Educated Fear and Educated Hope Papastephanou

Educated Fear and Educated Hope
Marianna Papastephanou - 978-90-8790-976-5

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EDUCATIONAL FUTURES
RETHINKING THEORY AND PRACTICE
Volume 40
Series Editors
Michael A. Peters
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
Editorial Board
Michael Apple, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

Miriam David, Institute of Education, London University, UK
Cushla Kapitzke, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
Simon Marginson, University of Melbourne, Australia
Mark Olssen, University of Surrey, UK
Fazal Rizvi, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
Linda Tuahwai Smith, University of Waikato, New Zealand
Susan Robertson, University of Bristol, UK
Scope
This series maps the emergent field of educational futures. It will commission books
on the futures of education in relation to the question of globalisation and knowledge
economy. It seeks authors who can demonstrate their understanding of discourses
of the knowledge and learning economies. It aspires to build a consistent approach
to educational futures in terms of traditional methods, including scenario planning
and foresight, as well as imaginative narratives, and it will examine examples of
futures research in education, pedagogical experiments, new utopian thinking, and
educational policy futures with a strong accent on actual policies and examples.

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Educated Fear and Educated Hope
Dystopia, Utopia and the Plasticity of Humanity
Marianna Papastephanou
University of Cyprus
SENSE PUBLISHERS
ROTTERDAM/BOSTON/TAIPEI

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A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-90-8790-974-1 (paperback)

ISBN 978-90-8790-975-8 (hardback)
ISBN 978-90-8790-976-5 (e-book)
Published by: Sense Publishers,

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http://www.sensepublishers.com
Printed on acid-free paper
Note on the cover:

Matthew Arnold´s famous phrase, culture is properly described as the love of
perfection has been transliterated into Helvetica Concentrated (a digital typeface
that concentrates the surface of Helvetica characters in dots which has been created
by Detanico and Lain in collaboration with Jiri Skala). The term Helvetica bears
associations of a utopia of modernist uniformity, success, prosperity and rational
planning. The phrase is then transliterated into Utopia, a typeface in which Detanico
and Lain replace capital letters with the iconic buildings of Brazil´s foremost modernist
architect, Oscar Niemeyer, whilst lower-case letters are equated with urban inter-
ferences such as fences, skateboarders, CCTV cameras, electricity cables, in short,
all those elements that escaped the utopian dream of the architect.
All Rights Reserved © 2009 Sense Publishers
No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or
otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material
supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system,
for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.

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For my family and for Yannis and Constandinos, my little nephews

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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements.................................................................................................vii
Introduction .............................................................................................................ix
1. Anti-utopianism as a Current Theoretical Challenge.............................................1
2. The Course of Utopian Thought .........................................................................23
3. Utopia and Dystopia: Conceptual Clarifications .................................................43
4. Education and Dystopia: Mamet’s Oleanna ........................................................63
5. Educational Theory and Practice: The 2000 Curriculum ....................................81
6. Utopia, Representation and Image .....................................................................103
7. Utopia and Reality .............................................................................................121
8. The Foul Stain of Our Species: Anti-utopianism

and Anthropology..............................................................................................147
Conclusion.............................................................................................................177
Notes ......................................................................................................................177
Bibliography .........................................................................................................193
Index ......................................................................................................................199
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Our debts, intellectual or other, surely extend far beyond the restricted space of an
acknowledgement note. Still I would like to express my gratitude to the following
persons and institutions.
Sincere thanks are due to the University of Cyprus, to the Head of the Department
(Prof Constandinos Christou) and all my colleagues in the Department of Education,
especially those who struggle to maintain it such a civilized, easy-going and
congenial workplace. Thanks also to my colleagues and friends Charoula Angeli,
Mary Koutselini and Nicos Valanides for our friendly collaboration on many
academic endeavours. Another large debt is to my students who provided and
sustained the stimulating context within which some of the arguments and ideas in
this book were first tried out.
Regarding the materialization of the book, I am grateful to the publishing house,
the anonymous reviewers whose constructive reports helped me with the final
revisions and Peter de Liefde in particular for his advice at various stages of the
publication process. I owe specific debts of gratitude to Michael Peters whose help
and faith in this project made it possible in the first place. He should therefore take
a part of the credit (though none of the blame) for the way the book has turned out.
I am also indebted to Terry McLaughlin who invited me to give a lecture at the
INPE conference in 2006 (Malta). Terry’s memory brings to my mind Victor
Hugo’s dictum, “les morts sont les invisibles mais ils ne sont pas les absents”.
Terry’s invitation got me more seriously involved in what had been, until then, a
vaguely formulated research project. I am especially grateful to the organizers of
that conference and to the audience whose questions and comments clarified my
thinking on several points. The invited paper that I delivered there was on the topic
of utopia, dystopia and education and appeared in the Studies of Philosophy and
Education. Parts of it have been included in this book – I am grateful to the journal
for this. Likewise, thanks to Ethics and Education for the kind permission to employ
some of the ideas of my article ‘Hesiod the Cosmopolitan’ that was published in
the journal last year. And I am grateful to the Brazilian artists Angela Detanico and
Rafael Lain for kindly agreeing to adapt an idea of mine to their splendid work,
their powerful visual poetics, and thus to design the jacket illustration for me.
More broadly, I owe special thanks to Prof Christopher Norris for his exemplary
guidance and support over the years of my PhD research as well as for the many
hours of fruitful conversation and for his invaluable friendship, then as now. I am
also much in debt to Prof Karl-Otto Apel for supporting me as a supervisor would
do during my studies in Berlin and for continuing to encourage me ever since.
After my employment at the University of Cyprus, I have been lucky to have met
Professors Richard Smith, Paul Standish, Marius Felderhof, Barath Sriraman, who
I thank for their friendship, for their sharing their views and experience with me on
various occasions throughout the years and for easing my transition from
philosophy into philosophy of education. Their encouragement, along with that of
Chris Norris and Karl-Otto Apel, has constantly been a source of restored motivation
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
and fresh inspiration. I would like also to acknowledge that I have derived much
benefit from discussing some of the ideas of the book with James Mensch, Padraig
Hogan, Denise Egéa-Kuehne, David Bridges and Jim Conroy.
Finally, let me thank: my friends outside the academic world for the mind-
broadening conversations and the memorable moments that we have had as this
work went along; and my family for their inexhaustible patience over the last
years, for their warmth and goodwill that relieved the solitude of authorship as well
as for other reasons that are too many to account.

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INTRODUCTION
Dystopian is a world and a life which one might have plausible and strong reasons
to revoke; in so doing, one may invoke the image of a desirable reality, the utopia
of how the world and life should be. The meeting point of thought and reality, of
utopia and dystopia, is the yearning for change: perhaps not just any change, but
the kind of change that involves hope and imagination of a truly good life and a
just world.
From antiquity, even before Socrates asked his friends to imagine the ideal city
(Plato, Politics, 272 a),1 philosophy had invited humanity to hope for the unexpected,
for if ‘you do not expect it, it will never come’ (Heraclitus, frag. 18). However, for
many decades now, (post)modern philosophy has renounced its own transformative
relation to the existing reality and condemned theories of dystopia and utopia to
obsolescence.
Much criticism of utopianism has been apposite and useful, but, in displaying a
sweeping anti-utopianism, i.e., a general hostility to dark depictions of the here and
now (as supposedly exaggerating) and to powerful portrayals of perfectibility (as
supposedly unrealistic and dangerous), philosophy has turned against itself. For
philosophy is expected to pit ‘thought against injustice, against the defective state
of the world and of life’, and there is no philosophy ‘without the discontent of
thinking in its confrontation with the world as it is’ (Badiou, 2005a, p. 29). An
unmitigated anti-utopianism is an anti-philosophical stance to life and the world.
When education endorses the general late modern philosophical tendency to
dismiss all talk about radical critique and desire for change it becomes anti-
philosophical too. This is all the more worrying if we consider that education is
precisely about the moulding of human desire and the shaping of the citizen.
Education and futurity are inextricably connected because education acts upon the
current state of affairs for the sake of the world that is to come, of the society and
its citizens in roughly twenty or in thirty years time. Hence, if the desire of
philosophy implies a dimension of revolt (Badiou, 2005a, p. 29), the desire of
education implies a dimension of preparation. An ecological ideal for environ-
mental protection, for instance, that would challenge those dominant human
priorities that destroy nature has to be theorized (philosophically, scientifically,
politically and educationally negotiated) and cultivated/debated in classrooms if it
is to be activated in order to play a significant role in the life of future generations.
Contrary to some anti-utopian assertions, education involves, by definition, issues
of utopia and of what counts as a good life – issues that education cannot sidestep
without losing its critical and preparatory character. Or, in other words, instead of
being pleased with life as it is and reproducing it uncritically, education must retain
and defend its proximity to the philosophical desire for perfectibility in a world
where systemic demands and procedural standardization make this task increasingly
difficult.
Then again, it is true that educational practice has improved: it is more
progressive than authoritarian and elitist, more democratic and open to the masses
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and surely more multivocal and sensitive to the historical context than ever. Yet, it
seems that precisely its de-distantiation (Mannheim, 1960), its proximity to the
needs of everyday life and its sensitivity to context have brought educational
practice closer to purposes set by the market (Young, 2003) that are extrinsic to the
educational ideal of human perfectibility. Against such tendencies of marketization,
for example, of ‘increasing corporatization of the university and the advance of
global capitalism’, it s no wonder that many educational theorists emphasize the
need ‘to resurrect a language of resistance and possibility’. Such a language is
expected to embrace ‘a militant utopianism while constantly being attentive to
those forces that seek to turn such hope into a new slogan or punish and dismiss
those who dare look beyond the horizon of the given’ (Giroux, 2003, p. 477).
The neglect of utopian thought and of utopian literature

But even the cornerstones of such a language of resistance, i.e. some of the most
cherished educational ideas and aims that enjoy the approval of all fields of
educational sciences suffer the consequences of anti-utopian hegemony and
become impoverished. Critical thinking, for instance, is often subordinated to an
ideal of performativity that affirms and reinforces the existing conditions of life
and the current state of the world. It is thought that criticality must steer clear of
conceptions of the good life and avoid any prioritization of one ethical ideal over
others. However, critical thought requires ideas of the good life and critical
approaches to value systems if it is to be something more than just effective
accomplishment of pre-set and heteronomously authorized tasks. Anti-utopian
critical thought tends to always be immanent, i.e. to avoid going beyond thin,
minimal and safe value paths. By contrast, Ernst Bloch, a leading utopian figure of
the 20th century, saw critical thinking as a ‘venturing beyond’. Such a formulation
captures the complex relation of new contents of thought with the existing reality
from which they emanate but which they transcend by the force of an extreme
effort of will (Bloch, 1986, p. 4). In fact, even now that most liberal philosophers
converge on the priority of the right over the good, utopian thinkers emphasize the
significance of futurity and of conceptions of the good for a truly critical thinking.
‘Without some, more or less determinate, guiding idea of the good society, critical
social thinking would be inconceivable: it would lack an ethical basis for its critical
diagnoses and its endeavor to stimulate social and cognitive transformation would
have no ethical point’ (Cooke, 2006, p. 3).
Even within the framework of anti-utopian immanence, it is true that critique
continues to be an enshrined ideal of education. Yet the very moment it takes the
shape of a standardized critical thinking, in its dominant, anti-utopian conception,
critique loses its internal connection to theoretical endeavour and becomes a means
for developing skills and performing specific tasks. While critique was associated
in modernity either with the coming of age of humanity (Kant) or the radical
change of the world (Marx) and it was accompanied with revolutionary enthusiasm
regarding those two possibilities, nowadays it is often attached to a mere
refinement of established orders. This effects not just the domestication of critique
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that is now being widely discussed, but also its subjugation to technicist and
performative purposes. It further has negative implications for education’s relation
to vision, humanities, and the experience of time – time understood both as an
always specific era determined by certain characteristics as well as a lived
condition of human action that is spent and managed according to given sets of
priorities.
Lacking critical self-distance and often theorized through the disillusioned
perspective of a post-metaphysical era, educational practice sometimes appears
insouciant. It indulges in the thought that it does its best, that, ultimately, our world
is the best possible and that any utopian attempt to change it for the better will end
in disaster. In so doing, it ignores and simultaneously fuels the dystopian elements
of the present. Thus, ‘with the end of realistic socialism in Europe, any vision
featuring a perspective that might transcend the status quo seems doomed’ and ‘the
political project of humanising society’ (Wimmer, 2003, p. 167) is in crisis. Not
that vision as such is given up; vision is still a guiding thread of human and
educational action but now vision is channelled in individualist and materialist
outlets. As futuristic visions ‘are increasingly linked to technological progress’,
they acquire the status of psychic discharge operating around a singularly
‘practical realisation of perfection’ (ibid).
Evidently, human sciences (humanities) and cultural or educational experiences
related to critique and vision or presupposed by them suffer the consequences of
the change that critique and vision have undergone. The time that is given to them,
e.g. curricular and classroom time or leisure time spent on them, is gradually
contested, as it bears more and more the condescension of conceded time or
the discontent of wasted time. Michael Wimmer formulates the paradoxes of the
contemporary world in a way that is particularly helpful here as it brings all these
notions together: ‘reflexive modernisation produces a devaluation of reflection;
acceleration of all processes to save time produces lack of time; and society’s high
estimation of science makes it into an enemy of theoretical thought’ (Wimmer,
2003, p. 171).
In this context, as I understand it, utopianism is neglected not only in its political
or project-like sense of change and vision of perfectibility but also in its literary
version. More generally, in fact, literature is emphatically understood as fiction, in
the sense of the unreal that is counterposed to real life facts and data. The latter is
now the myth-averse slogan of the realities of ‘contemporary society’ which has, in
being itself a cliché, turned into a myth. Literature as fiction is then connected to
leisure, a leisure that is more and more rare and unavailable, opposed to the
urgency of results, standards and pressures for increased productivity and trapped
in the ‘time – lack of time’ paradox. The fastfoodization of knowledge that is
connected with deadlines, performance and achievement devalues whatever can be
postponed to be carried out at a more convenient time. The increasingly frequent
response that students give to the question about the extramural books they read is
their ‘lacking time for such things’, rendering a further question about the way
literature influences their life and thought pointless. Worse, ‘I don’t read fiction’
no longer comes apologetically or accompanied with any discomfort and any sense
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of missing something valuable. It now comes naturally and even with an air of self-
importance: the more you disqualify things that do not fit in your timetable the
more organized, dedicated and hard-working you appear to be. Now, if we realize
that ‘with the development of computer technology, text has expanded into the
digital realm and new options such as literary hypertext or e-literature are gaining a
presence’ (Sumara, Luce-Kapler and Iftody, 2008, p. 229), the paradoxical nature
of our era, its capacity to disable the enabling new opportunities and to block the
possibilities for a harmonious interplay between science and humanities, becomes
evident.
Even when literature is accommodated in schooling, the employment of it is
often narrow, flat, uncritical and uninspiring. Hence the plea of many theorists
coming not only from purely literary contexts but also from the social sciences
context to reconsider the educational handling of reading comes as no surprise.
‘Teachers need to interrupt the superficial reading practices of students that are
now supported by school curricula and mandatory high-stakes testing regimes.
Many students use the text to confirm rather than to question their own beliefs’
(Sumara, Luce-Kapler and Iftody, 2008, p. 238). What we described briefly above
as a toning down of critique and vision regarding practice more generally reappears
here as a fact concerning reading more specifically.
Anti-utopianist thought fits in well with a reality in which being ‘down to earth’
means asking too few questions about the world as it is, as it might or as it should
be. From this perspective, Fredric Jameson’s explanation of the decline of utopian
literature in late capitalism makes good sense. To him, readers of that kind of
literature ‘become extinct because the level of tolerance for fantasy is suddenly
modified by a change in social relations’. Predictably, then, ‘in the windless
closure of late capitalism it had come to seem increasingly futile and childish for
people with a strong and particularly repressive reality-and-performance principle
to imagine tinkering with what exists, let alone its thoroughgoing restructuration’
(Jameson, 1989, p. 75).
RESPONDING TO THE NEGLECT OF UTOPIANISM. POLITICAL-PHILOSOPHICAL

UTOPIANISM AND LITERARY UTOPIANISM
Without underestimating the qualities of our world and its educational

achievements, this book will respond to the challenge utopianism presents by
defending the claim that the dystopian element in educational life must be
acknowledged not so as to promote cynicism and resignation but so as to motivate
desire for more radical reorientation. However, this claim presupposes a
philosophical reworking of the notions of utopian thought, dystopian reality and
anti-utopian hegemony. Thus, the book begins with the main anti-utopian
arguments that have reduced the importance of utopia and dystopia as theoretical
tools (chapter one). Then it is shown that much anti-utopian critique misses its
target because utopianism is not homogeneous enough to be susceptible as a whole
to the standard charges directed at it. To this purpose, gleanings from the historical
course of utopian thought are recruited proving the diversity and richness of
utopianism and the possibility to have futurist ideas that do not suffer from the
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standard problems that anti-utopianism justifiably chastises (chapter two). This

takes us to a brief study of the way in which the notions of utopia and dystopia are
now being evoked in most philosophical and educational trends and to a reworking
of the conceptions of utopia and dystopia and of their interrelation. The reworking
of utopianism and the exploration of the relation of utopia and dystopia attempted
in this book is then conveyed through the last pages of Calvino’s Invisible Cities
(chapter three). To illustrate the diagnostic force and usefulness of dystopia, I read
David Mamet’s play Oleanna as an educational dystopia (chapter four). To
uncover the spectral presence of dystopia and utopia as well as the repressive
nature of some liberal anti-utopianism through a more concrete educational
example, I explore an exemplary text of educational promise, a specific national
curriculum (chapter five). Then the aim of the book turns to a more positive task,
i.e. the deployment of (the proposed) utopianism through discussions of some of its
basic theoretical underpinnings in relation to other theoretical approaches.
Indicatively, the issue of utopian representation will be canvassed with reference to
Louis Marin, that of utopia and ideology through criticisms of Karl Mannheim and
Paul Ricoeur and that of utopian determinacy vs formalism by discussing Fredric
Jameson (chapter six). Via Maeve Cooke’s view of utopia as an ethical picture, I
move to an exploration of the ethical element of utopianism and I explain my
preference to ethico-political utopianism. To depict the specific relation of
dystopian reality and utopian imagination that I propose and to couple it with ethics
and politics, I refer to Hermann Hesse’s short story ‘Strange News from Another
Star’ (chapter seven). The book ends with a confrontation with the strongest anti-
utopian argument, the culturally deep-seated anthropological objection that all this
might be useless if humanity’s longing for perfectibility is doomed to always lead
to failure due to what Isaiah Berlin (1991) called ‘humanity’s crooked timber’
(chapter eight).
It is already clear that I shall be using texts that do not only belong to
philosophy and to political, planned utopianism but also to the utopian literary
genre itself. Thus, although my approach does not focus on the literary genre but
on utopian thought in general, on its significance for education and, more, on
utopia and education being inextricably linked, I consider literary utopia as a
cultural force that is complementary with the force of the better utopian argument
(i.e., with political philosophical utopianism). As the relation of the utopian genre
with politics and education is not the main focal point of the book, to justify this
employment of examples of what this genre has to offer, I would like to register
now some arguments that support the turn to political utopianism from the prism of
the relation of education and literature.
Literature is significant for a more reflective and transformative education. This
is most strikingly evident in one of the most politically involved genres, namely
utopian and dystopian fiction. Many utopias and dystopias have, in their dimension
that is critical of existing reality, warned us against social phenomena that affect
education dramatically, such as the now dominant combination of sexual puritanism
and reactionary hedonism that join forces in consolidating commodification of
sexual, pharmacological and media hedonism. They have also warned us against
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epistemological tenets that enforce scientistic positivism (e.g. the dehumanization

typical of a world ruled by mathematics and science). And many utopias and
dystopias have articulated a powerful critique of mechanical progress for its own
sake or production for production’s sake (Milner, 2005). Through works that
pertain to this genre such as Owen’s New Lanark, Zamyatin’s We, Čapek’s
Rossum’s Universal Robots,2 literature can be valuable to combating scientism and
positivism in education and questioning objectivist convention in schools. For
example, Lilian Hellman’s 1934 play, The Children’s Hour,3 can be read as a
drama of a dystopian world set in a school context. While blurring the line that
separates school and home, the play examines in a provocative and path-breaking
manner how objectivism in societies reflected in schools creates the dystopian
effect of persecution, self-reproach and cynical exploitation in various aspects of
the established order.
The list of examples and of their varying contributions could be endless, and it
would be a needless intricacy to enter into the maze of utopian literary construc-
tions here. What is more important is that, regrettably, the constellation ‘utopia/
dystopia, political consciousness and education’ has not adequately been mined in
philosophy of education (and education in general) yet.
Given the cultural and educational context that I have already briefly sketched,
the challenge for education is today, amongst other things, to escape its entrapment
in what Sartre (2004) called in his later works the realm of the ‘practico-inert’, a
realm that reduces education to a conservative and social-reproductive institution.
In a world that gives priority to scientistic and technicist ideals and effects a
‘truncating’ (Adorno`s term) of thought, literature should not only become
educationally rehabilitated but it must also become an actively intervening force of
educational redirection. If literature can teach how to live better, as many
philosophers of education argue,4 then the genre that concerns images of a better
life or a life as it should be seems the most appropriate to critical educational aims.
The genre in question is the utopian. Apart from offering images of a better life,
that is, apart from giving a possible content to teaching about a worthwhile life,
literary utopias have another connection to education: both assume the pliability of
humanity and operate in virtue of the feasibility of change for the better. Many
utopian/dystopian works see the child as the source of new hope [e.g. Andrei
Platonov’s The Foundation Pit (see, Osborne, 2003)] and reassert in this way that
the plasticity of humanity is education’s primary concern, while revealing the
dangers lurking in accounts of education that eliminate imagination.
Within the utopian genre itself, there have been variations of themes that tackle
in different and rich ways what ‘better’ might be. Now, since the socio-historical
and, consequently, the educational context favour practical-technological, instead
of ethico-political, aspirations to perfection (Wimmer, 2003, p. 167), those kinds of
utopia that revolve primarily around scientism and technicism would arguably be
part of the above mentioned problems rather than their solution. The most popular,
and, therefore, culturally and educationally less neglected literary works are usually
cybertopias and sci-fi; the opposite seems to hold for literature that involves some
form of collective ideal of perfection or an explicit political utopianism. Whilst
much futurism revolves around an unhindered flow of communication and a
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pharmacological, surgical or genetic (in fact, eugenic) ‘enhancement’ of humanity

and prolongation of vitality and youth, ironically, society recoils in the idea of
political vision. Hence, although I am aware of the fact that some sci-fi works are
commendably political even up to the concrete aspect of movementist ecotopia
[e.g. Ursula LeGuin’s books (see, Kumar, 1991, p. 105)], here, in this book I am
more interested in, and shall draw from, those utopias that have an ethico-political
direction and not a communicative, scientific, technological and medical direction.
Literature in educational settings has usually been seen as a means for cultivating
narrative imagination and identification with various ‘existing’ others within a
community and outside of it thus promoting cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism
(Nussbaum, 1997). The starting point is, often unconsciously, the self, the self-
consciousness and the perception of the other in consciousness. In a way, this is an
individualist frame of thinking about the ethico-political relevance of literature
which is important but inadequate in itself to cover the whole ground of what
literature might offer to readers. In fact, it cannot accommodate utopian literature,
for, as Martin Buber explains, utopia is as such tied with the yearning (Sehnsucht)
for the just (Recht) as an idea which can by nature be realized not in/for the
individual but in/for the human community (Buber, 1985, p. 30). What the
individualist narrative imagination leaves out is, amongst other things, the literary
portrayal of alternative and possible worlds, of collectivities of the future and fresh
ways of handling world politics beyond – though not against – the issues of
individual rights and respect for pluralism.
My rehabilitation of the educational significance of political utopian literary
works presupposes that literature is valuable not just for identification with the
right models or empathetic understanding of otherness, as it is widely assumed, but
also for enlarged thought and an active life (vita activa) [to use Hannah Arendt’s
(1989) terms]. Nothing compels us to view the educational significance of
literature exclusively through the lens of empathy, but, on the contrary, we have
reasons to question the absolute paradigmatic reliance on it. The focus on empathy
has been rightly criticized for its facile assumptions (Scarry, 1996) and it can also
be criticized as didactic, instrumental and committed in a rather costly way.5 The
major difference I see in the empathetic and the utopian perspective is that the
former revolves around an axis of actuality and subjectivity, whereas the latter is
oriented toward possibility and collective universality. My claim is that enlarged
thought is assisted by utopian literature because of the latter’s relation to vision.
Narrative imagination in utopias is extended beyond the actual and the individual.
The self constructs images of alternative realities that heighten awareness of
present societal flaws, instead of just being identified with various others and their
consciousness. Then, the self might be drawn into something better by the force of
the evocative and seductive literary portrayal of a yet unexplored ethical
possibility. By contrast, the empathetic focus on literature associates it solely with
individualist ideals of a more sensitive self that is valuable to society and the world
only by implication.
Further, the preoccupation with literary utopianism can be more directly
encompassing of cosmopolitan themes and of educational priorities than the
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preoccupation with individualist narrative imagination might be, that is, it may
score better even where narrative imagination is usually taken to be at its best. This
is due to reasons that can be associated with the following multiple dimensions of
utopianism. First, the utopian perspective makes world literature rather than
restrictively Western(ized) literature important for education (spatial dimension);
second, much utopian literature of the past has been and it can still be path-
breaking for education (diachronic dimension); and third, contemporary utopianist
literary works reveal social pathologies that educationists must bear in mind and
aim to avoid while providing ethico-political images of the collective Good
(synchronic dimension). An abundance of Golden Age narratives throughout
history and around the globe (narratives that do not largely offer main characters
for individual, empathetic identification) testifies to the fact that literature has often
mapped the human desire for a better world and/or the political effort to realize it.
But, also, from western and non-western antiquity to the present, literature in the
form of novel provides us with a very rich material of literary portrayals of a better
life of all kinds and for various social groups. As an example, consider, for instance
the feminist utopia we encounter in China. In the 18th century we find the first
feminist Chinese utopian novel authored by Li-Ju-chen (c. 1763–1830) and entitled
The Mirror of the Flowers. It is a novel that is set in the 7th century and ‘describes
the adventures of a hundred talented women in imaginary kingdoms; the
description gives rise to an acid criticism of China under the Manchu dynasty. In
these kingdoms women have the right to sit for public examinations, they study,
they marry freely [and] they do not have to bind their feet or serve as concubines’
(Chesneaux, 1968, p. 84). Again, the list of examples could be endless here
regarding various aspects of non-Western or ancient Western utopian constructions
of worlds in which the ‘no-count’, i.e. Jacques Ranciere’s (1999) politically
marginalized societal groups gain voice and intervening force in a universalizable
manner. The upshot is that political utopianism in its spatial and temporal
dimensions is not just an ideal that draws mainly from western, modern literary
sources; in being more encompassing, political utopianism in its literary form can
serve cosmopolitanism in ways that have not, despite intentions, been utilized by
standard, empathetic approaches to education and literature.
Diachronically and synchronically, literary utopias have offered education
valuable insights, or, as Jameson (2005) might put it (and much earlier than him
Walter Benjamin), glimpses from the future. For instance, Owen’s New Lanark
concerns the creation of a small society where there is no place for poverty, neglect
of health and crime and where education is put centre stage materialized by a
school that employs methods that can be characterized progressive even by
contemporary standards, e.g. the use of play for learning purposes in the early
years (Halpin, 2001b, p. 306). In New Lanark, Owen ‘pinpointed with astonishing
prescience the disastrous flaws in the “created opposition of interests” on which the
early capitalist systems of production, exchange and consumption were based,
finding “true civilization” impossible under such disabling conditions’. Unlike
much established educational practice, ‘the children at New Lanark were taught to
compete in “friendly emulation” but also to value “going forward with their
companions” over “leaving them behind”’ (Davis, 2003, p. 577).
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Owen’s views are a telling example of the fact that the educational element in
utopias was not serving purely rhetorical or literary purposes but it was, rather, a
significant source of inspiration and intervention in actual educational discourses.
His emphasis on the cultivation of imagination, on the significance of cooperation
and his employment of other, related terms, such as energy, emulation, activity,
liveliness, play, curiosity etc often nourished what came to be seen as an
educationally ‘libertarian lexicon’ against the then commonly held oppressive
educational tenets (Davis, 2003, p. 577). Unlike some literary works of a more
individualist character, utopia critiqued the modernist instrumentalist and performative
priorities of education (Davis, 2003, p. 580) and the concomitant goal-setting and
deserves some wider educational attention than it has so far enjoyed.
Another useful example here could be Fourier’s utopian work, for it outlined ‘a
projected future where passions, the basic unit of humanity, rather than Marx’s
labor, would be liberated, allowing for free associations through sex, love and
artistic appreciation’ (Leonardo, 2003, p. 513). These forms of passion are retarded
by a commercialism which, along with other operations of capitalism, it effects
also a transformation of the self and the other into abstract entities. In the embodied
and sensual dimensions of humanity that have to be redeemed, Fourier sees, as
Zeus Leonardo explains, the possibility of a complete, other-oriented and
harmonious humanity (ibid). This ideal of the homo harmonicus is accompanied by
an ideal of harmonious education emphasizing human attraction. Despite the
asphyxiating organization of daily life and the overdeterminacy of the utopian
planning as well as other problems of the modernist, canonical conception of
utopia from which neither Fourier nor Owen escaped, what remains important is
that such works connect education with radical societal redirection for collective
happiness and perfectibility and are in some respect really advanced efforts to
invigorate education even by contemporary standards.
The emphasis on literary utopianism by no means entails that other literary
genres are of secondary importance for education. It rather entails that, as a subset
of literature, the utopian genre must be rehabilitated and its educational significance
acknowledged in ways that the individualist, often didactic, focus on the
character(s) of a novel and the individual psychology (or their social positioning)
has not yet allowed.
THE NEGLECT OF UTOPIANISM, THE EDUCATIONAL CURRENT, AND THE AIMS

OF THE BOOK
As we have already seen, utopia relates to education by definition as both assume

