Utopianism and realism in IR theory

Sometime in the shadowy inter-war years saw the demise of utopianism as a viable aspect of IR theory. E.H. Carr gave the date of utopianism’s actual death in the events of 1931,Footnote ²⁴ and while that may or may not be accurate, one of the many casualties of World War II was the utopian imaginary and its replacement with what Levitas has described as an ‘anti-utopian utopianism’ – a political sphere that represses and obscures images of the good life, effectively removing them from consideration.Footnote ²⁵ One reason why IR theory has shown only the most sedentary flickers of a transformative capacity is, I contend, because of this dismissal of the utopian tradition near to the discipline’s inception in the debates between realism and liberal internationalism. Carr’s so-called ‘devastating attack’ on utopianism contained in the opening salvo of The Twenty Years’ Crisis has been the widely accepted as the coup d’état of all utopian thought in IR.Footnote ²⁶ In the aftermath of this First Great Debate, it was the methodology of realism that prevailed having ‘irrefutably’ discredited its alternative. Since then, like Alice in Wonderland, IR theory has had little practice in imagining what it considers ‘impossible things.’ For all its sensibilities, mainstream IR simply cannot see beyond the lens of its own looking-glass, where what is possible is deemed impossible, where what is in principle alterable is cast with permanence. That is, if the dominant approach to the field cannot believe what it considers impossible – and the immutability thesis of realism holds that any form of progressive change constitutes such an impossibilityFootnote ²⁷ – then not only is all imagination of betterment expunged from disciplinary knowledge but so too is any conceptualisation of change at all. In this way, realism asphyxiates thought in IR because of its inability to imagine anything other than what is.Footnote ²⁸ As shall be seen however, the philosophical grounds on which the forced exile of utopianism from IR was compelled are not as unassailable as is so widely assumed.

Carr dismissed utopianism on the epistemic ground that it was abstract and metaphysical, and on the normative ground that the utopianist’s desire for justice and perfection could rupture the ordered fragility of the international status quo.Footnote ²⁹ In distinction, realism sought to compel IR theorists to reflect only on empirical, non-ideal features of the world system, and to thus constrain the political imagination to present conditions alone. Yet these core realist assumptions suffer from two fatal contradictions. The first is the ontological problem that pertains to the relative position of different actors within the world system that would give different considerations to what is deemed objectively possible and desirable in world politics. What is considered impossible for the realist may be considered possible (and necessary) for peripheral groups who have long-term aims for the transformation of political power and community.Footnote ³⁰ The second contradiction relates to the false logic inherent to Carr’s assumption of impossibility – any estimation of the possibility or impossibility of utopian transition is not a prima facie ground for dismissing utopianism altogether. There can be no logical certainty deducible from a subjective estimate of what is considered possible, nor does Carr substantiate what it is exactly that makes utopianism impossible, other than vague references to the superiority of a scientific approach.Footnote ³¹ This view completely excludes the powerful ideational role that the utopian imagination can have at the level of will formation of agents in inspiring change. Moreover, such an argument only concerns the probability of change – and one could contend that the material/productive basis of society today provides far more potential for positive transformations towards utopia than has hitherto existed in history.

Carr’s condemnation of utopianism is relatively well-known in the discipline but what receives far less attention is how Carr derived much of his conceptualisation of utopianism from a particular interpretation of Mannheim’s seminal work, Ideology and Utopia.Footnote ³² One fundamental fault was that Carr did not sufficiently express the dialectical relationship between realism and utopianism that was crucial to Mannheim’s work and which IR, to its detriment, has since largely forgotten. This resulted in the problematic labelling as ‘utopian’ of all those theories deemed incongruous with realityFootnote ³³ which, in turn, enabled the rejection as ‘utopian’ of a wide range of approaches in IR, from the revolutionary to the merely reformist. For example, it was the ‘teleological aspect’ regarding the ‘desire to prevent war’ that allowed Carr to condemn liberal internationalism as ‘markedly and frankly utopian’.Footnote ³⁴ That is, it was the desire for peace alone that attracted the charge of utopianism to liberal internationalism. The problem with such an expansive notion of what could infract upon the disciplinary boundaries of IR theory, so narrowly conceived, was that it created a ready-made abeyance to any other normative goal considered more improbable than peace. Questions of attaining freedom, liberty, emancipation, or of overcoming injustice, poverty, and inequality – all would be marginalised as thematically utopian to be expunged from the agenda of the discipline altogether.

Part of this problem can be corrected by a closer reading of Mannheim’s work. In Ideology and Utopia, Mannheim makes a distinction between ideologies, errors derived from a distorted conceptual apparatus which served to perpetuate the existing order, and, utopias which worked ‘in opposition to the status quo’ and served to disintegrate it. It was only those ideas that transcended ‘reality’ and which ‘tended to burst the bonds of the existing order’ that were to be referred to as utopian.Footnote ³⁵ Mannheim’s analysis revealed the ideological function played by those theories that profess to reflect ‘reality’ and how they act to preserve existing conditions. For example, Mannheim exposed the limitations of the pragmatic view in the social sciences, warning us to be mindful of the interrelationship between an alleged intellectual point of view and the social position occupied by it.Footnote ³⁶ For Mannheim, knowledge is distorted and ideological when it fails to take into account new realities and when it attempts to conceal such developments by continuing to analyse them in categories that are no longer appropriate.Footnote ³⁷ One can see a clear parallel here with contemporary neo-realism which denies that there has been any substantive development in the reality of world politics and thus continues to analyse the world system in categories derived from the Cold War period.Footnote ³⁸ Mannheim argued that those who refuse to go beyond the traditions of their discipline merely reflect a defence mechanism which attempts to insure them against the questioning of their own presuppositions. Such traditionalists find it impossible to arrive at a more comprehensive vision made necessary by new conditions.Footnote ³⁹

Mannheim does not, of course, explicitly implicate realism as part of the dominant ideology as his work was not concerned with the field of IR theory specifically. However, by showing that those forms of thought that support the status quo and which tend to denigrate as ‘utopian’ any ideas that seek to alter it are ‘ideologies’, the logical inference can be drawn that realism constitutes such an ‘ideology’ within Mannheim’s typology – a position which the arguments of Cox, Ashley and others in the Third Great Debate support.Footnote ⁴⁰ For Mannheim, what is touted as ‘utopian’ is that which is judged so by those ‘representatives of the given order’ and whether they consider the idea to be unrealisable.Footnote ⁴¹ So while ideology and utopia are both clearly incongruous with reality, the point to take from Mannheim is that it is the representatives of the given order who serve the privileged function of determining what is considered utopian and ipso facto possible or impossible in world politics. We can see part of this role being assumed subsequently by specific realist and neo-realist theorists in the discipline – the aptly named ‘doorkeepers’ to borrow from BliekerFootnote ⁴² – who alone determine what approaches are to be labelled as utopian in the pejorative sense, to be thus excluded from the agenda of IR ‘proper’.

