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Villemard
"A l'Ecole" [At School]
Visions de l'an 2000, 1910
Chromolithograph
BNF, Département des Estampes et de la Photographie*Of the utopias that have been conceived – in theory, in literature, in reality, on the Internet – which do you find the most appealing, and why? Of the dystopias that have been conceived, which do you find the most terrifying or unpleasant, and why?
Merritt Abrash (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)
The principles and institutions described by Charles Fourier create not merely the most appealing but also the purest of all utopian visions – the only society that allows one to do whatever one likes and still remain wholly oneself. All other utopias require members to do what is best by some external standard – a complex of behaviors and attitudes selected as most suitable for the operation of an ideal society. Members are compelled to conform by means of either threat, scientific conditioning, or persuasion based on the logic that if a society is deemed to be ideal, by definition each member benefits and serves his or her own interest by acting only in socially prescribed ways. Fourier recognized that all such schemes based on imposed standards necessarily restrict either freedom or personal fulfillment. His utopia, organized so that it is precisely the complete freedom and fulfillment of each member that serves the best interests of the society as a whole, is the only one ever developed which overcomes that problem. Its impracticalities are easy to deride, but on a fundamental level are beside the point as regards utopian thought. As Fourier might argue: "Do you wish to solve the paradoxes of unlimited freedom in utopia? I offer the only way this can be done. If you insist that as a practical matter it is not possible, then you might as well abandon humanity's noblest social ideals. I, on the contrary, have shown how such ideals can be fulfilled – now it is humanity's choice whether or not to bring true utopia into existence."
Benjamin Barber (Rutgers University)
Rousseau's ideal community defined by the General Will is a deeply affecting portrait of a democratic utopia which, while unattainable in the modern world (in which conditions of complexity and diversity contravene Rousseau's conditions for democracy) is marked by a practical recognition that politics must be about "men as they are and laws as they ought to be." Although often taken as a nightmare prelude to the Jacobin terror as well as modern totalitarianism, Rousseau's General Will is rooted in the idea of harmonizing the autonomous will of individuals around the interests they share in common. Like all good utopias, Rousseau's own ideal social contract is beyond realization, but stands as a model of equality towards which every democratic community can aspire. Plato's Republic is in certain ways the most frightening dystopia because it is conceived as a utopia. A society in which abstract reason (or those who claim to possess it) can command the rest locks up freedom in the prison of rationality and invites the "brightest and the best" (Halberstam's description of the rationalists who conducted the war in Vietnam) to displace democratic pragmatism with five year plans and thousand year Reichs.
Francesco Battisti (University of Cassino)
I find most appealing the notion that utopia can be constructed online, because the Internet includes visual and textual representations made by literature, film and television. We think that modes of virtual representation of utopias shall become more widespread in the future, as the tools of virtual reality shall become more accessible to people who are not technicians, but are interested in improving the lifestyle in humankind and in representing their intention with the detail of utopian planning. Of the dystopias that have been conceived, some shall persist: poverty for a large share of the world population, especially in the developing countries where aspirations for a better life clash against economic deprivation; the break off of violence, both at the micro and macro level, including war; biological mutations piloted by genetic engineering, capable of creating men inherently unequal in intelligence and skills (human race breeding). Last century’s science fiction looks increasingly realistic.
Robert Fogarty (Antioch College)
Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) depicts a future society that has solved the problem of want and eradicated poverty; yet the novelist at the same time has created a society that suppresses individualism in order to sustain a centralization and efficient state. It is both utopia and dystopia at the same time.
James Gunn (University of Kansas)
I still like Bellamy's Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888), although Hilton's Lost Horizon, separated from society, seems more credible and perhaps more rewarding. Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) still may be the most terrifying dystopia, although I would rank Brunner's The Sheep Look Up (1972) right up there.
