Utopia and dystopia

Utopia is a political charge leveled based on questions of means rather than scope. Any self contained political rationality contains understandings about the limits to politics. This includes questions of how and when politics occurs as much as what types of plans for action can be undertaken. And so, the leftist guerilla or the postmodern academic receive the label of utopian theorists for their choices in locating politics either at the level of discourse or the construction of a revolutionary vanguard. Each sees the means for change in ‘alternative’ mechanisms aside from sovereign legislative administration. This also concerns the question of ‘pragmatism’ which establishes a similar standard of authentic/realistic political change based on a theory of political reality that understands human interactions as essentially free but mediated by imposition of law. The charge of utopianism also assumes a ‘legislative’ politics that seeks to establish social uniformity as its end. However, if the goal instead only seeks individual or sectional change, the utopian scope diminishes. It also presents the question of what would a non-utopian demand look like; that didn’t leverage what seem to be ‘unreasonable’ demands. The impoverished view of social and political relationships assumed in these models should be evaluated as urgently as the charges of utopianism denied.

Duncan