‘Sleeping dogs and rebellious hopes’: anarchist utopianism in the age of realized utopia

Abstract

After the tragedies of the twentieth century, the utopian impulse was subject to searching criticism by a host of liberal intellectuals including Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, and Jacob Talmon. Looking to history and political philosophy, these thinkers impugned utopianism for so frequently destroying the freedoms it appeared to pursue. Defined by its theoretical contradictions, the utopian project, rooted in the politics of the Enlightenment, bore some responsibility for the totalitarianism and genocide that had shaped their lives. As this critique became liberal orthodoxy, a heretic group of anarchist thinkers opposed these conclusions. While travelling some distance with the liberal critics, for Paul Goodman, Marie Louise Berneri, and Herbert Read, the twentieth century, rather than invalidating the utopian urge made its boldness and experimentalism all the more vital. Their act of heresy was defending utopianism as a central component of their anarchist critique of the present.Jean Baudrillard often provocatively returned to the idea of the 'realized utopia' when discussing the United States. 1 Travelling through the country in the midst of the Reagan revolution, he was drawn to a the comparison with that other French witness of American politics, Alexis de Tocqueville, who trod a similar path over a century and a half earlier. For Baudrillard, however, it was not the ethic of virtuous participation in political life that stood out, rather he was struck by the spectacular and simulacral nature of this existence. 'It is not […] in the operation of institutions as in the freeing of technologies and images that the glorious form of American reality is to be found', he wrote, 'in the immoral dynamic of images, in the orgy of goods and services, an orgy of power and useless energy […] in which the spirit of advertising is more to the fore than Tocqueville's public spirit'. 2 Americans had, Baudrillard felt, a 'certain indulgence towards their own banality' in this existence, a 'hellish tedium' that was, nevertheless, 'a thousand times more interesting' than the po-faced banality of European culture. 3 The 'provocation' of Baudrillard's classification of American prosperity as a 'realized utopia' rested on the fact that, in the Cold War parlance, this phrase was more redolent of Soviet barbarity than the liberation of consumer capitalism. 4 This was not, in conventional terms, a comparison to be celebrated. Baudrillard's comments also point to two key ways in which the utopian project fell into disfavour in the mid-twentieth century. Where he may have revelled in this utopia and its 'fragile, mobile [and] superficial culture', mid-century reactions to utopianism saw the cultural promise of 1

Learning to live: Anarcho-syndicalism and utopia in Spain, 1931–37

“…The anarchistic aspect of modern utopianism is marked by an engagement with an imaginative and open-ended exploration of alternative ways of being […] The anti-utopian bent of modern anarchism is shaped by a worry that utopianism threatens precisely these kinds of practice. (2009: 221) The threat to 'open-ended exploration', through which the drive towards liberation becomes its antithesis and leads to new forms of domination has been identified as fundamental to utopian thought, an assumption that has driven the association of utopianism with totalitarianism (Adams 2020(Adams : 1094. Theorists such as Miguel Abensour have sought to nuance this negative judgment of utopia by suggesting that it occupies a position of undecidability between the impulse for freedom and its oppressive reversal, what he calls the dialectic of emancipation in utopia (Abensour 2008: 415).…”