For the five hundred years since Thomas More first depicted the island of Utopia, the portrayal of an ideal social system has intrigued generations of authors. The concept served a double purpose: it applied to an ideal place (eutopia) but also an imaginary, unrealizable one (utopia). Although the search for utopia started from the Classical Age, More invented the genre and hundreds of utopian thinkers followed in his footsteps trying to predict how life would unfold and provide a detailed description of an ideal (or nonideal) future society. From H. G. Wells and Aldous Huxley to Arthur C. Clarke and Ursula Le Guin, successful and popular authors showed a deep concern for future living and working conditions. If the past is another country, the growing literature of utopian thought suggests that the future can be a whole continent. Several undiscovered countries lay in waiting and intellectual historians have often been fascinated by the dense explorations of the utopian writers.Footnote 1
Gregory Claeys, professor of the history of political thought at Royal Holloway, has made a bold and synthetic attempt to map the world of utopias and dystopias. In broad strokes, he surveys the influences of the idea of utopia in history. His well-written books combine erudite research, often in uncommon fields, with fresh approaches and provocative argumentation. Claeys provides not only the biographical details of several authors but also an in-depth analysis of the ideas and debates across the Western world. There is also an effort to discuss less well-known texts. For example, one can read about a few extra-European visions and the first utopian visions after the voyages of discovery to the New World. In addition, his book on utopias is much more approachable for the general public than the more academic one on dystopias, as it is accompanied by 206 illustrations, 141 of which are in colour.
On closer reading, however, it becomes evident that Claeys, the cartographer of Utopia, brings his own categories into his practice. As Manuel and Kumar did before him, so too does he approach the land of Utopia as a “paradise lost” and tends to underplay the modern revivals of utopia, as well as the political implications of twentieth-century socialist policies. This is not anything new. At least since the end of the 1980s, several scholars have spoken of a “decline” or an “end” of utopia, some of a transgression, a few of a resurgence.Footnote 2 However, the development of social and natural sciences, the cultural and technological revolutions and, above all, the world significance of the October Revolution have played a tremendous role in a new kind of utopian resurgence. One cannot fully understand the modifications of the utopian literature without these parameters. The “caveman's century” was also the “cosmonaut's century.”Footnote 3
In Talmonian fashion, Clayes's map of utopia tries to draw clear borders between the two different interpretations of modernity: one utopian and one dystopian, one liberal and one totalitarian, one ideal and one practical. However, the relationship between utopia and dystopia proved to be more complicated in the last two hundred years and the borders of utopia were never so rigid. In reality, modern utopia represented itself in a hybrid guise, combining both old utopian and dystopian motives; presenting them in new forms; and popularizing them not only in books but also in comics, games, television series and films. Twentieth-century utopias were produced amidst, and coloured by, two world wars, the Cold War, the scientific and technological revolutions, and the intensification of a general crisis in capitalist societies. While space exploration opened new paths to the “unknown,” it also led to Reagan's Star Wars. On the one hand, human civilization faced economic crises, oil crises, civil wars in Third World countries and theocratic dictatorships; on the other hand, the labour movement, the student movement, feminism and anticolonialism articulated new sets of rights and values.Footnote 4
Defining Utopia
In Searching for Utopia, Claeys distinguishes utopia from the wishes and principles of hope; utopia is defined as the imagined “space between the possible and the impossible” (15). Its origins (although never quite explained) seem to lie in the myths of the classical period. Hesiod's Works and Days, Homer's Odyssey, Ovid's Metamorphoses discuss the lost golden ages or the places of purity and harmony. Christianity creates the archetypes of the Garden of Eden and Paradise while the non-Christian religious traditions offer different variations of heaven such as the ultimate Enlightenment, the Land of Life or the final Pure Land. As the author rightly suggests, what distinguishes modern utopia is that it “places much greater weight on human efficacy in this life” (13). Human beings are capable of creating their own destiny. Thomas More's Utopia is an earthly island controlled by imperfect humans. Utopia begins to leap from the realm of perfection into the realm of process and possible applicability. Robinsonades and Gulliveriana are the two Janus faces of this new vision: the first creating utopias in desert islands, the other satirizing them.