(and are preconditioned on) the plasticity and perfectibility of humanity. However,
the connection has not been established adequately, despite the abundance of
ancient Politeias (Republics) or ethnographic utopias that reserved a crucial role
for education and of modern utopias that almost always put education centre stage.
Significantly, some of the earliest non-Western cases of Golden Age utopianism
connect egalitarianism and education. For instance, in a very ancient text in the
Chinese Book of Rites (Li Chi), the Golden Age period of Great Unity (ta-t’ ung)
is characterized, amongst other things, by education for all the young (Chesneaux,
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1968, p. 79). Education is available to all in More’s utopia (written at a time when
the democratization of education was inconceivable in England) (Halpin, 2001b, p.
304) and this is very telling about the extent to which education is valued in
utopias. Already in More, utopia is more of a thought experiment about how
humanity might be moulded rather than a detailed directive of the appropriate
course of change: it communicates ‘what is possible if you dare to deliberate,
daydream even, outside the strict confines of ways of thinking that currently have
the greatest salience and influence’ (Halpin, 2001b, p. 309). In some cases, the
pedagogic element of reshaping humanity would find in modern utopias a narrower
specification which is no less interesting in its connection of education with
concrete themes that aim to untangle theoretical knots. As an example of this one
might consider the effort to find a pedagogic mediation between religion and
science which ‘would flourish in an educative utopia’ and was the sole concern that
united utopian authors/thinkers as diverse as Bacon, Andreae and Comenius
(Shklar, 1981, p. 282).
Yet, the opposite, that is, educational theory accommodating utopia or explicitly
discussing it has not been the case. The exception here is John Dewey’s article for
the New York Times in 1933 with the title ‘Dewey Outlines Utopian Schools’
where he assumed the role of a visitor to a Utopia in which children and adults
interact to gain and develop skills and an inquisitive stance to life (Dewey, 1986)
as well as a willingness to tackle problems. Exceptions have also been some books
of the 70’s such as George Leonard’s Education and Ecstasy and John Mann’s
Learning to Be. Finally, the earliest exploration of the relation of utopia and
education that I know of is Howard Ozmon’s 1969 book Utopias and Education.6
True, despite such exceptions, the dominant trend in education has been anti-
utopianism, but recent educational theory has so far gradually retrieved utopian
thought in various ways. Anti-utopianism is still very influential, however, especially
in the liberal persuasion and in fields other than philosophy of education. Hence, as
late as 2001, David Halpin points out how neglected the concepts of utopia and
hope have been in ‘educational management studies and in the study of education
generally’ (2001a, p. 105). Dystopia is even more neglected, almost unspoken in
educational contexts.
However, the interest in utopia is now being renewed in general philosophy, in
cultural studies (Passerini, 2002, p. 17) and in philosophy of education (Halpin,
2001b, p. 300; Lewis, 2007, p. 1) through a series of books, special issues and
conferences on utopian imagination and through a proliferation of ‘sites,
organizations and communities that sustain themselves by reference to the utopian
tradition’ (Peters and Humes, 2003, p. 429). I believe that the educational
comeback of utopia can now largely be found in four trends: (a) the rehabilitation
of anarchist thought, of its utopian impetus and of its faith in education as
developed by Judith Suissa’s work; (b) the rich educational critical response to
Futures Studies (Peters and Humes, 2003); (c) the radical transformation approach
to education (which preserved the utopian element all along from Freire down to
Giroux and McLaren) and which defends the need to develop pedagogies of hope
(Stewart-Harawira, 2003); and (d) the reformist approach to educational practice
from Dewey down to recent thinkers (Halpin, 2001a & b; Demetrion, 2001)
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favouring piecemeal pragmatist utopian change. Overall, a number of educational

pathologies are expected to be treated by means of utopian thinking, pathologies
such as teacher apathy, student resignation and the oppressive reproduction of
social inequalities through schooling practices (Lewis, 2007, p. 1).
Despite their being valuable and very welcome in their capacity to invigorate
philosophical dialogue and reorient education to more critical and utopia-inspired
aims, educational approaches to futurity are often attacked by many of the above
mentioned utopianist educational philosophers for succumbing to systemic imper-
atives. As Peter and Humes remark, the utopias of contemporary educational
futures suffer from the narrowness and limits that follow their subjection to
methodology and disciplinary formation and their elevation to the status of official
policy narratives. A critical educational approach to Futures Studies questions the
predictive and planning emphasis that accompanies the viewing of education
through the lens of technical-managerial priorities (2003, p. 432). Further in Peters
and Humes` words, ‘now that the question of futures is subjected to its own
disciplinary formation and methodologies, educational futures tend to be more
mundane and technical, or both, especially when they are harnessed as official
policy narratives’ (Peter and Humes, 2003, p. 431).
One may also notice and add that most of the attempts to retrieve utopia, even
those which go beyond Futures Studies, lack the comprehensiveness (often
requiring book length exposition or defence of utopia) that is necessary if the old,
faulty lines that were justifiably targeted by anti-utopianism are to be avoided. For
instance, in much of the relevant material, utopia is more historically mapped
rather than revisited through the prism of contemporary philosophy. Or, when it is
reformulated, its renegotiation occurs within the confines of a particular tradition,
e.g. pragmatism, liberal realism, and Marxist or Lacanian and Althusserian
reconsiderations of utopia and it is almost always negligent of, or dissociated from,
the kindred notion of dystopia. The latter is often presented as the polemical other
of utopia, that is, the inexorable and hard reality of failed dreamworld or it is
confused with anti-utopia. The importance of dystopia for education as a diagnostic
but also critical tool of pathologies is, to my knowledge, totally absent. This
neglect, within the received view, of the possible complementary relation of utopia
and dystopia is accompanied by a failure to provide or imply a different anthro-
pology or, in other words, a different descriptive frame of what is to be human and
what counts as humanly (im)possible that would justify utopian normativity. As a
result, the normative force of utopia is attenuated through limitations imposed
along pragmatist and realist lines. The idea is that when utopian efforts aspire to
something beyond the axes set by neo-pragmatism and some version of realism,
dystopia will, by some kind of anthropological necessity, be the inescapable
conclusion. The term ‘realistic utopia’ encountered in John Rawls, Alasdair McIntyre
and others and the term ‘pragmatist utopia’ in Richard Rorty`s work exemplify
the presence of utopian energies in political philosophy and their simultaneous
attenuation through a less imaginative invocation of the potential for changing
historical reality. These approaches seem to have determined the course of the
revival of utopian thought in general philosophy and philosophy of education, and
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the treatment of the anthropological grounds of utopia that I propose further aims
to contribute to an enrichment and redirection of this course. For the attenuation of
utopian energies through a specific description of human potentiality and its limits,
i.e., through a particular philosophical anthropology, is usually accompanied by a
restriction of the symbolic association of utopian thought to ideology alone, which
is either contrasted or connected with it, to the total neglect of the corrective and
directive functions of dystopia and with a domestication of critique as a further
consequence.
In what follows, in order to make things clearer about the aims of this book, I
sketch some general ideas for a rehabilitated utopia coupled with, rather than in
opposition to, the notion of dystopia.
The conceptualisation of dystopia, utopia and relevant terms characterized by
futurity (such as hope, counterfactuality, regulative idea, thought experiment etc)
and the theoretical discussion of utopia as a political project and as a literary genre
require a distinction between the descriptive and the normative plane. Those
correspond to accounts of reality, cosmos and humanity on the one hand and the
image-creating [Buber`s (1985, p. 29) Bildschaffende] human desire for an ethical
life on the other. The descriptive and the normative side of the issue of utopia
relate thus: reformulations of what we should hope for presuppose what we regard
ourselves capable of and how we detect and describe our supposedly inherent
limits. Observing reality we can know how people have been and to some relatively
safe extent how they will be in the very near future. But this tells us very little,
perhaps nothing, about how people could and should be. Hence, the descriptive
frame does not comprise only observations of actuality but also conjectures of
possibility. The latter are crucial for judging the imaginative reach of normativity,
while normativity is crucial for inspiring a reconsideration of those conjectures.
This distinction between the descriptive and the normative justifies the emphasis
that the book gives (in the last chapters) to issues that go beyond a mere, posited
and often axiomatic shift toward, and renewal of, the interest in utopia.
More concisely, this is how the argument of the book goes:
The significance of utopian thought for education can be made evident through
reconceptualizing utopia and approaching it alongside with the notion of dystopia.
Awareness of dystopian elements of reality radicalizes the kind of critique that
assists utopian thought and makes engagement with it more pressing. Awareness of
the lurking danger of future dystopia goes hand in hand with a utopia that is
cautious and vigilant of its own possible turn into catastrophe. If education is not
just an institution of the unreflective socialization and social integration of the
young immersed in technicist and prudentialist goals, if it is about futurity and
vision of a better world, it has to rely on, and renegotiate, utopian thought. Yet, all
this presupposes a new descriptive account of the self and the world that breaks
with the kind of anthropology and ethics that generated a particular conception of
utopia as impossible and purely dreamlike.7
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ANTI-UTOPIANISM AS A CURRENT THEORETICAL

CHALLENGE
Anti-utopian is largely the kind of political discourse that treats utopias as

pernicious visions, condemns ideas of radical change, avoids experiments with
collective life and defends the reproduction (material, symbolic) of society or, at
most, the modest, minimal betterment of conditions of political life. Before
coupling utopianism and education, it is important to explore the counterarguments
to utopianism, that is, to consider the possible anti-utopian objections to the whole
venture. If they are decisively on the right track, the whole project of reviving
utopia – within, for and as education – that many philosophical educational works
have recently undertaken or favoured (this book not withstanding) is pointless.
Of course, counterarguments to utopia have taken the length of numerous books
and they cannot be done justice, much less be refuted, in a book or, worse, in a
book chapter. Nevertheless, utopianism and education as I intend to discuss them
presuppose that the equation of utopia with inescapable prospective and dramatic
failure is wrong. And this presupposition has to be explained programmatically and
convincingly enough to justify the worthiness of the suggested turn to utopian
discourse. The relevant steps cannot follow a linear logic because the main aim of
the book is not to target anti-utopianism exclusively and thoroughly but rather to
confront it only in a way that will enable the move to a more positive task: namely,
educationally to placing utopia alongside with dystopia and to highlighting their
corrective and directive interplay. Hence, to use a metaphor that illustrates the non-
linearity of the expositional strategy that I explain below, the intersection and
recurrence of the moves that are required for the deployment of the main argument
brings to mind images of waves, or, better, of ripples on water surface.
Anti-utopianism kept at bay: A more Detailed Commentary on the Structure

of the Book
The main part of the book begins with this chapter (chapter 1) which contains
indications of the chief directions of anti-utopianism and sorts or orders the most
outstanding anti-utopian arguments. This move will justify two other chapters of
the book, one (chapter 2) which follows right after the exposition of anti-
utopianism, responds to some weaker anti-utopian arguments and facilitates the
reconceptualization of the utopianist terms that is necessary for the positive task as
stated above. The twin chapter (chapter 8) concentrates on the anti-utopian
argument that is most difficult to tackle, i.e. the anthropological argument, and
appears last in the book. For, the chapter-length response to the anthropological
argument presupposes, in its turn, the ground that will be covered by the more

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substantive discussion of utopianism and education (chapters 4 and 5) and the

recurrent, additive defence of utopianism from multiple angles that comes about
through the deployment of the basic argument of the book (chapters 3, 6 and 7).
The deeper, internal logic of this articulation of the material of the book that is
relevant to anti-utopianism is the following: by focusing on particular conceptions
of utopia its detractors render the concept of utopia as such philosophically suspect.
Partly, the mistrust of utopian thought rests on a faulty and partial understanding of
what utopianism might be about (chapter 2). Some assumptions involved in the
rejection of utopian possibilities can be shown to be apposite only to specific, bad
and obsolete kinds of utopianism. Usually, defenders of utopianism confine their
response to anti-utopianism to such a demonstration of the opponents’ faulty
generalizations. They argue that the idea that any imaginable utopia would be a
static, totalitarian, over-determined, finalist and detailed blueprint of the good
society is a wrong way of conceptualizing utopianism. Chapter 2 aims to show that
the richness of the historical course of utopian thought approached from an
enlarged, universal perspective precludes the reductive understanding of utopia
strictly as a vision of a rationalist, motionless and utterly regulated society. In
showing this, one may go even further than the usual defence of utopia along lines
of conceptual richness. One may open the way to a conceptual renewal of
utopianism and to a possibility of reshuffling its components, i.e. utopia and
dystopia so as to rearrange them in their position within utopianism and in their
relation to one another (chapter 3).
Yet, we should not make things too easy for ourselves. We must not ignore that
the strongest challenge to utopianism, the deepest-seated in the Western thought,
does not just affect the various conceptions of utopianism but it affects the concept
of utopianism itself, that is, the very faith in human perfectibility, the discomfort
with the existent, the act of imagining a radically different future and the
remoulding of the gloomily depicted present along the vision of such futurism. The
strongest argument against utopia deals with the shortcomings of humanity (human
frailty), not just with the shortcomings of specific models of the good (chapter 8).
Therefore, it does not concern only old, rationalist, end-state utopias. The anti-
utopian equation of all utopias with dangerous efforts for social change rests on the
idea that human nature is prohibitive of radical change.
Hence, to formulate a new account of utopianism that is not teleological or too
determinate is one thing; to show that this formulation is not unrealistic qua at odds
with human potentialities is quite another. The challenge now is different, mainly,
either:
(1) to prove that the reformulated utopianism is quite mild in its political demands
on humanity and compatible with the dominant account of human nature’s
narrowly defined potentialities;
or:
(2a) to stick to a bold utopianism oscillating, however, between acknowledging its
necessity for the regulation of human action yet acknowledging also its supposedly
simultaneous impossibility due to human nature;
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ANTI-UTOPIANISM AS A CURRENT THEORETICAL CHALLENGE
(2b) to stick to a bold utopianism and justify this commitment by rejecting the
standard view of human nature that precludes bold utopianism and displaying why
that view involves an unsubstantiated elevation of Western self-conceptions to
anthropological constants.
Option 1 allows for the so-called pragmatist or realist utopia (e.g. Rawls,
McIntyre) which is modest enough to promote only the moderate change a
(post)modern citizen as a rational egoist would wish (whatever else s/he might
wish) but unable philosophically to sustain radical redirection. Option 2a revisits
and revives the Marxist tradition via deconstructive, poststructuralist or continental
post-metaphysical insights and it preserves the vision of radical change but in a
way that I regard as politically inoperative, deep down conventionalist and at times
contradictory. The final main option (2b) can accommodate radical change and the
aspirations of utopianism proper but requires an additional and more risky
theoretical endeavour: to show why its twin option (2a) is inadequate, while also
showing why the realist depiction of human nature as rationally egoistic is
problematic, that is, why the bulwark of anti-utopianism must be attacked. As I go
for this 2b option, the book will not finish with the exposition of the connection of
utopia, dystopia and education, as it might do (up to chapter 5), but it will go on
with a deeper justification of this connection (chapters 6, 7 and 8). Thus the rest of
the book chapters (after ch 5) will deal with a critique of the utopian thought that I
would place in 2a (Paul Ricoeur, Fredric Jameson, Ernesto Laclau, Slavoj Žižek
and Maeve Cooke) and of the received view on humanity, its relation to reality and
its supposedly ‘natural’ limits.
ANTI-UTOPIAN ARGUMENTS AND POLITICAL UTOPIANISM
Whereas in early modernity the notion of utopia was embraced and projected on a
temporal dimension of fulfilment that radicalized its initial spatial and novelist
character (Habermas, 1994), later it fell upon hard times. The attitude to actual
political utopian projects changed too. Even during more politically unsettled
periods with more revolutionary confidence, e.g. May 1968, there had been an
ambivalent stance to utopia. As Luisa Passerini (2002) explains, ‘the protagonists
of 1968 did not like to use “utopia”, because the negative sense of the word had
prevailed, indicating something impossible to reach, a sentiment against the spirit
of 1968’. However, the very moment when utopia appears tarnished, ‘slogans such
as “Being a realist means demanding the impossible” testify to the utopian strength
of 1968’ (Passerini, 2002, p. 17). The reasons for the ambivalence regarding utopia
or even for its downright rejection have been productive of very strong anti-utopian
theoretical positions (Sargent, 2006, pp. 13–4). In their simpler version, those
positions are by now well known as they have been popularized and widely
disseminated: for most lay people, the utopian is equated with the unrealizable, the
impossible in principle, or the impossible for most human beings over which one
should not waste time or energy. Apart from being presented as futile, the utopian
has been accused of having pernicious political implications. In philosophy and
in education as much as in the general, perhaps global, social imaginary ‘an
anti-utopianism of both the right and left can be found in those views that reduce
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utopian thinking to state terrorism and progressive visionaries to unrealistic, if not

dangerous, ideologues’ (Giroux, 2003, p. 475). From the anti-utopian perspective,
dabbling in arbitrary, wishful thinking may bring along risky social and political
experiments, even totalitarian new collective formations. Such formations may see
themselves as perfect and in need of no further change ending up in static and
illiberal models of society and life. Utopia appears, then, as inescapably totalizing.
Finality as an attribute of utopian thought derives from the taken-for-granted
assumption that ‘the long series of improvements on social reality was bound to
reach at some point its natural conclusion: not just a better society, but the best
society conceivable, the perfect society, society in which any further change could
be only a change to the worse’ (Bauman, 2003, p. 15).
The disparagement of utopia or, at best, the oscillation between positive and
negative treatments of utopia marked the modernist conception of education as a
project for future betterment of humanity – with the negative stance toward utopia
increasingly gaining a sweeping force. The anti-utopian loss of faith in human
malleability has pervaded education to such an extent that it has made schooling
complicit in the political and cultural failure to meet the task of imagining and
forging a better humanity. Adorno’s remark in a radio interview is very telling.
Not only does society, as it is presently structured, keep people immature but
every serious attempt to shift it – I’m avoiding the word “educate” deliberately – to
shift it towards maturity is immediately met with indescribable resistances, and all
the evil in the world at once finds its most eloquent advocates, who will prove to
you that the very thing you are attempting to achieve has either long been
overtaken or is utopian or is no longer relevant (Adorno & Becker, 1999, p. 32).
Given that education has played an important role in many utopian projects or
novels (Peters & Humes, 2003, p. 429), it is ironic that utopia has fallen into
educational disrepute (Wimmer, 2003, p. 167). What is alarming, though, is the
political quietism that results from the fact that philosophy of education loses much
critical force when it gives in so light-heartedly to anti-utopian trends. For Ernst
Bloch, as Vincent Geoghegan puts it, ‘the real enemy of humanity is not illusory
dreaming but nihilism, the loss of the capacity to dream at all’ (Geoghegan, 2004,
p. 130). Karl Mannheim (1960) sees as a de-distantiation a cultural democratization
where aristocratic cultural ideals give way to more mundane concerns. The aspect
of the Mannheimian de-distantiation that is relevant to education is the one that
contrasts the quasi-aristocratic, humanistic ideal of the all-round person with the
democratic ideal of vocational specialization. The shortcomings that Mannheim
detects in educational humanism comprise ‘the mistaking of one’s own limits for
those of the world; lack of contact with the realities of life; a purely aesthetic
relation to things; a lack of awareness of new potentialities and situations’ (Turner,
2003, p. 40). The democratic ideal is praised, on the other hand, for its focus on the
existing, limited situation. However, the danger of such de-distantiation lies in its
exaggeration that threatens humanity as such. For Mannheim, achieving some
distance from the contingencies of one’s existence is a fundamental trait of the
human being. Those for whom nothing is of value beyond their immediate situation
are not fully human. The ideal of going beyond the situational perspective is
termed ‘ecstasy’. In Mannheim`s approach, ‘rather than suppressing the possibility
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of ecstatic experience in favour of a culture saturated by vocational specialization,

democracy has the potential to become the basis, and the sole basis, for ecstasy as a
“universally shared form of experience”‘ (Turner, 2003, p. 41). Whether democracy
on its own suffices to maintain the ecstatic is a debatable issue which will be
encountered elsewhere in the book. The point here is that when ecstasy is missing
from the pedagogical enterprise, education becomes a modest operation of
socialization, an adaptive and conservative institution that aims to reproduce or, at
most, to modify and readjust the world to new developments rather than to raise
more radical demands on humanity.
True, the anti-utopian tendencies in modernity did not gain absolute control of
philosophical or educational thought. The most famous exceptions to the anti-
utopian theoretical concordance in the 20th century have been the works of Ernst
Bloch (1986) and Karl Mannheim (1960) but, despite their influence, those works
never turned into a dominant current of thought. In late modernity, conservative
and Cold War liberal attacks on the dangerous ambitions of utopianism assisted by
the downfall of revolutionary confidence led to ‘a full-scale retreat from visions of
perfection’ (Geoghegan, 2003, p. 156). And neo-liberalism now exploits the
collapse of alternative socio-politico-economical systems such as that of the
Eastern bloc. It lives off or it becomes constantly reinforced by ‘the increasingly
dominant view that society cannot be fundamentally improved outside of market
forces’. By means of such re-invigoration of its energies ‘neo-liberalism strips
utopianism of its possibilities for social critique and democratic engagement’
(Giroux, 2003, p. 475). By means of neo-liberal self-recuperative strategies that
guarantee the survival of the system, despite crises and democratic deficits, the
need to reclaim ‘utopian thinking as both a discourse of human rights and a moral
referent for dismantling and transforming dominant structures of wealth and
power’ (Giroux, 2003, p. 475) becomes undermined. But the sharpest anti-utopian
argument against radical human redirection is not the spectre of totalitarianism that
several liberal positions at times recruit. The sharpest anti-utopian argument is the
ultimate one, the point where a conversation between a utopian and an anti-utopian
theorist ends, that is, the anthropological argument about human nature being
prohibitive of perfectibility. From Adorno, as we saw above, down to Giroux,
utopian theorists confront ‘what Russell Jacoby called a “convenient cynicism”, a
belief that human suffering, hardship, and massive inequalities in all areas of life
are simply inherent in human nature and an irreversible part of the social condition’
(Giroux, 2003, p. 475).
In what follows, let us order and codify the main anti-utopian arguments
encountered in public debates, media culture and the social imaginary and let us
associate them with some emblematic figures and philosophical trends that have at
times initiated or promoted them.
THE MAIN ARGUMENTS AGAINST UTOPIA
(1) There have been severe criticisms of utopia for its prioritizing the role of faith
and not of reason in politics leading immediately to fundamentalism and/or
expansionism. This set of criticisms is usually put forward by much secular liberal
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philosophical discourse. (2) Unlike those who accuse utopia for too much reliance
on faith, there are those who accuse it of too much faith in reason and too much
reliance on the rationalist organization of life. Against the rationalism of a perfectly
regulated society and the dream of the radical change that would erase all
blemishes of an existing society, anti-utopians such as Karl Popper (1957) draw
a distinction between utopian holistic engineering and piecemeal engineering.
(3) There are anti-utopian arguments against visions of collective happiness as
supposedly suffocating for the individual. Here the issue is freedom and the
balance between subjectivity and society. Friedrich von Hayek (1944) attacks
utopian central planning for its inherent inefficiency as well as for its blockage of
individual freedom. From another perspective, Isaiah Berlin (1991) criticizes the
utopian emphasis on collective ideals as consolidating a split within the self and as
ultimately harming human freedom. (4) Marx and Marxist philosophers argued
against what they saw as utopian socialism charging it with unrealizability,
inoperativeness and escapism. (5) Much like the Marxist criticisms of utopian
thought, left-leaning deconstructive arguments are put forward against utopian
unrealizability, inoperativeness and escapism (e.g. Derrida). However, in my view,
they constitute a separate category because they do not share the positivist Marxist
distinction between ideology and science within which the Marxist critique of
utopian unrealizability is couched. Without assuming an eventual and scientifically
predicted realization of ideals, the deconstructive arguments contrast the inoper-
ativeness of the chimeric with the urgency of the here and now. (6) There have also
been some post-metaphysical, continental- and liberal- philosophical arguments
against the Marxian, Marxist and Mannheimian ideas of utopian realizability and
blueprint quality. Many continental and Anglo-American liberal philosophers
converge on the idea of utopia as, at best, a possibility while denouncing utopia’s
reconstructive aspirations and the metaphysical, philosophical-historical framework
that underpinned those aspirations. (7) Some anti-utopian liberals are more
dismissive of utopia as such because they see in utopian thought a desire for
stability and consensus. Their arguments focus on the significance of conflict and
dissent in societies. Ralph Dahrendorf’s (1967) anti-utopianism is a case in point.
(8) We notice a similar emphasis on conflict against consensus-theory utopianism
within some philosophies that are usually placed in the category of postmodernism.
Michel Foucault’s arguments come to mind here. (9) Neo-pragmatist arguments are
also put forward against utopian metaphysics but they are accompanied with a mild
appropriation of some utopianism as creative impetus (Rorty, 1995) or as part of
the democratic process (from Dewey down to contemporary educational pragmatism).
(10) Finally, there have been arguments in favour of political formalism and
against the political utopianism of a specific conception of the good alongside an
appropriation of utopian consensual themes (communicative utopias of a Haber-
masian style).
Surely, some of the above anti-utopian arguments have a methodological rather
than an absolute, all encompassing character. They are sometimes employed by
thinkers who wish to refute some kinds of utopianism while retaining, often tacitly,
milder forms of utopian-like visions of collective life and society. Thus, many
theorists employ ‘utopianism’ in a mitigated and strategic fashion, as a charge only
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to attack what they consider as bad utopianism, not to attack any utopianism or to
condemn the attempt to construct a utopian vision wholesale. For instance, Herbert
Marcuse (see, Cooke, 2004, p. 414) rejected utopias as obsolete and impossible,
distant from actual human potential and effort. This critique of utopian thought
holds that the utopian distance from the actual historical process obscures the
redemptive possibilities within everydayness. But this did not stop Marcuse from
having a very strong image of the good life based on the Great Refusal, i.e. the
protest against, and overcoming of, surplus repression (Cho, 2006, p. 23) and from
being one of the most distinctively utopian authors of the Frankfurt School. But,
despite the few exceptions such as Marcuse’s methodological anti-utopianism for
the sake of a different utopianism, beneath the surface of most of the above
counter-arguments or condemnations of utopia, even of mitigated and strategic
anti-utopianism, one finds a common grounding of the anti-utopian sentiment.
Anti-utopian variations share an implicit over-view of humanity that goes against
the utopian anthropological assumptions regarding the malleability of the human
self, the relativized, depoliticized and historicized character of human frailty and
the questioning of the supposed inherence or directive priority of egoism over
altruism.
THINKING OVER THE ANTI-UTOPIAN CHARGES
When looking at these charges as a whole, we realize that they are not always
compatible with one another and they do not address a single or uniform conception
of what utopia is about. Evidently, the charge of escapism cannot be plausibly
directed at utopia as rationalist or central planning and the charge of chimeric
urealizability cannot be considered as justifiable regarding piecemeal, democratic
change. Those Golden Age narratives that had a distinct political element and
orientation cannot be charged with escapism nor can they be condemned for
supposedly offering a detailed and static model of society (Papastephanou, 2008a).
Hence, we need first to recall that utopia has taken a wide number of meanings
along its historical course and its often conflicting manifestations and that not all
versions of it are susceptible to the above criticisms. A fuller deployment of this
argument, however, will be carried out in the next chapter which concerns the
appropriate redefinition of the terms. What is important here is that, if taken as a
whole, the above criticisms of utopia are either incoherent/inconsistent or they can
be played off against one another.
Simultaneously, one might show that the charges misfire one by one if directed
at a conception of utopia that is neither escapist nor too determinate, neither illiberal
nor hostile to controversy and, more generally, at a conception of utopia that
suffers from none of the above defects. This determines the task of contemporary
utopian thinking as one of showing that utopia can be conceived in fresh terms.
The book as a whole aims to contribute to this task. Conversely, this entails that the
opponents of utopia could be shown to fall into the trap of a genetic fallacy [i.e.,
the failure to suspect that the fault might lie in the various conceptions (the
thematization), not the concept f utopia as such] and that it rests with them to prove
that their criticisms of utopia do not concern specific, mostly modern conceptions
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of utopia but the concept of utopia itself. Genetic fallacy is the mistaken
assumption that the problematic origin or specific location of an idea must render
the idea itself problematic (Price, 1999, p. 77). In the case of utopia it might mean
that the fact that utopia had been thematized in times when regularity, stability,
duration and utter determinacy were in theoretical fashion sealed its fate and
reception in later times when that fashion was rendered obsolete. Again, the next
chapter with its gleanings from the history of utopian thought displaying the
richness of utopia beyond its modernist thematization and with its redefinitions
aims to expose this specific problem of anti-utopianism.
Nevertheless, in this chapter we should better present some general objections to
anti-utopianism and then move to a brief, one by one discussion of the above
summarized main anti-utopian arguments. It has to be noted, however, that the
critical discussion of anti-utopianism that will follow and the examination of anti-
utopianism’s own complicities do not undermine its undiminished usefulness as a
valuable tool against bad utopianism. Some anti-utopian arguments are still the
most effective and appropriate answer to facile and pernicious futurism. The
problem is that often anti-utopianism presupposes, or it slides in, such bad futurism
and becomes itself a crypto-utopianism. Often, anti-utopianism creates the
conditions for the twist of the utopian impulse into naïve and undesirable, even
totalitarian or fundamentalist vision. It does so by favouring a wrongheaded
assumption that lofty ideals are no longer needed thus opening space for all sorts of
public exploitations of people’s desire for, and thoughtless replacement of, the lost
transcendence.
Interestingly, to my knowledge, the earliest refutation of anti-utopian liberal
arguments can be found in the earliest liberal use of utopia alongside with dystopia.
We may stretch that refutation to turn it against current liberalism. To explain:
John Stuart Mill used the term dystopian in a public speech in the House of
Commons along with the term ‘cacotopian’ [coming from or favouring a bad place,
‘cacos’ in Greek means ‘bad’]. He accuses his opponents of being cacotopians and
says ‘what is commonly called Utopian is something too good to be practicable,
but what they appear to favour is too bad to be practicable’ (cf. Sargent, 2006, p.
15). However, I believe, to prove that this is not just a rhetorical flourish, one has
to stretch the argument and analyze what the anti-utopians actually defend showing
that it is indeed a bad place. In other words, we need a critical dystopian description
of the here and now that would expose the anti-utopians who rationalize the here
and now as cacotopians. This will be taken up in the chapters on Oleanna and on
the 2000 curriculum (chs 4 and 5 respectively).
Another objection related to the one above about favouring a bad place concerns
the fact that liberalism, which chastises utopia as promoting a specific vision while
pretending that liberalism itself does not promote any such vision, appears indeed
to also presuppose a concrete vision of the good. David Blacker makes clear that,
despite pretences, liberalism does operate with vision. Especially liberal contextualism
becomes associated in Blacker’s explanation with a world that is dreamed of and is
wider than any single philosophy (2007, p. 184). Liberal contexualism appears in
favour of ‘a certain picture of society’ (p. 193) as much as other, less liberal views
do. From another perspective, Slavoj Žižek also highlights the ideological character
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of anti-utopianism, despite the latter’s claims to being simply realistic. ‘Ideology is