Mannheim clearly warned us of the dangers of the dominance of ideologies. For him, such domination would mean the complete disappearance of all ‘reality transcending doctrines’ from political study and ultimately lead to a ‘matter-of-factness’, a ‘decay of the human will’ and a ‘static state of affairs’. The paradox would result that while humanity would have achieved a high degree of ‘rational mastery’ in the world, it would be left without any ideals or the will to ‘shape history’.Footnote ⁴³ Nevertheless, Mannheim held out hope for the capacity of humanity to become aware of ‘the necessity of wilfully choosing our course’ and emphasised the need for ‘an imperative (a utopia) to drive us onward.’ For him, it is only when we know what our ‘interests’ are and make a transition towards them, that we are in a position to inquire into ‘the possibilities of the present situation, and thus to gain our first insight into history’.Footnote ⁴⁴

When Mannheim is portrayed in this critical light, it dramatically alters the frame of reference for the debate between realism and utopianism in IR. It shifts focus from one centred on the subjectivity of utopianism to one that implicates realism with serving, in actuality, the subjective interests of the existing powers. For by making the ontological error that what it considered unrealisable in the given order as if it were unrealisable in any other, realism suppresses the validity of any claims that suggest the possibility of change. By labelling everything that goes beyond the present order utopian, the realist can set at rest the anxiety that may arise from utopias that would be realisable in another order.Footnote ⁴⁵ It cannot countenance that the utopianism of today may become the reality of tomorrow.Footnote ⁴⁶ In this context, Mannheim reinforces the importance of the utopian imagination because he seeks to locate where ‘transcendent ideas’ become active, that is, where they become forces leading to the transformation of existing reality.Footnote ⁴⁷ Mannheim goes on to espouse the importance of individual creative power, the ‘novel’ and unique human mind that can break beyond the bounds of the existing order, though he warns us to not overestimate the prominence of the individual or our abilities to affect such transformations.Footnote ⁴⁸

Mannheim posits that imaginary imperatives are not absolute but are a part of concrete life processes, they die away when they are outmoded and they can be realised only in given structural situations.Footnote ⁴⁹ As such, Mannheim offers a processual view of utopianism that explicitly refers to the transformative, mobilising nature of utopian ideas. Yet if Mannheim is considered as taking a processual view of utopianism, the question is how concrete does this depiction of utopia have to be? If utopianism can shatter reality only by being an end-state, then this would prescribe set blueprint forms of utopia. Alternatively, if utopia is viewed as a process (that is, that whatever is ‘different’ has the potential to shatter reality), then it does not require a telos of any kind. In fact, from this processual view, deterministic blueprint utopian ideas inevitably become ossified ideologies over time. When viewed as a process however, the imaginary of utopia acts as a negative pushing and pulling against reality, a joint process of thought and action (praxis). Utopianism here becomes something for agency and something against reality that need not be confined to any set form. The Life of Brian therefore captures the power of the utopian imagination far better than the rigid rule of Plato’s Philosopher Kings. Brian’s plea that he ‘hates the Romans’ is not followed by a detailed plan to be followed by the People’s Front of Judea, nor is his imagination fixed on one monist alternative but simply evokes a sense, no matter how vague, of a place somewhere else.Footnote ⁵⁰ Rather than lamenting this lack of concreteness, it is being against reality, knowing the possibility of change and imagining something that is not yet (no matter how ill-defined or ‘fuzzy’ the notion may be) that is the power of the utopian imaginary as a process for human agency.

Unfortunately, many IR theorists have failed to fully grapple with Mannheim’s ideas and have instead rested on particular, isolated passages taken from Carr’s incomplete reading. However, one must be wary to not conflate Mannheim’s ideas with Carr’s. While Mannheim was undeniably an inspiration, Carr’s actual arguments against utopianism depart significantly from Mannheim’s approach. That is, Carr argued that the classical liberal view of world politics was ‘essentially utopian’ because it was not based on the balance of forces, nor on the practical needs of the period, but on rational a priori principles which such utopianist’s assumed only needed to be applied in other contexts to be successful.Footnote ⁵¹ The problem for Carr was that the teleology of utopianism preceded its analysis, with the result that while utopian rationalism could envision utopia, it could not make it real.Footnote ⁵² Carr thus associated utopianism with the ‘initial stage’ of an ‘infant’ science whereby the solutions propounded had no logical connection with the conditions of the problem and were ‘the product, not of analysis, but of aspiration’.Footnote ⁵³ The advent of realism was held to be the endpoint of IR’s maturation process and the ‘corrective’ to the exuberance of utopianism,Footnote ⁵⁴ ushering in the breakdown of such ‘visionary projects’.Footnote ⁵⁵

What has been subsequently overlooked in many realist texts however,Footnote ⁵⁶ is that Carr's criticism of utopianism was directed at the fact that liberal internationalists invested their hopes in an assumed ‘harmony of interests’ between states and not because of their utopian imagination of a ‘better’ world.Footnote ⁵⁷ Carr indicted the ‘harmony of interest’ thesis as nothing but subterfuge designed to augment the position of powerful states, a ‘cloak’ for the vested and privileged interests in the world system.Footnote ⁵⁸ What animated Carr’s concern was the ‘collapse of the whole structure’ of this alleged harmony as professed by the winners of Versailles and not the utopian imaginary at all.Footnote ⁵⁹ Similarly, contemporary IR theory has also largely forgotten Carr’s belief that there existed a necessary complementarity between realism and utopianism that echoed Mannheim’s dialectical approach.Footnote ⁶⁰ That is, within the very same pages of The Twenty Years’ Crisis that allegedly sounded the death knell of utopianism, Carr openly recognised that the political sciences ‘can never wholly emancipate themselves from utopianism’ and he discusses, if only briefly, the important dialectic between realism and utopianism suggesting that the latter is needed to counteract the ‘barrenness’ of the former.Footnote ⁶¹ So while Carr charged utopianism with naivety, he indicted the realist with something even more insidious: sterility.Footnote ⁶² Without the utopian element Carr claimed that realism would fall ‘easily to determinism’ and become ‘impotent to alter the course of events’. To counter this, Carr posited that utopianism was necessary to demonstrate that ‘altruism’ is not an ‘illusion’ in the world and to expose the ‘naked struggle for power’ behind the realist analysis which would make ‘international society impossible.Footnote ⁶³

This dialectic between utopianism and realism is of crucial importance. Booth has explored Carr’s ambiguity on the relation between these two poles and finds it to be expressive of Carr’s uncertainty on this issue.Footnote ⁶⁴ For Booth, Carr was a potential ‘utopian realist’ because he saw the need to balance realism with utopianism for effective political thinking, a theme which was particularly evident in Carr’s plea for extending community beyond national frontiers.Footnote ⁶⁵ To extol either realism or utopianism at the expense of the other would lead to an analytic imbalance; either one would be too constrained by ‘reality’ to make progressive (utopian) changes, or one would be too idealistic (utopian) to give the foundation necessary to bring about such desired changes in reality. In this realist/utopian dialectic, there is no logical contradiction between the ethical projection of an ideal and the critical analysis of the real but rather, a necessary complementarity.Footnote ⁶⁶ This dialectic involves simultaneous movements between transcendence and immanence, for as argued by Schuler, immanent analysis without utopia is blind and utopia without immanent analysis is empty.Footnote ⁶⁷ Moylan made a similar observation regarding Mannheim’s work. He found that the distinction between ideology and utopia should not be reduced to simplistic binary opposites. Instead we must view the relationship between utopia and ideology as being both related and opposed – the utopian impulse operates dialectically by both sustaining and pulling against reality.Footnote ⁶⁸ Read in this light, Carr and Mannheim suggest the need for some form of dialectical sublation (aufhebung) between realism and utopianism to transcend the impasse in contemporary IR theory that has resulted from the dismissal of utopianism.

