Meditations on the impossible.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Milner, Andrew
• Date: 01 January 2006

The word 'utopia' was coined by Thomas More in 1516, but recognizably utopian 'ideal states' had been staples of literary and philosophical imagining ever since antiquity: important examples included Plato's Republic and the Hebrew books of Chronicles. More derived his word from the Greek outopia, meaning no place, rather than eutopia, meaning good place, (1) but subsequent use tended to revolve around the latter. In the European tradition, there has been a continuing tension in the conceptualization of ideal societies between, respectively, an aspiration to dominate nature and a desire for reconciliation with it. Hence, the contrast between Bacon's New Atlantis, (2) first published in 1627, and More's own Utopia. With Romanticism, the latter conception temporarily came to the fore, but both still retain their force in the contemporary Western imagination. From the Enlightenment on, notions of historical progress increasingly tended to substitute the idea of a better (future) time, literally euchronia, for that of a better place. This was true for both rationalist and Romantic variants of the utopian imagination. Witness the two best-known Anglophone 19th-century utopias, Edward Bellamy's scientistic Looking Backward 2000-1887 and William Morris' neo-Romantic News from Nowhere, first published, respectively, in 1888 and 1890, both of which were extremely influential on early Australian socialism. (3)

Bellamy's and Morris' very different socialisms attest to the wider political significance of 19th-century utopianism. But in the 20th century these earlier utopian traditions were progressively displaced by supposedly more 'scientific' understandings of progress, whether liberal, Fabian or marxist. An early formulation of this opposition is Engels' 1880 pamphlet Socialism, Utopianism and Scientific. (4) After 1917, the Bolshevik experiment in Russia justified itself in precisely such Engelsian terms, so that the wider communist movement and its even larger periphery on the broader Left of the Western labour movement became increasingly antiutopian in their politics. On the Right and on the anti-communist Left, there occurred a parallel decentring of utopianism, in which the dominant literary and philosophical modes became the critique of communism and other totalitarianisms as utopias gone sour, that is, as dystopia. Important examples included Zamyatin's We and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. By the mid-20th century, then, the utopian tradition appeared to have fallen into disrepute. There were important exceptions, most obviously in the critical 'Western Marxism' of Adorno, Benjamin and Bloch, (5) but their work tended to remain at the margins of contemporary debate.

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