Utopia

Mark Stephen Jendrysik’s Utopia is an introduction to utopianism as a genre of literary and political writing; it consists of eight chapters and 135 pages including references and index. Thus, as a type of book, it echoes to varying degrees Marie Louise Berneri’s Journey Through Utopia (1950), Robert C. Elliott’s The Shape of Utopia (1970), and Lyman Tower Sargent’s Utopia: A Very Short Introduction (2010). Shorter introductions invite comparison with more comprehensive treatments, such as Utopian Thought in the Western World by Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel (1979). However, even such a very long survey leaves things out that this or that reader might wish to see included. William Morris said of his News from Nowhere (1890) that any picture of utopia must be personal to the author; perhaps the same is true of introductory books about utopian literature. On the other hand, a scholarly text is different from a novel and might be expected to include and deal with at least a representative sample of what scholars in the field would recognize as canonical utopian texts. Jendrysik does this and does it very well, with a particular emphasis on political ideas as a unifying theme in his survey of the tradition.In a recent reflective personal piece on Star Trek and utopianism, Jendrysik suggests that the original Star Trek series “rejects utopia as an achieved space and instead supports the vision of utopia as social dreaming. The fact that the human race goes on, that there is hope for a better future, might be the most utopian thing about all Star Trek series.”1 Jendrysik’s Utopia begins with a nuanced and scholarly definition of utopianism as a mode of political thought. Although it is a scholarly treatment, the book is animated by the same grounded hopefulness as in Jendrysik’s personal reminiscence about Star Trek’s influence on his utopian teaching and scholarship. Both article and book underline that the human condition is contested, ambiguous, uncertain, unresolved, and dangerous, yet both choose to be hopeful about what humanity may be able to dream and to achieve.Jendrysik’s background as a political theorist informs the introduction; he suggests that “the nature of political life, the distribution of power among individuals and in society, and the legitimacy of authority over the community lie at the heart of utopian thought” (2–3). The definition of utopianism references important scholars in the field such as Ernst Bloch, Gregory Claeys, Ruth Levitas, Lyman Tower, Sargent, and others. The “retro-utopianism” that suggests a return to some ideal past is cautioned against, as is the tendency to apply the term utopian to almost any kind of political change. Jendrysik insists that the focus for utopia must be on political arrangements as they are worked out by human beings, not arrived at by magic or other fantastic means. The book deals with Western world utopian thought because Jendrysik expects “that the students who use this book will be concentrated mainly in the English-speaking world” (16). This is, therefore, intended primarily as a book for university students, yet there is much in it for students of utopia who may be any age.Chapter 2, on ancient utopianism, references Krishnan Kumar’s suggestion that for many centuries the dominant modes of utopian thought were either Athenian or Spartan. Jendrysik emphasizes Spartan discipline and commitment to equality; he contrasts the Spartan city with the hierarchical city of The Republic (c. 375 BCE) by Plato, hierarchical because political justice demands that the more gifted citizens become the guardians and the philosopher-kings. Although the contrast of Spartan and Athenian ways is useful, because it anticipates a thematic binary that runs through the entire utopian tradition, I would myself have included something more than brief references to Aristotle. Aristotle was the student of Plato and he explicitly challenged Plato’s idea of state unity with his own emphasis on multiple voices and political plurality. The survey of ancient utopianism concludes with a discussion of the Bible and rightly observes that, on the whole, the Bible does not see utopian-level improvements as possible in the sinful, earthly realm.Jendrysik suggests in chapter 3 that to understand the society described in Book Two of Utopia (1516), we must understand Thomas More’s idea of justice, referencing the central importance of justice to the Republic described by Plato. This chapter provides an admirable introduction to what is undoubtedly the foundational text of the utopian tradition. Due attention is given to the early modern historical context and to key features of More’s biography. The focus is on Utopia as a political document, but the political here is well connected to social and religious ideas. One of the great virtues of a utopian text is that it does connect the aspects that are often separated in academic and theoretical silos, offering a virtual working model of a functioning society, rather than simply presenting an idea to reform politics or improve education. Jendrysik’s discussion of politics in utopian society concludes by emphasizing one of the most radical things about Utopia. This is the view of More’s Utopians that a changed environment will lead to changes in human behavior, such as ensuring a decent living for all to remove or greatly reduce the inclination to steal. More also suggests this in Book One, when Cardinal Morton agrees that they should try Hythloday’s more humane method of dealing with thieves, as an experiment to see what will happen. To place nurture above nature in estimating the capacity of humans to improve, as well as to invoke the experimental method, is indeed radical a century before the usually accepted dates for the scientific revolution.An advantage of Jendrysik’s focus on the political is a fresh perspective about conventional historical divisions. He states in chapter 4 that the “three great revolutions of early modern times, the English, the American and the French, each saw utopian thinkers put forward plans for the reconstruction of society” (44). This discussion includes Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers, James Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), Thomas