not only a utopian project of social transformation with no realistic chance of
actualization; no less ideological is the anti-utopian stance of those who “realisti-
cally” devalue every global project of social transformation as “utopian”, that is, as
unrealistic dreaming and/or harbouring “totalitarian” potential’. From there on,
Žižek’s criticisms of such devaluation become sharper. ‘Today’s predominant form
of ideological “closure” takes the precise form of mental block which prevents us
from imagining fundamental social change, in the interests of an allegedly
“realistic” and “mature” attitude’ (cf Brockelman, 2003, p. 196).
Finally, another important variation of criticisms against anti-utopianism on
grounds of the latter’s own ideological character concerns the inability of anti-
utopians to avoid the unitarism and holism they detect in their ideological
opponents. For Mark Olssen, not only ‘much anti-utopian thought from liberal
quarters is incoherent’ (Olssen, 2003, p. 527) but, more than that, it suffers
precisely from the weaknesses it chastises. ‘The way Popper, Hayek […] and
Dahrendorf reject all philosophical alternatives to classical liberalism, as leading
to totalitarianism, reveals its own peculiar unitarist mantle’ (Olssen, 2003, p. 538).
It also reveals a kind of stasis and perennialism, since liberalism becomes the last
word in politics, a word that has only to be perpetuated. It thus becomes the
unsurpassable philosophical theory beyond which lies the chaos and abyss of
disaster.
Then again, such a general questioning of anti-utopianism might not do justice
to the specificity of the arguments we summarized above. Those deserve a separate
and more detailed discussion.
(1) It is thought that when faith escapes from the private to infuse the public
sphere it will inescapably revert to bad utopianism and fundamentalism. Conversely,
when phenomena of bad utopianism and fundamentalism (utopias turned into
dystopias) crop up in world politics religions must be hidden somewhere around.
There is some truth in this in some cases, but the sweeping assertion that ‘the
dystopias that are bedevilling us in the 21st century are based on faith and tradition
not reason’ (Sargent, 2006, p. 13) is wrong if by ‘faith’ and ‘tradition’ it refers to
religions or convictions rather than to the time honoured Western values of profit
and success. It might be true to some extent that ‘George W. Bush is as much a
utopian as the Taliban and other Islamic extremists, and they are both certain that
they are doing their god’s work’ (Sargent, 2006, p. 12); but it is rather naïve to
believe that, let us say, the Iraq war broke out because of faith, irrespective of
geopolitical and economic Western interests or that the American cold war ‘inter-
vention’ in Guatemala in 1954 overthrowing Arbenz was justified and planned on
the basis of the supposed will of god. It might also be true that bad utopianism
today revolves around faith rather than reason, and this is a good counterargument
to the Popperian charge of utopia as such with rationalism (Popper, 1957). But we
must not lose sight of the fact that when colonies produced ‘utopias for the
colonists and dystopias for the colonized’ (Sargent, 2006, p. 11), expansion was
fuelled by prospects and profit, the enshrined secular priority of the Western self.
The role of faith then was at most simply ancillary providing or supporting
rationalizations or disseminating throughout the world by religion’s ‘missionary
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position’ the puritan lifestyle and mindset that desires possession and self-
preservation accomplished through conquest. The tendency to produce exclusivist
and expansionist utopias can be found not only in faith or in reason but also in
other justifications of specific conceptions of the good.
We may turn this objection to anti-utopianist secularism into a more general
argument that counterfeits the naïve assumption that the disconnection of faith,
utopia and politics guarantees a better, safer albeit less ambitious future. Hannah
Arendt had already warned us on this faulty assumption and provided the ground
for such a general argument. She had explained that ‘it seems rather obvious that
men who have lost their faith in Paradise will not be able to establish it on earth;
but it is not so certain that those who have lost their belief in Hell as a place of the
hereafter may not be willing and able to establish on earth exact imitations of what
people used to believe about Hell’ (Arendt, 1994, p. 404). The spectres of oppression,
injustice and terror do not always appear in cassock or cloaks. Sometimes they
appear as power-dressed, ordinary profit-seeking achievers.
(2) Karl Popper argued against calculated and radical, holistic utopian change
unravelled through a large-scale project of realization of an ultimate goal. He thus
renounced comprehensive ideals of the good. He emphasized, instead, the kind of
piecemeal engineering that combats the most urgent pathologies of society. Popper
held an account of society as nothing more than the sum total of its members. Thus,
any other account of society, one that sees in it more than just a multiplied
individualism, appeared to him as inviting totalitarian oppression of the self and its
rights in the name of a dangerous abstraction, i.e. the ultimate collective good.
Olssen provides a very apposite critique of the distinction between utopian and
piecemeal change and shows how liberalism itself relies on a programmatic ideal
that it fails to acknowledge (2003, p. 532). What becomes ultimately apparent is
that Popper’s grounds for attacking utopia wholesale are more ideological rather
than epistemological (p. 533). Piecemeal engineering searches and combats the
greatest and most urgent evils of society; it does not go after the ultimate good.
I have argued elsewhere why this establishes an ethics of control undermining an
educationally more worthwhile ethics of risk (Papastephanou, 2006), so, there is no
need to cover the same ground here. What has to be added, however, is that, as we
shall see in a later chapter, without referring to Popper, Alain Badiou (2001)
provides a strong criticism of ‘the stodgy conservatism’ informing piecemeal
change and the idea of searching for the evil to eradicate it instead of searching for
the good to make it endure.
If the ethical “consensus” is founded on the recognition of Evil, it follows that
every effort to unite people around a positive idea of the Good, let alone to identify
Man [sic] with projects of this kind, becomes in fact the real source of evil itself.
Such is the accusation so often repeated over the last fifteen years: every
revolutionary project stigmatized as “utopian” turns, we are told, into totalitarian
nightmare. Every will to inscribe an idea of justice or equality turns bad. Every
collective will to Good creates Evil (Badiou, 2001, p. 13).
I bring up Badiou’s work here as an example because it is now being treated by
many commentators as a fresh defence of comprehensive conceptions of the good
against the liberal priority of the right over the good and the concomitant favouring
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of piecemeal change. Badiou’s work is seen as ‘a robust critique of the various

value systems and schools of thought which over the past quarter century in
particular have sought to minimise the potential for large-scale change in favour of,
at best, limited and partial progress’ (Hewlett, 2004, p. 338).
(3) Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944) comprises arguments against utopia
and its treatment of individual freedom. In the effort to oppose post-war statism
and defend individualism coupled with economic growth, Hayek directs his
criticisms, amongst other things, against utopian planning and utopia more generally.
Utopian central planning is, according to Hayek, inefficient and illiberal qua anti-
individualist. This is because public intervention in processes that resemble a
Darwinian natural selection in their independent self-regulation is doomed to fail
and to cause disaster. As Olssen puts it, for Hayek, ‘there is a natural selection of
competitive traditions whereby rules and practices that confer success come to
replace those unsuited to the human environment’ (Olssen, 2003, p. 529). More
deeply, Hayek sets out to develop his attack on utopia from a springboard of
absolutized individual and marketplace negative liberty. It is negative liberty in the
sense of one being free from coercion by governments and communities and of
being in the position of a non-intervening spectator regarding the unintended
effects of the market on the whole of society. Hayek stresses the freedom not to be
coerced by governments and other people. Yet, there are unintended effects of
markets on people which Hayek celebrates instead of condemning them, as he
naturalizes them via a Darwinian biologism. A simple and direct way of criticizing
Hayek would be to show the proximity of the ‘survival of the fittest’ rationale to
Nazism and to charge his views with a naturalistic fallacy, the well-rehearsed
argument, since David Hume, about the mistaken conflation of the Is and the
Ought. In less polemical terms, even if one grants Hayek an accurate depiction of
biological large-scale operations (which is debatable as such), this in no way
justifies the transference of biologism in political life and in society.
Isaiah Berlin is also a vehement critic of utopia along similar individualist lines
but for somewhat different reasons. In his work, the emphasis is put on the
negative, undesirable side of the positive freedom that grounds utopianism. Berlin
sees utopia as presupposing a subjective split between the regulating and the
regulated self. The regulating self identifies with supra-individual oppressive
mechanisms, e.g. the state or a collectivity; the regulated self is tailored to
the ostensibly rational expectations of the regulating self. Predictably, for Berlin, a
society that presupposes no specific and privileged conception of the good loosens
the tension within the subject, encourages freedom and diversity and is thus
preferable to a more active and intervening society or state. As liberalism is taken
to advocate no substantive conception of the good, it becomes the locus of freedom
par excellence. Within liberalism the space for diversity seems to be freed and to
be threatened only by statist, national, or other such collectivist interventions to
pluralism and individual freedom (Olssen, 2003, p. 536). Most of those arguments
are refuted very pertinently by Olssen and we might simply refer to his text. But an
additional comment would be helpful here: an important question is whether there
can be a society that does not presuppose a privileged conception of the good. Even
if that is a possibility, the liberal society is not its materialization. Perhaps in a
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liberal society one may be a believer or non-believer without serious cost, although
now even this is debatable given the fear of terrorism and its association with some
religious doctrines. But can one be a non-achiever, a so-called ‘looser’ in the eyes
of others, without paying too high a price, not only existentially but also socially
and politically? Is the self that is profit-seeking and success-oriented not a
regulated and coerced self? What would lie underneath a positive, possibly
Berlinean response to the last question would be the assumption that in seeking
profit and promoting self-interest, the human self is free because it is at its most
natural and authentic condition. In that case, the further confrontation with this
claim would take us directly to chapter eight where human nature is discussed.
(4) Marxism has had an apparently ambivalent position on utopia. Obviously,
unlike liberalism, it is appreciative of the social ideal inspiring many utopias. It has
attacked utopia nevertheless for reasons that the relevant literature has already
registered abundantly revolving around issues of proximity and distance to science
and ideology on the one hand and issues of realizability and escapism on the other.
Within the Marxist framework, scientific socialism was opposed to ideological,
utopianist socialism and anarchism, where the former referred to realizable and
sound political aspirations while the latter referred to chimeric and escapist, vain
hope. Marxism used the term ‘utopia’ to disparage particular versions of socialism
and anarchism (Buber, 1985) but it shared much with utopian constructions, and
the Marxist classless society fits in well with the end-state version of utopia. Many
left-wing thinkers have also maintained a negative or an ambivalent stance toward
utopia, often echoing Marx’s unease or downright rejection of the idea. After all,
Marx famously asserted: ‘I don’t write recipes for the cookshops of the future’
(Kumar, 2003, p. 68).
Marx’s objections to utopia are usually taken to have been directed against the
spatial utopian socialism but, as Ruth Levitas following David Harvey reminds us,
Marx also opposed Adam Smith’s utopianism of process (Levitas, 2003b, p. 141),
i.e., he opposed the utopianism of politico-economic liberalism. However, as
Michael Gardiner explains, ‘in repudiating abstract or idealist utopias, Marx did
not seek to embrace a kind of naïve empiricism and dispense with utopianism tout
court’. It can be shown, following Gardiner, that ‘what is under attack in Marx is
not anticipation or utopian expressions as such, but “rather the failure to root this
anticipation in a theoretical framework cognizant of the essential dynamics of
capitalism”‘ (Gardiner, 2006, p. 9). Be that as it may, the ambivalence within
Marxism regarding utopia has not been without cost for Marxism itself, for ‘the
traditional Marxist antipathy to utopianism has been repaid by a bourgeois antipathy
to Marxism as utopia’ (Kumar, 1991, p. 94). As Jameson puts it, ‘“utopian” has
come to be a code word on the left for socialism or communism; while on the right
it has become synonymous with “totalitarianism” or, in effect, with Stalinism’
(Jameson, 2004, p. 35).
Marxism rejected utopia for the sake of a rational and scientific organization of
life on the basis of a specific vision of the good which was considered imminent in
a historical materialist sense echoing the positivism and eschatology of the times.
In fact, a regulated, detailed end-state [both spatial (utopian socialism) and
temporal (capitalist progress)] was rejected for another regulated, detailed end-state
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[spatial (Britain as it would evolve from the industrial revolution era to the
proletarian revolutionary era) and temporal (the time of the ripe conditions for a
classless society)]. Marxist anti-utopianism did not escape from the traps in which
its opponents had fallen. Thus, justifiably, some theorists have accused Marxism of
an arresting of time that ultimately undermines utopian impetus as such. The
‘unutopian ideal that guides Marx’s theories’ is, according to Arendt, the idea of a
‘completely “socialized mankind”, whose sole purpose would be the entertaining
of the life process’ (Arendt, 1989, p. 89). Rather than freeing political thought from
bad utopianism, Marxist methodological anti-utopianism has not avoided the
dangers of bad utopianism. For the problem with both Marxism and utopianist
socialism/anarchism has been their modernist tenets directing them to exclusivist
and static visions (the utopia of a soteriological exclusive group, e.g. the proletariat,
and the utopia of a specific space of suffocating regulation of life correspondingly),
and not their supposed proximity or distance from science and ideology or realizability
and escapism.
(5) Yet it is not only Marxism that has charged utopia with unrealizability and
escapism. The incredulity toward utopia and the attack on utopia’s supposed
relation to the chimeric that has been brewing for some time now in postmodern
thought is evident in Derrida’s following assertion.
Although there is a critical potential in utopia which one should no doubt never
completely renounce, above all when one can turn it into a motif of resistance
against all alibis and all ‘realist’ and ‘pragmatist’ resignations, I still mistrust the
word. In certain contexts, utopia, the word in any case, is all too easily associated
with the dream, with demobilisation, with an impossibility that urges renounce-
ment instead of action (Derrida, 2000, p. 8).
This ambivalence regarding utopia is echoed in various instances and in the
work of many proponents of Derrida’s deconstruction. For instance, Sean Kelly
(2004) employs the term ‘non-utopian utopia’ to describe Derrida’s idea of cities of
refuge, where even the unforgivable is forgiven and where free movement and
settlement is predicated on an unconditional hospitality. Elsewhere (Papastephanou,
2006), I explain why I do not consider the cities of refuge as dramatically
challenging of the existent as its proponents imagine, and why I do not consider
them exhaustive of the ethical content of utopia proper. Thus, here I give only a
skeletal exposition of that argument. A utopian ethic of risk and a genuine
cosmopolitanism begins with hospitality, it does not end there. When it does end in
invitations and visitations, ethics loses its critical edge and leaves the Western
subject in the privileged position of the benefactor without for a minute forcing it
to confront the psycho-political denials from which its global position maintains its
privileges and its very capacity to benefit others (2006, pp. 53–4). In other words,
the politically inoperative pacification that Derrida associates with utopia may as
well apply to the non-utopian utopia of his politicization of hospitality.
Beyond this criticism, education as theory and practice could very well answer
Derrida’s concerns about utopian quietism. Theory aspires to formulate an
appropriate regulative ideal; practice aspires to approximate it, but, more than that,
practice raises a demand for ‘here and now’ that prevents the degeneration of the
ideal into an ever receding futurism. It also provides means for critiquing and
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modifying the ideal through the scrutiny that actuality invigorates and recharges.
Besides, utopia and education (as both theory and practice) have a common
denominator: the former presupposes the plasticity of humanity; the latter constantly
moulds and remoulds humanity. Education then fulfils its purposes better when it
exercises its utopian right, so to speak, most consistently, that is, when, against any
stagnation and against any relegation to a distant future, it raises the demands of
action and mobilization and shapes the subjects that are suitable to the vision of
reflective, sensitive and active citizens.
(6) It is said by many postmodern thinkers that utopia suffers from a tyrannical
blueprint quality and that it disqualifies whatever futurism appears as a mere
possibility. True, much utopianist discourse has been influenced by versions of
Marxism or by an adherence to Karl Mannheim’s conditioning of utopia on
realizability and confines utopia to project-like, reconstructive vision. However,
the anti-utopian postmodern argument that utopia should be rejected as inherently
premised on realizability and blueprint planning concedes too much, and in an
arbitrary fashion, to that particular utopianist trend. But nothing compels us to
accept realizability as a criterion (even if a retrospective one) for distinguishing
between utopia as a project and utopia as futile daydreaming. Various points of
later chapters will deal with the why of this questioning of realizability and
blueprint quality more effectively. Suffice it here to say that the anti-utopian
postmodern charge of utopia as by definition predictable, too concrete and regulated
is easy to refute because its target is principally a set of various versions of an
eschatological Marxism up to Mannheim’s utopianism. All we need to show is that
the teleological and determinist account of utopia is not binding and that a
reconstructive utopia need not be favoured against less detailed or non-project-like
utopian thinking.
Moreover, against the argument that utopia as a political vision is always too
determinate, teleological and finalist, there have historically been very many cases
that disprove this hasty identification; perhaps it is pertinent to turn to a case where
even the same thinker has an early position on utopia that contradicts his later one.
As Zachary Price explains, the substantive body of the early Georg Lukacs’ work,
while indisputably utopian, is not readily subject to the criticisms that have been
directed at Marxist utopianism. Lukacs does not offer a systematic account of
society or a description of the course of social action leading to the realization of
utopia (Price, 1999, p. 80). Unlike his later writings, which are characterized by the
determinacy with which they predict utopia as a future possibility, his earlier ones
do not claim that utopia should be theorized as the outcome of an identifiable
process of social change.8 ‘Utopia is instead used only as a hermeneutic device, a
ground upon which to criticize the dystopian present and a means by which to
stretch the critical imagination’ (Price, 1999, p. 68).
Like the early Lukacs, many Frankfurt School thinkers, especially Adorno,
treated utopia as a mere possibility. I maintain that we should deliberately avoid
any systematic theory of society and the temptation to elaborate a course of social
action that is likely to realize utopia. Like those, we too might simply allow ‘utopia
to appear as a possibility – albeit one among many – in spite of the alienated,
dystopian quality of life in the present-day world’ (Price, 1999, 80). We have no
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reason and no ground whatever to assume that utopia is predictable or imminent.

Being anthropologically optimist, that is, believing in the human potential for
perfectibility and believing that there is nothing inherent in humanity that blocks it,
does not amount to a naïve political optimism that assumes that history or social
practice delivers perfection to humanity without the latter’s conscious effort. The
realization of utopia is not guaranteed. On the contrary, as things stand in global
politics, it seems quite distant, perhaps far more distant and unreachable than
mediocrity or even disaster. Nor does precision remain an absolute requirement of
utopia today. Badiou’s utopianism, for instance, escapes the charges that are
usually directed at blueprint utopia because, as Hewlett stresses, Badiou ‘has no
clear vision of an alternative future’ (Hewlett, 2004, p. 338), without ceasing to
defend a bold utopianism of radical socio-political transformation.
Already in Walter Benjamin’s time and, especially, in his own thought utopia
can be imagined in terms that escape such charges. This is how Gardiner puts it
regarding Benjamin’s understanding of utopian wish-images. ‘Such wish-images
are best understood as sparks or flashes of insight and awakening that are spurs to
practice, not “blueprints” of some sort of fully imagined, perfect society of the
future. As such, Benjamin’s position here escapes the charge of “social engineering”
that is often levelled at utopianism’ (Gardiner, 2006, p. 20). Maeve Cooke helps us
unpack ideas of this kind by elaborating on the complex nature of the formalism on
which it rests. Formalism is not a necessary component of utopian thinking that
seeks to avoid ‘bad utopianism’, ‘finalism’ and ‘totalitarianism’. Rather, ‘formality is
a pragmatic requirement of such thinking. A projected utopian image must be
indeterminate enough to appeal to a wide range of social agents with varying
evaluative commitments and convictions, yet determinate enough to motivate them
to engage in transformative social action’. Yet, all this can be promoted in
awareness that ‘the line dividing formal and substantive accounts of the “good
society” is always inexact and provisional’ (Cooke, 2004, p. 427, fn 16).
(7) Dahrendorf is against utopia because it renders conflict superfluous. ‘One of
the basic assumptions of all utopian constructions is that conditions may be created
under which conflicts become superfluous’ (Dahrendorf, 1967, p. 139). Exclusively
associated with eschatological narratives of a supposedly prospective undifferentiated
unity, utopianism is then rejected as a violent revocation of singularity and
heterogeneity for the sake of totality and homogeneity. Apart from tailoring
utopianism to specific meta-narratives, criticisms such as those by Dahrendorf as
well as similar ones by many postmodern thinkers do not perceive the significance
a distinction between conflict and controversy might have for utopian thought
(Papastephanou, 2005a, p. 14). Interestingly, the earliest political and educational
utopian Western text, Hesiod’s Works and Days, utilizes the distinction between
bad and good strife for utopian purposes in a unique way. As I have discussed this
elsewhere (Papastephanou, 2008a), I shall concentrate here on a summary (more
will follow in chapter 8) of how I connect conflict, controversy and utopianism
against Dahrendorf’s (or postmodernist) charges. The exaggeration of the significance
that conflict may have for justice and societal wellbeing has led to extreme
positions that revert to a covert bad utopianism, i.e. to a utopianism that Jacques
Lacan would see as a hysterical attachment to a master signifier from which all
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goods are expected with no effort on the part of the subject. In this specific case,
conflict has started to operate theoretically as a Promised Land, since the mere
existence or perpetuation of disagreement and tension appears to be the ultimate
fulfilment of politics. Conflict is considered the force that unsettles hierarchies and
undoes stabilized significations. It is then expected to generate fresh and surprising
events that unleash the flow of becoming against any sedimentation of being
(Papastephanou, 2005a, p. 15). Within those extreme positions, even the mention
of consensus suffices to trigger liberal-Dahrendorfian, postmodern or post-
structuralist attacks. Attacks of that sort are justified only to a very limited extent
as reactions to an old but still growing tendency in applied politics to consider
agreement the ultimate answer to world problems, thus hypocritically glossing over
issues of power and uneven positioning of the parties expected to agree. But such
attacks are unsubstantiated and even dangerous especially when they quickly and
reductively dismiss agreement or consensus as ostensibly conservative features of
universalist and foundationalist utopias. Dissent and conflict may generate fresh
outlooks and just stances to unassimilated alterity. But in their inflated and non-
nuanced form dissent and conflict may work against the longing (especially of
those who have suffered the effects of violent conflict or perennial unresolved
disagreement) for peaceful coexistence of peoples. When dissent and conflict
signify a commitment to critique and wield new, as yet unknown and challenging
ideas, they may take the form of controversy and be very welcome in any worth-
while utopia. But in their exaggerated emphasis they may lead to a sterile,
perpetual or even violent negativity. Too many expectations from the inflated
tropes of dissent and conflict reify them and blunt their critique of stasis because,
in the end, they attribute to them a static, invariable social role.
The shortcomings of the celebration of dissent, the exaggerated political
expectations from conflict and the reluctance to utilize its difference form controversy
for utopian purposes are present not only in Dahrendorf`s position but also in that
of Laclau and Mouffe (Cooke, 2004) and Žižek, despite the fact that their anti-
utopianism is fundamentally different from the one that recruits the threat of
totalitarianism (Brockelman, 2003, p. 198). Typically, Laclau takes politics to be
the incompletion of the hegemonic game (based on an unevenness of power) and
fulfilment to be the negation of politics: whenever the undecidability in the relation
between the universal and the particular was missing, ‘all conceptions of a utopian
society in which human essence would have found its ultimate reconciliation with
itself have invariably been accompanied by one or another version of the end of
politics’ (Laclau, 2001, p. 10). What is common between Laclau and Mouffe, on
the one hand, and Žižek (Žižek, 1998, p. 992) (especially and more explicitly after
the Ticklish Subject), on the other, is that they have used a dose of anti-utopianism
in order to make room for radical transformation as each of them understands it.
Thus, as Brockelman rightly remarks, Žižek’s anti-utopianism is fundamentally
different from the liberal anti-utopianism that was constructed as a backlash
response to a supposedly ever threatening totalitarianism which animates the
condemnation of all radical political thought (Brockelman, 2003, p. 198). However,
as both these kinds of anti-utopianism criticise rationalist utopia from the pers-
pective of its discomfort with antagonism and as this blanket criticism derives from
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an anthropological rather than a political pessimism, I take it up again and confront