Modern utopians have turned out to be more practical than their ancient predecessors. From the English Revolution to the American and French Revolutions, millions of people held a mixture of utopian and nonutopian ideas. In their efforts to create harmonious communities, hundreds of religious communal societies, millenarian sects and utopian socialists retained strong connections with the utopian tradition. One is puzzled, though, by the author's claim that the more practical utopia becomes, the more it “ceases to dream” (99). This position assumes that the revolutions, starting with the prime example of the French Revolution, signal the “mutation of utopia into dystopia” (108). Revolutionary fervour, ideas of progress and modernization, such as industrialization and urbanization, are mainly seen as restrictions in the utopian project. Revolutionary socialism is understood as arrogant, chimerical politics and Karl Marx's dialectics as a mere continuation of the utopian tradition.Footnote 5
This outlook becomes more evident in Dystopia: A Natural History. If Searching for Utopia is a journey through history's greatest plausible dreams, Claeys's book on dystopia presents itself as a “natural history” of realizable nightmares. He starts with an attempt to define the latter, then approaches the real-life “dystopias,” and then completes the journey with a literary history of the genre (with a special focus on Aldous Huxley and George Orwell). The problem with the natural histories of societies or ideas is their attempt to naturalize the social processes. Ideas consist of things seeming to have a value inherent in them when, in fact, their value is produced by humans themselves. For natural historians, it may be an easy task to equate communism and fascism by using a heavily conceptualized, taxonomic scale of fear and terror; for social historians, things look more complicated: ideas are drawn from people's experiences and quite often reflect different realities. Claeys's neo-Orwellian reading of twentieth-century socialism is primarily based on subjective voices and historical accounts influenced by the theories of totalitarianism. Gustave Le Bon's reactionary identification of people's masses with irrational crowds provides the book with its theoretical compass. Thus mass ideology becomes another form of “social religion,” modern revolutions are equated to “social autism” and the postrevolutionary human agency seems totally subjected to discipline and punishment (21, 57).Footnote 6
This interpretation of socialist politics ultimately serves its own utopian agenda. History wears the mask of dystopia to hide the present “dystopian” reality and await its new “more liberal and forward-looking” prophets. It is primarily based on the author's previous work, which explored the utopian origins of early nineteenth-century socialism, the chimerical visions of the early British utopian writers and the relationship between Marxism and utopianism.Footnote 7 In his latest endeavour, Claeys presents most post-1789 radical social formations as modern forms of despotism. While he insists that utopia and dystopia are twins from the same parents, he reproaches the latter offspring for its “extreme ethos of sociability” (8). It is a hypothesis not well formulated. Since More's time, one can detect such extremities in both utopias and dystopias, from their initiatives to the daily lives of their subjects. By the same token, dystopias often included their moderate places, times and seers.
Stemming from the totalitarian model, Claeys's narrative lacks a dialectical understanding of modernity as a combination of catastrophe and progress, advancement and regression, utopianism and dystopianism. Several modern social historians have rejected totalitarian interpretations of the past by showing the differences between the so-called totalitarian systems and their internal social mobility.Footnote 8 According to Enzo Traverso, the totalitarian model of exegesis is based on highly selective comparisons between different social systems and is often used to designate the enemies of liberal democracy.Footnote 9 For Domenico Losurdo, it offers a new utopian schematology of salvation and redemption, which is ultimately derived from Christian theology.Footnote 10 For Juan Francisco Fuentes, it is an “invented tradition” that moulds “the past in the image and likeness of the present.”Footnote 11 Following Fuentes, it would not be an exaggeration to look at modern utopias as “invented traditions”: ideological mechanisms which can be used to provide future social cohesion, legitimacy and new forms of socialization, and require a dialectical approach of their own development. What is especially important (and missing from Claeys's diptych) is a co-examination and juxtaposition of utopian and dystopian traditions in their synchronic and diachronic dimensions. Such a method may demonstrate how modern utopia responded to the anti-utopian pageants and attained a mixture of utopian and anti-utopian elements in order to rejuvenate itself.
A crisis of the utopian paradigm?
The history of utopia is intrinsically connected with the parody of utopian ideals (known variously as “cacotopia,” “dystopia” or “negative utopia”). The debate between “optimists” and “pessimists” is not new. Certain ideas from both streams might coexist in the same books, and different authors might use the same utopian or dystopian ideals in different ways with similar assumptions. Although the notions of utopia and dystopia have changed through the ages, utopianists are almost as old as their opponents. Krishan Kumar's idea that Thomas More invented “a novel and far-reaching conception of the possibilities of human and social transformation,” which also provoked anti-utopian sentiment, has been quite rightly seen as absurd.Footnote 12 At least since ancient times, both utopian and anti-utopian trends have coexisted. Plato's discussion of a future regime of communal ownership in Republic was contemporaneous with Aristophanes’ satirical depiction of women taking power in The Ecclesiazusae.Footnote 13 For every Utopia by a More, there were several equivalents of Bernard Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees. Despite various attempts to intimidate social dreaming, utopia and dystopia have supported and fed each other through the ages, presenting their views of the future from different angles.
