases, the editors succeed in amplifying the intertextual echoes that resound between selections. Sometimes acts of textual borrowing are obvious; in Sinapia, for example, a long-lost work from the Spanish Enlightenment, passages from More's Utopia were copied directly into the manuscript. But in other cases intertextual traces are faint; they require, as J. C. Davis admonishes, that readers get to work. That is why Avilés and Davis's concise but intelligent introduction is so important. It does the heavy lifting for us. Here the editors highlight a number of shared preoccupations and common concerns that unite their cases. One recurrent feature among these tracts is the desire to improve human relations through recourse to newly discovered natural laws; this is as true for Campanella's Prince-Priest as it is for Le Guin's Shevek. Another shared feature is a commitment to treat social problems holistically. More himself understood this: since the problems confronting society are systemic, then the solutions must be equally wide-ranging. A third common element to these cases is a faith that education is key to the production of better people. While some utopians may be anthropologically pessimistic, they are, universally, pedagogically optimistic. Another common aspect is the widespread ambition to reconstruct the polis, to ground its legal system more forcefully in reason, and to make equality its prime concern. This aspiration is evident in Harrington's proposal, in Oceana, that the state should be performatively enacted by its citizens and not forcefully imposed upon...