it through the anthropological analysis of the last chapter.
(8) Not only the post-Marxist deconstructive Lacanian-influenced trend but also
the Foucauldian postmodern trend has developed a reticent stance to utopia for
reasons of consensus and comes extremely close to Dahrendorf’s liberalism. In a
striking resemblance to liberalism, the boogie of dystopia is recruited by Foucault
to combat the claims or aspirations to escape from the system. Foucault couples
utopia and dystopia in just such a manner: ‘we know from experience that the
claims to escape from the system of contemporary reality so as to produce the
overall programs of another society, of another way of thinking, another culture,
another vision of the world, has led only to the return of the most dangerous
traditions’ (Foucault, 1984, p. 46; also cf. Olssen, 2003, p. 541).
Furthermore, the criticisms of rationalist utopias are usually expanded to
communicative utopias too. In his critique of Habermas, Michel Foucault makes
clear his misgivings about what he sees as the utopian element in Habermas’
communicative action theory. ‘The thought that there could be a state of
communication which would be such that the games of truth could circulate freely,
without obstacles, without constraint, and without coercive effects, seems to me to
be Utopia. It is being blind to the fact that relations of power are not something bad
in themselves, from which one must free oneself’ (cf Olssen, 2003, p. 540). This
critique, which reflects, in my view, the anti-utopian argument (already familiar
from Dahrendorf’s anti-utopianism) that utopia promotes unrealistic stagnation and
tension-free homogeneity, stems from the fact that Foucault does not take here into
account an adequately theorized distinction between power and domination. Had
he done so, Foucault would have viewed Habermas’s ideas not as a plea to
overcome all subtle and complex forms of power that operate in life and in mutual
understanding but as a plea to render dialogue more inclusive, enlarged and
frequently used in ethical and political matters. If we realize that the issue for
Habermas is coercion-free or undistorted communication rather than a perfectly
transparent communication and notice the difference between the two, we see why
Foucault’s worry that Habermas aspires to a utopia of a society without relations of
power is off the point. Once again, the challenge is to see what might be accepted
as controversy and what is undesirable as conflict. Along with many liberals such
as Dahrendorf, Foucault seems to believe that a reality of diversity and a reality of
conflict are one and the same thing that has to be preserved at all costs. Hence
whatever tries to minimize conflict is regarded as tyrannical rationalist utopianism.
What is forgotten here is, amongst other things, that, if Habermas were against
diversity, his whole emphasis on dialogue as will-and opinion-formative process
would be pointless. Consensus occurs precisely when people who differ and come
from diverse backgrounds and persuasions converge or agree on something they
find convincing. Identical people, if they could ever be so, would not begin a
dialogue because they would not have a point of contention from where to start.
They would object to nothing, they would ask too few questions [as Harold Pinter
(1999, p. 1) put it when commenting on the fact that the British and the Americans
accepted their countries’ wars so easily] and debate too little in the public sphere,
even if they were ready to fight to the death for their economic interests in the
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private and social sphere. Ironically, in most non-utopian, real societies the very
moment controversy is absent, conflict is very much present.
Besides, to be politically meaningful, diversity must correspond to something
more than folklore and inoperative identities. It must entail active and
interventionist identities that question reality and cause controversy, identities that
enrich debates by introducing new sensibilities to them. All that is said by the
theory of communicative action is that such debates must be settled by the force of
the better argument and must presuppose that the partners in dialogue must be
treated as equal and co-responsible agents. True, there are problems with
Habermas’s (1994) or Apel’s (2001) communicative ‘utopias’ but, I believe, they
are other than those detected by Foucault.
Be that as it may, the difference between Foucault and Habermas lies in the fact
that, for the former, political consensus ‘is not rational but functionally expedient
and provisional, and continuing conflict is not a failure of communicative rationality
but an indication of diversity’ (Olssen, 2003, p. 540). That is, the Habermasian
force of the better argument is treated with suspicion as a sign of rationalist
utopianism and the emphasis on consensual solutions is met with the anti-utopian
argument about ongoing conflict as a sign of a free and open society. One often
wonders how all this would look if made relevant to unresolved conflicts and
problems of international legality and what the alternative to dialogue and consensus
(rational rather than merely expedient and provisional) might be. Now, as Olssen
pertinently shows, when interviewed and pushed in the direction of accepting
utopia as unrealizable and unattainable yet a worthy critical ideal, Foucault did
leave space for utopia as a critical idea to maintain ‘at all times’. In Foucault’s own
words, the thrust of this idea is ‘to ask oneself what proportion of nonconsensuality
is implied in such a power relation, and whether that degree of nonconsensuality is
necessary or not [on grounds of which criteria? The force of the better argument,
perhaps? - M. P.], and then one may question every power relation to that extent’
(cf Olssen, 2003, p. 542). However, this version of utopia (reminiscent of the
Derridean one which we saw above) that Foucault is led to endorse is an enervated
one. For, what is the point of a ‘critical’ utopia regarding which no attainability or
approximation of any sort is granted, other than perhaps its function as a psychic
discharge or, at best, as a springboard for minor modification of the actual society?
Is a critical outlook that does not believe in the possibility of its declarations not a
domestication of critique and an indirect, liberal anti-utopian affirmation of the
existent?
(9) Richard Rorty employs anti-utopian ideas and argues against grand political
theory (just as the liberal critics of utopia do) but tries nevertheless to rescue the
utopian element in some adulterated form in the idea of trial and error, of experi-
ment and piecemeal engineering. He does so from a neo-pragmatist perspective.
The latter is sometimes scornfully and undialectically rejected by defenders of
more radical projects of change, but my own mistrust should not be confused with
such sweeping and wholesale attacks. Many anti-utopian arguments that Rorty and
other pragmatist thinkers employ are apposite especially when they target end-state
types of utopia. And the positive task they assign to a pragmatist utopia, namely, to
open paths for improvement and betterment of societies, reflects the fact that utopia
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might consist of incongruous moments and glimpses of light here and there rather
than of absolute, timeless happiness. Although modest in scope, the ‘space for
limited reform within capitalism, that at least has the capacity to profoundly matter
to those potentially affected, should not be lightly ignored’ (Demetrion, 2001, p. 59).
However, the kind of utopia that is promoted by Rorty over-relies, in my
opinion, on the reformist potentials of creativity and democracy at the expense of
the acknowledgement of the significance of ethics and epistemology. This argument
will be unravelled in chapter seven but some indication of its direction is necessary
here. Despite his anti-utopianism on other occasions, Rorty (1995) characterizes
pragmatist feminists as utopians approvingly. He sees them as critical thinkers in
practice who use the springboard of real or imagined alternative linguistic
communities in order to introduce new and improved language games and
modalities of being and of socializing. Rorty’s own springboard that facilitates this
accommodation of utopia in his discourse is, according to Maeve Cooke, the idea
of a creativity that flourishes in a democracy. It is a ‘poetic discourse that aims to
create new descriptions and self-descriptions’ and that, by having ‘a place in the
domain of justice’ (Cooke, 2006, p. 33), it undoes the usual rigidity of Rorty’s
distinction between the private realm of creative imagination and the public realm
of democratic politics. ‘In other words, the utopian vision motivating democratic
politics is not just one of increased solidarity but one of unfettered creativity’
(Cooke, 2006, p. 33). For educational thinkers who follow some form of pragmatism,
usually the Deweyan variety, especially for those who compare the implicit or
explicit utopias of Giroux’s transformative pedagogy and Dewey’s democratic
change, Dewey’s concept of democracy ‘represents a nearer term utopian project
that could push trajectories toward Giroux’s ideal, however piecemeal and
episodic’(Demetrion, 2001, p. 58). Or, some combine Dewey with Hardt and
Negri’s notion of the multitude as a new form of collective agency,9 one that is not
mediated through a national identity but rather through the unity effected by the
desire for democracy (Lewis, 2007, p. 8). This desire for democracy is taken to
mean a desire for cosmopolitan freedom, where the latter seems to be equated to
the ability to move across all borders without impediments (Lewis, 2007, p. 9).
Yet, such a connection of democracy and multiculturalism has been shown, by
Ernesto Laclau amongst others, to quickly confront the limits of democracy itself
(Laclau, 2001, p. 4).
Despite its importance, the coupling of democracy, utopia and creativity does
not suffice on its own to stave off a naively optimist, bad utopianism. Cosmo-
politanism is more than just free circulation; it is not just about the encounter or
agreement with the other, it is about the treatment of the other. Not all poetic
discourse is ethically desirable or politically pertinent and no democracy may
guarantee a reflective handling of political matters. True, reflection is assisted by,
and presupposes, full and unhindered participation as well as the kind of maturity
that only democratic conditions of life can allow. But reflection signifies something
more than participation. Beyond politics, reflection is the dynamism of thought that
points to the realm of the ethical, the emotive and the epistemological. Without a
clearer vision of what is to count as democracy, the good life and the well-being of
cosmos, without an emphasis on reflection for good measure, all absolutizations of
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global mobility or creativity are doomed to misfire or, worse, to revert to yet
another bad utopianism. To avoid this, the strong pragmatist anti-utopian argument
against rational utopia must be revisited and limited to a more modest role.
(10) Adhering to the priority of the right over the good, Habermas (1994, p. 69)
rejects specific conceptions of the good that substantive utopias prioritize. He
promotes a formalist, communicative utopia. Anti-utopianism is then expressed
regarding the old utopian tendency to offer a more or less determined and detailed
picture of what counts as a good life. To some extent, this variation of liberal anti-
utopianism is justified and valuable. Yet it fails to see (and, consequently, to
accommodate) the points where material, substantive utopias score better than the
formalist, communicative ones. By avoiding specific pictures of the good and by
letting the task of specifying the vision to the participants in communication alone,
communicative utopias operate at a psychological and moral, intersubjective level.
They concretize the dream of a subject who feels at ease to take part in dialogue
and assumes argumentative responsibility for it while acknowledging the equal
rights of the interlocutor. But the dreams of the starved, of those who lose their
loved ones in war, or of lack of water supplies, or of diseases that are curable in the
West might be different. On those, communicative utopia is silent. The material
and political gains envisioned by, let us say, a substantive utopia of global
redistribution of wealth are secondary and derivative in a communicative utopia.
They might get decided in dialogue at some point by all those affected when and if
such a topic becomes ever thematized.
Furthermore, the price communicative utopias have to pay for their concessions
to anti-utopian formalism is none other than their own consistency and coherence.
To illustrate this, let us consider whether communicative utopias are indeed as
formalist and indifferent to specific conceptions of the good as they purport to be
by contrasting two communicative utopias, the one of Axel Honneth and that of
Habermas. Honneth sees Habermas’s theory as one that projects ‘a vision of the
good society in which human beings would have achieved a state of perfect
communication’. To this, Honneth counterposes the vision of ‘a social condition in
which human beings would have achieved a state of perfect mutual recognition of
each individual’s needs, rights, and distinctive contributions to society’ (Cooke,
2006, p. 46). As Cooke rightly observes, these different normative conceptions of
the good, detect a different social obstacle to human flourishing.
Habermas is concerned with social impediments to the development of comm-
unicative relations based on practices of reason giving; he argues that, currently,
the functionalist rationality of the economic and administrative systems pose the
greatest threat to such communicative relations. Honneth, by contrast, is concerned
with social impediments to the development of an ethical personality […]; these
impediments take the form of institutional arrangements that deny the individual
human being full social recognition of her needs, rights, and distinctive contributions
to society (Cooke, 2006, p. 46).
Evidently, here we have two communicative utopias that differ not only in form
but also in content. They rely on two distinct conceptions of the good and on two
specifications of what hinders it. Formalism in utopia is not consistent and the
content of the vision is of decisive importance even within communicative utopias,
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i.e., utopias that share the formalist framework of intersubjectivity. In stressing

their argumentative character so as to avoid charges of bad utopianism, both neglect
the material dimension of human collective desire and the critical-ideological
significance of the discussion of what counts as need and determines political
outlooks and justifications.
DEFECTS VERSUS AMBITIONS. THE RICHNESS OF UTOPIANISM
We have already confronted anti-utopianism with some head-on attack on its

assumptions and a ‘one by one’ refutation of its arguments, and we have done so
only indicatively; many critics of anti-utopianism (Levitas, Kumar, Geoghegan,
Cooke and in educational discourse Olssen, Halpin, Suissa) have so far provided
much more detailed and thorough developments of some of those points. But what
has been gained by this exposition and is useful for the next steps is an overview of
the stakes of utopianism, of the tensions, divergences and dilemmas within anti-
utopianism, of the complexity of the whole issue against dismissive and simplistic
stances as well as a set of admissions that prepare the ground and the limits within
which the book will move. Utopian constructions of the past had very many short-
comings that anti-utopian discourse rightly chastises. Curiously, though, they stood
accused in postmodernity not for those shortcomings but rather for their ambitions.
Those ambitions do not always appear to anti-utopians as unrealistic. On the
contrary, the nightmare of anti-utopians is usually not the unattainability of utopias
but precisely their realizability. ‘The burden of the anti-utopian critique was not
that utopia was impossible, the irresponsible fantasy of shallow optimists: quite the
contrary [although I believe that this is often the case too - M. P.]. What appalled
them was that the modern utopia was only too possible’ (Kumar, 1991, p. 93).
Even if those ambitions were irretrievably tarnished by the limitations, or even
if ambitions can often themselves be a defect, as one might object, they had a
unique ethical significance: they loaded political action with a responsibility for,
and accountability to, hopeful and anticipating publics. They promoted an ethic of
responsibility10 that took into account the consequences of political actions and
condemned the loss of control (now found most exhilarating by much postmodern
vogue or liberal political globalism) whenever such loss appeared in contexts
where it was most needed and judged desirable (Crowley, 2000, p. 151). Anti-
utopian argumentation misses both, the variety, richness and diversity as well as
the ethico-political significance of utopian ambition.
The next chapter turns to some other indications, the indications of the richness
of the concept of utopia and the variety of its conceptions throughout its historical
course. The aim is to show that many charges against specific conceptions of
utopia misfire when directed at other, alternative conceptions. This paves the way
for a reconceptualization of the notions of utopianism (utopia, dystopia, counter-
utopia etc) and for a different connection of them against some received views
which truncate utopianism in order to render it amenable to the justified anti-
utopian attacks. What follows the suggested reconceptualization is a whole set of
clarifications of the significance of utopia and dystopia, hence utopianism as a
total. In this way, my defence of utopia will once again be indirect: rather than
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further combating anti-utopianism with direct counterarguments I shall show

the lasting significance of utopianism and its relation to education. As I consider
the anthropological argument the most worthy of attention and in need of
deconstruction, I shall take up again a more direct defence of utopia in the final
chapter, the one on anthropology.
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CHAPTER 2
THE COURSE OF UTOPIAN THOUGHT
Some anti-utopian thinkers attack particular conceptions of utopia. Having first

equated those conceptions with the concept of utopia as such, then they move to a
wholesale rejection of all bold visions about humanity’s potentials. Therefore, an
immediate response to some anti-utopian criticisms would be to show that the
various conceptions of utopia that are susceptible to those criticisms are only some
of the possible contents that the concept of utopia may take. It can be demonstrated
that the plausibility of anti-utopianism depends on the scope and calibre of its
charges. More deeply, a confused position on conceptual matters about utopia leads
to a wrongheaded treatment of its beginnings, its course, its ‘form versus content’
quandaries and its particularist or universalist character. Further, it may have
undesirable theoretical consequences for opponents and proponents of utopia alike.
In turn, this has implications for educational theory because the latter largely
derives its position on utopia from the philosophical and/or cultural debate on what
counts as utopia and on what might justify anti-utopianism. Thus, the educational-
theoretical benefits of conceptually revisiting utopia can be summed up as follows.
A large part of a rich but neglected utopian cultural and theoretical material might
be recuperated through questioning the received view on utopia which limits it to
the modern conception. Apart from affecting the misinformed way in which we
might select and utilize utopian taught material, a new approach to definitional and
conceptual standards of utopian thought might change our outlook on the relation
of education and utopianism. The need for such a change is further established
by the fact that various and often contradictory definitions of utopia (Lewis, 2007,
p. 1) are asserted within educational philosophy.
Then again, an attention to redefinitions and reconceptualizations does not amount
to a plea for a rigid and non-elastic definition of utopianism that would occlude any
reformulation and ossify the term. The acknowledgement of the openness and
inconclusiveness of a defining effort is a necessary filler of the crack separating the
essentialist element within the notion of a ‘concept’ and the fluid pluralism
inherent in the notion of a ‘conception’. Even when our ultimate aspiration might
be to approach something like the concept of a term, we are usually aware that we
may speak only about formulating new conceptions. We do not delude ourselves
that our reformulations will constitute ‘the last word’ on the subject. Such reformul-
ations will be revisable reflections of how the terms of a subject could be more
comprehensively and plausibly grasped so as to clarify many issues at stake and,
more than that, to overcome previous consolidations and sedimentations of meaning
that block our vision. However, the admission of the inconclusive character of
reconceptualizations must not discourage us from taking up the challenge to re-
approach the semantic content of an idea. For, the exaggerated efforts to stress the
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indefinitiveness and openness of conceptualizations are, in the end, those which

consolidate conceptual essentialism by letting existing and widely-held
conceptions be elevated to the onto-epistemological level of the concept and by
regarding contingent tensions within the established discourse and the consolidated
terms of the surrounding debates as onto-logical constants. In simpler words, when
reconsiderations are feared, dominant conceptions remain unshaken and
misguided, thus re-establishing what is most feared, i.e., conceptual closure.
In what follows, I first glean from the richness of the utopian history those
elements that expose the exclusions effected by standard conceptions of utopia. It
will become clear that the established conceptions elevate modern utopia to the
status of the concept of utopia, lead to conceptual confusions and oust certain
important varieties from the utopian conceptual province. Then, I give an outline of
the reformulations and prepare the ground for the next chapter and its discussion of
utopia alongside with dystopia.
FANTASY, POLITICAL PROJECT AND IDEAL ETHICAL LIFE
To begin with, some anti-utopian sentiment might be due to conceptual confusions

that arise when dialogue turns to the notion of utopia without a prior questioning of
the ‘commonest popular meaning of the word’. The popular meaning of utopia has
negative and derisive connotations, since it implies the fanciful, useless, and wildly
impractical (Dawson, 1992, p. 5). All utopian discourse is thus equated with an
overt or covert chimeric daydreaming or even pursuit of what is humanly
impossible. To provide some working categories11 so as to add some order to an
otherwise unmanageable material, let us name this loosely understood utopia
‘daydreaming utopianism’. Opponents and proponents of escapist fantasylands rely
implicitly on this category. Against it, there have been conceptions of utopia as a
more or less realistic account of the ideal society. Those conceptions that stress the
more realistic possibility of thinking about the common good take utopia to mean
an ideal society as a program for political action. Let us place these conceptions
within a broad category of ‘programmatic utopianism’. Opponents and proponents
of concrete projects of radical, reformist or piecemeal change usually debate
utopianism within the confines of the programmatic conception (from socialism
and evolutionist liberalism down to Rawls’s or MacIntyre’s realistic utopias).
Conceptions of utopia that emphasize the less realistic account of the good life
employ utopia as a regulative ideal that sets a theoretical standard to be
approximated even if never attained. Let us call this ‘regulative utopianism’ and
associate it with classical constructions of the ideal city (e. g. ancient Republics),
formalist communicative utopias (Habermas, Apel), deconstructive impossible yet
necessary futurism (Derridean cosmopolitanism) and vaguely determinate ethical
pictures of collective life (Cooke). A crucial point of difference of the regulative
utopianism from the programmatic is that the latter usually has a more historicist
conception of time and thus a stronger predictive dimension or a more progressivist
perception of the course of utopia.
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Depending on their implicit attachment to either of such categories, i.e. between

fantasy, political project and ideal ethical life, many theorists set the historical
origins of utopianism in different temporalities and spatialities or they often
employ anti-utopian arguments against one another. For adherents to daydreaming
utopianism, all western and non-western ancient yearning for a better life and its
projection to a fantastic time and place constitutes the beginning of utopia
corresponding to the earliest historical times. For proponents of programmatic
utopianism, the ‘revolutionary tradition that began in early-modern Western
Europe and climaxed in the socialist movement’ (Dawson, 1992, p. 5) restricts
political utopianism to North-western modernity. Adherents to regulative utopianism
set the beginning of utopia in classical ancient Greece. Both programmatic and
regulative utopianism can inspire a dismissive stance to daydreaming utopianism
since they seem to share the view that the oneiric pictures of a better life elsewhere
or in another time, pictures encountered in Western antiquity prior to Plato and in
most non-Western ancient cultures, had only a comforting purpose and reflected an
individualist and particularist ethics. Such pictures are invariably dismissed as
escapist and are excluded from utopia proper. What is usually missed is the
political element which appears in stronger or weaker forms in various Golden Age
narratives of most cultures and thus the universalism of utopia as a human longing
for a better ethico-political condition. Proponents of programmatic utopianism are
more adamant on dismissing (political or less political) fantasy, since they
understand utopia as collective ideality about the ethical and political life aspiring
to a collective finalistic (short- or large- scale) reform of society. Obviously, they
do not find project-like, modernist elements in non-Western or ancient Western
utopias and they see no purpose in fantasylands, other than offering solace to
individuals. This argument is further extended to cover, and ultimately exclude,
even the softer political regulative utopianism, to the point that the cases in the
fringes are automatically relegated to daydreaming utopianism. Thus, the Stoic and
Cynic utopias, being in the same category with Plato’s (i.e. regulative utopianism)
but even less preoccupied with guidelines about how the citizen body can set up
the right mechanism of rule, are usually placed in the ‘utopia’ of the pure
imaginary and remain under-theorized. The escapist prejudice further grounded
many unsubstantiated restrictions of ancient utopia to Plato’s Republic, to the
exclusion of the utopian writings of the Stoics, the Cynics and others, and
perpetuated the false common perception that ‘ancient utopian thought has nothing
to teach us’ (Dawson, 1992, p. 4). Lewis Mumford’s work on utopia comprised a
distinction between utopias of reconstruction and utopias of escape in virtue of the
fact that the former’s ideal society is detailed and plausible (Mumford, 1922). It
was a distinction that was destined to influence decisively the formation of a
Western canon of utopianism proper and to enforce a rigid demarcation between
serious utopias which are peculiarly western (Dawson, 1992, p. 3) and folk utopias
to which myth, fantasy, messianic expectation along with non-modern, non-
Western ideality are usually relegated.
Furthermore, many proponents of programmatic and regulative utopianism
attack daydreaming utopianism wholesale because they have too narrow a conception
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of the political. Doyne Dawson makes an explanation that is useful to keep in mind
before examining the possibility that some Golden Age narratives may rightfully
belong to a political utopianism as we might wish it to be in times after
postmodernism. Dawson distinguishes between the political in the fullest Greek
sense and the political in one common modern sense. The political in the Greek
sense proposes that one dealt with the affairs of the polis, which did not necessarily
‘include programs for immediate action’, that is, with the politika in the sense of
reforms of a public and social nature. The political in the modern sense recommends
that one be ‘engaged in or taking sides in the struggle for governmental power’
(1992, p. 6). Some versions of Golden Age utopianism (Greek and non-Greek) are
political in the fullest Greek sense rather than in the common modern sense.
Besides, we must not forget that ‘politics, the activity aimed at designing,
guarding, correcting and repairing the conditions under which people pursue their
life-purposes, derived its name from the Greek term meaning the “city” – and
whatever else the city might have been, it was always a place’ (Bauman, 2003, p.
21). Politics is not only associated explicitly with land, space, but also with fantasy,
imagination: perhaps this is nowhere more clearly manifested than in Plato’ s
Politics (272 a) where Socrates challenges his friends to invent a State ‘with our
imagination’. Fantasy, land and politics are inextricably connected not only in
ancient Greek thought but in non-Western accounts of the ethical life that we shall
indicatively approach later on. Here, a first approximation of what might count as
utopia begins to emerge in a negative way. Utopia is not an individualist ideal of
personal flourishing but a vision of a collective harmonization/regulation of action
that allows worldly happiness. Utopianism includes the political variety; that is, the
ideal city is a subset of the set ‘utopia’. If we identified utopianism with the ideal
city, this would mean that only political utopianism deserves the name and that all
other utopianisms are not about life as it might be. The ideal city cannot exhaust
the content of utopianism because we may have medical, technological, scientific
and other varieties of utopianism (where, again, the utopian element in such visions
lies in the fact that they do not concern just a personal dream of gratification but
rather a collective ideal of happiness).
UTOPIANISM AND EUROCENTRIC CATEGORIZATIONS
It might be true that many ‘utopias’, old12 or contemporary, do not deserve the
name because they are limited to individualist complaint about the hardships of
quotidian life and lack all connection to totality or, in the case of political
utopianism, to politics, either in the Greek or in the modern sense. But not all folk,
non-western or pre-Platonic dreamworlds are of this kind. Each version must be
dealt with in its specificity. Regrettably, this has not been the case, and the relevant
scholarship has operated within rigid demarcations and Eurocentric sweeping
categorizations. For, apart from essentializing programmatic and regulative
utopianism and apart from being entrapped into those faults of modern utopia that
have justifiably been condemned by anti-utopians, this restriction of utopia to its
modern shape denies other cultures their voicing of the human desire for
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perfectibility and of their hope for collective happiness. In this way, north-Western
early modernity becomes the starting point and preserves for itself the status of
utopian history proper, setting the standard of a linear, North-Western European
time against which other ‘utopian’histories could be defined retrospectively and
negatively, i.e. in their difference from it. What is relatively other to modern utopia
and its specific operations and modalities is set in what I would describe, adapting
Anne McClntock’s insights (expounded for a different purpose), as a relation of
propositional time, pre- or meta- and is given at most only the status of progenitor,
precursor and ultimately, prehistory (McClintock, 1994, p. 255).
The following are some examples of programmatic or regulative utopianist
temporalization. For Judith Shklar, ‘the real history of utopia does not begin in
ancient Israel or Greece but in Tudor England, specifically in the infinitely
complex mind of Sir Thomas More’ (Shklar, 1981, p. 280). For David Halpin,
whose work on utopia is pioneering in current educational philosophy, just as for
other thinkers in general philosophy, the long history of utopia stretches ‘from the
third century BC (Plato’s Republic and Iambulus’ Heliopolis)’ (Halpin, 2001b,
p. 301). Frederic Jameson sees More’s Utopia as ‘a convenient and indispensable
starting point’ of the utopian genre (2005, p. 1) but he does not complement this
clarification with any specification or mention of the beginnings of political
utopianist thought.13 More explicitly, Krishan Kumar believes that myths of the
Golden Age (‘a time of beginnings in which humanity lived in a state of perfect
happiness and fulfilment’, 1991, pp. 3–4) are a variety of thinking about the good
that is distinctive from utopia. He writes,
the “original” time or condition was one of simplicity and sufficiency. There
was an instinctive harmony between man and nature. Men’s [sic] needs were
few and their desires limited. Both were easily satisfied by the abundance of
nature. Hence there were no motives for war or oppression. Nor, for the same
reason, was there any need to toil painfully for long hours. In the Golden Age
men and women lived in a state of ease, plenty, and freedom. Simple and
pious, they were and felt themselves close to the gods. For the West, the myth
of the Golden Age was definitively expounded by Hesiod, Plato, Virgil and
Ovid (Kumar, 1991, p. 4).
Apart from omitting Homer here, whose Odyssey includes islands on each of
which there is a distinct order, at times paradisiacal, at times infernal (Ainsa, 1986,
p. 37) as well as islands of the Blessed (Bichler, 1995, p. 49), Kumar overlooks the
fact that, at least in Hesiod, Cronus time does not fulfil the same purposes that
other Golden Age accounts do (Papastephanou, 2008a), and it should not be placed
in the same category, say, with the Golden Age myths of the Latin poets.
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CHAPTER 2
THE ‘JUSTIFICATIONS’ OF THE EUROCENTRIC CATEGORIZATIONS:
The Golden Age and Escapism

More about why this lack of nuance should be reconsidered will follow soon, but
here it is important to see how this flat treatment of ancient narratives is usually
justified. Established authorities on utopianism have played a crucial role on this.
For instance, Mumford’s (1922) work on utopia has been monumental in its
influence. Thus, when Mumford distinguished between utopias of escape and
utopias of reconstruction (Dawson, 1992, p. 3), he initiated the kind of utopian
discourse that was to seal the fate of all imaginary worlds, the Golden Age being
one of them, that failed the test of offering blueprints and ‘directions of use’.
Escapist utopias include ‘all the worldwide myths, legends, and folklore about
gardens of Eden, golden ages, Elysian fields, lands of Cocaygne, and other more-
or-less primitivistic paradises set in remote times and places; and all the
sophisticated literary adaptations of this theme, from the Old Comedy of Athens to
contemporary science fiction’ (Dawson, 1992, p. 3). Mumford’s ‘utopia of
reconstruction’, on the other hand, ‘is a serious political theory and peculiarly
Western’ (ibid). Against this position, I claim that we must relativize or, at least,
render this demarcation of escapist and reconstructive utopia less rigid, less
exclusivist and less Eurocentric.
Nuance must first be acknowledged regarding the modern utopia itself. Dawson,
following Miriam Eliav-Feldon, gives several types of 16th century, modern, ideal
society. There had been (1) models of good government based on moral rather than
institutional reform; (2) idealizations of existing societies (e.g. Venice); (3)
architectural designs for model cities; (4) descriptions of primitive Golden Age; (5)
programs for secret societies, real or imaginary; (6) plans for world empires; and
(7) prophecies for theocratic millenial kingdoms (Dawson, 1992, p. 11, fn 12).
Such nuance is encountered in utopias of premodern and non-Western times and
spaces. Of all those Renaissance types, only the last two were unknown to the
Greeks, as Dawson shows. It should be noted here that, if we take into account that
those two extra kinds of utopia (empire utopianism and millennium utopianism)
emerged in Renaissance times, then we realize that it is simply false to charge
indiscriminately all utopia with teleology, messianism, stability and expansionism.
Regarding the rest of the types, programs for alternative ideal communities
(number 5 above) can be associated with the Pythagorean koinos vios in ancient
Greece (Dawson, 1992, p. 16) and, outside of Greek antiquity, with secret societies
of egalitarian or millenarian aspirations in the China of the Mongol and Manchu
dynasties (Chesneaux, 1968, p. 85). Already in western and non-western antiquity
the complexity of utopianism is such that reductive accounts of it, be they anti-
utopian or pro-utopian, face difficulties.
Of course, the question whether various utopian constructions deserve the name
of political utopianism can not be answered by recourse to nuance itself. To this
end, more substantive discussion is needed. In contrast to the committed
modernism of many contemporary utopianist thinkers, Walter Benjamin’s position,
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if thought to its ultimate conclusions, helps us see the possibility that some Golden
Age narratives might be politically utopian. For Benjamin, ‘there has existed in the
collective consciousness of humanity since time immemorial countless dreams and
“wish-images” of a free human society founded on equality and universal material
abundance’ (Gardiner, 2006, p. 19). But, as Gardiner explains, although rooted in a
timeless past, what is important to Benjamin about such wish-images is that ‘they
are anticipations (pace Ernst Bloch) of a transformed future society, and hence a
kind of “dreaming forward”, or “future nostalgia”‘ (Gardiner, 2006, p. 20). However,
more often than not, even when the universalism of utopia is, theoretically and
historically, acknowledged as a desire for a better life common to all humans [by
Ernst Bloch (1986) approvingly, by the Manuels (1979) less appreciatively], it
acquires only an impulsive psychological character, lacking direct political
pertinence. The universality of utopics is better defended and non-Western utopian
concerns better accommodated by undoing first the Eurocentric prejudice that a
politically relevant utopia begins either by Plato or by Thomas More and that
whatever is of a Golden Age character is necessarily apolitical or not serious. Such
accounts overlook the rich history of imaginary states in ancient texts that is
manifested in many ways: as part of the history of literature, as a chapter of
the history of political thought, as a model for the early Enlightenment reception
of antiquity and much more. As Bichler remarks, Plato’s work occupies the middle
of this history and marks at the same time the decisive turning point (Bichler, 1995,
p. 4).
To undo the Eurocentric prejudice, then, we need to indicate why the charge of
escapism cannot be levelled invariably at all Golden Age narratives. In Roman
times, the Golden Age is given a naturalist and nostalgic, rather escapist twist (e.g.
in Ovid’s Metamorphosis or in Tibullus’s Elegy) and an inherent ambivalence. On
the one hand, it becomes an era of absolute bliss, sufficiency and reconciliation of
humanity and nature (Ryberg, 1958). But these elements are either unavailable in
the Hesiodic original narrative or extracted from its context and inflated by the
Roman poets. On the other hand, and this is a Roman addition to the narrative, the
golden era is not perfect for people because, as long as it lasts, they experience
utter boredom. For many Roman poets who praise nostalgically the Golden Age,
self-sufficiency and freedom from care is an aura mediocritas (Ainsa, 1986, p. 28),
a golden mediocrity that haunts the contented of the earth, and, to overcome it,
people begin to travel, to cross borders and create their own world. For some
Romans this is celebrated as the dawn of human inventiveness and rationality. For
others, it is the break with an initial state of happiness and the beginning of an
eventually harmful enlargement of the world, where greed and desire for gold is
introduced and along with it self-interest, strife and war. In an interesting reversal,
the gold of the Golden Age, i.e., gold as marvel is lost when people start searching
for gold as booty. The myth of the Argonauts and the Golden Fleece is the
archetypal story suitable to Seneca’s intentions to weave his account of the lost
happiness with his interpretation of mobility and discovery of lands in his Medea.
There Seneca predicts that ‘the time will come as the years go by in which the
ocean will unfasten the barriers of the world, and the world will be opened to its
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full extent’. However, for Seneca, when people abandon their homelands in pursuit
of new boundaries, it is because they have lost their happiness in their native land.
Thus, the prophecy that the ocean will unfasten the barriers of the world allowing
the unveiling of ‘the secrets hidden beyond the limits of the known’ is ‘a
malediction cast at the future rather than a joyful announcement of a discovery’
(Ainsa, 1986, p. 23).
The Hesiodic Golden Age refers to issues of justice and politics far more
explicitly and directly than the Latin counterparts and reflects political utopianism
for reasons that I have explained elsewhere (Papastephanou, 2008a). The Golden
Age of the Latin literature is at first glance more individualist and idyllic, without
lacking entirely, however, the political element, as the ‘gold as booty and marvel’
dichotomy shows. And even when a Golden Age utopia of abundance and leisure
is described without any overt political allusions, it can have a direct political
significance on grounds of its theoretical employment. Such is the case of Fourier’s
materialist utopia in which no one went hungry. There, through the use of the
graphic imagery of a Land of Cockaygne kind of utopia, Fourier ‘was seeking to
mobilise among his readers a commitment to a conception of social life in which
being properly fed was regarded as a basic human right’ (Halpin, 2001b, p. 302).
Egalitarianism
Then again, pre-modern utopianism is often discarded, especially, by programmatic-
socialist utopianism, not because of its relation to Golden Age narrativity but
because of its supposed irrelevance to specific ideals which are crucial for modern
political utopianism, e.g. the egalitarian ideal. Thus, Bruce Mazlish maintains, for
instance, that ‘More’s utopian communism was different from the earlier Christian
version and was an idea that had never existed before in the history of the Western
World’ (Mazlish, 2003, p. 46). Likewise, egalitarianism ‘is commonly assumed to
be a Judeo-Christian ideal, and Thomas More is commonly given credit for
introducing it into utopia’ (Dawson, 1992, p. 4). Yet this is not so accurate, not
only regarding ancient and non-Western utopia but also regarding More’s Utopia
and its sources. Dawson questions the above common assumption about egalitaria-
nism throughout his book which aims precisely to retrieve the egalitarian, even
communist element in ancient political ideality. And it can be argued that More’s
influences regarding egalitarianism had not been entirely Judeo-Christian but also
Greek. For instance, More’s Utopian citizens mock the foreign ambassadors who
display proudly their golden ornaments and, as Moses Hadas showed, this was
taken from Herodotus’s narrative of how the ambassadors of Cambyses were
ridiculed for their golden chains and then shown that, among the Ethiopians,
prisoners’ fetters were made of gold (Hadas, 1935, p. 113). There had been striking
anticipations of utopian egalitarianism in Herodotus again (that More had in mind)
with Ethiopia being the place where the community leaders deposit food during the
night that can be freely taken by the people during the day (Hadas, 1935, p. 114).
More generally, as explained above, Dawson has established that some classical
Greek texts as well as attempted utopias dealt with egalitarianism and utopian
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communism. But the egalitarianism that Hesiodic Golden Age (the time of the
reign of Cronus) inspired is only almost inadvertently acknowledged by Dawson; it
is not fully utilized. That ‘at the harvest time festival of the Cronia in Attica,
masters and slaves exchanged places, apparently to recall the primitive equality of
Cronus’ time’ (Dawson, 1992, p. 14), and the same idea was pervading the Roman
Saturnalia (Ainsa, 1986, p. 33), is very telling as to the political significance of the
Golden Age, even if such significance had remained under-theorized or sub-
conscious. This is also shown by the fact that Plato, whose utopia is otherwise so
different from the Golden Age and people tend to contrast it to Hesiodic escapism,
urges his compatriots to ‘imitate with all possible means the legendary life of the
age of Cronus and obey all there is in us of immortal principles’ (Plato, Laws IV,
713e). Instances of egalitarianism in thought and in political proposals abound in
antiquity, with Phaleas of Chalcedon being the first to suggest redistribution of
property (Aristotle, Politics, 66 a 39) and with various law-givers such as the
Spartan Lycourgos or architects such as Hippodamus promoting a utopianism of a
kind of central planning aiming to control inequality (Aristotle, Politics, 67, b 22).
For Hannah Arendt, ancient politics and the ideal city are exemplary cases of the
aneconomy that should be constitutive of an active life (1989, p. 29).14 Economy as
oikos and nomos, and, consequently, the household as family and property are left
aside or even transcended in ancient politics. As the boldest experimentation with
politics, ancient utopia had been radically aneconomic, that is, beyond individual
property and beyond the family, and that makes it easier to understand that in, most
ideal cities, egalitarianism took the form of sharing everything in common with
others on grounds of philia, as the famous phrase koina ta ton philon = ‘friends
share everything in common’ has it (Dawson, 1992).
Egalitarianism is very much present or alluded to in various utopian pre-modern
non-Western narratives.15 In accordance with other, Western Golden Age descriptions,
there is in the Chinese equivalent respect for and protection of all members of
society, especially the old and the sick, and there is commitment to work (contrary
to Western misreadings of the Golden Age as a time of effortless plenty). Yet, very
much like the Hesiodic common sharing of the fruits of human effort, that
commitment to work was not for private gain. A similar ideal is encountered in the
6th century Chinese thinker, Mencius.16 Thus intellectuals too, borrowed constantly
from the Golden Age heritage either to express in words their criticisms of the
established reality and their visions of a more just society or to put their social
reform projects into practice (Chesneaux, 1968, p. 82). And ancient Chinese ideas
such as tai-ping (great harmony) and p’ ing-chung (equalization) that derived
directly from Golden Age narratives of the Taoist kind had been sources from
which ‘peasant revolts and Utopian reformers’ borrowed ‘heavily throughout the
history of China’ (p. 81).
A possible objection here would be that in both ancient Greek and non-Western
utopian narratives egalitarianism was not strong enough to keep away forms of
aristocracy that reintroduced hierarchies by the back door. For example, Plato’s
Republic promoted an intellectualist aristocracy and a division between the mental
and the manual that consolidated inequalities other than the economic. But such an
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objection is misled by a uniform and misinformed image of ancient utopia, one

