The Quest For Utopia
Pauline Hadaway
When Eric Hobsbawn, one of the foremost historians of the twentieth century, was invited to address the World Political Forum in 2005, almost fifteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he used his speech to express admiration for Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, and architect of perestroika, who died last week, aged 91. Extolling the almost bloodless transition from communism to post-communism in Eastern Europe, while lamenting the social, economic and cultural catastrophe that followed, Hobsbawn proclaimed that the world had witnessed ‘the last of the utopian projects, so characteristic of the last century’. Perhaps surprisingly, ‘the last of the utopian projects’ was not an allusion to Soviet communism, but rather to the epic triumph of Western capitalism and the associated belief that liberal democracy now represented the final, ideal mode of government. Addressing the Forum - with its audience of political, business and cultural leaders and its impeccably utopian mission ‘to solve the crucial problems that affect humankind today’ - Hobsbawn, a lifelong Marxist, declared that it was the visions of liberal, not socialist utopias that now epitomised the triumph of hope over historical realism.
Two years ago, The Liverpool Salon discussed the economic future of the North, in the light of recently made election promises to level up forgotten towns and regions, where growth had lagged behind the prosperous Southeast. In the middle of Britain’s first national lockdown, the future looked grim, yet barely 12 weeks earlier, UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak had pledged some £640 billion capital investment in roads, railways, schools, hospitals and power networks, promising that ‘no region will be left behind’. After decades promoting the values of individual responsibility, the benefits of privatisation and the evil of state handouts, was a Tory government prepared to rip up its fiscal rule book to lay the ground for a new Jerusalem in Labour’s old northern heartlands? Similarly, Manchester’s metro mayor, Andy Burnham, warned there would be no return to ‘business as usual’, now that the pandemic had exposed the gaps in social care systems and the weaknesses of the gig economy. Appealing for consensus and cooperation, Burnham called on civic leaders to get behind his strategy to ‘build back better’, based on valuing the dignity of labour and fostering mutual dependency and community support. Having grown great cities of culture from the dung of deindustrialisation, were Britain’s metro mayors ditching their enthusiasm for trickle-down economics and dreaming of a return to grass-roots socialism? The world transformed by an unlooked-for natural event is an archetypal theme in utopian – and dystopian – fiction. Were these grandiose visions of transformation to new and better ways of living, a genuine map to the future or nothing more than flights of fancy, designed to distract us all from the deepening political crisis?
Of all the grandiose political projects that emerged from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Marxism, the ideological foundation of Soviet communism, made the most audacious claims – not least of which was the belief in its own historical necessity as part of the onward drive of human progress. However, communism’s grand promises of peace and freedom rang hollow during the period of Soviet communism, which saw the creation of some of the world's most militarized and ruthless police states. The murderous tyranny of Stalin’s Great Purge saw the execution of at least 750,000 people deemed ‘enemies of the state’ with many more sent to the Siberian Gulags. After Stalin, the remaining power and authority of the Soviet system rested on its promise to harness the forces of industrial modernity to banish scarcity and ensure economic security and well-being for all. Though hard to imagine from today’s perspective, the Cold War was as much a competition over the best way to organise the future of humanity, as it was a race to build more nuclear missiles and tanks. The question of which system – capitalism or communism – offered the best means of meeting human needs was central. Looking back, the whole Cold War period abounds in paradox. At its height, and in the midst of a terrifying escalation of the arms race which threatened global nuclear annihilation, and with brutal proxy wars raging in Africa and South East Asia, populations from both sides of the Iron Curtain still maintained their belief in the possibility of peaceful international cooperation. Importantly, both sides still believed in the certainty of future material progress. At a time of rising expectations, as the world tried to put the devastation and depravities of WW2 behind it, the ideological resentments that had frozen East-West relations were simultaneously fuelling intense competition over the rival systems’ capacity to deliver cultural, educational and medical advances and to expand the bounds of knowledge and scientific exploration for – both claimed - the benefit of all mankind.
The struggle between competing visions of the future took a somewhat bizarre turn in 1959 at the opening of the American National Exhibition in Moscow’s Sokolniki Park, designed to display the very best in American life to a curious Russian public – in cars, homes, fashion, art, and - that great icon of American modernity - Pepsi Cola. Against the surreal backdrop of an American model kitchen display, a heated argument erupted between US vice-president Richard Nixon and Soviet First Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev. Nixon boasted that capitalism had provided American steel workers with affordable homes, dish-washers and colour TVs, provoking first-secretary Nikita Khrushchev’s angry riposte:
“Is that what America is capable of, and how long has she existed? 300 years? 150 years of independence and this is her level. We haven't quite reached 42 years, and in another 7 years, we'll be at the level of America, and after that we'll go farther.”