Jameson offered an insight into how this realist/utopian dialectic works by illustrating how anti-utopian ideas must, sooner or later, reveal themselves to be forms of utopianism in their own right.Footnote ⁶⁹ For example, realism attempts to combat utopianism by evoking a supposedly ‘real’ account of the world and yet its theory of a self-perpetuating world system is as ahistorical and idealised as any utopian fantasy. The realist’s construction of world politics is rendered without much reference to political history or political economy but is derived from ‘systemic’ features alone, with the result that its account is far removed from reality. To the extent that realism misses out or downplays certain key aspects of world politics it takes on the very characteristics that it condemns as being utopian. Yet, as argued by Ashley, one is not even allowed to ask how such ideas are formed under realism. The subjective process of theory construction is rendered mysterious and is bracketed off from the scope of rational inquiry; realism disallows explorations of these subjective processes even as it depends on them.Footnote ⁷⁰

It is for this reason that Jameson contended that utopian optimism generates the formation of conservative (dystopian) attitudes of resignation and it is here that utopia and realism merge as two variations on the same theme, one dynamic and optimistic, the other static and pessimistic: one side, conscious and open in the expression of its projected vision of betterment, the other which is made apprehensive by its own inherent normativity and who thus attempts to conceal it. Yet, both nevertheless constitute forms of the utopian mentality and turn against each other by demanding that the other is to correspond with what it considers important (the imagination of ‘betterment’ for the utopian, the objective study of ‘reality’ for the realist). What each disputes is the relative worldview of the other and each employs a range of arguments to establish how their own worldview, ontology and episteme constitute a more sufficient theoretical position. This is why so many of the debates between realism and utopianism revolve around the objective/subjective nexus, with each side claiming that the other has their head in the proverbial sand. Despite the intractability of this dispute, it is this dialectical tension that offers fruitful grounds for a possible synthesis of both approaches, a movement from mere projections of ideal worlds to visions that approximate more closely events transpiring in this world. Utopia and reality are thus distinct, yet equally important planes in world politics.Footnote ⁷¹ The dialectical contradiction between realism and utopianism heightens the utopian ‘intensity’Footnote ⁷² and offers the possibility of sublating both towards a higher understanding of world politics.

Consequently, Carr represents a far more limited attack on utopianism as an imaginary than the mass of subsequent realist IR literature has suggested. Not only does Carr offer the utopian imagination a fundamental role to play in world politics so as to counter the banality of realism, his actual objection to utopianism does not centre on liberal internationalism’s vision of a ‘better’, peaceful world, but its assumption of the ‘harmony of interests’ that masked the designs of powerful states. His argument therefore attacks utopianism at best tangentially, and when coupled with Carr’s unambiguous statement that ‘any sound political thought must be based on elements of both utopia and reality’, does not deny the validity of utopianism but actually endows it with a fundamental role in IR theory. As he affirms, the study of politics is ‘not only of what is, but of what ought to be.’Footnote ⁷³ Carr openly acknowledged ‘[t]he wish is father to the thought’ and it is the role of the utopian imagination to envision a more just society that is so necessary in world politics today.Footnote ⁷⁴ Carr’s legacy therefore suggests that the problem does not lie with utopianism but the fact that there is not enough of its imaginary in contemporary IR theory to balance the sterility that results from the dominance of realism.

The other towering figure and founding father of realism, Hans Morgenthau, would come to dismiss utopianism somewhat differently. In distinction to Carr, Morgenthau’s position against utopianism was premised on what Waltz would later call a ‘first image’ analysis,Footnote ⁷⁵ the range of supposed ‘objective laws that have their roots in human nature’. For Morgenthau, the negative characteristics of our anthropology precluded the peaceful, moral conduct of international relations that utopianism promised as we were deemed to possess an innate urge for power: animus dominandi. He argued that IR theory had to separate itself from naïve utopian rationalism – a view that he considered was mere ‘prejudice and wishful thinking’ – to instead focus solely on ‘what is true objectively.’Footnote ⁷⁶ Morgenthau thus merely repeated the well-worn argument against utopianism as being concerned with the land of ‘escape’ which threatened the theory’s capacity to deal with things as they ‘really’ are.Footnote ⁷⁷ The utopian hope for a ‘science of peace’ and, in particular, Marcuse’s ‘pacification of human existence’, were disparaged as nothing but misguided rationalism that could not be applied to a world that was ‘complicated, irrational, incalculable’.Footnote ⁷⁸

What Morgenthau failed to recognise however was the complete arbitrariness that infects spurious forms of philosophical anthropology such as his. Whether Mills’ view that ‘ordinary human nature is so poor a thing’,Footnote ⁷⁹ or Machiavelli’s depiction of humankind as ‘ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous’,Footnote ⁸⁰ such negative depictions are rarely based on anything more substantive than the most vulgar impressions of humanity the author presumes that they can extrapolate across the entire human species. They have little basis outside of the writer’s imagination and the Hobbesian account adopted by realism is no less specious merely because it offers a negative rather than positive conception of humanity. This is hardly a basis for ‘scientific’ scholarship, which, ironically, was Morgenthau’s own express objective standard.Footnote ⁸¹ The problem with any derived conceptualisation of human nature is that they become totalising discourses and the institutions that are believed to result from them become oppressive and unjust.Footnote ⁸² This is because what is usually taken as human nature is merely a (poor) reflection of dominant attitudes at any given period. The result is an ahistorical generality that is washed over the entirety of human diversity, which no theory of human essentialism can ever fully grasp. As stated by Marx, writers who purport to have found the essence of human nature merely transform the relations of particular, historically situated individuals into relations of humankind as a whole and thus abandon historical analysis for mere ideological assertions.Footnote ⁸³

The question to be asked of such philosophical anthropologists like Morgenthau is what characterisation of human nature qualifies a work as constituting an ‘objective’ political treatise and another as utopian fiction? What is the distinguishing ontological feature that renders Hobbes’ Leviathan and its unverifiable account of a ‘brutish and short’ pre-societal state of nature to be objective and other, more optimistic accounts, not?Footnote ⁸⁴ While systematic realists would deny the ‘utopistic’ aspect of their aspiration, their reliance on the Hobbesian imaginary results in an ‘unreal realism’ that maintains a deeply flawed anthropology and a reductionist project consistent with Hobbes’s nominalism.Footnote ⁸⁵ Yet, one cannot remain a Hobbesian realist without reliance on his problematic anthropological idealism and as expressed by Burchill, such a priori assumptions about human nature cannot be tested or verified to any meaningful extent and thus appear as mere dogmatic assertions.Footnote ⁸⁶ So as Leviathan was based on the projection of an ideal rather than being a reflection of reality, realism’s primary justification for excluding utopian theory disappears completely.Footnote ⁸⁷ Moreover, even if the realist assertion of human imperfectability could be somehow proven, it would not preclude the benefits of the utopian imagination. Rather, it would make utopian attempts at social change all the more necessary to remove these iniquitous conditions and forms of socialisation that threaten to make life ‘brutish and short’.