that focuses exclusively on Plato, and bypasses the fact that the utopias of the
Cynics and the Stoics did not hold those hierarchical commitments or distinctions.
Cynic and Stoic Politeiai differ from Plato’s Kallipolis in egalitarianism,
universalism and sexual freedom. The Cynics first highlighted the oppositional
character of a utopia regarding the established city, its being anti-thetical to the
existing order. According to Diogenes or Bion, love of money is the metropolis of
all evil. Their ideal city was an antipolis and was worldwide, that is a cosmopolis
(Dawson, 1992, p. 149). The Diogenic Republic proposed the raising of children in
common, the use of dice for currency, and the abolition of war. Likewise, Crates
gave all his property to the Thebans and, outside the narrow circle of Cynic
thought, Oneisicritus talked about the Indians as an ideal society with no war,
crime or slaves. Instead of having slaves, the Heliopolitan citizens of Iambulus’s
utopian imaginary society performed themselves chores for each other in rotation
(Dawson, 1992).
The Cynics used to satirize the intellectualism and the narrowness of Plato’s
Kallipolis (Dawson, 1992, pp. 139ff). In another suggestive resemblance, the
ancient Chinese agrarian utopians ‘attacked the views of Confucius on the
necessity of having wise men, exempt from manual labour, to direct the State. In
the ideal country they describe, the leaders cultivate the land with the simple folk,
and prepare their morning and evening meals themselves, and at the same time
carry out their official duties’ (Chesneaux, 1968, p. 82). Many other analogies
between what J. Chesneaux following sinologists describes as ancient Chinese
utopia (p. 82) and various Greek utopias can be found but they are beyond the
scope of this chapter.17 What is important so far is that not only a vague utopian
impulse is available in Western and non-Western antiquity (as many theorists
might concede) but also utopian egalitarianism is manifest in it thus revealing the
temporal and spatial richness of political utopian thought.
As for the modern version of political utopian thought, it does begin in the
Renaissance but it is influenced, amongst other sources, by an ancient egalitarian
utopianism that is wider than the Platonic. To deploy this argument, we may
borrow some distinctions from Dawson’s (1992) account. According to Dawson,
there is in antiquity what he calls a ‘low utopia’ as a comprehensive program for an
ideal city meant to be put into action while providing a critique of the existent and
a model for limited reform. It is utopian because it envisions reforms belonging to
a total, radical long-range plan. It is termed ‘low’ because the program is real and
practical. It includes the predecessors of Plato, Aristotle’s utopia and a number of
little known works by later Aristotelians, as well as Cicero’s On the Republic and
On the Laws. ‘High utopianism’, on the other hand, is a plan for the ideal city that
is not to be literally enacted, that is, it is a model for reform but in a more oblique
way. Such are Plato’s Politeia and the Cynic and Stoic utopias (3rd century BC). Low
utopia is of the 5th BC whereas high utopia (invented by Plato) is of ca 375 BC).
The Platonic Politeia inspired Renaissance thought and art (and even more
recent modern utopias such as those by H. G. Wells) (Kumar, 2003, p. 66). Plato’s
Atlantis and Old Athens (in Timaeus) inspired the utopian element in Renaissance
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architecture, e.g. Antonio Filarete’s Trattato dell’ Architettura of 1460/64. But,

contrary to widely-held assumptions, the latter was also influenced by another
ancient Greek text that was translated in Latin in 1449, namely, Diodorus’
Universal History (Bichler, 1995, p. 3) and which had many ethnographic utopian
elements. Other architectural works of the early renaissance had rediscovered
Hippodamus from Miletus (Bichler, 1995, p. 178, fn. 13). For Dawson, Hippodamus
of Miletus resembles modern utopians in planning a total and radical reconstruction
of society. He was according to Dawson the inventor of political utopianism (1992,
p. 21). As an architect, designer of imaginary cities with imaginary laws and a
lawgiver (like the figure of the lawgiver we encounter in Rousseau’s social
contract) Hippodamus gave an abstraction to planning that proved to be a crucial
influence in later times. Regarding utopian literature, Campanella’s City of the Sun
as well as a long series of early and later renaissance utopian texts (ibid) had been
influenced either by regulative ancient utopianism or by accounts of lost, novelist
ancient egalitarian utopias or travel narratives.
Secularization
Often, the exclusion of ancient or non-Western utopianism from the domain of
utopia proper is effected on grounds of secularization. Thus, for Krishan Kumar,
one reason why it is difficult to find utopia in non-Western societies is that
they have mostly been dominated by religious systems of thought. It is this
that also makes problematic the idea of a Christian utopia. Utopia is a secular
variety of social thought. It is a creation of Renaissance humanism (Kumar,
1991, p. 35).
Roland Fischer breaks with this account only to the extent that the classical ideal
city and even the Golden Age are rehabilitated as utopias. But he joins Kumar in
placing the Christian heritage alongside the classical one and in denying the
universality of utopias. He claims that utopias ‘appear only in societies with the
classical and Christian heritage, that is, only in the West’ (Fischer, 1993, p. 14).
Such Eurocentrism overlooks the fact that the egalitarianism of the Golden Age
and the religiousness of archaic societies made common cause in some historical
instances rather than being adversaries. Before expanding on this, let us first
differentiate millenarianism from religious utopianism. Millenarianism is a non-
utopian vision of an ideal situation, because, as Kumar rightly remarks (1991,
p. 36), this situation of perfection is not realized by conscious rational human
action but by divine intervention or providence. The fact that the ideal state is
disclosed or reached by faith and not by reason and the fact that such faith
presupposes a linear and eschatological sense of time explains why the millenarian
kind of ideality we encounter in the Renaissance is not available in Greek
antiquity.18 Judaeo-Christianity added to the vision of a good society in the
Western world the idea of the deliverance through a messiah and the culmination
of history in the millennium (Kumar, 2003, p. 63; Racine, 1983, p. 127). It added,
that is, a dynamic element that provided the terminology of the end of days and the
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CHAPTER 2
end of history (Kumar, 2003, p. 67). The worldly element and the belief in utopia
as a mere human possibility being missing in millenarianism suffice to place it in a
position of ideality that is distinct from the utopian.
However, that the political optimism of the time to come combined expectation
with preparation entailed some political action that was not of the kind we
encountered in the Medieval contemptus mundi relegation of perfection to the
celestial kingdom. After all, ‘the Christian millennium was to be a terrestrial order.
The second coming of Christ would usher in Christ’s thousand-year reign on earth’
(Kumar, 2003, p. 67). That millenarianism was pronounced a heresy in 431 AD
(Kumar, 1991, p. 9) does not mean that the idea of earthly bliss was also erased.
Interestingly, the millenarian Joachim of Fiore is echoed in Hegel, Saint-Simon and
Marx (Kumar, 1991, p. 11); modern millenarianism had religious origins that seem
to be forgotten due to its laicization (Racine, 1983, p. 128 and 133). Despite its
overall significance, and contribution to the rise of utopianism, as Kumar argues
(p. 36), or to modern utopianism as I would specify, millenarianism has, arguably
more often than not, contributed to a bad utopianism that was to tarnish utopian
thought and offer ample space for anti-utopian critique.
Millenarianism aside, images of original earthly perfection expressed in
religious parlance worldwide the human dissatisfaction with the present. During
the Krita Yuga, the first and perfect age described in the Mahabharata, the Hindu
epic, there were no poor and no rich and there was no hatred and cruelty suffered
by anyone (Kumar, 1991, p. 4). Just like in Greek and Roman antiquity, where
perfection (the Golden Age) is contrasted to existing imperfection (the Iron Age),
for the Hindus, Krita Yuga is set against the Kali Yuga, the gloomy description of
the present (Racine, 1983, p. 125). In the sacred book of Dilmun of the Sumerian
civilization, centuries before all other Golden Age narratives, an idyllic and
peaceful condition is described in which (wo)man has no rival (Ainsa, 1986, p. 25)
and lives in harmony with nature. The Golden Age is also involved in the
Dreamtime of the Australian Aborigines (Kumar, 1991, p. 4), in the Egyptian
Kingdom of the Dead and in Celtic traditions of a Paradise (Ainsa, 1986, p. 23), the
Celtic Atlantic in the Western Ocean (Kumar, 1991, p. 5), the Nahuatl songs about
the ancient Toltec where no one among them went hungry (Ainsa, 1986, p. 42) and
even in forms of millenarianism encountered in religious views without the
Christian influence, e.g. among the Guarani Indians of Brazil and the Indians of the
Pacific North-West (Kumar, 1991, p. 11). But, even beyond the Golden Age, there
had been sporadic instances of utopianism in the ancient expressions of
religiousness. In Homer, when the Gods wish to avert their eyes from the cities in
war, they turn them to the ideal extremes and edges of the world: the Ethiopians in
the far south and the Hyperboreans in the far north (Hadas, 1935, p. 116). What is
utopian about Zeus’s averting his eyes from the scenery of the Trojan War and
turning to the Ethiopians? By imagining a disapproving and dismissive withdrawal
of divine attention, human beings express discomfort, guilt about the wars they
unleash and a deep knowledge of the fact that it is possible to act better, to form a
better society. Finally, egalitarian traditions and narratives used to hold an
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important place in Buddhist countries of South-East Asia and in the Moslem

countries (Chesneaux, 1968, p. 79).
As for the idea that early Christianity ‘produced no utopia’ (Kumar, 1991,
p. 35), it is arguably true if by ‘utopia’ we mean the novel. But this idea loses its
validity and becomes just another sweeping and forced statement if by ‘utopia’,
here, we do not understand strictly the literary genre. For if we take it to mean
utopian thought with a political, egalitarian touch, an antipolis, we see that the
early Christian agapai and the emphasis on the sharing of the clothes with those
who do not have (symbolically a redistribution of wealth) are, at least before
Clement of Alexandria, of a utopian nature. Not accidentally, the ancient author
Lucian associated renunciation of property equally with the philosophical trend of
Cynicism and with Christianity (Dawson, 1992, p. 273). Against the dissociation of
religiousness from egalitarian political utopianism that prevents us from perceiving
other choices and possibilities, we may draw attention to the reception of Luke’s
phrase panta koina (all in common) (p. 278), and to the influence of the
‘communistic rhetoric of pagan philosophy’ (in interpreting the Apostolic practice
of no property) on early Christianity in general (p. 277). It is mainly by Clement of
Alexandria that the call to sell all is stripped of subversive tendencies and takes the
allegorical meaning of generous almsgiving and ‘selling everything you have’ in
the soul (p. 278) and, further, simply entailing detachment from worldly goods.
Indicative, then, is the way in which Origen rejects Clement’s allegorical exegesis
of the call to sell all ‘on the grounds that historical examples prove that it is
possible to take it literally: complete renunciation of property was practiced by
pagan philosophers like Crates, and also by the first Christians described in the
Acts’ (p. 280). In an interesting parallel, the Islamic idea of riba, i.e. the increase of
wealth, excessive gain and illegitimate pecuniary advantage without providing
services in exchange was being condemned as a grave sin (Chesneaux, 1968, p. 98)
and an ethic of sharing was religiously being promoted in the Muslim world.
From another perspective, rather than being a dividing line between ancient and
modern utopianism, the Christian element is so strong in some early modern
utopias that their ideal world can be aptly described as a Christian commonwealth.
Andreae’s Christianopolis, for instance, is such a Christian utopia, and the
pansophic utopias of Bacon, Comenius and Leibniz, as Fischer argues,19 were
conceived within the framework of Christian philosophy and submitted science to
its purposes. In the early modern Christian world, the effort to find a pedagogic
mediation between religion and science which ‘would flourish in an educative
utopia’ was the sole concern that united utopian authors/thinkers such as Bacon,
Andreae and Comenius (Shklar, 1981, p. 282).
When Kumar argues that utopia is a renaissance creation, he admits nevertheless
that ‘its practitioners have often been devout Christians – Francis Bacon no less
than Thomas More – but what their utopias principally declared was a faith in
human reason’. To harmonise the claim that utopia must be non-religious to
deserve the name with the claim that such Christian thinkers had been no less
utopian pioneers, Kumar argues that ‘in their utopias, whatever the case in their
other speculations, they were more concerned with the City of Man than the City of
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God’ (Kumar, 1991, p. 35). Now religiousness as the dividing line seems to be
blurred and the contrast appears to be between utopian reflective, rational vision
and non-utopian hope for divine intervention. But if that is what differentiates
utopianism from non-utopianism, then, on what grounds is all western and non-
western antiquity seen as utopia’s prehistory? For one thing, many ancient utopias
that are excluded form accounts of utopia proper share with modern utopias a
strong faith in reason. In a striking similarity with the meritocracy of an intellectual
Platonic aristocracy, in the ancient Chinese narrative of Great Unity (ta-t’ ung) the
leaders were chosen only on grounds of talent, they exercised harmony and their
voice was sincere. Rather than being unreflective, the unity of both the Greek
Golden Age (as expressed by Hesiod) (Papastephanou, 2008a) and the Chinese
ching-t’ ien (a myth of primitive agrarian communism, as expressed by Mencius) is
based on critical thinking and describes a society were people ‘live intelligently
together’ (Chesneaux, 1968, p. 80).
Thought through, the idea that ancient societies have been dominated by
religious systems of thought with the immediate consequence that their utopian
cultural material, unlike Renaissance, is not capable of declaring faith in reason is
too sweeping and unsubstantiated. It is precisely for doing all this, i.e., for
defending worldly happiness through human sensible or even wise conduct that the
ancient utopias belong to political utopianism as much as their Renaissance
counterparts. True, More is the initiator of modern utopianism,20 of the coining of
the term and he is, indeed, the exemplary reference point of the corresponding
literary genre. But utopia in precisely those terms of reason coupled with a vision
for a perfect society and the good life on earth is prior to Renaissance and its
exclusion from contemporary accounts is contradictory.
Traits, Specific Contents, Quantities, Concepts and Traditions

If utopias declare a faith in human reason, on what grounds are they said to be a
renaissance creation and not, say, of classical antiquity? Kumar is apparently aware
of that and discusses it a few pages later, yet in a way that is so forced that it
confirms rather than dissolves the suspicion that More’s utopia is not argued as the
beginning of the history of utopia, it is simply asserted. He writes, ‘utopia is not
just the conception of the good or perfect society. It is a particular and distinctive
way of discussing the good society’. This way of approaching ethical life has
specific traits and ‘its own form. Moreover it arose at a time when the very idea of
what constituted the good society was being transformed. This gave it too a
distinctive content. In both these ways the utopia of More’s invention distanced
itself from the ideal city of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds’ (Kumar, 1991,
pp. 37–8). As said above, no one doubts the originality of More’s venture and the
special position of his Utopia especially for the literary genre. But is this a criterion
for placing it in a rigid demarcation from the past and excluding from the province
of utopia whatever was or is not like it? After all, before More, many other
utopians had broken with Plato’s Kallipolis, i.e. with the specific content of Plato’s
utopia in significant ways. For example, prior to influencing Thomas More, Plato’s
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Republic had been a point of critical departure for Al-Farabi (also known as
Avennason), an important representative of medieval Moslem thought (c. 950
A.D). In his On the Principles of the Opinions of the Inhabitants of the Perfect
State, he criticizes various political systems in a Platonic manner and contrasts
degenerate cities (I would say ‘dystopias’) with the perfect city. He departs from
Plato in extending the vision of the localized city to a limitless human community
(Chesneaux, 1968, p. 96). Surely, Avennason’s text is not a utopian novel but it is
clearly an essay of political utopianism that precedes modern western utopianism
and cosmopolitanism by roughly five centuries. Why should its differences from
More’s utopia play such a decisive role regarding the beginnings or the evolvement
of political utopian thought as to constitute reasons for denying it the status of a
political utopianist text?
Beyond form, a further argument for excluding the versions of ancient ideal
cities from utopia proper is that the ‘classical texts that have any claim to be
considered as utopias’ are very few (Kumar, 1991, p. 38). A first objection here:
why should sample quantity be an argument for conceptualizations? A second
objection: it is possible that the texts that have such a claim appear to be so few
because those discussing them have already committed themselves to exclusivist
and too narrow conceptions of utopia. If by ‘utopianism’ one has already decided
to mean novels of ideal islands or socialist projects for centrally planned and
sustained radical change, understandably the starting point is either the Renaissance
or the Enlightenment. In fact, if utopian thought is understood as thought (at times
expressed through literature, at other times through political planning or action)
about the possibilities for a collective life as it might or should be on grounds of
human action that can change the unsatisfactory world and as a commentary
(prosaic, satirical or not) on them, the eligible texts are very many and the sporadic
utopian ideas in other texts rich enough to need book length exposition.21 I believe
that the problem arises not only because Kumar and other utopian thinkers have a
narrow conception of utopia but also because they have a very narrow approach to
the idea of a concept. Rather than being an unchanging entity, a concept can be
broad enough to accommodate a great number of conceptions, of textual forms and
various contents and elastic enough to accommodate peripheral change of its
attributes. If Kumar is comfortable with the fact that the concept of the ideal state
of affairs in his work is broad enough to incorporate the primitivist account, the
ancient Greek city, the Chinese rural social ideal, the millenarian constructions
etc,22 why should the notion of utopia be narrower and not have its own distinctive
scope of those ideal societies that, despite their variations and differences, unite in
challenging the collective existent by providing images of an alternative life
through human agency?
Kumar goes as far as to write that there is no tradition of utopia and utopian
thought outside the Western world and he seems to maintain this position even in
his later writings (2003, p. 64). Other varieties of the ideal society or the perfect
condition of humanity are to be found in abundance in non-Western societies,
‘usually embedded in religious cosmologies. But nowhere in these societies do
we find the practice of writing utopias, of criticizing them, of developing and
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CHAPTER 2
transforming their themes and exploring new possibilities within them’ (Kumar,
1991, p. 33). An obvious objection to the claim that there were no written utopias
comes from Chesneaux’s essay where there is mention of The Mirror of the
Flowers, a Chinese text that could easily pass, in my view, for a feminist utopia,
one that antedates any Western equivalent - apart from Aristophanes’s Ecclesiazo-
usae [Assemblywomen] - and to which we have already referred in the introduction.
And there are very many other examples again from Chesneaux’s pioneering work
on the topic that are left aside here for reasons of space. Yet, Kumar’s response
would be, as he makes clear in another passage, that even if some individual works
correspond to a Western utopia, ‘there is no utopian tradition of thought’ (ibid).
Kumar is well aware that Chesneaux and several sinologists present the Chinese
thought on utopia as a tradition in its own right, but he objects to this by reducing
Chinese utopias to primitivist conceptions whose central feature is a lost Golden
Age (ibid). Thus, in an endnote (en 27, p. 112) of his 1991 book and in his 2003
article (en 20, p. 75), he quickly dismisses Chesneaux’s claim that not only in
China but also in South-East Asian places like Burma there had been a utopian
tradition by writing that ‘it is clear that [Chesneaux] uses the term “utopian” very
loosely’. However, rather than Chesneaux using utopia very loosely, it is Kumar
who, in his earlier work, following a long Western canon, uses utopia too strictly
and Eurocentrically. The Western discourse on utopia has established criteria that
tailor utopia only to the conceptions of a very specific Western era, the modernist.
A careful reading of Chesneaux proves that he cautiously included in his research
material only that kind of utopian thought that had visible (and I mean this literally,
implying concrete images) egalitarian significance and other political implications.
That material is then woven with its intellectual remoulding and with its historical
role in political upheavals and risings avoiding most of the themes that remained
within the frame of an escapist individualism or individual religious soteriology
(redemptivism). The political element, the relation to practice and the relevance to
real life, the clear sense of a tradition and the nuanced reshaping of the Golden Age
myth are very well presented there, aptly enough to establish the difference
between primitivist narrative and utopian thought and to corroborate the existence
of the latter. On the contrary, one may argue today, in the hindsight of the years
that have passed since the publication of Chesneaux’s essay that, writing in 1968,
Chesneaux himself appeared overanxious to establish a direct relevance of his
material with some sense of communism and too diffident in his conclusions.23
And he did so precisely because he, like those who preceded and followed him,
was deeply suspicious of any Golden Age talk and familiar with the tendency to
classify it in apolitical escapism, knowing that only concretized socialism could
easily pass for utopianism. Instead of Chesneaux using utopia loosely, it is Kumar
and others sharing his view, who fail to distinguish between utopian thought and its
thematization, that is, utopian discourse. Had they assumed such a distinction, they
would have noticed that lacking an academic discourse (i.e., systematically
theorizing and criticizing utopias, debating its various contents etc) is not quite the
same as lacking a thought.
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BEYOND EURCENTRISM: UTOPIA REVISITED
By leaving a more nuanced approach to non-Western and ancient material aside,

Kumar and many other proponents of utopianism axiomatically set More’s utopia
in a privileged position as a yardstick for whatever is assessed as deserving the title
of utopia. Implicitly, the renaissance conception of utopia is elevated to the status
of a concept, the exhaustive and absolute demarcation of what can count as utopia.
In this way, they make things easier for opponents of utopianism to generalize their
anti-utopian criticisms that are justifiably directed at modern utopia and to thus
reject utopia wholesale. We realize here that, by implication, a rehabilitation of
some ancient and non-Western utopianism is not just a matter of preference or an
arbitrary shift of the boundaries that Western utopian discourse has set in more
inclusive directions. To see why there are other, equally substantial reasons, let us
consider where utopianism stands now regarding its political reconstructive
element that has been so glorified.
In the many years hindsight of concrete political efforts for radical social
redirection and of their failures and produced terrors, and under the pressure of
those anti-utopian arguments that are sound, utopian theory has become suspect of
end-state models of the good life (McKenna, 2001, p. 6). As Kumar himself
admits, a detailed reconstructive utopianism is no longer tenable. ‘Utopian
conceptions are indispensable to politics, and to progress; without them politics is a
soulless void, a mere instrumentality without purpose or vision. But this is quite
different from treating utopias as blueprints for action’. He astutely perceives that
‘it is precisely in taking them as such that the anti-utopians are able to score their
points’. However, he curiously associates this fact solely with the socialist utopia.
‘It is the concept of utopia as blueprint that has discredited the socialist utopia and
made the apparent bankruptcy of socialist experiments tantamount to the bank-
ruptcy of utopia itself’ (Kumar, 1991, p. 96). What remains unacknowledged in
this passage is that the detailed and over-regulated renaissance utopia has also
discredited utopia as such. It is not only the temporal, teleological blueprint kind of
utopia that has given a bad name to the term. It is the renaissance type of utopia
that emphasized stability and holism and not necessarily all versions of utopia. As
Olssen rightly remarks, the ‘renaissance characterization of utopia, with its
emphasis upon stability, consensus, and holistic construction’ also accounts for the
bad image of utopian thinking in Western political culture (Olssen, 2003, p. 527).
As things stand now, the most convincing utopian approaches to politics revisit
the older demand for detailed representations of perfection, for signposts and
cartographic guidance to a desirable future. They speak against the authoritarianism
of the determinacy and finalism of past project-like utopias and portray the
reconstruction of political vision in more suggestive terms (Cooke, 2006). The
desirable destination looks hazy in the distance, and it is recognizable as utopian by
its evocative ethico-political impression. The overcoming of modern metaphysics
of eschatology and teleology has also put an end to predictions of the human
arrival to the unknown land and to the naive optimism of a linear, proceduralist and
eventual human anchoring in the ports of the good life.
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CHAPTER 2
Now we can see Mumford’s distinction between reconstructive and escapist

utopias and the segregation of ‘serious’ utopias from folk utopias in virtue of the
fact that the former’s ideal society is detailed and plausible (Dawson, 1992, p. 4) in
a different light. Regrettably, although the teleology and linear eschatology
underlying the detailed reformist program have been questioned, or even rejected
and overcome within current utopianism, Mumford’s categorization of utopias on
such grounds and Mannheim’s distinctions of utopianism retrospectively along the
axis of their realisability and eventual materialization have not yet attracted a
concomitant critical attention. Those (mostly proponents of programmatic
utopianism and to a lesser extent regulative utopianism) who do not use the term
utopia loosely enough to contain any form of escapism and millenarianism tend
also to banish all Golden Age narratives (along with many other texts that diverge
from the socialist model) from serious utopian thinking. And those who adopt a
concept of utopia that is too elastic leave the assumption that any employment of a
Golden Age myth (e.g. Hesiod’s poetry, ancient Taoist ideal-society visions) is
escapist and apolitical untouched. What is thus missed is: the interplay of utopian
and dystopian images in the earliest utopian narratives; the abstraction of those
narratives that allows them to avoid the conservatism we encounter in many
modern utopias that detail a moralistic and socially approved or an idealized
lifestyle and concerns of the times; the positive implications of the fact that the
embarrassing detailed and finalistic element of temporal modern utopias and the
equally embarrassing rigid architecture of spatial utopias are absent in most ancient
and non-Western narratives; and, overall, the fact that in some non-modern
narratives there is no strict utopian prediction and the message for change is
articulated for the whole of humanity rather than for a specific carrier of
revolutionary potentials.24
Does this mean that everything is utopia? No. Utopias and dystopias concern
societies and are structured systemically (by this term here I do not denote
necessarily detailed and rigid systemic organization) exploring the position of
the individual within simple or complex (depending on the era and culture of
the utopian construction) institutional and societal processes. There is a collective
dimension in the notion of utopia in the sense that utopia is ultimately about the
relation and harmonization of the private and the public, the individual and
society.25 An individualist dream of eternal youth, for instance, is not utopian,
strictly speaking, although, say, a research project of gerontology might very well
be utopian if there is in it a vision that concerns collectivity.
The collective element is there in political utopianism, namely, in the category
of utopianism that concerns this book, and it is there in all versions of political
utopianism, all along from ancient times. All utopias that preceded Plato and More
can be examined as to political utopianism to the extent that they were ideals of
action coordination within the community or state life and not just ideals of
personhood. Let us rephrase the initial question then: is any collective ideal
depiction of the world (past, actual or possible) a utopian one? Again, the answer is
no. A primitivist ideal society [as much as the contemporary, cultural qua
collective yet deep-down individualist discharges of the urge for a new beginning
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(e.g. shopping therapy, pharmacological or surgical ‘utopias’ of ‘eternal youth’)] is

not utopian when its construction functions purely in escapist, nostalgic, regressive,
crypto-utopian and even anti-utopian ways (e.g. when it is deployed in order to
relegate perfection to an unreachable, forever lost, idyllic world, thereby
channelling the desire for change to privatist paths). Evidently, to be in a position
to classify ideals into utopias or not, one has to examine their semantics, their
energetics [their proposals about human action (Papastephanou, 2006)], their
descriptive frame and their normative imaginative reach.
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CHAPTER 3
UTOPIA AND DYSTOPIA: CONCEPTUAL