Claeys realizes that the prehistory of the genre goes at least as far back as classical Athens but he never quite explores its social origins. In his thought, dystopia is intrinsically connected to a revolt against modern “despotism,” the true and only child of modern “collectivism.” Earlier monstrosities and persecution manias are seen as demonstrations of the human psyche or effects of the magical worldview. Their real inheritor is the Christian Devil who conquered the souls of early modern Europe so that “Satan's powers came to dominate Europeans as no fear of an ethereal being had ever done before” (109). What were the material causes that gave rise to this sympathy for the “Devil”? Are all “Devils” similar? Were they all just part of a mechanism of oppression? Things become more reductionist and manicheistic for Claeys as he approaches the modern era. He never truly acknowledges the dynamics of social revolutions or the social and political complexity of socialist systems (never treated in the plural) and treats revolutionary groups as perpetrators and victims of a collective paranoia.Footnote 14 By far the largest part of his analysis of modern utopian thought is dedicated to a detailed and practically oriented discussion of disillusions with utopian promises and experiments. Thus the twentieth century is presented as the prime time of universalized dystopias.
In essence, though, the faces of utopia were multiplied in the twentieth century in both East and West.Footnote 15 Several contemporary utopias and uchronias, retro-utopias and techno-utopias, feminist and ecological utopias, formed the basis of political thinking and practice. Utopian thought is ultimately hidden in contemporary utopianism and has passed on its transforming effects and irrational values to the latter. In terms of periodization, one may speak of two different peaks of utopian writing: the first is connected to the general socioeconomic crisis of the 1920s and the other to the utopian projects of the 1960s and 1970s when there was a revival of utopianism in various ways and forms.Footnote 16 Both periods had their own normative or nonnormative accounts of utopian thought, some based on “official” narratives and others on popular accounts and beliefs. Nowadays, utopian thought and utopianism are evident in everything from modernist art and architecture to the Hollywood “dream factory,”Footnote 17 from religious traditions to political theories around the world.Footnote 18
Still, one may suggest that the twentieth century equally proved a fertile time for the growth of dystopian (satire of utopia) and mainly anti-utopian (negation of utopia) literature.Footnote 19 This was certainly the case for the first half, but it is not the whole story. The impact of novels such as Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (1921), Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) is crucial to contemporary anti-utopian ideas, which not only portrayed undesirable worlds but dismissed utopia per se. These books regarded the rise of modern industrial states as inherently problematic, and it is no accident that they were all published in the interwar period, alongside the development of the concept of “totalitarianism.” As several scholars of utopian thought have suggested, an optimistic vision of the future was at that point abandoned due to their common disbelief in progress and/or fear of political change. Anti-utopians saw utopia as “a form of subjectivism which ignore[d] the fact that we cannot reshape the world in our own image.”Footnote 20 One of their main aims was to illuminate what they perceived as utopian thought's undermining of the traditional humanistic foundations of society. “Utopias appear to be much easier to realise than one formerly believed,”Footnote 21 Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev noted in a phrase that summed up the fears of anti-utopian writers.
To a certain extent, one may agree with the idea that “the whole rise of antiutopianism can be interpreted as a manifestation of hostility to the aspirations of the French Enlightenment and the French Revolution.”Footnote 22 Zamyatin's hostility towards social change, Huxley's horror of modern technological advances and Orwell's depiction of a totalitarian state questioned the hope that human reason would lead to a more humane society. Although they justly criticized utopians for their a priori schematizations of the future, their complete skepticism of any general sense of human progress strengthened the fear of political experimentation and technological advancement. Modern utopian thought, a theoretical stream of the Enlightenment, had found its first real enemies, and they did not believe in the same ideals of progress as Enlightenment thinkers did. In many ways, the anti-utopian turn did not go beyond a mere negation of the status quo and was skeptical of any forces of political radicalism. Zamyatin wanted to preserve “the wild hurricane of ancient life” and Orwell was afraid of the modern “vast system of mental cheating.”Footnote 23 Their later quietism and retreat to the supposedly preindustrial environments (Llano, Jura) was a case in point. Their world was not one of hope, but of disenchantment.
