In her essay “The Liberalism of Fear,” Judith Shklar famously proclaims that liberalism is “entirely nonutopian.”Footnote 1 In his new book, a highly original contribution to the political theory of literary dystopianism, Matthew Benjamin Cole challenges this view. His central argument is that the dystopian literature of the twentieth century actually constitutes its own form of “social imaginary,” an inverse utopianism that can serve as a guide to how we think about political ideals in light of these explorations of the dark side of modern political possibilities. On this account, dystopias have had “a constructive role to play in orienting our ethical and political thinking toward the future” (4). Dystopian writers like Yevgeny Zamyatin, George Orwell, and Aldous Huxley are usually read as “anti-utopian,” that is, as per se opposed to utopian thinking as such. But Cole’s reinterpretation of these writers holds that they can be read as proposing their own ideals about political possibilities. Dystopia becomes, on this read, its own a unique form of utopian thinking.
Cole begins by contrasting “modern utopianism,” a reflection of the possibilities inherent into early modern scientific and historical thought, with a more moderate version of utopianism he proposes as a way to “once again make the future an open prospect” (145). He identifies refers to two essential aspects of modern utopianism: “mastery” and “futurity” (34). The awareness of an open-ended historical horizon, combined with the realization that mankind can shape this horizon through technique, becomes constitutive of modern utopian projects. Figures like Condorcet and Marx are reinterpreted as proponents of such “open futures”: Marx’s utopian schema “could remain viable without the scaffolding of historical law” (68). Accordingly, Cole sets aside Weber’s worries about the dark possibilities of ever-increasing mastery: “Weber could offer nothing more than a clear-sighted … diagnosis of the perils that lay ahead” (64). More on this below.
The greatest contribution of this excellent book comes in its interpretive stance toward some of the great dystopian writers of the twentieth century. Cole makes much of the fact that, D-503, the main character in Zamyatin’s We undergoes an “amputation of the imagination” (62). Similarly, Huxley’s lesser-known novel dystopia Island seems to demand that humanity as a whole chart “an alternative course” (89). Political quietism or withdrawal is a recipe for disaster. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is read as showing what happens when the “utopian imagination … is extinguished” (97). Thus, “It is this final defeat of utopian strivings, more than the establishment of state surveillance or the centralization of the economy, that brings the terrifying, post-totalitarian world of Nineteen Eighty-Four into the range of human possibility” (101).
Cole then shows how fears of the “total state,” “the masses,” and technological mastery arose as a result of the social imaginary shaped by dystopian literature—that is, an imaginary shaped by conventional anti-utopian readings of these works. On Cole’s account, Erich Fromm, Hannah Arendt, and Herbert Marcuse (among others) fall into this camp. Cole convincingly demonstrates that dystopian literature influenced these thinkers, but probably understates the extent to which their these thinkers’ approach to these questions also stems from first-hand observation of totalitarianism in action. This is understandable given the aims of his argument.
These masterful reinterpretations are then employed in chapter 4 to show that political theorists like Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, and Michel Foucault share a concern that freedom “must be continually defended against and disentangled from an array of dominating and dehumanizing forces” (150). In other words, dystopianism formed political thinkers in the twentieth century to pursue take a sort of via negativa to new understandings of what human freedom means in light of new political, social, and technological threats to such freedom. This is probably the book’s greatest insight: in the modern age, the way we understand ourselves as human beings comes about primarily by in imagining (or historically observing) how we can destroy our humanity.
In the end, Cole’s broader argument succeeds only if one accepts his revisionist definition of “utopia.” He wonders whether “utopia … might survive without perfection,” asserting that “utopians could concede that their visions would only ever be approximated” and pursue them “as ideals, if not as blueprints” (69). This would mean reading utopianism as a “vision of a better future” without “finalism” and “totalism” (212).
Of course, the thinkers he calls anti-utopians (e.g., Shklar, Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, Jacob Talmon) would deny the possibility of such a construal of the term in principle. For them, something like finalism and totalism are a necessary part of its essence. This is why Weber had worrieds about the so-called “iron cage of reason,” which he thought characterized the modern world. Given this, rationalized utopian projects tend, by their very nature, toward closure or finality. It is also why thinkers like Karl Löwith and Eric Voegelin chose to critique totalitarianism on the level of philosophy of history. For them, utopian thinking means thinking in terms of historical totalities. They might respond to Cole’s argument by saying that a politics of “moderate utopia,” defined as “a vision of human potential and collective flourishing,” sounds looks more like a politics of prudence than a utopia (212).
What Cole does show is that our late modern age may require a more imaginative approach to public policy concerns than that which Shklar or Berlin’s approaches might allow suggest is required. Perhaps we do indeed need more than a politics which only seeks only to “navigate between lesser evils” (212). Addressing climate change and rapid technological and economic disruption may well require such a politics. But does this require utopian thinking? Readers may wonder.
Despite these reservations, These quibbles aside, however, the book is a remarkable achievement. It will stand as remains a highly original and valuable contribution to the scholarship on the question of the relation between the dystopian writers and twentieth-century political thought. The insightful political interpretations of the dystopian literature are especially insightful long overdue, while the sections on how some of the great political theorists of the preceding century were influenced by them are thoughtfully presented deftly presented. The book will also be useful helpful for overview for background reading for graduate courses in twentieth-century political theory or for those looking for a helpful introduction to the thinkers and subjects surveyed. But more importantly, Cole’s book will stand for the foreseeable future as a major contribution to the study of dystopian literature’s impact on political thought.