CLARIFICATIONS
Within the framework that is constructed by a more nuanced approach to the

universal cultural utopian material, we may attempt the following conceptual
distinctions and clarifications. From Bloch (1986) and Mannheim (1960) down to
Bauman (2003), the utopian urge is articulated as a universal impulse to measure
life as it is by a life as it might or should be. A utopian urge is present in all visions
of life as it might be, from projects of change and scientific discourse to Paradise
and Golden Age narratives, escapism and messianism. Although not always political,
the impulse grounding such visions is important for utopianism in general and
indispensable to its theorization. It proves an even deeper-laid universalism of
utopia than the one that political utopianism might be able to prove, i.e., it proves
the existence of a sort of a transhistorical anthropological constant, as perceived by
Ernst Bloch (1986). It is true that the utopian urge can be passive, inoperative and
dangerous,26 but this is not a constitutive element of the concept of utopian urge, in
other words, it is not a conceptual criterion for what should count as utopian desire:
it concerns the content of the narratives that voice such an impulse, despite its first
sight similarity to a form characteristic.27
Yet, we must keep in mind that utopian urge is not quite the same as the utopian
thought that preoccupied us in the previous chapter. Much like the urge, utopian
thought imbues not only the utopian genre and the utopian projects but also other
cultural textual material that does not fall into those two modern categories.
However, utopian thought, of which political utopianism is an indispensable but
not exhaustive part, concerns a more reflective, conscious and collectivity-sensitive
vision than that involved in various expressions of utopian desire. As Martin Buber
explains, although utopia is an image of what should be and is usually determined
by visionaries, it is not wishful thinking (Wunschbild) (Buber, 1985, p. 30).
Further, we must be cautious about the way in which we might treat utopian urge
in its relation to political utopianism. While we see many political utopianists to
dismiss the universalist, disposition-like, psychic energy that produces fantasylands,
alternative worlds and new images of life as lacking political relevance, especially
when it cannot be tailored to the early and late modernist account of detailed,
finalist political projects, the other extreme is also possible. That is, all utopia is
approached by some in purely psychological terms that suffer from the defect of
reducing all ‘intellectual constructs to the personal sources of the imagination that
creates them’, as Judith Shklar criticizes the monumental work by the Manuels
(1979) of doing (Shklar, 1981, p. 279). But this problem, this challenge to
elaborate carefully on the limits of psychology and politics belongs to utopian
discourse, that is, to the systematic, meta-critical thematization of utopian thought
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CHAPTER 3
and should not be projected to the texts themselves. The study of some texts
proves, as has been argued in the previous chapter, that we have strong indications
that not only the utopian urge but also political utopianism is universally
encountered. Rather than merely expressing discontent with life as it is, many
ancient and non-Western narratives articulated a utopian thinking about how the
world might change and they often inspired uprisings or constituted long-lasting
educational material about how people should live and act if they wanted a better
world.
THE SCOPE OF UTOPIAN THOUGHT: NO TOPOS, BAD TOPOS

AND GOOD TOPOS
So far, we have argued for methodological purposes (thus without assuming rigid
demarcations or spheres isolated from one another) that utopianism comprises a
utopian urge and a utopian thought which, in turn, contains political utopianism as
a subdivision. Now let us clarify the scope of utopian thought and political
utopianism as its subset, since they are usually taken to encompass whatever
concerns the good place that is no place. Utopianism has often been conflated with
utopia as the desirable no topos. Considered as eutopia in More’s sense (where
utopia as no topos makes a pun with eutopia as the good topos) utopia has signified
a picture of a good and happy existence in the world belonging either to a
wonderful but forgotten past or to a better future (Bichler, 1995, p. 6).
Therefore, the term ‘utopia’ has come to describe a literary genre of concrete
oneiric pictures of the good life as well as abstract socio-political philosophical
projects (Kumar, 2003, pp. 63–65), dreamworlds imagined and dreamworlds
attempted. For instance, Alfred Dorens’ definition of utopia captures this installation
of desirability within utopia, since utopia in his work is associated with the
Wunschraum and the Wunschzeit (desirable space and the desirable time) (Bichler,
1995, p. 181).28 Utopia refers to the good projected in some remote space or,
similarly, it may refer to the projection of the good in time. Both notions are
criticized by Reinhold Bichler as unable to incorporate dystopia (ibid). Bichler
takes dystopia to belong to the notion of utopia too, if we strictly define it as,
literally, no topos. No topos can either be good topos, or bad topos and the
corresponding discourses are either ‘protreptic’ [protreptische, proklamatorische]
or ‘apotreptic’ [apotropäische, denuziatorische] utopias (Bichler, 1995, fn 27,
p. 181). To accommodate Bichler’s justified concern,29 I propose that we take
utopianism to be generally about the no-place and thus to incorporate utopia as the
invocation of a good world and dystopia as the revocation of a bad world.
Conversely, unlike utopianism, which I would reserve for the signification of no
topos, utopia can be taken to concern life and society as it might or should be,
based on a particular conception of the good. To Buber, utopia is the unfolding of
the possibilities that lie hidden within the communal life of humanity regarding the
just order of things (Buber, 1985, p. 30). Dystopia, on the other hand, is the
blackest representation of an existing or possible society where most qualities of
life are absent.
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UTOPIA AND DYSTOPIA: CONCEPTUAL CLARIFICATIONS
This invites a further clarification. The dystopia that utopianism comprises is not
the dystopia that is employed by anti-utopianism but, rather, it is what Moylan
(2000) calls a ‘critical dystopia’. The dystopia that belongs to utopianism and
assists utopia is the critical ‘probing of human society at its most bleak’ that can
open up a space ‘where preventive action can take place, and positive possibilities
can be explored’. Dystopia thus understood ‘can help generate utopia. Fearlessly
contemplating utter hopelessness can be the first step in the recovery of hope’
(Geoghegan, 2003, p. 151). Usually, though, dystopia is placed against rather than
together with utopia. There have been two reasons for this. One is that, as we have
just seen, against the emphasis on the no topos element, as the concept evolved in
modernity, the meaning somewhat changed in a way that the term ‘utopia’ is
reserved for what is pronounced exclusively a good topos and dystopia is presented
as its opposite. The other reason is that anti-utopianism tends to appropriate all
kinds of nightmarish depictions of fantastic worlds. Thus all kinds of dystopia have
been seen as imaginary constructions of how horrible the world would be if some
utopias were realized. That is, they have been presented as weapons in the arsenal
of anti-utopianism.
To realise why it is misleading to always place dystopia against, instead of
alongside with, utopia, let us consider the following. Around the time of the
temporalization of utopia, we encounter the first use of the term ‘dystopia’. The
word spelled ‘dystopia’ is first used by Noel Turner in 1782 but it is Henry Lewis
Younge who uses the word ‘dustopia’ as a clear negative contrast to utopia in his
Utopia or Apollo’s Golden Days back in 1747. Cacotopia was first used by Jeremy
Bentham (Sargent, 2006, p. 15) and then employed by John Stuart Mill, as we saw
in the first chapter. Yet, as Guy Baeten remarks, unlike utopia which has been
particularly influential throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, dystopian thinking
dominates Western culture ‘during the latter half of the 20th century, up until today’
(2002, p. 141). For that reason, I believe, dystopia has been defined in its relation
to modernity and postmodernity, since it is often understood as ‘the imaginative
portrayal of how modern societies can go badly wrong’ (Geoghegan, 2003, p. 151,
emph mine). From Dawson’s statement that ‘dystopianism also belongs to the
modern utopian tradition’ as it is ‘the product of the modern hope and fear that
utopia can be realized in our countries’ (1992, p. 5), we realize how broad is the
tendency in contemporary utopian studies to mistake dystopia for anti-utopia, that
is, for an almost reflexive conservative response to demands for radical change.
Like their colleagues in general philosophy and in cultural studies, philosophers of
education tend to frequently concede the whole space of dystopia to their anti-
utopian opponents and, amongst other things, this book aims to reclaim dystopia
for utopianist education. Against the general tendency, we may argue that dystopia
can indeed be used to promote anti-utopianism.30 But dystopia can also be used
(and has, equally, been used) to promote utopia. In the latter case, utopianism
depicts the existing reality (or the future world that is prepared by the existing
situation) as dystopia so as to promulgate a resolution to changing it.
When dystopia is recruited to show the current or future dangers of an established
order so as to strengthen the desire for redirection, it becomes part and parcel of
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utopianism. When it is utilized so as to warn about lurking dangers of specific

utopian demands for radical change and thus to discourage utopian aspirations, it
becomes a weapon of anti-utopianism. Anti-utopian is the thought that nourishes
fear of drastic social transformation and chastises all such efforts. Following
Moylan (2000), I define the anti-utopian as the belief that utopia is inherently
dangerous and that it inevitably leads to totalitarianism. The dystopia that derives
from such anti-utopianism depicts ambitious experiments that have gone wrong
and chastises the hubristic character of utopian imagination. The moral is, as
Geoghegan puts it, ‘leave the path of tradition or minimal reform and the gulag
beckons’ (2003, p. 152).
By contrast, radical change presupposes a radical critique of the present. On the
one hand, if we consider that the ‘critique of the current order of things is a
necessary starting point for any project for radical change’, we realize that ‘without
an analysis of what is wrong, it is hard to convince anyone that change is
necessary’ (Van Heertum, 2006, p. 45). When dystopia differentiates itself from
anti-utopia and in involving strong images of unhappiness, dystopia radicalizes
critique. This is precisely the part that has not yet been recognized to dystopia
within educational discourse. On the other hand, dystopia cannot perform its
critical role on its own, for, as van Heertum rightly remarks when discussing
critique, ‘critique alone rarely inspires people to act. We need something to fight
for as well as against’ (ibid). Thus: utopia (eutopia) and dystopia can be part of
utopianism, presupposing one another, functioning as mutual correctives and
directives (Papastephanou, 2008a and 2008b) and making common cause. Anti-
utopia, rather than dystopia, is utopia’s real opponent (Geoghegan, 2003, p. 153).
Yet, even anti-utopianism often presupposes utopia (Levitas, 2003a, p. 3) and
tacitly equates it with the existing reality that it defends so forcefully. This is what
underlies the notions of repressed utopia (Olssen, 2003) or crypto-utopia (Milojevic,
2003) that we encounter in educational utopian theory and we shall employ in later
chapters. Conversely, utopianism often needs some of the philosophical argu-
mentation that anti-utopianism offers, so as to avoid the pitfalls of bad utopianism
and to be aware of dangers involved in futurist thought. And there is not only space
for a useful employment of anti-utopianism; there is also space for the utilization of
two relevant but somewhat different handlings of discontinuous time and space:
counter-utopia and heterotopia.
COUNTER-UTOPIA AND HETEROTOPIA
Counter-utopian is the impulse to preserve one’s critical judgment, to keep it

always activated in relation to concrete utopian visions and proposals. Unlike the
dystopia that operates critically regarding the status quo and opens space for
utopia, counter-utopia operates critically regarding the suggested utopia. Although
often counter-utopia displays an apparent negativism, it should not be identified
with anti-utopia. Whereas anti-utopia is opposed to the very idea of utopianism,
counter-utopia ‘is actually a critical adjunct’ of the utopian ideal (Osborne, 2003,
p. 129), since it enhances its self-reflective quality. In fact, no utopian picture, no
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matter how compelling and enticing, should be endorsed without counter-utopia as

its indispensable companion. This holds as much for explicit utopias as for crypto-
utopias or repressed utopias. And, ‘if the idea of utopia is in crisis today this is not
because we are at the end of history and utopia as such is dead; it is rather that we
lack the spirit of counter-utopia to wage war against those utopias that are so
dominant as to seem akin to common sense’ (Osborne, 2003, p. 131). Ironically
and subversively, instead of having transcended utopia, anti-utopian liberalism as a
crypto-utopia has in fact given up counter-utopia, i.e., the critique of its own
implicit and unacknowledged utopianism.
Heterotopia can be another critical tool for analysing spatiotemporality. Foucault
approaches heterotopias thus: there are ‘probably in every culture, in every civiliz-
ation, real places – places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of
society’. Despite their reality, heterotopias are something like counter-sites, i.e., ‘a
kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the real sites that can
be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’
(Foucault, 2008, p. 3). The ambivalence within this kind of spatiality which, as I
see it, is productive of a critical immanence as a prerequisite of transcendence is
due to the fact that ‘places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may
be possible to indicate their location in reality’ (ibid). Now, whereas, at first sight,
the emphasis seems to be on space, for Foucault, the axis of time is equally crucial.
‘Heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time – which is to say that they
open onto what might be termed […] heterochronies’. The function of heterotopias
is thus connected with the moment when people break absolutely with their
traditional time (ibid, p. 6). As Foucault mentioned, places and moments of this
kind can be found in every culture, but, here, to offer some examples of heterotopia,
I shall draw from cultural material with which I am already familiar. We have seen
in the previous chapter the utopian character of ancient Greek and Roman festivals
such as the Cronia and the Saturnalia respectively where masters and slaves
exchanged places. We may specify now that character as heterotopian. As more
recent heterotopias we may consider some old customs that have survived in the
modern Greek cultural space and which set a specific day of the year as a day of
effected no place and suspended time. As cases in point we may consider: the
custom of gynaikokratia (the rule of women) according to which women enjoy,
during a specific day, a freedom and control over life that is not available throughout
the year; and the custom (of rural Greek spaces and of folk religiousness) according
to which, on a specific day, shepherds distribute milk and other such products to
everybody for free imitating an imaginary condition of life where all are entitled to
food regardless of wealth. In disrupting the smooth flow of conventional life they
represent a mixture of heterotopia and heteropotia (pote=never), and, here, the
permutation of p and t allows us to follow Louis Marin’s (Marin, 1993, p. 16)
making time and space equivalent.
Heterotopia is interesting for yet another reason: it can bring together apparently
incongruous loci, and this helps us perceive the possibility of having utopian and
dystopian representation side by side. To explain, Foucault’s third principle of
heterotopology reads as follows. ‘The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a
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single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible’
(Foucault, 2008, p. 5). He mentions gardens and carpets as the oldest examples but
I believe that, in the same manner, we could also add the Shield of Achilles in
Homer’s Iliad and the Shield of Hercules by Hesiod. There, we find in a single,
artistically created, space the juxtaposition and contrast of cities which live happily
and of images of their rural peaceful life as well as of cities which are engaged in
war with one another – all this topography surrounded by the Ocean as the limit of
the Earth. What we gain from this move is that we extent the function of hetero-
topia further back in cultural time and we enrich the account of utopian history.
More than that, and more importantly, we see the depictions of cities and alter-
native modes of life placed side by side as contrasted utopian and dystopian images
that reflect the primordial unity and alliance of the components of utopianism.
However, we should not mistake heterotopia for utopianism, nor assume that it
can replace utopianism in its role. In most of Foucault’s examples of heterotopias
there is an element of functionalism present, as they are not just depictions or
instances of alternative life but they are rather functioning places. Unlike a utopia
or a critical dystopia, heterotopia is more suggestive, subconscious and enacted
rather than thought out, articulated and applied. It can be better associated with the
utopian urge rather than with a self-reflective, let alone political, utopianism. This
does not diminish its critical importance lying in the fact that heterotopia is a locus
of lived alternative reality, a city within a city, to which the actual and dominant
sites can be contrasted. When it is nightmarish, heterotopia reveals practices
through which societies repress and keep out of sight their gloomy realities or
construct gloomy realities for those that societies abject. When it is eutopian-like, it
reveals practices through which the social imaginary suspends the dominant time
and place and experiences possibilities that the everyday normalcy continuously
blocks.
LITERARY AND POLITICAL UTOPIANISM. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE

CONCEPTUAL DISTINCTIONS AND THE MODERN UTOPIA
Utopia varies from a literary articulation of the impulse for human perfectibility to
concrete political projects for social transformation. From More on, the term utopia
evolved31 to designate not only the corresponding genre but primarily the metaphor
of a fictive ideal state. The qualification we might add here, based on the
rehabilitation of pre-modern utopianism, is that, whereas for many commentators
the literary utopia seems to be exhausted by the novel, the earliest Western literary
utopia can be shown (Papastephanou, 2008a) to have been the didactic epic, and
the modern literary utopia includes also short stories, as Hermann Hesse’s ‘Strange
News from Another Star’ proves (see ch 6). Now, another point of contention
concerns literary utopia in relation to utopia as political theory: for some thinkers,
Kumar, for instance, literary utopia is superior to other ways of promoting the good
society (Kumar, 2003, p. 70). Whilst I share some of his views about the
motivational strength of imagery and I appreciate its educational significance, as it
is already clear from the introduction and as it will appear later; and whilst I
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believe that metaphors and vivid representations have a unique force, I would not
go as far as giving them superiority over the explanatory and justificatory quality
of utopian political theory and abstraction. Of course, this is a matter that demands
more argumentative support than it could spatially be appropriate here. Thus I can
only state here that I see the literary utopianism as complementary with, but in no
way superior to, political utopian philosophy, and this further explains the intentions
of my weaving literary utopianist textuality and utopianist philosophy later on.
The above categorizations, i.e. utopia, dystopia, anti-utopia, counter-utopia,
heterotopia and the distinction between impulse, genre, political thought and political
project are expected to keep away many conceptual and semantic confusions of the
term ‘utopia’. From now on and for the rest of the book, when I employ the terms
‘utopianism’ and ‘utopianist’ I shall refer to utopian, critical dystopian and counter-
utopian thought. Heterotopia, however, is compatible with both utopianism and
anti-utopianism depending on the theorisation and the context in which it is
unravelled or on its social function – at times as psychic discharge and domestication
of critique and at times as a lived reminder that otherness is possible. When
I employ the adjective ‘utopian’ and the noun ‘utopia’ I shall refer only to visions
of the ideal life. Apart form adding nuance, the immediate implication of these
conceptual clarifications is that it thus is shown that there is nothing in the concept
itself that favours a modernist conception of utopia(nism) over, let us say, the non-
Western, the ancient or the postmodern possible contents of utopia(nism). Unlike
Mannheim, and more in line with Bloch, we should avoid the kind of reductionism
and schematicism (Geoghegan, 2004, p. 128) that connected utopia with specific
social strata or a particular collective subjectivity in a strict fashion, as if utopian
ideas were the prerogative of specific social actors. There is no messianic carrier of
revolution as an inherent element of the notion of utopia and, thus we can make a
good use of the post-metaphysical critique of Marxism which has freed us from
restrictions of that sort. Consequently, and evidently, the attacks on the messianic,
teleological kinds of utopia are not relevant to the utopias that do not belong to
such kinds.
The modern utopia which is often associated with an ethics of control and the
avoidance of societal risk is but one kind of utopia. Indeed, in modernity, utopia
‘was to be the fortress of certainty and stability; a kingdom of tranquillity’. In
Bauman’s words, instead of confusion, clarity and self-assurance characterized
modern utopia; ‘instead of caprices of fate – steady and consistent, surprise-free
sequence of causes and effects’. Instead of the ‘labyrinthine muddle of twisted
passages and sharp corners’ there were ‘straight, beaten and well-marked tracks’;
instead of ‘opacity – transparency. Instead of randomness – a well-entrenched and
utterly predictable routine’ (Bauman, 2003, p. 16).32 That modern utopia emphasized
stability, organization and predictability does not mean that any utopia must be
modern in its emphases to deserve the name. The reductionism of all utopia to
modern, end-state or detailed models is to deny the richness of utopian history.
In the modern world, utopianism has taken a vast number of forms and so has its
modernist specification through political projects. But we must not forget that
‘utopias may contribute to progress in ways other than by the design of political
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CHAPTER 3
programmes’ (Kumar, 1991, p. 96). And some utopias may contribute to progress
precisely by revisiting the standard and fashionable understanding of progress
itself. I consider ethical utopias to be precisely of this kind, often against
technological utopias and cybertopias.33 The reason for this is the fact that ethical
utopias tend to focus on the question about what is desirable and acceptable, i.e.
about progress as enlargement of ethical possibility, whereas most techno- and
cyber-topias explore primarily what is achievable and humanly possible, leaving a
modernist, theogenic notion of progress as radicalization of human control up to
omnipotence untouched.34 This is precisely one more reason why the concept of
utopia must not be tailored to the modern conception of it.
Modernity, progress and utopia as genre and project have also been connected
through a specific understanding of space and time that has to be revisited. At
first sight, it seems that spatialization is the absolute determinant of utopia. True,
‘however imagined, visions of a different and better life portrayed in the description
of utopias were always territorially defined: associated with and confined to a
clearly defined territory’ (Bauman, 2003, p. 12). However, temporalization is
equally, and often even more than spatialization, a significant determinant of
utopia. Contrary to the dominant modern view about utopia, the temporalization of
utopia manifests itself somewhat obliquely and sporadically in various utopias
from very early times [e.g. there is a strong temporal element in Hesiod whose
utopia does not only go back to a Golden Age past but is also oriented to future
time rather than distant space (Papastephanou, 2008a)]. But it is true that it was
radicalized around the late 17th and early 18th centuries along with the apotheosis of
progress and the concomitant temporalization of European thought generally
through the new emphasis on linear time (Kumar, 2003, p. 67). Regarding the
utopian genre, Louis-Sébastien Mercier (born in 1740) with his book L An 2240
introduced the form of the modern temporal utopia (Mazlish, 2003, pp. 49ff).
Beyond the utopian genre, political modern utopian projects can be said to have
sedimented into two basic routes to utopia in virtue of temporalization. The one
describes utopia in terms of an ‘abrupt transition between two discontinuous states’.
The other ‘sees it in terms of steady progress along a continuous path’ (Lassman,
2003, p. 51). Although both have been associated with revolutionary change or
eschatology pertaining to various forms of leftism, the linear historical evolutionary
element is present in capitalism too, for which utopia becomes a natural outcome
of the dynamics of modern societal development, of its predictability and
securitization. A related development that has become relevant to education is the
modern distinction between spatial and process utopias. Halpin utilizes this
distinction and illustrates the latter pole (i.e. process utopia) educationally through
reference to schemata ‘for economic and welfare reform such as twentieth-century
plans for the introduction of comprehensive schooling, the development of a
national health service and proposals for new forms of progressive taxation’. Free
market utopianism defined as ‘the attempt to increase material well-being
throughout the world by means of extended capital accumulation’ is the process
utopia which has, arguably, had ‘the biggest impact on most people’s lives during
the latter half of the last century’ (Halpin, 2001b, p. 301).
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Thus concerning the specification of vision, we see that the notion of utopia
unravelled historically through subsequent shifts of emphasis from territoriality to
finality (Bauman, 2003). Whilst in Thomas More35 and in most other literary
constructions of utopia determinations were spatial, for the socio-political version
of utopia-as-project, determinations were temporal.36 Generally, the axis of space
was usually opposed to that of time. But there have also been instances of political
utopian thought where the spatial and temporal axis converged. One such example
might be the theoretical justification of British colonialism, where the metaphysical
capitalist finality met territoriality in conceptions of colonial additions as Promised
Lands. Utopian spatiality was manifest in treating foreign lands as worth conquering
for renewing the resources of Britain (Parry, 1987, p. 54). In other words, instead
of being an aneconomic political space of a new beginning, the guiding Wunschraum
was at the same time the Lebensraum of economic sense. Such spatiality favoured
mobility, in a very capitalist manner, rather than stasis. This is a marked difference
of colonialism from other Lebensraum rationales. For instance, the Mussolini
counterpart favoured stasis and spatiality over mobility in a pre-capitalist nostalgic-
regressive sense. This becomes more evident when one compares the intervention
of both colonial/expansionist ‘utopias’ in the landscape of their colonies/occupied
lands. In Rhodes at the time of the Italian occupation (from WW1 up to WW2), the
emphasis was on urbanism. Mussolini’s regime had built there architectural
monuments that were meant to reproduce the Roman glory. In Cyprus at the time
of British colonialism (fairly cotemporaneous with the Italian control of Rhodes)
the intervention was, like the one in India and elsewhere, mainly of the road and
train transport kind, to facilitate the mobility and flow of resources. British
colonialism is exemplary then of the fact that progress (time axis) can be connected
with the exploitation of land (space axis). For obvious reasons, both, the spatial and
the temporal utopian modernism (or their combination) attracted fierce attacks for
their stasis and homogeneity as well as for tyrannical historicism.
CITIES THAT ARE STILL INVISIBLE
Now37 we may link together the various points that have been developed separately
above and approach a utopianism as we might want it to be today. Objecting to the
architectural and urbanistic (Bauman, 2003, p. 14), modern origins of territorial
utopian determination and to the finality and teleology that led to the totalitarianism
of the past, a revival of utopian thought is rather to be preconditioned on spatial
and temporal indeterminacy. As Louis Marin engagingly remarks, in More’s Utopia,
‘the possible inscription of the island on a map disappears completely’, despite the
fact that utopian representation always takes the figure, the form of a map (Marin,
1993, p. 15). In Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1997, p. 164), a passage that echoes
Oscar Wilde’s view (cf Kumar, 1991, p. 95) that a map of the world not including
utopia is not worth even glancing at, reads as follows:
The Great Khan’s atlas contains also the maps of the promised lands visited
in thought but not yet discovered or founded: New Atlantis, Utopia, the City
of the Sun, Oceana, Tamoé, New Harmony, New Lanark, Icaria.
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Kublai asked Marco: ‘You, who go about exploring and who see signs, can
tell me toward which of these futures the favoring winds are driving us’
(emph mine).
Regarding the utopian destination as illustrated here, I would like to discuss the
following two issues: (1) exploration and (2) signs.
(1 ) Utopia is usually depicted as a journey, and ‘any travel is, first of all, a moment
and a space of vacancy, an unencumbered space which suspends continuous time
and the ordering loci’ (Marin, 1993, p. 14). Navigation and movement is constitutive
of any kind of utopia. Whereas boats and journeys are the transporting devices to
spatial utopias, the vehicles to temporal utopias are usually dreams and sleep during
which the ‘traveller’ is transferred to the utopian world. In both cases, navigation
and movement confirm the special relation of utopia to place and time. To specify
the element of navigation and exploration, we may employ Foucault’s ideas.
Brothels and colonies are two extreme types of heterotopia, and if we think,
after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that
exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to
the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from
brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious
treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has
not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present,
the great instrument of economic development […], but has been simultaneously
the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par
excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the
place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates (Foucault, 2008,
pp. 7–8).
And to specify the relation to place and time, we must recall that ‘utopia was the
topos that rewarded the hardship of the travellers’ (Bauman, 2003, p. 15). To avoid
the finalism and closure that is entailed by the arrival at the port or by the landing
place, many thinkers illustrate utopia as a journey that could be endless. But, on the
other hand, the metaphor of the endless sea journey, endless, as Crowley (2000,
p. 145) remarks, in the dual sense of a journey that has no destination and a journey
that lasts indefinitely, damages political utopianism and turns it into escapism.
Besides, it is only by setting an end to the journey that both the sexism and the
imperialism of the brothel and the colony, the Hegelian master-slave narrative
underlying them, can be contested and their exculpating exoticisation and
romanticization exposed.
We must not forget that the utopias of the colonists had been the dystopias of
the colonized (Sargent, 2006, p. 12). Also, we must not forget the ambivalence the
Roman poets introduced into the notion of the voyage and the symbolization of the
ship. Instead of being a vehicle to utopia, a symbol of humanity’s sailing to new
lands of prospective happiness, the ship is, for thinkers like Seneca, the medium by
which utopia ends and a new era of navigation begins in which nothing remains in
its place in the universe and all barriers have fallen (Ainsa, 1986, p. 29). Before
Roman antiquity, narratives presented the Argonauts as building the ship Argo to
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set out to get the Golden Fleece and King Solomon as sending his ships to look for
gold in the biblical kingdom of Ophir in the Book of Kings (Ainsa, 1986, p. 44).
Geographical utopias have not just been marked by the search for gold as marvel,
but also (to employ Bloch’s distinction as we saw it in the previous chapter) by the
search of gold as booty. When some ancient Greek authors condemned navigation,
it was not just because they had kept ‘clearly in mind the active presence of the
Phoenicians in the Mediterranean’ and their ‘sacrilege of uniting parts of the world
that were “naturally separated”’. They did not condemn only the Phoenicians for
the ‘pursuit of precious metals such as tin, copper and gold’, and for ‘founding
colonies and trading posts on the coasts of a sea whose peoples had to remain
unknown to each other if they were to continue to be happy’ (Ainsa, 1986, p. 39).
Especially after the experience of the Persian expansion against their cities, many
ancient Greek thinkers condemned any aggression based on border crossing (their
own not withstanding). For instance, in the tragedy Iphigeneia, Euripides condemns
the chase of Trojan gold as one of the reasons for the war against Troy.
Breaking with such narratives, Horace in his Epode proposes nostalgically the
restoration of a utopian space and time through expansion. ‘If the Age of Gold no
longer exists here (in Europe) we must emigrate to the lands beyond (a New
World) where it may still survive’ (Ainsa, 1986, p. 35). For Horace, a flight over
the border is the only escape route from the dystopia of his times, of the quarrels
and civil wars of his place. His view is later vindicated in the eyes of the Western
subject, when gold is again encountered in the projects of the American conquest,
since the result that is hoped for is mainly the acquisition of precious metals. No
longer merely in practice but now also in theory, ‘the expectation of booty justifies
the risk and appears to rationalize the pure marvel of discovery’ (Ainsa, 1986,
p. 44). Exploration, navigation and global mobility are proven to be double-edged
and Janus-faced as much as most other human realities are. Ultimately, rather than
subscribing wholeheartedly to the idea of an endless voyage, perhaps the only
means one has in order to judge the quality and desirability of the utopian
adventure is the end of the journey.
(2) In an early renunciation of the intellectualism that is not capable of giving
life to a societal ideal that would motivate and excite people, Socrates does not turn
to philosophers or poets when discussing the ideal city. Instead, he turns to
Timaeus and Critias as ‘men of substance and worldly experience’, who have
‘travelled and seen the ways of the great cities of the world’ (Kumar, 1991, p. 23).
Like Socrates, the Great Khan turns to the traveller in the above passage, but in
addressing him, he characterizes him as one who sees signs. Who might the
traveller of utopia be? Who sees signs? One possible answer might be: the prophet.
To Alain Badiou, ‘a prophet is one who abides in the requisition of signs, one who
signals, testifying to transcendence by exposing the obscure to its deciphering’
(Badiou, 2003, p. 41). In such a case, the utopian message, be it a warning or a
promise, is the word of a predictive mastery and the law of a world-less causality.
Badiou again: the prophet’s is a ‘discourse of exception, because the prophetic
sign, the miracle, election, designate transcendence as that which lies beyond the
natural totality’ (ibid). The other possible answer that might be given to the
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question of the sign breaks with the metaphysics of predictable transcendence.