Naomi Jacobs (University of Maine)
I like William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890) for its beauty and leisure; the Shaker communities for their quiet simplicity; Mattapoisett of Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) for its passion and color; and the town in Kim Stanley Robinson's Pacific Edge (1990) for its rueful, qualified optimism, its sense of the hard work that is needed to move toward utopia or to sustain the utopian qualities in the real places we love. Octavia Butler's near-future Los Angeles of Parable of the Sower (1993) is the scariest dystopia I've visited lately, for it seems all too plausible. There, social order has almost completely broken down and random violence and destruction rule. Of the older dystopias, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) still frightens me with its vision of a world entirely joyless and hopeless.
Ruth Levitas (University of Bristol)
My favourite utopias are fictional: neither real nor virtual ones match up. They are William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). I first read News from Nowhere a long time ago when I was 17, and have re-read it on many occasions and in many Morris-related places, such as the garden of his country home in Oxfordshire, and the pub opposite his London house at Hammersmith. Part of the attraction is that it transforms a landscape (Hammersmith, London, the Thames Valley) familiar to me all my life: I grew up in Hammersmith. More importantly, Morris’s utopia is essentially about a society based on unalienated labor, in which people get to do many different things rather than being forced to specialize, and where a high value is placed on both on the practical skills supporting life, and on aesthetics. It’s a very green book, too, with many industrial processes and the metropolis abolished, but it isn’t as machine-free as many suppose. Rather, production is decentralized into small workshops spread through the country using clean, abundant energy. Morris incorporates a very Marxist account of the change. The struggle to overthrow corporate capital will not be an easy one, and this is a burning issue for socialists today: how do we change things? The biggest weakness in Morris’s (1890) account (apart from being a bit optimistic about the revolution in 1952) is his treatment of women, who (largely) get to keep house. So on gender politics, I much prefer Piercy’s 1970s novel – also ecological, decentralized, socialist, but with a much greater emphasis on gender politics and interpersonal relations in general. Both share the view that decent relations between individuals, as well as a decent society at the more public level, depend on the material security and equality which eliminates personal economic dependency. The worst dystopias? In fiction, Andrew Macdonald's The Turner Diaries (1978), although it’s meant to be a utopia. But here, reality is more terrifying, and my nightmares have always revolved around the Holocaust.
Elizabeth McCutcheon (University of Hawaii)
I can't claim familiarity with any Internet utopias, I'm afraid, and my knowledge of others is selective. I'm also ambivalent about any utopia, so that "appealing" is not the adjective I would use. "Interesting" and "challenging" are words I'd like to substitute. From this perspective, More's Utopia (1516) is most interesting to me. Why? In part because it asks crucial questions about whether or not a society can be just, and challenges our understanding of social order, community, and human nature. In part because, as I read it, it invites further discussion; I see it as utopian, dystopian, and meta-utopian. In other words, it seems to me to be more capacious - to have a larger range and deeper implications than other writings in the genre, to be better written, and to be more stimulating and provocative. I also like the balance of wit or play and seriousness and the way that More, through his narrator, constructs a place (or quasi-place), inviting visualization of an alternative community at the same time that he "checks" it, by way of paradoxical assertions and contradictions, so that reading it is, itself, a process that challenges and stimulates. As for dystopias, they are all terrifying - so much so that I can't bear to see them realized on film. One that I find particularly grim and painful is George Orwell's 1984 (1949), because of its powerful political analysis, the characters Orwell creates, and the horror of their experiences. It seems to me that, like More's Utopia, 1984 has penetrated our consciousness in ways that remain fresh, even though the obvious political references may be dated.