Claeys's Orwell is not a man of unconstructed pessimism, ultimately due to the fact that he talked about the British proletariat whose so-called robustness would resist totalitarianism (Dystopia, 436). However, as E. P. Thompson had shown, Orwell's politics contributed to what Thompson dubbed a “Natopolitan culture”.Footnote 24 If there was ever an optimistic hinge in Orwell's writings, it was not revolutionary, or indeed utopian. In general, modern anti-utopianism tried to deal the final blow to utopian aspirations. It promised the “death of utopia” by ridiculing its intentions and criticizing its “totalitarian violence.” Still, by the 1960s it was already evident that the effort had failed. The emergence of several utopian books and practices and the parallel failure of an emerging anti-utopian tradition created new forms of utopianism.Footnote 25 Despite the political crisis of the 1930s and 1940s, utopia was alive in the mass democratic movements of Europe and the United States. Anti-utopianism did not disappear,Footnote 26 but disillusionment with modern social norms found new ways to express itself. What essentially happened was the emergence of a new kind of utopian literature with a self-critical attitude to its own laws and aims. Utopia would not give rise any more to the same old simplistic and crude depictions of future reality, but try to incorporate some anti-utopian elements in order to express itself more convincingly.
A response to dystopia
The utopian dream changed its character in the first half of the twentieth century. First, the increasing role of state capitalism and the gradual development of welfare-state theories affected the ideals of utopian writers. The relationship between the utopian state and its citizens was now reviewed and intensely reexamined. New questions were raised about the role of individual freedom, state machinery and restrictions on democratic participation. However, the most important question seemed to be whether the radical changes in science and technology would ameliorate future social conditions. This question of social progress proved to be the most discussed and interesting one of the utopian tradition. The old discussion about technology and rationality, initiated by Tommaso Campanella and Francis Bacon and continued by Karl Mannheim and Max Weber, reached new heights. While skeptics from Ignatius Donelly to Lewis Mumford and Kurt Vonegut demonstrated the failures of scientific revolutions, other thinkers deified the impact of technology.Footnote 27
Although Claeys never offers a comparative history of the two genres, one can easily recognize that the first attacks on the anti-utopian turn actually came from within the anti-utopian tradition. This is quite important, as Claeys downplays this point by sympathizing with those scholars who argue that the “difference between utopia and dystopia comes down to a matter of point of view” (Dystopia, 284). Still, one cannot understand utopia and anti-utopia without analyzing their interrelationship. For instance, H. G. Wells's A Modern Utopia (1905) can be seen as an antidote to his deeply pessimistic novel The Time Machine (1895)—possibly the birth of modern science fiction. Profoundly inspired by the futuristic aspects of Edward Bellamy's vision,Footnote 28 Wells's utopia was a technocratic prophecy. The depoliticized society of the future would be run by a ruling elite: the Samurai. Like Plato's guardians, these fit, trained and noble persons would form “the real body of the State” and run an ascetic life.Footnote 29 The state would control its citizens’ individuality by using rational, scientific methods and keep private property intact. Wells's utopia was connected to a certain type of early twentieth-century utopian literature, whose aim was to transform the West's democratic institutions. In contrast to the anti-utopian trend, this new kind of utopia emphasized the roles of efficiency, technical skills and management. It also reflected the crisis of liberal ideology and stood as a critique of pessimistic views about the future.Footnote 30
Wells's dream of a Samurai-controlled utopia was just the precursor for a series of postwar technocratic theories, which extended the idea of a society regulated by skilled persons—mostly managers and engineers. A utopian spirit was evident in several sociological theories, which tried to define the future world as a “new industrial” or “postindustrial” society. From Daniel Bell and John Kenneth Galbraith to B. F. Skinner, the dream of a better society would be materialized through the technology of the future. For some, this meant rationality and efficiency, while others spoke of a “technology of behaviour.”Footnote 31 Obviously, this technocratic trend was not always welcome, especially in academic circles where more traditional perspectives (Robert Nozick) or negative attitudes towards utopian projects (Ralf Dahrendorff, Karl Popper) prevailed. Slowly but steadily in the postwar era, an academic opposition to any kind of historical transcendence began to be articulated, its subtext that modern societies should remain close to traditional values and norms or defend utopia on “pragmatic,” “realistic” grounds.Footnote 32 It was one thing to speak about utopian projects and another to try to give them shape.