Badiou would see the utopian moment as one of event, the event which, in its
disruptive anarchy, being illegal and acosmic (ibid, p. 42), refuses ‘integration into
any totality’ and signals nothing. ‘Proceeding from the event delivers no law, no
form of mastery, be it that of the wise man or the prophet’ (ibid).
Chiming with Badiou’s position, Polo sees no clear signs and refuses the causal
predictability of teleology and the rewarding determinacy of cartographic guidance.
But, in contrast to Badiou’s position and to the exceptionalism of the illegal and
acosmic, Polo finds the possibility of utopia within the lifeworld, not in its rare
evental rupture. This is how Polo responds to Khan’s question about utopia in
Calvino’s Invisible Cities:
At times all I need is a brief glimpse, an opening in the midst of an
incongruous landscape, a glint of lights in the fog, the dialogue of two
passersby meeting in the crowd, and I think that, setting out from there, I will
put together, piece by piece, the perfect city, made of fragments mixed with
the rest, of instants separated by intervals, of signals one sends out, not
knowing who receives them. If I tell you that the city toward which my
journey tends is discontinuous in space and time, now scattered, now more
condensed, you must not believe the search for it can stop. Perhaps while we
speak, it is rising, scattered, within the confines of your empire; you can hunt
for it, but only in the way I have said (1997, p. 164).
Echoing Ernst Bloch’s (1986, p. 146) novum,38 that is, the irruption of the radically
new into the apparently eternal and stable, Polo’s location of the utopian, no matter
how discontinuous and scattered in space and time, recuperates everydayness and
restores its lost or repressed transcendence. This is all the more significant when
we realize how the incrimination of the everyday has imbued many philosophical
traditions – from those less connected to utopianism such as Heidegger’s conception
of the everyday world as fallen and repetitive in a habitualizing manner (Gardiner,
2006, p. 27) down to more utopian positions such as Adorno’s which renounced
the search for the progressive social change within the quotidian and resorted to
furtive glimpses of it in avant-garde aestheticization (ibid, p. 16).
We may clarify the significance of theorizing the quotidian for political
utopianism by drawing from Terry Eagleton’s critique of French thought and of
Badiou more specifically. Eagleton describes how French thought (from Sorrel and
the Surrealists to Sartre, from Levinas to Lyotard, Derrida and Badiou) ‘returns
incessantly to the break, crisis, disruption or epiphany of otherness that will tear
you free of everyday inauthenticity’ (Eagleton, 2001, p. 155, emph. mine). Thus, in
Eagleton’s words now, Badiou wishes ‘to insert the eternal into time’, to ‘negotiate
the passage between truth event and everyday life, which is what we know as
politics’. However, this passage ‘is blocked by the fact that Badiou, for all his
undoubted political zeal, is as much caught in an elitist sort of antithesis between
the ordinary and the epiphanic as Derrida’ (Eagleton, 2001, p. 158). For, Badiou
does not share the Hegelian and Marxian view that ‘there are forces which are part
of the situation but which also have the power to transform it. He does not trust the
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quotidian world sufficiently’ (Eagleton, 2001, p. 158) to believe that it contains its
own transcendence. Against such mistrust we may argue that human beings are not
just captive of the strict order of everydayness, the incriminated, nuance-lacking
everydayness of Badiou and others that is disrupted by the monumental evental
truth. The apparent recklessness of everyday dealings may hide a substratum of
various ethical instances. But these remain hidden and bypassed when theory
misses the translucence of such recklessness. When that happens, the gap between
the incriminated quotidian and its transcendence becomes unbridgeable. Ultimately,
utopia reverts to the unattainable and chimeric.
From Walter Benjamin down to Agnes Heller (Gardiner, 2006), there have been
efforts to avoid precisely this gap. Eagleton argues to a similar effect, I believe,
when remarking that, if everydayness is as Badiou characterizes it, ‘then indeed,
little short of a quantum leap out of it into a higher dimension of truth is to suffice’
(Eagleton, 2001, p. 159, emph mine). Against Badiou’s and others’ emphasis on
the utopian evental radical break with a thoroughly incriminated quotidian continuity
as the one that suits a predatory animal such as the human being (we may notice
here the implicit anthropology that will concern us in the last chapter), Polo asserts
the utopian within the quotidian. ‘The ordinary can become extraordinary not by
eclipsing the everyday, or imagining we can leap beyond it arbitrarily to some
“higher” level of cognition, knowledge or action, but by fully appropriating and
activating the possibilities that lie hidden, and typically repressed, within it’
(Gardiner, 2006, p. 3, emph mine).
Then again, what is the meaning of the everydayness which concerns us here
and to which Polo alludes? By ‘the everyday’, I do not refer strictly to how daily
life is in our contemporary world. I refer, rather, to the everyday as the complex,
invaluably rich modes of actual existence, irrespective of time and space. This
sense of everydayness encompassing liberating forces and suppressed potentialities
that contradict habitualizing tendencies characterizes even the worst accomplished
dystopia. Thus the way I employ the term is close to Agnes Heller’s use. To her, as
Gardiner explains, ‘daily life cannot be understood as a “thing” or “system”, or
even an “attitude”’. Instead, Heller ‘conceptualizes the everyday as an ensemble of
historically constituted practices and forms of subjectivity that are complexly related
to and mediated by other structures, institutions and practices’. Thus, the everyday
is ‘a universal human experience’ and as such it exists ‘in all societies, although of
course the actual content of the mundane life-world and its relationship to wider
sociohistorical forces is historically variable’. In pursuing the goal of ‘humanizing’
and democratizing everyday life, Heller asserts that ‘we must strive to nurture
utopian hopes within a largely (but not inevitably) dystopian society that exists in
the present day’ (Gardiner, 2006, pp. 24–5). What is also important to keep in mind
is that, as Heller reminds us, that such suppressed but dynamic elements in the
quotidian exist does not mean necessarily that they are automatically or sponta-
neously discernible or that they are easy to disentangle from the reified and
authoritarian elements (Heller, 1984, p. 15ff).
Now we may characterize more confidently Polo’s utopianism, the utopianism
that dispenses with the old faults of modern utopia, as everyday utopianism. I
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borrow Gardiner’s term ‘everyday utopianism’ because it describes the theoretical

position ‘that imagines utopia not as an ideal society located in some romanticized
past “Golden Age”, or in some distant imagined and perfected future understood in
a “blueprint” or “social engineering” sense, but as a series of forces, tendencies and
possibilities that are immanent in the here and now, in the pragmatic activities of
daily life’ (2006, p. 2).39 That everyday utopianism is more easily detected in some
Marxian or post-Marxist reformist critical social theories (give examples) should
make us cautious, however, to dissociate this recuperation of the quotidian form a
possible eschatological-predictive interpretation of it that would assert that the
utopian element within the lifeworld will lead, by some causal necessity, to the
overcoming of the dystopian element. That utopia is glimpsed in the here and now
does not entail that it is dominant enough to eventually and perhaps effortlessly
produce the desirable and salvaging change that societies and the cosmos need.
Such immanence is often over-emphasized – especially in Marxist or related post
Marxist circles and in pragmatist or neo-pragmatist circles that have exaggerated
faith in the democratic process itself and in its self-recuperative, problem-solving
force. In turn, such over-emphasis produces unwarranted political optimism which
ultimately leads to inoperative confidence in the historical course itself and in its
supposed vindication of the hidden daily potential.
Yet, historicism and evolutionism are not the only sources of unwarranted
political optimism. Even positions such as that of Georg Simmel, while thoroughly
anti-metaphysical in their mode of rescuing everyday life from irredeemable
commodification, had resolutely been optimist about modernity. Such optimism
might lead to a hasty identification of the faith in emancipatory possibilities with
the anticipation of a sooner or later imminent activation of those possibilities. Not
all theories which redeem the everyday are prone to such optimism, and proof of
this is Walter Benjamin’s position which, although it defended the existence of
hidden ‘constellations of qualitative meaning’ in the modern world, it in no way
displayed Simmel’s optimism about modernity (Gardiner, 2006, p. 17). In Calvino,
such caution is available through the last lines of the previous quotation as well as
the assertion below.
‘For these ports I could not draw a route on the map or set a date for the
landing’.
Thus, we may rescue utopia by arguing against the metaphysical stagnation of the
locatability of the perfect eternal and static city and by promoting the utopia that is
critical not only of the present but also of the closure of previous utopias
(Geoghegan, 2003, p. 152) and their naïve faith in their imminence. Indeed, it may
be shown that finality is extrinsic to the demand for the common good, obfuscatory
and even detrimental to it. For we may argue, following Turner, that ‘the excesses
of totalitarian regimes flowed not from a belief in universal happiness or truth, but
from a belief that “history” might be the ultimate legitimation for political practice’
(2003, p. 44, fn 1).40 No specific place is about (or soon) to become a utopian land
and no prognosis might justify the waiting of ripe conditions.
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Does this relativization of time and space mean that we must lose all interest in
those ports ‘for which we cannot draw a route on the map or set a date for the
landing’? A ‘yes’ answer privileges form over content: in Habermas, Honneth and
Seel’s approaches (Cooke, 2004, p. 416), formalism empties utopia from specific
contents of the good life. Maeve Cooke sees at least two advantages in formal
conceptions of the good society. First, ‘on the assumption that they are addressed
to human agents with divergent life experiences and in different kinds of life
situations’, formal utopian conceptions are likely to appeal to ‘a wider range of
people than conceptions that specify the details of social organization and regulation’.
Second, ‘by refusing to specify such details’, formalism pays ‘tribute to the
openness of the historical process’ (Cooke, 2006, p. 165).
However, my answer to the above question is ‘no’, we must not lose our interest
in the various contents of utopias. For one thing, as Cooke avows, ‘formality must
be recognized as a matter of degree: there is no sharp dividing line between formal
and substantive conceptions of the good society’ (Cooke, 2006, p. 165). In fact,
even formalist utopias from mildly indeterminate ones up to those that are purely
abstract have a general feature that classifies them as utopias in the first place and
which is contestable from the point of view of other utopian versions. For instance,
Honneth’s good society is the society in which there would be full recognition of
the several dimensions of the ethical personality (Cooke, 2006, p. 177). Habermas’s
good society is the one of a communicatively rationalized lifeworld harmonized
with (but not subservient to) systemic societal imperatives. Apel’s (2001) utopia of
discourse ethics rests on a transcendental-semiotic grounding of the normative
presuppositions of argumentation. Laclau’s idea of the good society corresponds to
‘a social condition of ceaseless conflict and permanent suspicion, in which there
would be never-ending contestation of claims to hegemony’ (Cooke, 2006, p. 178).
To select from such variations of the formalist utopian theme, let alone to commit
oneself to it and be motivated to work for it, one needs to have some criteria related
to what is determined and promoted by each variation. Without some determinate
content even the most formal conceptions of the good ‘would be unable to arouse
the ethical imagination and would lack motivational and justificatory power’
(Cooke, 2006, p. 165). Purely abstract conceptions of the good society, e.g. Judith
Butler’s ‘non-place’ and Laclau’s ‘void’ (if we suppose that in the latter’s case,
contestability does not become a transcendental signifier and that the content of the
good society remains empty), confront serious difficulties regarding their plausibility.
Even if we posit an empty ethical transcendence as the impossible yet necessary
object of human desire as many theorists do, e.g. Laclau influenced by Derrida and
Lacan, the issue of a more or less determinate picture of utopia persists. For, no
representation of emptiness can serve utopian purposes. As Cooke argues against
Laclau, ‘an entirely empty object could not serve as a source of illumination and
orientation and could not motivate us rationally and affectively in our judgments
and actions’ (Cooke, 2006, p. 170).
But the difficulty in formalism is not only the one that Maeve Cooke detects,
namely that even formal ideas of the good require some determinate content if they
are to arouse the ethical imagination and acquire motivational and justificatory
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force. Geoghegan, following Moylan on this, takes issue with Jameson’s attempts
to ‘downgrade utopian content in favour of concentration on the negative and
critical functions of the utopian’. For this would lead to jettisoning ‘the factor that
first attracts people to utopian forms – the portrayal of the shining city or the island
of peace and plenty’ (Geoghegan, 2003, p. 155). We must turn to the contents of
various utopian images not only because of their motivational role but also because
of their significance for discerning what would be worth pursuing. After all, what
else distinguishes, say, the utopia of Mussolini’s fascism from various utopias,
other than their contents, that is, their definition of the good? Jameson’s view41 that
the positive function of various utopias is not their individual content but rather
their ability to critique or negate one another gains a different perspective when
placed alongside a utopia of a specific content: Mussolini’s utopia ‘was continually
and aggressively engaged in the production of dystopian visions of other cultures’
(Burdett, 2003, p. 103). Can we simply argue that a fascist utopia has this ‘positive
function’ as much as any other, non-fascist utopia, placing them on an equal
footing, regardless of their content? Likewise, we may take issue with other
approaches to utopia, which, out of fear of the risk of metaphysics lurking in
concrete accounts of the good, they avoid a specification and critique of what
should count as a desirable utopian image. The absolute proceduralism of Badiou’s
utopia of the truth event is asserted, for instance, when Badiou stresses the
procedural character of his singling out Saint Paul as an exemplary figure of an
ethic of fidelity in the truth event and when he makes clear that he has no interest
in Saint Paul’s good news, i.e. in the content of the evental irruption (Badiou, 2003,
p. 1). But it is not just the pure encounter with the evental that redirects people.
Redirection depends on the content of the encountered entity or event, on the
responsiveness of the one who encounters it and her readiness to recognize it. It
depends, overall, on what Badiou seems dismissively to place in the order of law
and knowledge. Contra this faith in procedures and suspicion of specification, I
believe that teaching, learning, knowledge and the ‘law’ of analysis of the utopian
content are indispensable to the very idea of fidelity to a utopia: why fidelity to
something that could be detrimental or horrific? Utopia needs counter-utopia, and
the latter can make sense only as content analysis.
We need to ponder the substantive content of utopian accounts so as to discern
and judge the degree of their desirability in the first place. Chapter 6 will clarify
my position on a possible content of utopia, but here it is important to see first
where we stand after a post-metaphysical critique of utopia. If the wrongheaded
revolutionary confidence in the past emanated from an eschatological and messianic
conception of human history that is now implausible and obsolete, is there space
for a new utopian thought in postmodernism (Kumar, 2003, p. 74)? And furthermore,
‘can one portray the good society in the terms of irony, scepticism, playfulness,
depthlessness, ahistoricity, loss of faith in the future’ (ibid)? My response is positive
regarding irony, playfulness and ahistoricity but negative regarding scepticism and
depthlessness; a new utopian thought can combine a loss of faith in the future with
some faith in the glimpse of the unexpected and the possibility to discern it. The
utopian emerges only as a possibility,42 felt through disconnected instances of the
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good embedded in everyday life and in various social contexts. As such, the
utopian has the counter-utopian, i.e., the suspicious and critical treatment of all
utopian contents, as its indispensable companion, for ‘the ironist, the cynic may be
the friend of the utopian’. All the more so, since ‘each would wish to hold the
future open instead of closing it off in some endogenous inevitability’ (Osborne,
2003, p. 129).
Along with human freedom as constant creative reaction to mutable reality
(Cooke, 2004, p. 421), the finitude of human existence and the limits of knowledge
and existential scope preclude the finality of the perfect time and the finalism of
the perfect space. It is not compelling that for a utopia to deserve the name all
tensions and contradictions within the society it depicts must be reconciled or
solved. Thus, I take issue with the idea that utopian redemption is about the
removal of all obstacles to human flourishing and the attainment of a human state
of complete sufficiency.
Of course, the most immediate and fashionable objection to all this is the danger
of dystopia recruited by anti-utopian discourse. The original meaning of utopia, the
good place that is no place, is transformed into ‘the good place that can be no place,
and which, in seeking a place, becomes its opposite, dystopia’ (Levitas, 2003a, p. 3).43
Already the great Khan was leafing through his atlas, over the maps of the
cities that menace in nightmares and maledictions: Enoch, Babylon,
Yahooland, Butua, Brave New World.
He said: ‘It is all useless, if the last landing place can only be the infernal
city, and it is there that, in ever-narrowing circles, the current is drawing us’
(Calvino, 1997, p. 164).
What is reflected here is the commonplace idea that utopia is doomed to turn into
its opposite. We see how dystopia is usurped by anti-utopianism44 and becomes a
weapon against radical imagination. In endorsing such anti-utopianism, the Great
Khan would have, in the eyes of Badiou, been just another obscurantist. For this is
precisely the term Badiou employs to characterize the proponents of the pessimist
line of thought. Obscurantists ‘seem to have understood once and for all that to
strive for nothing beyond what is has always been the surest way not to fail’
(Badiou, 2005b, p. 71). Badiou detects pure and conscious conservatism in the
decision of anti-utopians to dismiss collective commitment to a conception of
the good with some evasive recruitment of the charge of totalitarian ideology.
Anti-utopians ‘would be more convincing if only it were not so apparent that they
had simply abandoned the ideas of justice and the emancipation of humanity and
had joined the eternal cohort of conservatives bent on preserving the “lesser evil”‘
(Badiou, 2005b, p. 70).
Obscurantism and conservatism aside, there is tragicality in positions such as
that of the Great Khan – a tragicality that is missed in the polemical context
surrounding the debate over utopia. To illustrate it, let us briefly consider the myth
of Pandora’s jar as recounted in Hesiod (Papastephanou, 2008a). To punish humans
and Prometheus who helped them to change their conditions of life, the Gods send
Pandora, the first and only God-made human in antiquity, to Epimetheus, Prometheus’
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brother. Pandora unleashes all the evils of earth from the jar and puts back the lid,
perhaps at Epimetheus’ request. The single effect of this is that the only good thing
that, in a moment of compassion, the Gods placed in the jar, i.e. the bird of hope is
kept locked in the jar. Just as in the myth, in encountering the evils that are unleashed
due to efforts for radical change of a given order, the agent forever represses the
very anticipation or hope for any radical change. In fear of further evils, contemporary
thought rushes to exclude hope from its province. Anti-utopianism becomes a
leading force in times of political contre-temps, when people realize too late and
act too soon. Their deliberate anti-utopian move to block the possibility for hope,
i.e. their exclusion of the very belief in possibility and the risks it entails, ironically
secures only that the effected dystopia will last. ‘Dystopias have been deployed to
stifle necessary and beneficial change by making people fearful of such change,
with the paradoxical outcome that the failure to change plunges society further into
the mire’ (Geoghegan, 2003, p. 151). If the utopian figure of a revolutionary
Prometheus (his name meaning ‘forethought’) causes disaster, it is the anti-utopian
figure of Epimetheus (‘afterthought’) that completes it. Epimetheus, who has
remained philosophically in the dark throughout the years, is no less a tragic figure
than the Ur-rebel Prometheus.
However, as we have seen, there is also the dystopia that is not the opposite of
utopia and is termed ‘critical dystopia’, which contains, ‘both in form and content,
a destabilizing element of dogged hope’ (Geoghegan, 2003, p. 153). As I see it,
their conflation often occurs due to the mistaken assumption that dystopia is a
vision of the future as the advent of a time that is discontinuous with the present
rather than a depiction of the present situation and its ongoing degeneration.
The warning element is found in both kinds of futurity but the difference lies in
the location of danger: in anti-utopian dystopias the danger is associated with the
actualization of any utopian aspiration. In critical dystopias the danger is placed in
the existing reality, the current condition of society and the system. In exaggerating
the faults of the system, this kind of dystopia revitalizes the urge for change, the
yearning for a better life.
How are the redefined utopia and critical dystopia entangled? Unlike many
readings of Bloch that focus on the psychological aspect of utopia and dystopia,
my concentration on the relation between utopia and dystopia and on the relevance
to present day education addresses the objective pathologies of society. For Bloch,
the future dimension always contains both dystopia and utopia. Hope is superior to
fear because it is not passive (Bloch, 1986; see also Halpin’s account of it in 2001a,
p. 109) and urges us to praxis. I believe that this is not the case, as fear too can
become creative within the framework of a fresh interpretation of dystopia in the
same way in which Bloch wanted hope to be creative. To unpack this point, we
must see dystopia as a form of ‘negative hermeneutic’45 that should not operate in
isolation but in a dialectical relation with a ‘positive hermeneutic’ (Jameson, 1981,
p. 292) of utopian analysis.46 Beyond optimism or pessimism as a psychological
state, we may argue that both hope and anxiety are necessary for political purposes
and their interplay enhances utopianism as an interesting and promising intervention
in politics. Such utopianism reminds us that, just as everyday life stores utopian
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moments, likewise it stores dystopian elements, and it drives home qualifications

of utopia such as everydayness, content determinacy and necessity of learning.
How all this is done is manifest in Polo’s responce to Khan’s fears of dystopia.
The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is
what is already here, the inferno where we live everyday, that we form by
being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for
many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer
see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension:
seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not
inferno, then make them endure, give them space (Calvino, 1997, p. 165).
From Simmel to Benjamin, much critical social thought has revolved around the
idea that ‘the effects of alienation and reification pervade the modern social world,
and one significant result is a stereotypical everyday consciousness and manner of
bodily deportment that is characterized by habituated “distraction”‘ (Gardiner, 2006,
p. 19). Utopia then requires a defamiliarization of the taken-for-granted inferno, an
awareness of the existing dystopia and an aroused discomfort. A world in which
what is not inferno is repressed and must be sought, and this process of recognizing
it needs to be learnt, perhaps also taught, is the raw material for pedagogical
moulding. Like Calvino, Benjamin too had prompted theory to ‘detect the pulse of
utopian energies in the here and now (and in the most unlikely of places), to tap
into these forces, revivify them and link them to transformative political praxis’
(Gardiner, 2006, p. 19). For Gardiner, the most apt metaphor for such a stance is
the one of the collector or the ‘ragpicker’, ‘a figure that sifts through the scraps and
debris of modern everyday life in order to glean what is worthwhile out of what has
been discarded or forgotten’ (Gardiner, 2006, p. 21).
THE INTERPLAY OF UTOPIA AND DYSTOPIA
Fragmentary and discontinuous hope intersects with instances of lived nightmare.

As Osborne asserts when commenting on Andrei Platonov’s utopian fiction, ‘the
nightmarish quality of everyday life runs up against the epic quality of the absolute,
not as elements that are extraneous to each other but as mutually reinforcing
tendencies’ (Osborne, 2003, p. 131). But failure to perceive these dystopian instances
normalizes them and blocks the effort to pursue the utopian moment. Such uncritical
normalization often derives from memories of past disheartening experiences when
utopian energies produced a chaos and a terror that was worse than the one they
were unleashed to fight. I have argued that what remedies this normalization of
societal symptoms is the turning of dystopia not against utopian imagination but
against the dominant reality. As Andrew Milner notes, the informing tense of
utopia is the indicative future perfect, the tense of what will have been if a
transformative commitment is pursued. The ‘equivalent tense of dystopian prevention,
of what we seek to avoid by negative example, will be the subjunctive future
perfect’ (Milner, 2005, p. 16). For the dystopian fictions recount ‘what would have
happened if their empirical and implied readerships had not been moved to prevent
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it’ (Milner, 2005, p. 17). Thus, although I agree with much of what is being written
about the significance of utopian thought in education (Halpin, 2001ba, p. 110ff;
Stewart-Harawira, 2003, p. 160ff), I believe that this significance could be more
adequately theorized and defended through an examination of the way in which
dystopia and utopia intersect. Counter-utopia is yet another significant factor here.
It initiates a discussion of the possible slippage of ambitious ideas for change into
dystopian distortions and it can also function as a corrective of utopian thought that
enlarges its imaginative reach: utopian theory should deal not only with ideal contents
but also with their possible degeneration. On this condition, educational dystopia
becomes not a discourse of forecasting but of foreboding, mixed with tenacious hope.
A discussion of dystopian elements in educational reality can work as a directive
of utopian thought toward alternative futures and away from existing pathologies
mistaken as inevitable. The caustic element of dystopia is indispensable to critique
and even more effective: where Julian West, the famous utopian hero of Bellamy’s
Looking Backward (1986) stops, there May West takes over with her famous
saying, ‘when I’m good, I’m good, when I’m bad I’m even better’. The caustic
idiom will be provided to us by David Mamet’s theatrical play Oleanna. As we
have seen, it is important to distinguish between the anti-utopia that expresses the
anti-revolutionary ideology for which utopias inevitably lead to repression and
dictatorship and the dystopia ‘which is necessarily a critique of tendencies at work
in capitalism today’ (Jameson, 2004, p. 41). It is precisely in this sense that Oleanna
is a dystopia. As such it serves as an illustration of the role reserved in this book
for dystopia as a critical device that unmasks educational pathologies and comple-
ments utopian educational discourse by giving it a new impetus.
Being a play, Oleanna is significant in yet another sense. For Mercier, the author
who introduced the modern temporal dimension in the utopian novel, the theatre
was the school for citizenship, since, through it, the public could be introduced to
civic virtue. The centrality of the theatre in that approach that echoed Diderot is
owed to its conception of the ‘theatre as a space wherein society was shown to
itself as it was and as it should be’ (Mazlish, 2003, p. 51). A dystopian depiction of
educational reality, its diagnostic and remedial intervention in educational matters
and its role in radicalizing educational demands for systemic change is served by
the interplay of proximity and distance that a stage uniquely provides. Through
Oleanna, a revocation of the present, an antipolis, will prepare the invocation of a
better future for the whole world, a cosmopolis that has to be striven for.
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CHAPTER 4
EDUCATION AND DYSTOPIA: MAMET’S OLEANNA
In recent educational literature, utopian imagination and hope, especially the

pragmatist or processual kind, is expected to contribute to the overcoming of various
negative educational phenomena. Such are, for instance, the crises related to the
recruitment of teachers and the stress levels of in-service teachers or the crises
related to poor motivation and under-achievement on the part of students and to
ineffective school management (Halpin, p. 2001b, p. 310). More specifically, the
task David Halpin assigns to utopia is to assist the recovery ‘to the forefront of
teachers’ and other educators’ minds submerged ways of thinking both positively
and prospectively about their work and about education generally’ (Halpin, 2001b,
p. 312).47
Yet, as we have seen in the previous chapter, hope and vision presuppose or
interact with the anxiety and the discontent regarding reality that are necessary for
critiquing the present and imagining a better future. Utopia requires a critical dystopia
as a complementary rather than opposing force. A ‘revocation of the present becomes
tied with the invocation of a better future that has to be striven for’ was the
concluding statement of the previous chapter. Hence, dystopian depictions of
educational reality are significant for diagnostic and remedial intervention in
educational matters, for detecting much deeper crises than those that the system
allows us to perceive and for radicalizing educational demands for systemic
change. Mamet’s Oleanna will serve as an illustration of the argument about the
role of dystopia as a critical device that unmasks educational pathologies and
complements utopian educational discourse by giving it a new impetus. Before
discussing its dystopian educational character, let us see how the play unfolds.
John, a professor of education, is in his office talking on the phone about the
new house he is buying, while Carol, a student, has been asked to his office to talk
about her essay mark being a fail. When they start talking, their communication is
most of the time either distorted or disrupted: she cannot understand the words he
uses, they interrupt each other and they get interrupted by a series of phone calls
about his house. At some point she attempts to justify her difficulty with the taught
material by recourse to social positioning and economic status but he has already
interpreted her difficulties through a reductive psychologism: she is ‘an incredibly
bright girl’ but she is angry, frustrated at the system and has internalized failure. In
line with a kind of ‘American dream’ rhetoric and privatized utopia, John seems to
imply that all one needs in order to succeed is to believe in the ability to succeed.
‘If I do not want to think of myself as a failure, perhaps I should begin by
succeeding now and again’ (p. 23), he says. So, when she appears intuitively to
approach a ‘cultural capital’ explanation of learning failure, he does not pay
attention at all but keeps interrupting her.
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CHAPTER 4
Carol: It is true. I have problems …