Raymond Polin (St. John's University)
I find very appealing, but not necessarily most so or always convincing, and – to borrow some language from Karl Marx – not fully practicable "out in the real world," the utopian ideas of Josiah Warren (1798?-1874). Warren was the founder of the American school of philosophical anarchism and wrote Equitable Commerce: A New Development of Principles, for the Harmonious Adjustment and Regulation of the Pecuniary, Intellectual, and Moral Intercourse of Mankind, Proposed as Elements of New Society (1846) and True Civilization An Immediate Necessity, and the Last Ground of Hope for Mankind (1863). His credo of "The Democratic Idea" called for: freedom (the "universal right of self-sovereignty," as he mistermed it), "permanent and universal peace, and security of person and property," the "instinct of self-preservation [life] … as a sacred right," "restraining violence as the mission of government and military power," "the true Democratic idea," equality, "individuality," "give to labor its legitimate reward, and its necessary and natural stimulus," "the competition of Equitable Commerce" (competition as a perfectly irresistible force for reform), prevention rather than punishment of crime, voluntarism, repose, abundance, and equity (justice). I find the Third Reich of Adolf Hitler and his followers most terrifying because their doctrines and practices lacked pity, remorse, equality, freedom, truth, and loving-kindness (misericordia and chesed).
Kenneth Roemer (University of Texas at Arlington)
Most appealing: Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home (1985). The ingenious form of the utopia invites readers to assemble their own utopias. The utopia becomes a living room where we gradually pull together the bits and pieces – the brief narratives, poems, illustrations, recipes – so that we can begin to imagine ourselves living the rich ritual life of the Kesh culture. Of course, for readers who like their utopias all at once and in one piece, Always Coming Home must be a frustrating reading experience. Despite its outdated predictions, its bureaucracy, and its static qualities, I still greatly admire the utopia (Looking Backward [1888]) envisioned by Edward Bellamy because of his sincere desire for equality. His fears and hopes seem even more relevant today as we see huge divides between groups in America and around the world. Also considering the aging of the U.S. population, his notion of government by alumni/ae may become quite relevant. An obscure utopia – John and Ruth Vassos's Ultimo (1930) – fascinates me because it is the only literary utopia I know of that was first conceived as a series of visual images – in this case from a dream. (The author was a well-known designer.) Most frightening dystopian visions: As much or more than many of the famous 20th-century dystopias, Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) still seems to be one of the most haunting American dystopian images. The final chapters predict Americans' tendency to see the world only through their own eyes and to seek advanced technological answers that include forcing the world to our views. The way Hank Morgan, the all powerful boss, is reduced to a lonely confused childlike figure is a haunting critique of how Americans could go wrong. It's revealing that Dan Beard's illustrations stray far from the text by the end of the book, and Twain approved of all (save one minor one) the illustrations. His approval suggested he was glad that Beard could cover for his utopia gone bad.
Dan Sabia (University of South Carolina)
Probably the "ambiguous utopia" described in Ursula LeGuin’s novel, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974), is the most appealing utopia I have ever encountered. The form of life depicted in this well-written novel is best described as communal (or communist) anarchism, and I believe that communal anarchism is, on balance, the most attractive form of life that human beings can share. Communal anarchism seeks to foster individual autonomy, self-development, and freedom within the framework of a genuinely communal society. The politics of communal anarchism are radically democratic and significantly decentralized. Economic life and material wealth (though not work) are recognized as having limited and only instrumental value, and contributions are based on ability, distribution on need. The ownership and possession of things and people is rejected, and solidarity or fraternity, and therefore mutuality and reciprocity, are regarded as important as, and as essential to, equality, freedom and justice. At the same time, The Dispossessed does indeed describe an "ambiguous utopia," by which is meant that the society is not merely imperfect in terms of its own ideals, but that the very idea of perfection is both impossible and undesirable. This is due in part to the fact that evolution or change is regarded as inevitable, and in part to the fact that the multiple goods and values which characterize communal anarchism are quite demanding (given the imperfections of human beings), and to some degree conflicting (given the complexities of social life), with the result that unwanted and undesirable consequences are unavoidable, and vigilance and struggle, readjustment, even revolution, is constantly required. Regarding dystopias, I would have to say that Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) is the most unpleasant, because it presents in quite striking ways some depressing insights and possibilities regarding the human condition. For instance, the novel suggests that freedom and happiness may really be, for most people at any rate, incompatible: freedom demands initiative and effort, courage and the taking of responsibility, and it represents, therefore, a threat or burden to those people who associate happiness with comfort, pleasure, and freedom from responsibility. Relatedly, the novel famously suggests that, thanks in large part to modern science, oppression need not rely primarily on coercion. It can instead be manufactured and self-imposed through the manipulation of consciousness, the conquest of (physical and even psychic) pain and suffering, the cultivation of a wholly present-minded and hedonistic culture, even the manipulation of the gene pool and fabrication of human beings. Underlying these possibilities, and key to the success of a science "in the service of mankind’s happiness," is the disturbing claim that human beings are wholly (or at least largely) determined creatures, hence easily controlled and manipulated.