As with Carr, there has been a neglect of aspects of Morgenthau’s analysis within subsequent realist accounts – many of which do not go far beyond his infamous ‘six principles of political realism.’Footnote ⁸⁸ What is usually overlooked is that Morgenthau offers a cogent defence of the utopian imaginary that is most visible in his discussions regarding the transcendence of the nation-state. Here Morgenthau expressed a sentiment clearly akin to utopianism when he expressed the necessity of thinking about ‘novel structures and types of organization’, including supranational community and a world government, in order to move beyond the state.Footnote ⁸⁹ In his later years, Morgenthau stressed the need for a form of world government to avoid the dangers that the pursuit of state power in world politics entrenched.Footnote ⁹⁰ Clearly, such a view is not directed against utopianism and its capacity to envision different forms of community but is in fact aimed at making these ‘novel’ ideas realisable.

One could also point to the work of another of the founding fathers of realism, John Herz, who, after the formation of his own so-called ‘realistic liberalism’ publicly questioned whether he had ended up advocating an ‘idealistic utopianism’ himself.Footnote ⁹¹ For Ashley, it was Herz who added a strong commitment to an emancipatory cognitive interest in the realist dialogue because he blended realism with liberal and utopian ideas. Herz’s work encourages us to reflect on the unacknowledged influences that make possible the autonomous and self-directed development of life to improve our control of our objective environment.Footnote ⁹² In this way, Herz moved to a form of idealism that combined the idea of a universal consensus through reason with the interests of technical realism and its concern with survival, which Booth has heralded as a clear example of the attempt to reconcile utopia and reality.Footnote ⁹³ As such, we must counsel caution to those who would label classical realism as categorically ‘anti-utopian’ because passages in Carr, Morgenthau and Herz demonstrate that their aversion was directed to a specific type of idealist thought (that is, liberal internationalism) rather than the utopian imaginary itself. Carr defended a role for utopianism in order to balance against realism’s sterility; Morgenthau actively imagined a world order beyond the state-system; and Herz, in the end, moved to a form of idealistic utopianism. All of these examples disclose a unique compatibility between realism and utopianism which should open a space for IR theory to (re)explore the potential benefits of the utopian imaginary.

However, this should not be taken to mean that realism possesses no barrier to the re-invocation of utopianism in IR theory. Ironically, it is the idealism that permeates the realist tradition – its immutability thesis that assumes world politics will be the same thousands of years hence – that functions as the tangible impediment to utopian theory.Footnote ⁹⁴ And on this point Carr and Morgenthau each provide a powerful supportive role for the preservation of the status quo by contributing to the perception that the world is unchangeable, either through the constraints imposed by the ‘irresistible strength’ of existing forces in world politics (Carr) or the defects in ‘human nature’ (Morgenthau). The litany of realist arguments convey the notion that either state-interests, human nature, or the systemic reproduction of the world order are immutable features that apocryphally preclude all emancipatory approaches. In this way, the realist tradition sets very clear bounds around the kinds of ideas which it deems are reasonable to contemplate.Footnote ⁹⁵ Yet such arguments are not diametrically opposed to utopianism but are reflections of its inversion; they embody an idealism of stasis rather than progress, and instead of Eutopia, the ‘good place’, they promise Kakotopia, the ‘bad place’, where war, suffering and inequality are endemic features in a self-perpetuating international system.

Ultimately, what underlies the realist critique of utopianism is the exclamation that ‘ought does not entail is’.Footnote ⁹⁶ Yet the problem with this foundational argument is that while realism may not be able to deduce an is from an ought, neither can it derive a should not from a can not. And this distinction is fundamental. For even if we think we cannot change towards betterment, this is not an a priori ground for concluding that we can never do so. Nor does it parry the normative commitment to change, the belief that we should do so. Under the dominance of the realist mantra however, IR theory has become preoccupied with system reproduction – problem-solving theory in Cox’s parlanceFootnote ⁹⁷ – rather than the possibilities of social transformation. However, to remain idle against the inequity within contemporary global conditions because they are deemed to pervade in a ‘realm of recurrence and repetition’Footnote ⁹⁸ merely invites complacency without justification. Such realist attitudes must be labelled immoral because what they indicate can be given up is ultimately rejected in order to preserve the existing states system with all its failings. This realist paradigm has become the accepted knowledge boundary of IR and hence we see even the critical traditions responding to its agenda within the parameters that realism itself has set. The result has been the rejection of the utopian imagination within both realist and critical ontologies. The question to be asked however is why does realism compel us to act and think in ways that are politically apathetic and alienating, in order to pacify us, to blind our vision to the ‘city on the hill.’ Why does realist IR theory wish for the wishes of the weak to be weak?Footnote ⁹⁹

Anti-utopianism in political philosophy

The rejection of utopianism in international relations was paralleled by similar anti-utopian sentiments expressed in political philosophy around the same period, as evident in the works Popper, Berlin, Arendt and Hayek. While otherwise being highly dissimilar theorists, this group argued on essentially the same grounds for the denigration of utopian thought.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Both political philosophy and IR theory came to dismiss utopianism on the epistemic grounds that it was arbitrary and ‘unscientific,’ and yet their normative objections differed. Whereas realism saw in utopia an impossible desire for perfection that could rupture the ordered fragility of world politics, political philosophy identified the so-called ‘paradox of utopia’: the idyllic vision of a future state of perfection whose actual reality brought about totalitarian domination.Footnote ¹⁰² These views mutually reinforced each other and banished utopianism to the realm of literary fiction alone. Yet, recent endeavours by Jacoby and others are now beginning to pull-back this shroud, revealing the many problems endemic to this line of thought.Footnote ¹⁰³ The legitimate challenge that these thinkers raised to the utopian project was how to ensure that utopianism would not devolve to totalitarianism, or what Fournier describes above as the ‘hardening’ of utopias. However, the shortcomings of such approaches were that they foreclosed on any possible solution to this problem and assumed that utopia must inevitably lead to totalitarianism – an assertion without logical foundation or empirical evidence and which can be overcome through an open-dialectical utopianism outlined in the final section of this article.