Clayes's analysis misses the opportunity to elaborate on the transmutations of the utopian dream after the Second World War. Due to his zealous effort to illustrate the (non-Western) contemporary world as the kingdom of dystopia, he often ignores or denigrates several postwar utopian visions. However, in the postwar years one could witness the rise of a new utopianism, which coincided with an upsurge of “new social movements” and the exploration of novel ways of living. Youthful factions, especially within the New Left, wanted to change society as a whole. Hopes for the possibility of an alternative form of political and social life tried to overcome the pessimism of the interwar years. Modern communes tried to create new models of social development and personal interaction. A combination of new pedagogical, moral and political methods was developed which questioned old practices and gave rise to new possibilities. Of course, this kind of “counterculture” did not become a massive international movement, perhaps because of the absence of the political and class organizations of the workers’ movement. Still, its protest against the suffering and dehumanization of state control and its bureaucratic institutions showed the growing concern among citizens, especially the “traditional intellectuals” and the young,Footnote 33 about the rise of authoritarianism and the oppressive conformity of state policies.
Along with the rise of modern utopianism, there was a new plethora of utopias, semi-utopias and futuristic fantasies. One may divide this trend into two tendencies: the first tried to incorporate utopianism into the contemporary political system. The utopia of neoliberalism as the guarantor of freedom is such a case. In Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom (1962), economic freedom becomes a vital means for future political freedom. This neoliberal utopia found its inspiration in the liberal tradition of the nineteenth century and opposed all forms of socialist policies. Friedman's monetarist paradise would be founded under the rule of money and consist of free markets, free enterprises and free entrepreneurs (excluding any idea such as a “free lunch”).Footnote 34 Friedman's allusions led him to defend Augusto Pinochet's junta for its highly neoliberal “shock treatment.” He also counselled several other Western governments on fiscal policies and created the space for the Chicago group to institutionalize neoliberalism in the 1980s.Footnote 35
The other tendency was democratic or militant utopianism. It arose in the 1960s and 1970s, when several writers and scholars “discovered” the island of Utopia in the activities of radicalized students and urban outsiders. The search for a democratic or socialist alternative to the status quo was the main reason behind the activities of several protest movements and radical groups, for example the Students for a Democratic Society in the USA or some of the left-wing collectives of the May 1968 events in Paris. Futurology was suddenly a respectable intellectual pursuit, with Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave (1980) becoming one of the best examples of a democratic futuristic project. Despite the fact that his project was not essentially anticapitalist, Toffler spoke of a new, postindustrial “Information Age,” which would leave behind the old hunter-gatherer and industrial societies and create an assault on bureaucratic standards, nation-states, monetary wealth and representative democracy. Based on the advancements of information technology and biotechnology, Toffler (as well as Rudolf Bahro, André Gorz and, more recently, Jeremy Rifkin and Paul Mason) aimed to eliminate the burden of state politics and create an alternative, postindustrial or postcapitalist future without taking into consideration “the political economic strength and experience of the labor movement.”Footnote 36
The rise and fall of New Leftist literature played an important role in the making of militant utopianism. Some of the main New Leftist ideas came from the Frankfurt school and other left-wing academics, who played a key role in shaping the thoughts of some leftist students in the 1960s. Ernst Bloch's idea of utopia as a process, Erich Fromm's utopian socialism based on his idea of a “sane society” and Herbert Marcuse's emphasis on the psychic liberation of “Eros” created new vocabularies of hope but failed to delineate any steps towards the realization of their dreams.Footnote 37 Most of these thinkers did not actually focus on the operability of modern social revolutions, and their main emphasis was on cultural revolts, communitarian hypotheses or student power. Thus “the New Left perceived alienation as the main problem, not exploitation or material depravation.”Footnote 38 In a way, its critique was mainly an antithesis to bureaucratic, industrialized societies without an alternative, a contempt for modern technological advances combined with a revolutionist rhetoric without revolutionary practice.
Brave new world in need of revision
The principal archenemy of most modern utopias and dystopias was the modern capitalist system, which Claeys neither describes as dystopia per se nor does he analyze its modifications. Still, hundreds of new utopias came to the fore with a mixture of capitalist and anticapitalist characteristics. The ambiguities of these new utopian ventures—not analysed by Claeys—emanated from a profound ideological crisis. First of all, there was a marked tendency towards the “scientization of politics” (Jürgen Habermas) and a growing connection to science fiction (Tom Moylan, Fredric Jameson). There was also a self-critical element as the idea of different plausible futures became more evident. Postindustrial utopia is a good example, with its main feature being an effort to depict a more technocratic future, taking into account contemporary social and technological developments.
