LEVEL 1 - 11 OF 35 STORIES
    Copyright 1993 Information Access Company, a Thomson Corporation Company
                                      ASAP
       Copyright 1993 Statesman and Nation Publishing Company Ltd. (UK)
                            New Statesman & Society

                               November 26, 1993

SECTION: Vol. 6 ; No. 280 ; Pg. 37; ISSN: 0954-2361

LENGTH: 1052 words

HEADLINE: Paradise Dreamed: How Utopian Thinkers Have Changed the Modern
World._book reviews

BYLINE: Porter, Roy

 BODY:
    Do dreamers change the world? If so, do their dreams inevitable turn to
Waco-like nigghtmares? This ambitious history of utopias raises such key issues,
but the Singtons have perhaps bitten off more than they can chew. Paradise
Dreamed offers a sequence of lucid expositions of the canonical utopian texts:
Thomas More's Utopia itself, of course, but also preceding works, notably Plato's Republic 
and such key later blueprints as Bacon's New Atlantis, Fourier's New World, William Morris'
News From Nowhere (with its remedievalised Hammersmith), B F Skinner's behaviourist 
Walden Two and others.

    Nor do the Singtons confine themselves to ideas. They also examine
bricks-and-mortar utopias, such as Oneida and the Owenite communities in the New
World. Especially in the closing chapters, "dystopias" come into the picture,
notably Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, with its dissection of bureaucratic
hedonism.

    This, the unproblematic aspect of the book, makes for stimulating reading,
because the Singtons skilfully pinpoint the vital preoccupations of
utopia-mongers. They highlight the driving desire to forge an authentic
community. That is why so many of yesterday's tomorrows take the form of an
ideal city.

    Communities, of course, suggest communism and the abolition of private
property in the name of social justice. Increasingly common, from the
Enlightenment, has been the goal of sexual liberation. Both Diiderot's fantasy
of Tahiti, the isle of free love, and Fourier's schedules for public orgies
aimed to emancipate mankind from the ills of Christian asceticism.
 Erotic liberty generally requires the elimination of the family; and form
Plato onwards, utopian communities have often commandeered sex for social ends
through eugenics, securing the future perfect by prescribed breeding. Most
utopias having been penned by males. Not surprisingly, this has often meant
polygamy. In their anatomy of utopias, the Singtons avoid the seductions of
crude judgmentalism or psychobiography: the interpretation of utopian vision as
projections of individual hang-ups.

    The genre, however, poses puzzles that the Sington's don't really resolve,
particularly if we are concerned witht he status of  utopian thinking  today.
What, at bottom, constitutes utopianism? What makes it fundamentally different
from regular social criticism or any manifesto of the future? Does its essence
lie in the fantasy elements, thus inviting the reactionary put-down of "utopian"
as applied to anyone who has got what George Bush called "the vision thing"?

    Doubtless, utopias have been mooted by authors who never epected to see them
implemented--who, indeed, did not want the realisation of ideas that were
"thought experiments" rather than paradigm societies. Thomas More, the original
utopian, was probably of that ilk. But others--St Simon, Fourier and the
Owenites--expected the fulfillment of their shapes of things ot come.
                      
    Is perfection, then, the core idea? Or does the heart of a utopia lie in the
tabula rasa: a clean slate, a radically different order of things either in the
future or at some major geographical remove (over the rainbow)? As Le Corbusier
insisted, one must "build on a clear site". The Singtons are partial to this
notion--that utopia is, at bottom, the blotting out of history, a "clear break
with the past"--but they don't fully clarify the issue. One result is that there
are some odd inclusions, including de Sade, while major utopian types have been
left out, including almost the whole of today's science fiction--surely the most
imaginative body of utopian writings ever.

    These are not pedantic matters, for the label "utopian" is fraught with
value judgments. Take Marx. Marx set himself up as a great adversary of
utopianism; yet for the Singtons he is a prime specimen of the beast (though
surely, the last thing Marx the historical materialist was doing was erasing
history). Marx, of course, is commonly dubbed a utopian by those using the term
disaparagingly to denote dogmatist whoe whoolly head has got the better of his
heart, or worse, a monster of inhumanity. Ever since Burke, "utopian" has served
the domonology of the right to denote a dedluded idealist, by implication
megalomaniac and psychopathic.

    The Singtons flirt a bit with that position, maintaining in the later
chapters that in the name of virtue, justice or equality, the utopian mode
readily becomes totalitarian, inimical to freedom and indivudually. Rousseau's
quixotic vision of the general will, they believe (following Talmon's Origins of
totalitarian Democracy), engendered French revolutionaly terror, just as the
Marxist dream later paved the way for Stalin. Utopia (one might declare,
amending madame Roland)--what crimes have been committed in thy name!

    Utopiansm, in this reading, comes to mean something akin to a fatal
obsession with ideological purity or abstract logic at the expense of humanity.
And, as is signalled by their subtitle, the Singtons are concerned with the
practical reverberations of utopian schemes. For utopianism, they argue, ahs
been more than philosophy seminars in the Athens sun; it has been the midwife of
modern political realities.

    Here they seem to offer contradictory messages. "Beware" signs are erected.
Rather in the manner of Popper's Open Society and its Enemies, they warn that
the road to hell may be paved with good utopias. Rousseauian or Marxist ideals
of justice may have been noble, but look where they led. The politics of
perfection must make way for the art of the possible. Yet the twist in the
Sington's tail is that they don't conclude with the hackneyed right-wing homily
abou the evils of ideology. They fly a flag for utopianism: visions are needed
to leaven the lump; they give us goals and hope.

      Large questions are thus raised about the relevance of utopianism today. Are
utopians dreamers, or frustrated dictators? Is utopianism a blessing or a bane?
Do all attempts to create heaven on earth end in Waco? This book does not solve
these problems, not least because it does not trace the impact of utopian ideas
rigorously enough. But in dark days when idealism has becomes a dirty word, the
vision of More, Marx and Morris is heartening indeed

    Roy Porter is senior lecturer at the Wellcome Institute

GRAPHIC: Photograph

IAC-NUMBER: IAC 14795947

IAC-CLASS: Magazine; Trade & Industry

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

LOAD-DATE: September 07, 1995