In Popper’s view, utopia was to be considered amongst the enemies of the ‘open society’Footnote ¹⁰⁴ because it could be achieved only by crushing ‘competing Utopian religions’, stamping out all ‘memory of them’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Popper based this damnation of utopianism on the bleak historical record of past revolutions which always seemed to produce societies very different from those ‘desired’ by the revolutionaries themselves.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Such a description attempted to invert the promise of utopia with its very opposite but the veracity of Popper’s critique hinged on the level of substantiation required to establish the logical connectivity within his syllogistic proposition against utopianism – that utopianism’s attempt at theoretical ‘holism’ could only result in ‘totalitarian intuition’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Popper failed to demonstrate a causal link between the two predicates that would prove why an imagined reconstruction of the whole must lead to totalitarian policies. Without this determination, Popper’s argument is merely an ideological statement that does not sufficiently implicate utopian imaginaries with totalitarian realities but instead reveals a base ideological assumption posing as objective analysis. While Popper attempted to distinguish between what he considered ‘admissible plans for social reform’ and ‘inadmissible Utopian blueprints’,Footnote ¹⁰⁸ without proffering any normative criteria that would render one ‘plan’ admissible and the ‘blueprint’ not, his condemnation of utopianism possesses no objective foundation. Moreover, shunning utopianism in this way would seem to devalue what Popper elsewhere upheld as most important in the ‘great advances’ of science, namely ‘critical creativeness’ and the need to ‘operate freely with speculative theories’ – both of which are elements of imagination itself.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Following uncannily similar reasoning to Popper, Berlin argued that utopian schemes were both dogmatic and monist and would ultimately lead to ‘inhumanity’Footnote ¹¹⁰ because rational argument could not ‘conceive what such an earthly paradise [i.e. utopia] could be’.Footnote ¹¹¹ One could easily counter however that a thing is not impossible merely because it is inconceivable in a particular epoch.Footnote ¹¹² Moreover, Berlin based much of his dismissal of utopianism via a misappropriation of Kant’s famous dictum ‘that out of the crooked timber of humanity nothing straight could be made’ which appears time and time again in Berlin’s essentially repetitious papers on the topic.Footnote ¹¹³ Yet this is hardly a credible argument, neither anthropologically verifiable nor practically demonstrable in light of humankind’s creative potential. Moreover, it would assume that very little was possible in establishing political community, including the acceptance of plurality, which is Berlin’s ultimate ideal.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Far more problematic is that his extraction does not follow the content of Kant’s argument but in fact wilfully distorts it.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Berlin conveniently overlooks Kant’s writings that pay homage to utopianism, where Kant argues that it matters little if we cannot realise ‘glorious ideals’ at once because whilst difficulties obstruct their realisation, the idea of a ‘perfect republic’ is not impossible merely because it has not been experienced.Footnote ¹¹⁶ So while Kant may have been against revolutionary activity to achieve such ‘glorious’ ideals, he nevertheless supported their construction in thesi Footnote ¹¹⁷ and did not regard the ‘crookedness’ of human nature as a delimiting condition to social transformation as Berlin would have us believe. Recalling Plato’s rhetorical question whether ‘our picture is any the worse drawn because we cannot show how it can be realized in fact?’,Footnote ¹¹⁸ what Kant suggests is that while we may be uncertain whether we can hope for anything better for humanity, such fears cannot detract from the assumption that progress is possible.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Uncertainty should neither distract us, nor does it preclude us, from the responsibility to actively work towards realising such ideals. Yet in distinction to the optimism of Kant, Berlin deferred to ‘utilitarian solutions’Footnote ¹²⁰ and yet the cultural relativist position he subsequently adopted made little justification for its denial of any alternate ‘vision of reality’Footnote ¹²¹ and became pathetically exculpatory to the inequities of existing society.Footnote ¹²² In effect, by precluding any moment of transcendence within them, Berlin rendered existing social conditions as a perpetual totality that he ostensibly so reviled.

Following similar reasoning, Arendt argued that utopianism suffered from the twin defects of totalitarianism and idealism – an assertion which, unfortunately, was tainted by the same logical deficiency that we have already identified in Popper and Berlin’s accounts.Footnote ¹²³ The problem surfaced when Arendt made the distinction between ‘ideological supersense’ (that is, utopianism) which she defined as a ‘logical, closed system […] that issues into mass murder’,Footnote ¹²⁴ and the rational notion of ‘common sense’ which she favoured.Footnote ¹²⁵ As with Popper and Berlin, Arendt did not sufficiently prove the necessary connection between utopianism and the totalitarianism of Hitler and Stalin to which her critique was directed. Not only would it be difficult to sustain an argument that these tyrants actually possessed utopian imaginaries of ‘better’ worlds but the historical validity of Arendt’s linkage is dubious as it would be a gross distortion to attribute twentieth century violence to utopianism. For Jacoby, this exposes the intellectual sleight of hand by which utopia was to be banished in the name of violence that could be far more justly attributed to other sources (tyrants, bureaucrats, ultra-nationalists, etc.) than to utopian-dreamers.Footnote ¹²⁶ In the words of Levitas, the problem with totalitarianism was its totalitarianism, not its alleged links with utopianism.Footnote ¹²⁷ What is more problematic is the fact that Arendt then championed conformity to ‘common-sensical presuppositions’ to prevent the emergence of ‘ideological supersense’. Here Arendt seemed blind to the idea that common-sense itself can be culturally monistic in the same manner she assumed utopianism to be. Common sense possesses no prima facie ethical or normative content other than the fact that it is the widely accepted knowledge of the time and could actually become a form of Arendt’s dreaded ‘ideological supersense’ through its domination of alternative ways of thought and being. Arguably, today's dominant ‘ideological suspense’ is one that forecloses on any utopian imaginary. However, it is important to note that Arendt’s attack was focused on utopian ideologues and not on the utopian imagination itself. Arendt actually favoured what she called a “spontaneous” ‘people’s utopia’ – a view consistent with an open-dialectical form of utopian imagination posited in this article.Footnote ¹²⁸

The problem with the anti-utopian arguments of Popper, Berlin and Arendt is that their interpretations rendered utopianism far too didactic – if you believed in the possibility of radical human improvement then your approach could be labelled as unscientific, and if you made a claim to what was deemed a utopian alternative, then you were to be condemned as a totalitarian. Instead of a radical form of self-actualisation and creativity that would emphasise the transformative capacity of the people themselves (something that Arendt in particular should have been mindful of) these thinkers alienated humankind from the ability to be self-determining. Instead of utopian imaginings and movements to ‘better’ worlds, the ambit of what was considered as humanly possible was narrowed considerably and divested to either ‘admissible plans’ (Popper), ‘utilitarian-solutions’ (Berlin) or ‘common-sense’ (Arendt). The elitism and technocracy offered by Popper and Berlin ‘plans’ and ‘solutions’ are fairly obvious but the dull uniformity of Arendt’s appeal to ‘common-sense’ is no less limiting to the radical transformative potential of humankind. Ultimately, by implicating visions of the ‘good life’ to be at best unrealistic, and at worst as leading to complete socio-political domination, these thinkers silenced imagination as completely and as ruthlessly as any form of totalitarian repression could ever hope to achieve.