In the shadow of a model kitchen display, US Vice-President, Richard Nixon and USSR Premier, Nikita Khrushchev debated their competing visions of the future before reporters and onlookers at the American National Exhibition (1959). Their impromptu exchange became known as the Kitchen Debate.
The fact that the Soviets were willing to host such an event might be seen as a testament to their own cultural confidence at the time. Thirty years on from the kitchen debate, the USSR had dissolved into chaos, consigned to the dustbin of history, along with its own futuristic visions of space colonization, flying cars, jet-packs and miracle kitchens for all. Good riddance, declared hard-headed economic realists and monetarists like Milton Friedman and Margaret Thatcher, while promptly proclaiming the triumph of their own vision of property ownership and purchasing power as the pinnacle of human happiness and freedom.
This ‘Last Utopia’ was thus conceived as the old one heaved its last, its future guaranteed within a harmonious framework of global institutions and markets, to which there could be no alternative.
‘The impulse to imagine new lands of plenty or to yearn for a vanished golden age is as old as human civilisation. After all, what do the ancient myths of the lost island of Atlantis or of Moses leading his people to the Promised Land constitute but a sense of a better way of doing things always just beyond reach.’
After the shock and pain, first, of the 1970s oil crisis, then of de-industrialisation, the triumph of the free market ushered in an era of abundance, as capital flowed to low-cost destinations, profits soared and cheaper imports drove up standards of living. Falling prices and easy credit brought foreign holidays, electronic goods, luxury cars and miracle kitchens within reach of millions in western democracies and eventually to citizens in the old communist bloc and across the developing world. The 1990s saw the return of large-scale public spending in Britain, investment in schools and hospitals and the beautification of grim post-industrial cities, like Glasgow, Manchester and Newcastle. The expansion of the cultural economy stimulated new industrial activity based on media and communications, tourism, leisure and design. From near-costless telephone calls to online streaming and advanced communication, the giveaway economy of the turn of the century even engendered – albeit briefly - a freewheeling idealism and revolutionary optimism redolent of the 1960s. The global financial crisis of 2008 revealed that the networks of markets and global supply chains holding up this brave new world were little more than a great house of cards.
Thirty years on from the end of the Cold War, we appear to be waving a fond farewell to the promised era of abundance, and witnessing history’s rapid return. As world leaders rub their eyes and adjust to the changed reality, it is still unclear what kind of future will finally emerge from the ruins of the old system. We seem to be approaching a new day of reckoning, when promises of peace and prosperity secured within a harmonious commonwealth of markets may prove as illusory as earlier promises of peace and freedom, begging the question: can a perfect world ever be realised?
Speculation on the ideal state goes back at least to Plato’s account of a perfectly ordered Republic ruled by philosopher-kings, while the impulse to imagine new lands of plenty or to yearn for a vanished golden age is as old as human civilisation. After all, what do the ancient myths of the lost island of Atlantis or of Moses leading his people to the Promised Land constitute but a sense of a better way of doing things always just beyond reach. However, the term utopia, only dates to the beginning of the early modern period, with Thomas More’s 1516 fictional account of the discovery of the island of Utopia, an ideal commonwealth, situated somewhere in the new world, likely southeast of Brazil. Apart from naming a whole genre of political writing and thinking, More’s Utopia brought the speculative premise of building a more perfect order closer to reality. One of the ways of making Utopia seem credible was the adoption of a prevalent form of story-telling: the returning traveller who gives an eyewitness account of a curious distant land that seems both similar, and yet more attractive, pleasing and sensibly ordered than his own.
Taking the voyages of real-life Florentine explorer, Amerigo Vespucci as its model, More’s Utopia purported to be a literal rather than allegorical account. The supposed truth of Utopia’s perfections comes with a caveat from the author that fantasies of human perfection inevitably fall apart in the encounter with reality. While More, ever the sceptical narrator, frequently pokes fun at the absurdities of the Utopian system, the credibility of the tale he recounts is undermined by the name he gives to his traveller: Hythloday, Greek for ‘talker of nonsense’. Indeed, the first utopia effectively demolishes the whole utopian premise. More coined the word from the Greek ou-topos meaning 'no place' or 'nowhere', with a nod to the almost identical Greek word eu-topos which means a ‘good place’. In other words, the ideal place that does not exist.
