After 1989: Globalization, Normalization, and Utopia

Abstract

This chapter examines the effects of thinking about utopia in the context of the anti-communist revolutions of 1989 and debates about globalization. Since Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), imaginative fiction has been a major source of utopian visions, and is also a critical commentary on society, and since the nineteenth-century, utopia has become an important strand of social theory (Kumar, 1991, p. 87). The latter differed significantly from fiction, though, in that for many political and social theories the projects of recreating social life according to principles of social justice and technological efficiency were understood as achievable objectives. On the other hand, such projects were alarming to some, and in response, images of the future in early twentieth-century fiction became increasingly dystopian — as in Huxley, Fritz Lang, Orwell, and Zamyatin. In social theory too, by contrast with optimistic socialist and liberal utopias, the future was often portrayed in dystopian ways — notably in Max Weber’s vision of a rationalized iron cage of modernity. But the utopia/dystopia dichotomy should not obscure the ways in which utopian visions have differing contents and, as Levitas (1990, p. 185) says, ‘are not the monopoly of the Left’ — on the contrary they may be uncongenial — neoliberal, nostalgic, past-oriented, and commodified.