The limits of a ‘realistic utopia’ for IR theory

Despite the disdain of its critics, utopian thought has managed to develop through four discernible phases in IR theory; the post-World War I utopianism of the liberal internationalists; the ‘peace’ or anti-nuclear utopianism of the 1960s and 1970s; the utopian reaction to the ‘planetary crisis’ of the late 1970s; and the ‘realistic utopianism’ of the early 1990s.Footnote ¹³⁰ The utopian tradition has thus gradually widened its ambit from the liberal-peace to include other progressive ends, including emancipation and environmental concerns. While the first form of utopianism has already been discussed, the middle group – the peace and planetary utopianism – focused on the necessity of change, making a stark choice between nuclear annihilation, environmental collapse or utopia. For these groups, it was the magnitude of possible calamity to humankind resulting from the planetary wide security dilemma that prescribed utopia.Footnote ¹³¹ While the contribution of this planetary utopian literature cannot be over-stated, due to considerations of length, this part focuses on ‘utopian realism’ and will conclude by advocating the need for a new, fifth mode of utopian thought that emphasises the capacity of imagination.

In the early 1990s considerable interest grew for the idea of a realistic utopia championed by Ken Booth.Footnote ¹³² This ‘realistic utopianism’ hoped to restore balance in the relationship between utopianism and realism that had eluded Carr. Booth explained his approach to be more an attitude of mind than a theory, even though it was to be based on normative (utopian) and empirical (realistic) theories. The normative content of utopian realism was derived from its ‘universal appeal, based on reason, to various world order principles and its empirical content sought to go beyond realism to offer a ‘fuller’ understanding of those forces shaping the globe. Borrowing from Hoffman, Booth labelled his approach as one of ‘uplifting politics’.Footnote ¹³³ Booth argued that the benefit of utopian thinking was that it was able to ‘set goals’ that could act as a ‘catalyst to action’, a process in which humans would no longer merely be the object of historical forces but the subject. Booth explicitly related his approach with processual utopianism which he saw as embodying reformist and practical responses to existing problems.Footnote ¹³⁴

While I am deeply sympathetic to this project I am also wary of a number of its suppositions which unduly limit what it considers as possible in world politics. There is a distinct lack of imagination that ‘utopian realism’ evokes, concerned as it is more with the traditional aspects of the discipline, particularly war and nuclear disarmament. It fails to fully appreciate, unlike Bloch’s children quoted above, that in IR ‘much could be different.’ That is, utopian realism is far more realist than utopian and its imagination is relatively muted. Much of its prescriptions are focused on reforming the worst features of the international system, rather than advocating the radical transformation of international political community. So while Booth was right to point out that the past has contained many ‘radical surprises’,Footnote ¹³⁵ I find that an appeal to realistic utopianism does not contain much that is either radical or surprising.

While Booth rightly rejects the ahistoricism of ‘end-point’ utopias his move to ‘process utopias’ suffers from how he situates them as mere conservative reforms that render them far too limited as alternative imaginaries of world politics.Footnote ¹³⁶ The problem centres on the epistemological question of what is considered possible in the existent conditions of world politics and Booth offers no reasoning as to why the solutions he proposes are to be considered ‘realistic’ and others not. Booth’s attempt to correlate ‘process utopianism’ as ‘practical utopianism’ has meant the exclusion of many possibilities from the agenda of reform. These unwarranted restrictions are particularly evident in Booth’s conception of emancipation. Booth defines emancipation as ‘freeing people from those constraints that stop them carrying out what freely they would choose to do’, which implies an expansive notion of emancipation, but which he then dramatically restricts to ‘a few’ practical measures such as ‘war, poverty, oppression and poor education.’Footnote ¹³⁷ Booth justified this mitigation of emancipatory aims by stating that what is ‘appropriate’ depends on the situation and power of different individuals and groups. For example, for a nuclear superpower he sees ‘a process-utopian policy’ to be one which involves moving from nuclear pre-emption to minimum deterrent levels.Footnote ¹³⁸ However, one could contend that living with MADness, no matter at what minimum level, is hardly a utopian program and one which is not justified epistemologically by Booth’s theory, regardless of the normative concerns we could also raise against it. Instead of imagining a nuclear free world, Booth downgrades utopian hope to minimum nuclear capacities which begs the question what is a minimum level and for whom? Instead of imagining the elimination of nuclear arms we are left only with their minimisation – an end that is now re-cast as utopian. Carr’s fear of sterility, impotence and determinism that would flow from the dominance of realism has come full circle.

Others, like Nicholson, have pursued utopian realism by reference to democratic peace postulates and have pointed to gradual moral improvements over time (such as the lessening of slavery) as indicative of such utopianism.Footnote ¹³⁹ Yet this hardly evokes the power of imagination and is in fact contradicted by empirical evidence. References abound as to the growth of actual slavery, despite its formal prohibition.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ These two examples from Booth and Nicholson reveal how utopian realism gives far too great a concession to realist parameters so as to ensure that its approach is ‘proximately’ rather than ‘remotely’ possible. This need to proximate reality is never ontologically justified in the tradition of utopian realism and has rendered the worst features of world order to remain unopposed by it. So while Booth asks us to ‘confront the rigidity that is in our minds’ in making his appeal to utopian realism, one could ask the very same of the programmatic aspects of his theory.Footnote ¹⁴¹ In distinction to the confines of utopian realism, we must emphasise the need to remove utopian imaginings as far as possible from collaboration with existent dominant ideologies in order to re-appropriate imagination as an instrument of opposition and alterity. I contend that utopian realism does not sufficiently achieve this end and instead encloses political imagination within the confines of a realist agenda.Footnote ¹⁴²

The problems associated with the project of utopian realism largely stem from its uncritical reliance on aspects of Rawlsian morality.Footnote ¹⁴³ The issue is not only Rawls’ dubious references to the international sphereFootnote ¹⁴⁴ but because the political alternatives that he derives under his veil of ignorance serve only to justify a romanticised form of liberal democracy. For Rawls, a ‘realistic utopia’ is a condition where the ‘great evils’ such as unjust war, oppression, religious persecution and slavery (note that inequality, gender and racial discriminations, and environmental problems are downplayed) have been banished through the establishment of ‘just’ basic institutionsFootnote ¹⁴⁵ – a reductionism of the utopian impulse clearly mirrored in the reformist agendas of Booth and Nicholson. The ‘veil of ignorance’, even as a tool for ethical abstraction, does not lead Rawls to espouse the right of all to be self-directing and autonomous beings. Rather, Rawls leaves in place the operation of the ‘difference principle’ and all the iniquitous outcomes that flow from it. All that Rawls imagines is a place where persons have an equal right to ‘basic liberties’ which is hardly an extension on century’s old liberal conceptions regarding rights endowment. Further problems centre on his Eurocentric conception of what constitutes a ‘well-ordered society’, the penultimate standard of which is the ideal, modern, liberal state – though he does suggest that other forms could also qualify.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ As such, Rawls’ merely validates the existent, bereft of its many possibilities for emancipation. So despite Brown’s insistence that ‘nothing has been compromised’ in Rawls’ attempt to balance realism and utopianism,Footnote ¹⁴⁷ it is obvious that the promise of more radical types of reforms, what Moylan has called the demand for the impossible, is completely absent in Rawls’ formulaic system. This is reflected in Rawls’ own admission that his utopia does not settle for a ‘compromise’ between power and justice ‘but sets limits to the reasonable exercise of power.’Footnote ¹⁴⁸ What this reveals is the intrinsically negative character of Rawls’ ‘realistic utopia’ in that it seeks to make only ‘reasonable’ limitations to the exercise of power and therefore precludes the imagination of any alternatives outside that very framework.