‘The idealisation of a centrally organized international order, dominated by great powers, governed by a professional administration, consulting with teams of academics, lawyers, diplomats, philosophers, doctors and entrepreneurs, while keeping the masses at arms-length from political decision-making, only goes to show that one man or woman’s dream of utopia is another’s idea of hell on earth.’
One of the most striking of Utopia’s many excellent perfections arises from the absence of private property and the abolition of money, where all things are held in ‘common to every man’. A century later, a very different vision of perfection was created in the highly technocratic Bensalemite nation depicted within Francis Bacon’s novel, New Atlantis. For the rulers of Bensalem, perfection lay in an endless expansion of knowledge and power over nature to enlarge ‘the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible.’ The imaginary government, economy, laws, practices of war, customs and religions of More’s humanist and Bacon’s scientific utopias recognisably prefigure numerous social and economic experiments that have followed in Britain, Europe and the United States. Published 150 years after Utopia, James Harrington’s, The Commonwealth of Oceana was both an exposition of an ideal constitution and a practical guide for the government of England’s new Cromwellian republic. Those who chose to abandon England for a better life in the American colonies often did so in pursuit of their own dreams of utopia, like the seventeenth-century Puritans with their ‘city on a hill’ in Massachusetts Bay.
Having taken concrete form in the English, American and French revolutions, utopian ideals of liberty, equality, the pursuit of happiness and a more harmonious order have become deeply embedded in the political psyches of men and women in the modern world. The nineteenth-century was a particularly fertile time for social experimentation, with the utopian socialism of Charles Fourier and Robert Owen inspiring attempts to establish ideal communities in Europe and the US. Enlightened industrialists built their own ideal company towns, like Saltaire in Bradford, Merseyside's Port Sunlight and Pullman in Chicago, designed to showcase the potential beauty and order of life under industrialism capitalism.
Utopia in space. In 1975, after a study into future space colonies, Nasa commissioned a series of illustrations to imagine what they might look like. Technology and nature sat side-by-side in this doughnut-shaped structure. Rick Guidice / NASA Ames Research Center
Characteristically sceptical of utopianism, the liberals and neoliberals were latecomers to the quest for utopia. W.E. Gladstone, the first great leader of the Liberal party, proclaimed that he would not be diverted from the task of ‘effecting great good for the people of England’ by speculating on ‘what might possibly be attained in Utopia’. By the end of the nineteenth century those sections of Liberal thought critical of the ‘false phantoms’ of imperial glory - the little Englanders and the Manchester Liberals, like Cobden and Bright - had given way to the proponents of global expansion, which saw Britain as a force for good in the world. After the horrors of the Great War, Liberal utopians contemplated a future world state, set up and led by an enlightened committee of wise and tolerant rulers, rather like the ‘voluntary nobility’ imagined by H.G. Wells in the novel, A Modern Utopia. The idealisation of a centrally organized international order, dominated by great powers, governed by a professional administration, consulting with teams of academics, lawyers, diplomats, philosophers, doctors and entrepreneurs, while keeping the masses at arms-length from political decision-making, only goes to show that one man or woman’s dream of utopia is another’s idea of hell on earth. Oscar Wilde wrote that ‘a map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing’. When humanity lands, he went on to say, ‘it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail’. While many of the problems and imagined solutions that excited early utopian thinkers continue to perplex us, our enthusiasm for setting sail in search of new worlds has – not surprisingly – faded.
Oscar Wilde rightly observed that the realisation of utopia lies in material progress. Today, however, we seem more inclined to expect the worse, than hope for better times. In another paradox, the triumph of capitalist democracy appears to have deepened the level of hostility towards the historical benefits it has achieved. Mass consumption is reviled as crass consumerism, manufacturing and scientific progress seen as destroyers of the planet, while popular democracy is recast as dangerous populism. Believing that history has taught us that the road to dystopias of disorder and tyranny are paved with dreams of perfection, Faustian dystopias haunt our dreams of building a better world. For new generations setting out on their own quest for utopia - at the end of the end of history - the fundamental question is not so much the possibility, but the desirability of realising a perfect world.
Pauline Hadaway is a writer, researcher and co-founder of The Liverpool Salon, which has been hosting public discussions around philosophical, political and cultural topics on Merseyside for over seven years.
Book Now
The Liverpool Salon presents The Quest for Utopia
Liverpool Athenaeum, Thursday 15 September 6.30 pm
Buy tickets
Join us at Liverpool’s iconic Athenaeum club for The Quest for Utopia, the first in a new series of public conversations that take utopia and dystopia as themes for exploring the possibilities of building other, and better, societies, while reflecting on the shortcomings of our own.