Paine, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I particularly like the conclusion to this chapter, in which Jendrysik asks what these “revolutionary utopians have in common” (55). He answers that the common factor is the belief “that human beings are free to shape their world through acts of will” (55) and that this is “the key utopian idea” (56). He is correct to suggest that this is both “liberating and frightening” (56) since the power to make things better implies that the power could be used to make things worse.A fundamental problem for the scholar who is surveying a large field is whether to discuss the material in a linear and chronological way or to discuss it in topical categories that may be more logically coherent. Jendrysik achieves a workable balance in his chapters 5 and 6. In chapter 5 he presents nineteenth-century utopianism as a response to the Industrial Revolution’s profound dislocations. He includes Charles Fourier, Étienne Cabet, Robert Owen, and other utopian reformers, proceeding from there to a discussion of four important literary utopias published between 1888 and 1915: “Edward Bellamy’s Disciplined Utopia,” “Morris’s Pastoral Utopia,” “H. G. Wells’s Platonic Utopia,” and “Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Feminist Utopia.” This book is part of a series about “Key Concepts in Political Theory,” so it is appropriate that the emphasis in these short discussions of each text is political, including, of course, that Morris proposes a future society that does not have politics beyond the local motes for deciding practical questions. Mid-twentieth-century examples include B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two (1948), and concerns expressed by critics about its hierarchical nature; Aldous Huxley’s Island (1962), whose bleak ending signals “the death of utopia”; and Ecotopia (1979) by Ernest Callenbach, some of whose ideas and emphases have become “absurd or embarrassing in the last forty years” (71). Jendrysik suggests such factors as perhaps a reason for “the decline of the literary utopia” and an increase in cynicism (71). These comments are clear and somewhat provocative and would be a good basis for classroom discussion of the texts. For example, I would certainly want to challenge the idea that Huxley’s Pala follows Plato, and that “change can only be seen as a movement away from perfection” (69). In choosing Aristotle for the epigraph to Island, Huxley disavows Platonic idealism; although it is a stable society, it is much more like More’s Utopia in its willingness to consider new ideas and to change. Chapter 5 concludes with a useful discussion of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), seeing it as committed to the idea of utopia as a process rather than as a destination defined forever by a blueprint, which has certainly become the prevailing view among utopian scholars of today.The political theory emphasis of this book, and the series of which it is a part, lead to chapter 6 on utopia in relation to ideology. Various utopian scholars have focused on this issue, with a consensus view that although ideology and utopia are closely related, since, as Sargent writes, “there is a utopia at the heart of every ideology” (qtd. on 77), they are different concepts; when utopian ideas rigidify into an ideology, their proponents have often sought tyrannical power to enforce them. The chapter then asks us to rewind the clock to the 1840s for a discussion of Marx’s ideas and the question of whether Marx can be considered as a utopian. Jendrysik covers the scornful rejection of “utopian socialism” and the ultimate communism in which the state shall have withered away; here Jendrysik cites Kumar on the irony that Marx absorbed this idea from the utopian socialist Fourier (79). This chapter on ideology also discusses Bloch’s The Principle of Hope (1954–59), Milton Friedman’s libertarian “capitalist manifesto” in Capitalism and Freedom (1962), Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), and several modern feminist texts after Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). In the final section of this chapter, Jendrysik asks, “Whither Utopian Thought?” He points out the increasingly negative response to utopian ideas, because in the twentieth century they became so closely associated with totalitarian inhumanity, but he cites Vincent Geoghegan’s point that Auschwitz is not the only possible consequence of utopian thinking (90).Chapter 7 provides a very effective explanation of the political paradox that utopian ideologies can turn into despotisms. Examples include Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1879–80), Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924), Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), and several more recent dystopian texts that reflect contemporary concerns with ecology and artificial intelligence. He provides some examples from the movies, as he does throughout the book, including Blade Runner (1982) and Gattaca (1997), as well as the video-game series BioShock (2007, 2010). Jendrysik writes, “Hope provides the essential focus of utopian thought. Fear provides the essential focus in dystopia” (92).The concluding chapter asks, “Does Utopia Have a Future?” Jendrysik documents a variety of opinions that utopia is dead, but he proceeds to make a deeply-felt argument that utopia is an essential aspect of political theory. He cites some hopeful examples, such as the Martian transformation imagined by Kim Stanley Robinson or the challenge to totalitarian regimes in young adult works such as The Giver (1993) and The Hunger Games (2008). The conclusion includes five propositions about utopia and five propositions for utopian contemporary political thought. These are clearly intended to stimulate discussions about utopian ideas by students of any age, since they embody contradictions (such as that utopia has been realized because many now live in material splendor relative to former times, yet that utopia is impossible because of corrupt human nature). Myself being a student of utopianism in the “any age” category, I found much in this book to think about. I believe it would be an excellent resource for courses in utopianism or for courses with a utopian emphasis within traditional disciplines.