Towards an open-dialectical utopian imaginary

As we have seen from the above discussion, the case against utopianism in both realism and political philosophy is relatively weak. The brunt of the realist criticism is applicable only against blueprint utopias, a concept long jettisoned in Utopian Studies, and rather than confirming the irrelevance of utopian thought, reveals a powerful realist/utopian dialectic that affords an important role for the utopian imagination in world politics. Having already illustrated the problems with the anti-utopian thesis, I wish in this final section to highlight the positive aspects of the utopian imagination and how it may serve to widen the ambit of IR theory. While there are certainly limitations to utopian thinking,Footnote ¹⁵⁰ the vehemence of utopia’s critics has meant that they have inadequately reflected on the constructive, ideational role that the utopian imaginary can play. As expressed by de Jouvenal above, picturing the ‘good day’ is the first step in leading to progressive change and in this way the utopian imagination and the search for the ‘real’ conditions for their fulfilment are mutually related. It is this fantasising power of imagination that is the productive element of utopianism, its projection of novel solutions to current problems that broadens the horizon of our conceptions of possibility and offers long term goals to our endeavours in world politics. It is in exercising this long-dormant imaginative function that can envision the future that is the crucial feature, and benefit, of utopian thought.Footnote ¹⁵¹

In distinction to futurism which extrapolates from the conditions of the present a prognostication for the future (and thus absorbs the stifling conditions of the present),Footnote ¹⁵² the open-dialectical utopianism advocated here, maintains a non-deterministic view of the world. It is characterised by a belief in the possibility of progressive development through the capacity of human reason to help shape social conditions, to pull the process of change from in front.Footnote ¹⁵³ In distinction to blueprint utopias, the key benefit of the utopian imaginary is what Kateb has described as its ability in setting the tone of what life in utopia could be. It crowns Proteus the symbol of utopianism by embodying self-expression, mutability and responsibility to the changing needs of future generations,Footnote ¹⁵⁴ alongside Prometheus as the elemental figure symbolising the imaginative inventive capacities of humankind. The benefit of such plurality and openness regarding conceptions of utopia is that by hypothesis we can explore the normative content of each claim without the evasiveness, subterfuge and sophistry that typically accompany such debates. Moreover, the benefit of placing imagination as central to theorising is that it requires one to labour on exactly what they are really seeking and in so doing reveals the theorists own values and dreams of a ‘better worldFootnote ¹⁵⁵ – questions typically camouflaged in mainstream approaches to IR. The ontology of utopianism is thus a theoretical advancement over the value ‘shyness’ of other approaches as the examination of norms, values and ideals is the central purpose of its philosophical inquiry and it openly confronts such issues discursively. People can respond to the idola of any given representation of utopia – they can accept, reject, contest or modify its ruminations – and through their capacity to react creatively on their environment, develop ‘better’ ways of life. Without such disclosure, theories would lack an account of their own projections which would make the particular measures or ends that they offer justifiable.Footnote ¹⁵⁶

What utopian thought enables is the opening up of debate on choice and possibilities in a world that postmodern thinkers like Derrida and Foucault have correctly described as being ‘undecidable’Footnote ¹⁵⁷ and ‘open’.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Tillich has labelled this the ‘anticipatory inventiveness’ of utopianism and describes how it ‘opens up’ possibilities of human fulfilment that may have otherwise been lost.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Tillich’s account is important because it sets up a dialectic between the positive and negative meanings of utopia, between truth/untruth, fruitfulness/unfruitfulness and power/impotence. In Tillich’s view, to reject utopianism outright would be to reject what human artifice and invention are now capable of.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Humankind today can strive for conditions of freedom hitherto unthinkable, yet the perception of the capabilities of our rational faculties has degenerated to such an extent that many approaches tacitly accept the positivist dogma that only that which is objectively verifiable can be considered sufficiently non-utopian to be an erstwhile object of human endeavour.Footnote ¹⁶¹ This pervasive scepticism unnecessarily limits the possibility of betterment to objective content alone and narrows the horizon of possibility to within the parameters of acceptability set by representatives of the status quo themselves.

The question is why the human political imagination is still so impoverished and denies itself the ability to theorise on ‘better’ conditions, given that it is today potentially so liberated from material constraints?Footnote ¹⁶² Instead of nihilistic despair or the acceptance of the immutability thesis, the question should be what are we now to do with our knowledge and power?Footnote ¹⁶³ The problem is that IR theory remains reticent to re-evaluate utopianism based on its earlier rejection of the tradition by classical realism. Such obstinacy has left little room for conceptual movement. Seeing as though anti-utopianism has been a central ideological pillar upholding the existing world order this reticence is hardly unsurprising. Yet, any one of the counterfactuals of the realist position demonstrated in this article should be enough to warrant an urgent reappraisal of the viability of utopian thought in IR. The problem for the future development of world politics is that without imagination and visions of betterment, our conceptualisation of world politics will soon become, as Mumford quipped, ‘empty of useful furniture’ and the choice will no longer be one between no place or a good place, but nothingness.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ As such, I posit that we must examine our political imaginations anew and explore utopian ideals that could assist in reconstituting our political landscape towards ‘betterment’.

Fortunately, recent developments have shown a resurgent interest in the topic of utopianism. Of note is a new compilation by Hayden and el-Ojeili who have described utopianism as involving the ‘triple task’ of subjecting the politics of the present to critique, imagining alternative human communities and preventing the foreclosure of political possibilities in the present and future. These writers have posited that globalisation is replete with positive potentials for the fundamental transformation of the world if IR theory is able to overcome its ‘presently existing limitations of imagination’.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Moreover, a recent paper by Ian Hall has argued that IR could yet benefit from the utopian construction of ‘imaginary worlds’.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ These works have been paralleled with recent studies in political philosophy, Marxian studies and even game theory, not to mention the significant developments in Utopian Studies itself.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ However, while these recent works offer fundamental insights, they do not make central the imaginative aspects of the utopian project which, to this writer at least, gives meaning and purpose to the very notion of Eutopia as ‘no place and a good place’.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ For example, Hall limits the purview of utopianism to a method of critique through comedic and satirical portrayals of existing socio-political reality rather than defending the potential of utopian imagination to envision the ‘good life’ as a legitimate aspect of IR theory.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ A similar problem has arisen in a recent piece by Elshtain which makes some astute observations highlighting the problems associated with realism’s reliance on the Hobbesian imaginary but then seems to call for the re-invention of an Augustinian framework rather than appealing to the utopian imagination as a creative influence in world politics.Footnote ¹⁷⁰

