Political Uses of Utopia: New Marxist, Anarchist, and Radical Democratic Perspectives ed. by S. D. Chrostowska and James D. Ingram (review)

The scholarly field of utopian studies has to date focused primarily on three broad varieties of utopianism: literary utopias, utopian social thought, and communal experiments. By comparison, the study of the relationship between utopia and politics has been relatively neglected. In his book Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction, published in 2010, Lyman Tower Sargent observes that at the time of writing there was no general study of the role utopianism plays in political theory. Nor, it may be added with due acknowledgment of partial exceptions such as Barbara Goodwin and Keith Taylor's The Politics of Utopia (1982), is there any extant general study of the role utopianism plays in politics more broadly or, indeed, of the role that politics play in utopianism.

The editors of Political Uses of Utopia: New Marxist, Anarchist, and Radical Democratic Perspectives set out to fill this lacuna. In his excellent introduction to the volume, co-editor James D. Ingram outlines the project's ambitions. As he observes correctly, the question of utopia's relationship to politics and political thought has been mostly absent from the revival of utopian studies in recent decades. The same missed encounter may be observed from the other side, in the sense that, just as utopians have tended to keep a distance from politics and political theory, so, too, have normative political theorists in the English-speaking world (the primary focus of the introduction) tended for the most part to either attack, dismiss, or ignore utopia(nism) or to take it up in an impoverished, overly literal form bereft of the irony, reflexivity, playfulness, and attention to detail that make utopias something more than a series of more or less desirable or plausible models or normative ideals.

While the reasons for this missed encounter are complex, Ingram alludes to some plausible explanations, including the critical and imaginative distance utopias always take from the status quo; the overwhelmingly realpolitik liberal or social-democratic trajectory of politics and political theory in English-speaking countries over the last five or six decades; cultural-geographic peculiarities associated with the post-1968 revival of utopianism (especially the sometimes myopic concern of North American utopian studies scholars with utopias as literary, filmic, and televisual phenomena); and (most notably) the long historical shadow cast by the Cold War and its anti-utopian intellectual paragons, from Jacob Talmon and Karl Popper to Isaiah Berlin.

Ingram also suggests, and this is the starting point and raison d'être of the edited volume, that now is a particularly propitious time to reopen utopia as a political question. If the Cold Warriors' anti-utopian liberal fear of utopianism's authoritarian tendencies now rings hollow in a period dominated by consumer capitalism, dystopian disenchantment with politics, and generalized anxiety and fear of environmental apocalypse, so, too, has the felt need for utopia perhaps never been greater. Hence the rationale for an edited collection showcasing fresh, timely, and politically insightful utopian thinking committed to sustained reflection on the desirability, character, possibilities, and problems of radical transformation—reflection, moreover, conducted on new bases beyond the impasses and static oppositions (e.g., utopia as mere thought experiment versus utopia as freedom-constricting blueprint) so characteristic of Cold War anti-utopian political thought. In Ingram's words, "The aim of this book is … to take a full measure of nineteenth- and twentieth-century views on utopia and politics, and to relate them to the specific challenges for radical political thinking of the present" (xxv).

Unfortunately, the essays collected in this edited volume do not fully satisfy this ambition. The chief difficulty is that few of them address directly its central problématique. Part 1 (entitled "Reviving Utopia"), for example, features English-language translations of previously untranslated work by utopian studies aficionados Miguel Abensour, Richard Saage, and Francisco Fernández Buey. Each of these contributions is fascinating and...