It was H. G. Wells who first claimed that modern utopia should be more dynamic and “kinetic” as opposed to the (inherently anti-utopian) idea of utopia as a static vision. He thought that modern utopia “must shape not as a permanent state but as a hopeful stage, leading to a long ascent of stages.”Footnote 39 As Simon J. James suggests, “Wells's vision of Utopia, like Darwin's of Nature, is holistic … In order for Darwin's prophecy of a ‘secure future of great length’ to come true, the ideal society must seek to adapt, to improve, and, particularly, for Wells, to encourage specialization.”Footnote 40 Wells thought that modern utopias should not be “citadels but ships of state.”Footnote 41 He brings utopia closer to the idea of a journey, and thus gives more freedom to his utopian navigators. It is not a coincidence that Wells does not offer one but several modern utopias, starting with Modern Utopia and concluding with Men Like Gods (1923). For Wells, the project of utopia is endless and the utopian dream may seem distant, but it is realizable.Footnote 42
Scientific and technological advancements played a role in this move from static to kinetic utopias. Although most utopias of the past responded to the cultural changes of their epoch, the rapid development of modern technologies caused an exceptional integration of the concept of time and its impact on contemporary utopian literature. Clearly, this kind of integration does not mean that modern utopias were not marked by antihistoricist aspects, more that the role of transformation became a fundamental feature of their systems. For Dahrendorf, “the crucial distinction to make here is the distinction between intra-system processes, i.e. changes that are actually part of the design of utopia, and historical change, the direction and outcome of which are not predetermined.”Footnote 43 However, this distinction does not do full justice to the contradictions, ambivalences and potentialities of modern utopias. In modern utopian ventures, one can see that the idea of the future is not permanent, but changes in accordance with human actions. Everyday disturbances, social anxieties and even acts of violence are not fully eliminated. From Wells and Olaf Stapledon to Theodore Roszak and Ernest Callenbach, the ideal society is characterized not only by internal changes, but also by a continual shift in time and imagining of alternative futures.
What Claeys's narrative really does is retell, yet again, the totalitarian account of modernity as a battle between “open” and “closed” societies at the period when the borders between utopia and dystopia had become quite unclear. It is a testament to the influence that this story continues to exert over twenty-first-century intellectual life. It is rooted less in an authentically historical narrative than in an emotional dislike of radically changing modernity. Much of its appeal rests on the claim that utopias and dystopias present themselves as an antithesis, not a synthesis. Utopias are presented as possible variants of the present society, dystopias as befallen utopias that eliminate this society. Both are treated as worlds apart instead of complementary and interlinked aspects of utopian society and social thought. At the same time, revolutions are mainly treated as the drawbacks of utopian certainties instead of fair battles and signals of periods of general improvement.
Nowadays, it is not uncommon to see both hope and despair equally highlighted in the same books. Using side-by-side scientific old utopian recipes with methods borrowed from dystopia, one can easily mistake these utopias for dystopias. For instance, both B. F. Skinner's Walden Two (1984) and Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End (1953) combine technological optimism with evolutionary or apocalyptic pessimism.Footnote 44 Huxley's utopian novel Island (1962), written thirty years after the publication of Brave New World, is another fine example. The author's skeptical outlook towards modern technology does not share the optimism of Skinner and Clarke and betrays a late preference for More before Wells.Footnote 45 Still, and despite that it is more optimistic than its predecessor, “it can also be read as marking a retreat from the suggestion that mankind's great problems could be solved humanely on a global scale” (Dystopia, 386). Depending on one's viewpoint, Island can be seen either as a mere refuge or as an alternative, secluded world. Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed (1974) is both a utopian and a dystopian novel. It is the story of two planets: one capitalist and authoritative and the other where society is ruled without any real enforcement. The importance of the book lies in the fact that these places recognize a new planet (not an island) of hope, and this planet is not alien to its neighbours.
Claeys is at his best when focusing on the early modern literary development of utopia. Readers will enjoy his explorations of various intersecting utopian traditions of the old ages and their dystopian alternatives. However, he misses the opportunity to explore the origins and the history of the modern, kinetic utopia. His hero is Orwell, not Wells. Despite the relative predominance of dystopias in the interwar period, utopian and dystopian links increased from the late nineteenth century and a kind of hybrid utopian literature seemed to prevail after 1945. These were novels in which utopias and dystopias merged, creating a new utopian whole that stood simultaneously as criticism, forecast and nostalgia. Not mirrors of a nightmarish world, but books of a universal moral library. Don Quixote's voice was still plainly heard: “To change the world, Sancho my friend, is neither a utopia nor an act of madness; it's simply justice.”