Under the approach advocated here, utopianism is not some passive device but an active ideal that makes central the notion that we are co-creators of our world who possess the ability to generate the visions and conditions of a remarkably appealing world.Footnote ¹⁷¹ Utopia is not considered a closed system where future developments are precluded. Instead, utopianism becomes a ‘mental exercise on lateral possibilities’Footnote ¹⁷² – a process, rather than a framework. However, this form of processual, open-dialectical utopianism does not fall into the false duality between timeless ideals and temporal reality that so troubles utopian blueprints, nor does it suffer from the dubious normative compromises that so infects the tradition of utopian-realism. It escapes the disillusionment that comes from such approaches because it suggests that what is hoped for changes throughout history and need not unduly constrain its imaginary to what others perceive as precluding change. This preserves the spirit of utopia, not its letter.Footnote ¹⁷³ But neither does it fall prey to voluntarism because it remains aware of its embeddedness in the world – with all its limiting conditions – and the productive dialectical push and pull that the tension between reality and utopia engenders. This idea follows Oscar Wilde’s sentiment of utopianism as the progressive realisation of innumerable Utopias which humanity again and again reaches the shores of, and again and again sets sail for something better.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ The conceptual task is to now make the logical corrective to our definition of utopianism from one of static ‘perfection’ to one of indefinable limits, open-ended developments and pluralistic values, a utopianism that recognises its provisionality and partialityFootnote ¹⁷⁵ just as it recognises the need to discuss these openly. Only in this way, can utopianism move with the ever-changing needs of the future, be resistant to theoretical monism, and continue to imagine new possibilities and hope.

Taking this open-dialectical approach, contemporary utopian thought can circumvent its two principle criticisms; that such models create systems of rigid conformity or possess a totalising conception of the ‘good life’. In distinction to Plato’s attempt to render his Republic immune to change, the ceaseless process of self-transformation is placed at the very heart of the utopian project.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ Similarly, open-dialectical utopianism need not rely on the problematic assumption of a universal harmony of interest that, in the words of Engels, purports to emancipate ‘all humanity at once’.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ It is not concerned with establishing a realm of uniformity set for all time but rather with initiating a self-consciously directed course of dialectical development that forms and re-forms the conditions of human emancipation. Such sentiments are echoed by Geras who provides for a ‘modest’ platform of utopia that is concerned with a life of free self-developmentFootnote ¹⁷⁸ and Fournier, who is concerned with creating the material conditions for the cultivation of possibilities and (re)claiming control over the ways in which we organise our lives; a ‘movement of hope’.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ This open-dialectical utopianism would resist closure around any touted “best” alternative and instead exist in a dialectical tension created by the juxtaposition of multiple possibilities.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Pursuing ‘betterness’ however, should not be taken as limiting the utopian imaginary to mere reformism, or to risk its attenuation by losing sight of the sublime as a possibility.Footnote ¹⁸¹ Rather, the term betterment should be seen as alluding to the impermanence of change and the ongoing renewal of conceptions of ‘betterment’ (and of the movements towards it) and not as a limitation on what is considered actually possible.

In similar fashion, Harvey has called utopian imagination the ‘signifiers of our desires’Footnote ¹⁸² – a recurring motif in his attempt to construct a utopianism that is explicitly ‘spatiotemporal.’ For Harvey, this involves the operation of ‘imaginative spatial play’ to achieve specific moral and social goals, an endless experimentation with the possibilities of spatial forms that allows for the exploration of alternative and emancipatory strategies.Footnote ¹⁸³ This ‘play’ does not evoke a static emancipatory process but is a dialectical movement that remains rooted in our present possibilities while at the same time pointing towards different trajectories. Harvey draws much inspiration from Unger’s work on utopia which looked to alternatives that emerge out of the critical and practical engagements from within existing institutions. In this way, Harvey and Unger believe that by changing our institutions we can change ourselves; and through the desire to change ourselves, we can alter our institutions. They do not therefore present a picture of a perfect society but instead look towards the potential for the conscious ‘redrawing’ of our maps of possibility and desirable forms of human association’.Footnote ¹⁸⁴

Similarly, Levitas has sought to clarify and provide a new definition of utopia which she frames under the constellation of ‘the education of desire’.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ She finds that while the content, form and function of utopias may change over time that the constant element in utopian thought is the expression of desire for better ways of being and living.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ It is by reflecting on these desires which are left unfulfilled in existing conditions that opens the space that utopia occupies.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ She considers a broad rather than restrictive definition of utopianism to be essential and holds that utopia need not necessarily be immediately possible.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ Instead, she allows for the freeing up of the ‘explorations of desire’ so that utopias only have to present transition as being a vaguely defined event – a possibility rather than inevitability. Moreover, she seeks to avoid imbuing utopia with normative content so that it is not seen as being necessarily oppositional. By changing focus from an understanding of utopia as relating specifically to form to one of desire and imagination, Levitas enables us to explore changes in the form of utopia over time and cultures.Footnote ¹⁸⁹

What flows from this emphasis on utopian imagination is the acknowledgement that solutions need to be created – they will not arise automatically from historical and economic developments alone, nor are they precluded by alleged self-perpetuating world systems. This imagining of alternate worlds is the productive role that utopianism can play in expanding the focus of IR theory. Its most salient feature is its rejection of historical necessity (including realism’s immutability thesis) and its appeal to constructive human thought and agency in emancipating the present and building the future. In this way utopianism can become an instrument of praxis by motivating change and evoking in the imagination another place where obstacles to freedom are removed and other freedoms gained.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ The power of utopia is, like Kierkegaard said of the will, ‘the passion of possibility’,Footnote ¹⁹¹ and it is this key characteristic, found nowhere else in political theory, that underlies the importance of utopianism as the realm of imagination and possibility in IR theory. This does not mean, like Engels remarked, that the theorist has to ‘serve the reader on a platter the future historical resolution of the social conflicts which he describes’Footnote ¹⁹² but it does mean that the vision of utopia that animates the critique of existing society should be made explicit because it remains the underlying motive of the theory whether it is explicitly stated as such or not. The goal is to render alternatives more vivid and less fixed.Footnote ¹⁹³ Such an approach would emancipate IR theory from its aporia, the false duality between political reality and political imagination which condemns political thought to the pillories in which it is transfixed between an inability to think practically or imaginatively about its object or its purpose.

This open-dialectical utopianism evades totalitarianism by being open in its discourse and plural in its imaginings – the Utopians of Sir Thomas More, it must be noted, did not assert that theirs was a model amenable to all.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ This open-dialectical utopianism can remit a myriad of interpretations within it, all of which envisage ‘betterness’.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ In this form, utopianism is a social process in which we develop our ideas through open, practical dialogueFootnote ¹⁹⁶ – the point is to ensure that all can and do give voice to their imagination, openly and discursively. As expressed by Jameson, the utopian imaginary does not promise a humanity of perfection but one released from the multiple determinisms of history (economic, political and social), in order to be free to do whatever humanity wants with the intersubjective relationships within it.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ We must accept the limits of utopianism and openly acknowledge all utopian accounts as transitory, partial, preliminary, ambiguous, something that we can all judge, and to whose finitude we admit.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ It is this openness that allows the ongoing development of different imaginations of utopia. As we all co-create reality it is through processes of dialogue that both the utopian author and their conception of the ‘good life’ will change, and in so doing, will open up completely new kinds of political community, new utopian shores.Footnote ¹⁹⁹