Lyman Sargent (University of Missouri at St. Louis)
There is no single eutopia that I find entirely appealing, but Austin Tappen Wright’s Islandia (1942) seems to me to reflect much of the complexity that we express as humans in allowing for a wide range of ways of expressing personal attachments. Aldous Huxley’s Island (1962) also recognizes diversity, but it undermines that by a process of behavioral engineering. Many of the feminist eutopias of the last thirty years, like Marge Piercy’s Woman On the Edge of Time (1976) recognize and encourage the development of human difference combined with a respect for the environment and other species. Joan Slonczewski Still Forms on Foxfield (1980) presents a Quaker Society successfully dealing with serious problems, and I find it quite attractive. Louis J. Halle’s Sedge (1963) presents a eutopia on a small scale that is again attractive. There are hundreds that appeal for differing reasons. Katherine Burdekin’s Swastika Night (1937) presents the most horrifying picture: a world in which National Socialism dominates. There are hundreds of dystopias that present people dehumanized by capitalism, communism, or fascism, and I find all of these depressing because, as with most dystopias, they tend to present worlds extrapolated into the future from tendencies found in our own.
Brian Stableford (Freelance Writer)
The Utopia of which I am fondest, not unnaturally, is the one described in my novel The Fountains of Youth (2000). There seems little point in discriminating between dystopias, given that all of the myriad ways to suffer and perish have the same end point.
Darko Suvin (McGill University)
Most appealing to me would be the diametrical opposite to present-day capitalism without a human face (or is it showing its real face now that it fears communism no longer?), that is, a type of relationships between people using the stupendous productivity developed by capitalism to ensure a by now quite possible life of dignity for each human being. Dignity means first & foremost getting rid of the totally unnecessary starvation, epidemics, druggings, and other brainwashings enforced by the war of each against each, breaking out into innumerable small wars (such as in the streets of many U.S. cities) and medium wars between states. In my opinion this could only come about by a rigorous introduction of direct democracy from below, extending Jeffersonian ideas to all genders, ages and races. The nearest one can today get to obviously abbreviated depictions of such states is in the warm utopian tradition of William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890), supplemented by more practical economics as in Ursula K. Le Guin's Anarchist planet in The Dispossessed (1974) or Marge Piercy's good future in Woman at the Edge of Time (1976). A number of practical attempts should also be mentioned, from utopian colonies in the U.S. of the last 200 years to the popular socialist beginnings of major revolutions of this century, from Lenin and Trotsky's Russia to Castro's Cuba, which were however all ossified and stifled by military and economic pressure from abroad. I'm not sure whether the worst dystopia is the one in which 85% of people in today's world live physically and perhaps 98% psychically, or what is to come after its not-too-distant breakdown. Being an optimist, I opt for the earlier. Again, approximate descriptions can be found in science fiction, from the U.S. New Maps of Hell in the 1950s to the present.
Wilhelm Vosskamp (University of Cologne)
Utopias: More's Utopia (1516) and Mercier's Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred (1770-71); models of the utopias of space and time
Dystopias in the twentieth century: Zamiatin's We (1920-21) and Huxley's Brave New World (1932); models of modernity and post-modernity
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Please note: The views expressed on this page are those of the named individuals, and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The New York Public Library.
In the ongoing search for the ideal society, the Internet has been proposed as a "place" in which a utopia could exist. Parallels to previous notions of utopian thought are discussed in "Cyber-Utopianism" and the Evolution in Utopian Thought.
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