John: … every …
Carol: … I come from a different social …
John: … ev …
Carol: a different economic …
John: … Look:
Carol: No. I: when I came to this school:
John: Yes. Quite … (Pause) (p. 7–8).
Carol tries to explain apologetically that she did all she was told (she bought and
read John’s book) but she just cannot understand the material at all (p. 9).
Contrasting the extra-mural with the academic world, she says:
there are people out there. People who come here. To know something they
didn’t know. Who came here. To be helped. To be helped. So someone would
help them. To do something. To know something. To get, what do they say?
‘To get on in the world’. How can I do that if I don’t, if I fail? But I don’t
understand. I don’t understand. I don’t understand what anything means …
and I walk around. From morning ‘til night: with this one thought in my
head. I’m stupid (p. 12).
John takes an interest in the case, despite his initial hurried dismissal of her
protests. ‘I’ m not your father’ (p. 9), he had said, but now he wants to deploy his
good pedagogical tactics to undo her negative self-image, to give her a new chance
to learn and to enlighten her about the vices of the educational system. Schooling
makes students internalize failure and give in to self-fulfilled prophecy; it is
tyrannical and authoritarian. But Carol does not pay much attention to his words.
What she is really interested in is her grade (p. 24). Evidently, her effort to account
for the economic and social barriers to her learning was more related to individual
social mobility aspirations rather than to a Freirean realization of her existential
situation and a demand for social radical change. He quickly gets the distraction of
the grade out of the way by granting her an ‘A’ and offering to teach her the
material all over again (p. 25). Full of faith in the power of his progressive
questioning of the system, a questioning that has secured him the publication of a
book, an imminent tenure and a high salary, he sets out to convince Carol that he is
on her side and that she can learn. ‘I’m talking to you as I’d talk to my son’ (p. 19),
he now says. What we may perceive as Carol’s inability owed to a long series of
educational misfires is expected to be overcome in a couple of sessions with John.
In an interestingly subversive move, we see John attacking the system and Carol
becoming more confused and more defensive, since, to her, education is the only
road to success. Act One ends with a further failure of communication. Carol is
about to open up and talk about herself (p. 38): ‘I always … all my life … I have
never told anyone this…’ (p. 38). But, that very moment, the phone rings. John
picks it up; it is about a surprise48 party in the new house to celebrate the tenure
announcement and, as he has to go to his party, the secret Carol was about to tell is
forgotten.
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In Act Two we are informed about Carol’s formal complaint against John of
sexual harassment and John now appears to have faith in the very system he was
condemning. He had talked previously to Carol about the ‘bad committee’ that had
put him to the test, that, in his exact words, had people ‘voting on me I wouldn’t
employ to wax my car’ (p. 23). Now he is saying, ‘the Tenure Committee will
meet. This is the process, and a good process. Under which the school has
functioned for quite a long time. They will meet and hear your complaint – which
you have the right to make; and they will dismiss it’ (p. 45). As the act unfolds,
John displays the same concern about his material goods that are at stake now that
his tenure is suspended because of Carol, as Carol did in the first act regarding her
grade. Carol, who was instructed to make the complaint by a group, which remains
anonymous throughout the play, is now articulate and eloquent in promoting this
new, corporatist ‘we’. ‘You mock us. You call education “hazing”, and from your
so-protected, so-elitist seat you hold our confusion as a joke, and our hopes and
efforts with it’ (p. 52). John’s attempt to convince Carol to withdraw the complaint
fails and the act ends with John restraining her from leaving.
In Act Three this is construed as attempted rape on the grounds of which John
will lose his job. John appears cautious and tries to appeal to her feelings. Once
again, Carol attacks him from a position of power, the power she now has over his
future. She accuses him that he does not believe in ‘freedom of thought’. You
believe, she says, ‘in a protected hierarchy which rewards you. And for whom you
are the clown. And you mock and exploit the system which pays your rent’ (p. 68,
emph mine). The new, empowered Carol of the third act does not gain her power
from an abstract sense of justice or the force of the better argument or the influence
of transformative teaching and emancipatory learning material. She draws power
from the system itself which she turns against John through the help of the group
that directs her legal moves. Carol cynically leaves us think that sexual harassment
is not really the issue; it is unclear whether she had consciously twisted the
meaning of his words to use it against him or she had truly mistaken his intentions.49
What mattered to her was that newly acquired power over him. He argues that what
he said or did was devoid of sexual content, and she retorts: ‘I say it was not. I
SAY IT WAS NOT. Don’t you begin to see …? Don’t you begin to understand?
IT’S NOT FOR YOU TO SAY’ (p. 70). And she is ready to withdraw the complaint
only on the condition that he agrees to give up his academic freedom to choose the
taught material. She gives him a list of texts that she and her group want removed
from the syllabus. When John reads the list and sees his own book there, he refuses
point blank to proceed. ‘I’ve got a book with my name on it. And my son will see
that book someday. I have a responsibility … to myself, to my son, to my
profession’ (p. 76). Towards the end, John tells his wife on the phone ‘I can’t talk
now, Baby’ and Carol, on the way out, tells him: ‘don’t call your wife “baby”‘ (p.
79). Infuriated, John begins to beat her shouting: ‘You think you can come in here
with your political correctness and destroy my life?’ (p. 79). The play ends with a
violence and power symbolism: John picks up a chair, raises it above his head and
advances on her; she cowers on the floor below him, he looks at her and lowers the
chair and she says: ‘Yes, that’s right’ (p. 80).
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In a Pinteresque manner,50 Mamet finishes the play with that enigmatic phrase
that can be interpreted in many ways. R. Skloot’s remark that the play’s last words
have a ‘multiplicity of voicings available to the actor and appear to prevent closure
in the traditional sense’ (Skloot, 2001, p. 101) is very apposite. But within the
overall interpretation I give below to the play, I would opt for the voicing that
insinuates a further deferral of the same power game: Carol appearing momentarily
submissive and overcome by his authoritarian act but later accusing him of yet
another systemically condemnable violation. Still, both her power acquired through
her accusations as well as his power acquired through academia are illusions. All in
all, what is left standing is domination. We could interpret this ending as an
assertion that in this system of acting and communicating the only effective means
is domination in various forms and the only model of the teacher and student
relation that survives is the one of asymmetrical power and control in the position
of which they alternate. And this model is also pathetic and only momentarily
effective, since John can in no way uphold his previous image of the composed and
secure challenger of the system by resorting to physical violence, nor can Carol in
any way obtain understanding or convince him to satisfy her (and her group’s)
demands. In dystopias, the order that is based on domination is temporary, sham
and utterly futile, but, at the same time, it is the only thing left standing or even
triumphing. In yet another association with the genre of dystopia that strengthens
my particular reading of Oleanna as a critical dystopia, the resonance of the ending
of Orwell’s 198451 implicit in the enigmatic ending of Oleanna [‘Yes, that’s right’
(p. 80)] cannot be missed. This is how 1984 ends: ‘But it was all right, everything
was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He
loved Big Brother’ (Orwell, 1954, p. 256; emph mine).
The deployment of the textual evidence that opens up the play to a utopianist
reading and supports the claim that the play is a valuable illustration of a critical
dystopia could begin with the title itself. The title Oleanna refers to a utopia where
all goods are accessible and ready for consumption with no effort or energy spent
on acquiring them, but the play unfolds as a depiction of an educational dystopia.
Before we comment further on the title, to support the characterization of the play
as an educational dystopia, let us give reasons for reclaiming the play’s educational
and dystopian character against the sweeping tendency to see it as a drama of
power and sexual politics. After an initial reaction to the play that mistook it for a
realistic melodrama about sexuality and political correctness, many critics now
stress the educational dimension of Oleanna. Mamet himself has helped in this
redirection by stating that the play ‘is not a melodrama [that] awakens feelings of
pity for the person with whom we identify, and fear of the person with whom we
don’t. It’s a tragedy’ (cf. Braun, 2004, p. 108). The play can now be seen as
pointing out ‘some of the most basic failures of American education and the long-
term effects of the damage it does to young people’ (Murphy, 2004, p. 124). Set in
an unnamed college and concerned with pedagogical principles and techniques, the
two-character play becomes ‘a meta-educational experience’ that ‘discusses the
work of teaching at the same time that it “performs” it’ (Skloot, 2001, p. 97).
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The acknowledgement of the pedagogical element of the play has led Skloot to
offer the only reading of the play that approximates a utopianist perspective. For
Skloot, the play ‘can be used to reflect upon a comprehensive philosophy of
teaching’, thus permitting Mamet’s ‘provocative dramatization to guide us toward
a vision of pedagogy’ (Skloot, 2001, p. 96).52 My utopianist approach to Oleanna is
less general than Skloot’s, for it concentrates specifically on the play’s critical
dystopian imagery. My emphasis will be not so much on the directive possibility
toward a vision of pedagogy but rather on the play’s diagnostic penetrating outlook
that unveils the unresolved tensions created by a dehumanising established reality.
Thus, I interpret the fact that the characters of Oleanna, both Carol and John,
‘suffer oppression, and their oppression is to be found in both their behavior and
the place they inhabit’ (Skloot, 2001, p. 96) as a token of the lack of escape route that
characterises the actuality of dystopia that is portrayed by the corresponding genre.
As suggested above, although the educational element is increasingly
acknowledged as crucial for understanding the play, the dystopian element is still
missed. We shall go through the more substantial reasons for this later, but now it
is important for introductory purposes to explain that this neglect is, amongst other
things, due to a conceptual narrowness of what dystopia is largely taken to signify.
Dystopian works seem to register the fears aroused by concrete visions of how the
world should be. As we saw in the previous chapter, such works are put in the
service of anti-utopianism. When utopian visions emphasize certain future expect-
ations and overlook the dangers accompanying them, they mobilize the deepest
fears and worries of those who do not share the enthusiasm of the visionaries. Such
fears that have fuelled various dystopian works are those concerning a future
authoritarianism or a return of totalitarian regimes, an unbridled dispersal of global
corporations, an unprecedented gender subjection to new forms of power and
control, genocidal outcomes of technology, military and ecological disaster, etc
(Geoghegan, 2003, p. 153). Obviously, Mamet’s play does not belong in this
category because it does not refer to any of the nightmares just listed and, more
than that, it does not refer to a danger engulfed in future experiments with life,
politics and the world. It refers exclusively to the actual situation of society. Its
dystopian depiction focuses on existing but caricatured human relations within a
dehumanizing social system. By contrast, standard literary dystopias (that are
easily discernible and classified as such) are afraid of things to come, of things
pertaining to developing or anticipated projects of life as it might be, of things that
are overlooked and ignored by the one-sided utopias that promote such projects.
Rather than voicing a premonition, Oleanna is afraid of the here and now as it has
already been shaped. Its dystopianism is closer to that of Hesiod and Hesse that we
shall take up in later chapters. For, all these dystopias are more like the critical
dystopias of Tom Moylan (2000) in their exaggeration of actual rather than
potential faults. That makes them less recognizable by much consolidated literary
criticism and utopian studies which tend to equate dystopia with anti-utopian
foreboding.
As I have already mentioned, to my knowledge, Mamet’s controversial play has
not been understood or ever discussed as an educational dystopia. A first reason for
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this that concerns the play and not the conception of the genre as such is that the
play has no obvious futurist dimension to match the dominant semiological genre
analysis that perceives dystopia as a construction warning us of a dangerous
situation to come. The warning element is usually connected by most critics with
an imagined, distant and unrealizable world that some dreamers wish to bring
closer to life. Thus, most critics neglect the case of warnings related to how things
actually are and the course they take. When we take notice of this nuance, we
realize that, lack of futurism aside (a lack that brings the play closer to being a
critical dystopia as explained above rather than an anti-utopia), the play does have
the warning element of dystopian textuality. And it has it to such an extent that
critics could be easily driven in that direction of interpretation just by considering it
an insightful expression of foreboding as regards where actual, existing education
is driving us. B. Murphy moves along such lines when quoting the following
comment by Richard Badenhausen: ‘the play offers an ominous commentary on
education in America and more particularly functions as a dire warning both to and
about those doing the educating’ (cf Murphy, 2004, p. 125, emph mine).
An even more specific reason for the neglect of the dystopian depiction of
educational reality in the play, one that reconnects us with the utopianism of the
word Oleanna, is, I believe, the failure to perceive the irony of the title of the play.
The title Oleanna has been treated as enigmatic and obscure and many critics of
the play emphasize its supposed irrelevance to the play itself. The utopianism of
the title and the irony that critics miss can better be examined via two epigraphs
that Mamet’s published text of Oleanna includes (see, Murphy, 2004, p. 124).
These epigraphs are: verses from the folk song that gives the title to the play and a
passage from Samuel Butler’s novel The Way of All Flesh. The verses from the
folk song read as follows:
Oh, to be in Oleanna,
That’s where I would rather be.
Than be bound in Norway
And drag the chains of slavery.
The citation from Butler reads as follows:
The want of fresh air does not seem much to affect the happiness of children
in a London alley: The greater part of them sing and play as though they were
on a moor in Scotland. So the absence of a genial mental atmosphere is not
commonly recognized by children who have never known it. Young people
have a marvellous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to
circumstances. Even if they are unhappy – very unhappy – it is astonishing
how easily they can be prevented from finding it out, or at any rate from
attributing it to any other cause than their own sinfulness.
Taken together, the title of the play, the verses from the folk song and the quotation
from Butler provide the first step for approaching Oleanna as an educational
dystopia, a satire of the existing order, its theoretical justification and its repressed
or explicit utopianism.
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Alluding to an old utopian attempt in Wisconsin, i.e., a community founded by

the Norwegian violinist Ole Bull and his wife Anna (thus: Oleanna) (Murphy,
2004, p. 124), the title Oleanna is in stark contrast to the dystopian world described
in the play. While explaining that the name ‘Oleanna’ refers to that failed nineteenth-
century Utopian commune in Wisconsin, in his commentary, Daniel Rosenthal also
notices the contrast of the title and the play. ‘So there is an immense, ironic gap
between the title’s allusion to an idyllic community in which men and women live
in harmony and the dramatisation of an academic community riven by sexual and
linguistic tension and argument’ (Rosenthal, 2004, p. xxvii). That the actual Oleanna
utopia failed because, as Murphy (2004, p. 124) explains, the land that that agri-
cultural community had bought was rocky and infertile is an additional allusion to
the hopeful beginnings of educational ideas going wrong in practice. Yet, like the
Land of Cockaygne whose inhabitants, as Halpin explains (2001b, p. 302), ‘want
for nothing materially and where there is super-abundance of food and drink’, and
nobody works to obtain all this, the song ‘Ole Anna’ describes a materialist utopia.
The lyrics that are not included in the epigraph concern the singer’s desire to leave
Norway and escape to Oleanna, a land where ‘wheat and corn just plant themselves/
Then grow a good four feet a day/While on your bed you rest yourself’.53 Thus, the
unpacking of the allusion of the title to the old folk song (from which the epigraph is
drawn) where utopia is exhausted in commodities and facile unreflective gratific-
ation gives it a whole new dimension, since the events of Oleanna are set against a
background of ‘getting on in the world’ where students strive for easy or even
effortless achievement and material gratification.
And the dystopian space in which the young find themselves in Butler’s
quotation, speaks of an ‘intellectual and environmental deprivation’ (Skloot, 2001,
p. 103) that condemns the young to what we have seen in the previous chapter,
following Calvino, as the ‘inferno of the living’ to which they are adapted, and of
which they have become ‘such a part that they can no longer see it’ (Calvino, 1997,
p. 165). The open space of a natural heterotopia (the moors in Scotland) makes the
citation from Butler redolent of Golden Age and Paradise symbolisms. Louis Marin’s
expansion of the spatial range of utopia beyond the polis and his discussion of
Rousseau’s ‘Jardin de Julie’ (in La Nouvelle Eloize) as an exemplary case of the
garden presented as a place of suspended time (Bann, 1993, p. 2) come to mind
here. Within such a framework, we may perceive the contrast between London,
i.e., the closed and suffocating space of a big city, and the moors of Scotland as
one of a gloomy reality set against a topos of pleasure and freedom, a no topos in
fact, as it is beyond the reach of those children. An infantile authenticity, in Butler’s
quotation not quite lost but rather never gained, a genuine happiness unattained but
replaced with Erzatzbefriedigung (Adorno, 1972) is set against a closed system
with no escape.
But what drives home the association of dystopia with the title and play Oleanna
is the relation of the one epigram with the other, an exploration of which has not
been carried out by the play’s commentators. There is a first sight divergence in the
epigraphs: the discontent voiced in the epigraph from the old folk song points to
awareness of present unhappiness and a desire for freedom. In other words, it
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expresses a transcendence of some sort. By contrast, discontent is absent in the

second epigraph, save as the feeling of the narrator, the observer. Those observed
are so immersed in their situation that they know no better and confine themselves
to self-accusation, unable to imagine something beyond the existent and to articulate
the critique that is required for change. What characterizes their condition is a pure
immanence.
However, the transcendence that is operative in the first epigraph seems to be
more of the escapist rather than of the political kind. The verses that are not
included in the epigraph make explicit the escapism and the misplacement of the
utopian desire, where the longing for transcendence is channelled in instant
individual gratification. The subjects of the Butler epigraph, experiencing pure
immanence, are the subjects who wish to get on in the world (both Carol and the
professor), yearning for the commodities and facile gratification echoed in the folk
song Oleanna. In the play Oleanna, the two characters are at the same time the
subjects of the folk song epigraph and of the Butler epigraph: Carol and John begin
with a yearning for transcendence and end up being trapped in a circle of
immanence; in being so trapped, the only ‘happiness’ that they hope for or are able
to imagine is that of getting on in the world, of acquiring material and symbolic
power, which further plunges them into the mire. Both characters in the play are
marked by repressed utopian desire; they yearn for a better life, they long for
understanding, as Carol says explicitly in Act Three (p. 71). But, as Murphy
remarks, ‘both of these characters being who they are, it is always a matter of
others understanding them’ (Murphy, 2004, p. 132). They begin with repressed
utopian desire in Ernst Bloch’s sense of an impulse to a better life; and they end up
in the kind of non-utopian world that Karl Mannheim (1960) characterized as
literally inhuman, where the ‘elimination of reality-transcending elements’ conditions
the subject as a creature of impulses the very moment it traps the subject into a
dehumanizing ‘matter of factness’ (Mannheim, 1960, p. 236).
But it is not only the utopianism of the title Oleanna and of the epigraphs that
has been interpretively neglected. A more important reason for missing the dystopian
interpretive possibility concerns the fact that the play has mostly been read as a
story of sexual harassment and a satire of the excesses of political correctness54 in a
way that I would describe as an autistic, self-affirmative isolation of, and fascination
with, the perspective of gender.55 In line with a tendency to view all realism as
patriarchal, some critics mistake the apparent realism of the play as an uncritical
defence of the existent mode of familial organization. Thus K. Bean articulates a
feminist critique of the play that completely misses its irony by arguing that ‘in the
tradition of realistic drama, Oleanna portrays a patriarchal family struggling to
survive’ (Bean, 2001, p. 16). Against this line, I approach the play as a work of
ironic critical postmodern realism. As Murphy remarks, ‘Mamet uses the education
system as a vehicle for his perennial subject, what he calls “human interactions”, in
this case the ironic desire for both power and understanding in human relationships’
(Murphy, 2004, p. 124). I believe that the main irony within this play is deployed
through the fact that, as with many of Mamet’s characters, Carol and John ‘think of
themselves as rebels against the system’ but in reality and ‘in practice they remain
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answerable to its demands’ (Price, 2004, p. 167). Yet this irony does not operate
against fantasy, that is, against the possibility of a vision of transcendence of the
system. The entrapment into the system is not an argument for anti-utopianism but
rather a point of departure for a counter-utopian critique of the crypto-utopianism
of facile individualist gratification that is politically and systemically cultivated.
The play does not deconstruct critique; it attacks modish criticality in order to
energize a more radical critique of the system.56 Mamet’s work has always been
political at some level, as Hudgins and Kane point out, and in the case of Oleanna,
Mamet’s realist postmodernism is ‘typically critical of our economic systems and
of the educational structures, formal and informal, that underpin our political
economy’ (Hudgins and Kane, 2001, p. 6) just as in other works of his.
Against arguments such as those of some feminist critics who claim ‘that
realism is in and of itself a patriarchal genre’ and who are rightly criticized by
Hudgins and Kane (2001, p. 7), the realism I see in the play is that of a great artist.
To paraphrase Adorno, it is the kind of realism that aspires to have the sharpest
sense of reality so as to effect the profoundest estrangement from reality, just as
Adorno considered the work of great artists to be (Adorno, 1997). Or, to strengthen
this with a similar idea that I draw from Iris Murdoch’s texts ‘the realism of a great
artist is not a photographic realism, it is essentially both pity and justice’ (1970,
p. 87). If the realism of Oleanna were of the traditional kind, it would claim
representational control over reality and accurate depiction in order to affirm or
exonerate its segments or its agents. Far from it, the play keeps creating an
alternation, and simultaneous shattering, of empathetic and critical reversals of
identifications with the protagonists, without blaming them as individuals exclusively
for the pathologies of their world. As Mamet himself insists: ‘I don’t take,
personally, the side of the one [character] rather than the other. I think they’re
absolutely both wrong, and they’re absolutely both right’ (cf. Murphy, 2004,
p. 125). Ultimately, the play depicts a dystopia because all the characters involved
in it are complicit in a critical postmodernist mode that avoids reductive
psychologism. ‘When the professor has control and power, he is distorted by the
system; when the student has it, she is distorted as well. The fault is not in the
individual psychology of each character, as it would have been in modernist
realism, but, rather, in the system as a whole’ (Sauer, 2005, p. 6).
Regrettably, an additional reason for the dominance of the traditional realist
interpretation is the fact that the production of the play coincided with the public
discussion of a sexual harassment case in the US that influenced decisively the
play’s reception.57 Against this but without reaching the conclusion of dystopia,
Christine MacLeod paves the way for a richer understanding of Oleanna that is
indispensable and presupposed by any interpretation of it as educational dystopia.
She argues that ‘the narrow critical perspective with sexual harassment, political
correctness and beleaguered masculinity in Oleanna has obscured a far wider and
more challenging dramatic engagement with issues of power, hierarchy and the
control of language’ (MacLeod, 1995, p. 202, emph mine). Building on these
issues as manifested in the play, I shall read Oleanna as an educational dystopia, a
‘mocking Doppelgänger’ [double] (Kumar, 2003, p. 71) of the idea that autonomy,
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critique and emancipation can be effected without major changes in the system of
schooling and in society.
Issues of power and hierarchy of the kind that we encounter in a nightmarish
world with no escape route manifest themselves in the play from beginning to end.
A subject - object relation of the characters equally affirmed by the initial placing
of them in positions of authority and control or dependence as well as by the
reversal of that placing runs through all acts. Evidence of this we obtain from the
information about the staging itself. We learn from Skloot that ‘the constant
dialectic of subjectivity and objectivity finds a precise theatrical expression in the
playing of the script’ (Skloot, 2001, p. 102, emph mine). For instance, ‘in the London
production of Oleanna, directed by Harold Pinter, Carol’s battle for psychic
“territory” was reflected in Pinter’s gradually allowing her to claim more and more
physical space’ (ibid). We also know that the transfer of power is visualised in the
film Oleanna directed by Mamet himself in the same spatial mode ‘when Carol
begins to move more freely around John’s suite of rooms’ (Braun, 2004, p. 107). In
sharp contrast to Butler’s open spaces, i.e. to his garden/moor heterotopia, all is
happening in the professor’s office, a typically closed modern space with a
hierarchical and formal set up. Within the closed space of the office, nevertheless,
it is physical mobility and the being seated in place that suggest the reversal of (or
the alternation in) the subject and object position of domination and control.
But the subject-object relation is evident in purely educational terms too. The
professor is the absolute subject of knowledge and learning, whereas Carol is the
passive recipient of his educational messages, very much along lines described by
Paulo Freire. What is constantly re-enacted in the play is the nutritionist or banking
conception of knowledge that Freire attacks as mediating between the teacher and
the pupil in the position of the subject and object correspondingly. John speaks
and Carol keeps notes without him encouraging a less passive stance, a more active
and intersubjective effort of learning. Ironically, those notes were not empowering
for Carol in a cognitive but rather in a strategic, ‘political’ sense: she uses them
later as proof of his supposedly sexually intended meanings. In a move that reveals
the extent to which Carol is used to a nutritionist conception of knowledge, she is
presented as keeping notes throughout the session with the professor. But she does
so, as she says, only in order to be able to reproduce the taught material at the right
moment. To her, keeping notes is an act of investment for the sake of a secure
future of getting on in the world. ‘She is not, as she frankly tells him later in the
scene, interested in what John thinks or says; she just takes notes “to make sure that
I remember it”‘ (Murphy, 2004, p. 127). And he shows no signs of astonishment,
irritation or protest at this; perhaps he is even flattered by her seeming dependence
on his words. When he asks her if she is checking her notes and she responds with
‘yes’, he encourages her to ‘tell me in your own…’ and she objects: ‘I want to
make sure that I have it right’ (Mamet, 2004, p. 27). And when she claims that she
keeps the notes in order to ‘know everything that went on’ he utters the approving
‘that’s good’ (p. 28). His mild objection is only that ‘I was suggesting many times,
that that which we wish to retain is retained oftentimes, I think, better with less
expenditure and effort’ (p. 28).
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John seems totally blind to the internal contradictions of his own approach, on
the one hand, to expect students to have accurate knowledge of his ideas so as to
conform to them in their papers and, on the other, to ask her through a subdued and
mild request not to stick to the exactitude of notes. Consider, for instance, another
of his questions: ‘I spoke of it in class. Do you remember my example?’ (p. 29).
She looks down at her notes and he says that he wants her to remember without her
notes so as for him to see whether his example was interesting. Was it then that he
would find out this? Timing is very important here because it proves that his
teaching had not, throughout the term, been interactive and dialogical enough, let
alone inspired by an ethics of care or an ethics of risk. The issue of keeping notes
comes up again further down and his reaction is more abrupt but even more
revealing of his deep-laid acceptance of the system he purportedly criticized. There
John says explicitly that Carol does not have to take notes. To this, she comes up
again with the excuse of making sure that she remembers it. He appears to accept
that this is ok when the issue is lecturing but not when he is ‘just trying to tell [her]
some things [he] think[s]’ (p. 34). This acceptance on his part of the kind of lecturing
that does not allow the professor during the process to even know whether the
example he offered was interesting and this indirect admission that the ideas aired
in classroom are the exam material which students have to remember displays how
accustomed he also is to the nutritionist conception of education. Eventually, the
power structures and the authorization of knowledge encroached upon a single
(authorial, authoritative or authoritarian) figure lead students to finish their studies
being more skilled in stenography rather than in the field of their degree.
Otherwise, John loves to teach and he flatters himself that he is skilled at
teaching (Mamet, 2004, p. 43). Yet, he has not realised Carol’s learning problems
before marking her work. His progressive anti-systemic attitude falls short when it
comes to the subject and object of knowledge. It is only when he marked her essay
that he found out that she had not understood the teaching material and the lectures.
Throughout the term he knew nothing about this student and the difficulties she
was experiencing: it is the moment of evaluation, when the good are sifted from the
bad that the professor will offer so charitably his progressive effort to transform
Carol in a minute, as if by a magic wand, into a ‘good’ and ‘learned’ student.
Following a conventional recipe for bonding and a facile way to overcome the
subject-object relation that both the system and himself otherwise perpetuate, John
assures her that ‘there is no one here but you and me’ (Mamet, 2004, p. 27). As a
progressive academic, he wants to build trust and ‘a kind of conspiratorial relationship
between teacher and student’ (Bean, 2001, p. 111). But despite its guaranteed success
in Hollywood films, the pally façade sometimes misfires in real life. Arguably,
according to Bean, ‘the assurance that they are alone might actually comfort a
masculine student’ but it can signify very differently in a context of gender roles
(Bean, 2001, p. 111), especially in a society such as the one of Oleanna, where
suspicion of friendship dominates (the implicit rationale might very well be: to try
to make friends with me, one must have an ulterior motive and some future
expectation of reward or benefit). Carol is quick to exploit the possibilities and
prospects that are opened by the assurance of being alone with him and to promote
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her accusation of harassment. When everything is going wrong from the start,
when educational tactics mirror strategicality, self-importance and superficiality,
every trickery aspiring to a minor improvement leaves things unaltered or exacerbates
them.
On her part, Carol seems utterly comfortable with the established educational mode
that makes her an object of the learning relation: ‘teach me, teach me’ (Mamet,
2004, p. 11), she pleads. Since education ‘is only measured in terms of gaining
socially and economically useful qualifications’, ‘Bildung is reduced to instruction,
identified with knowledge, and short-circuited with learning’ (Wimmer, 2003,
p. 169). No wonder that she defends the system so forcefully against his progressivist
attacks on it. The system is good because it offers her opportunities to get on in the
world. Just like the children that Butler describes as adapted to the system,
unhappy but strangely unaware of it and internalising the faults of the system as
their own sinfulness, she states toward the end of Act One that she is bad (p. 38).
John also feels he is bad when he is in a weak position regarding his Tenure, and
he had felt that he was bad in his student years as he confided in the first Act. The
displayed self-depreciation is predictable, since, in a combination of repressive and
ideological tactics of interpellation, the protagonists have gained their sense of
selfhood through the prism of dominant interpretations of worth, capability and
existential priority. Their identity is shaped by the feeling of unworthiness and
impotence that the profit-seeking direction of life inspires to those who are not yet
achievers or to those who struggle to maintain the brittle balance of the gains and
losses of their professional or intellectual biography. Perhaps his sudden decision
to help her by offering her tutorials could be seen from the prism of such self-
depreciation not only as a narcissist desire to deploy his pedagogical virtuosity but
also as a sign of understanding his own unhappiness. As Murphy suggests, that
decision might be informed by empathy related to his own feeling of badness and
his unconscious understanding that regarding the Tenure committee he is in the
same position as Carol (Murphy, 2004, p. 128).
What mediates between the subject (hypokeimenon) and the object (antikeimenon)
is the text (keimenon). Authority, authorship and authoritarianism intersect and play a
crucial role in the play, as the protagonists take turns in the corresponding positions
and battle over such authorial space. The taught material is narcissistically
determined mainly by one text: the professor’s textbook. The ‘primary mechanism
of communication between them’ establishes his authority and ‘codifies his own
rhetoric’ (Bean, 2001, p. 111). He is in the position to assess her text, her essay;
she takes it for granted that that essay would have been good only if it had echoed
his book. She is not in a position to understand his book; let alone critique it and
raise her own voice.
However, a focus only on his authorial position would be one-sided and poor
theorizing of the play. When ‘empowered’, Carol’s authority operates in the same
dismissive way with regard to his book. Textuality is what connects and simul-
taneously drives them apart in a master-slave dialectic. Both have written works
that ultimately serve the purposes of the system and are authorized by it. His
authority is served also by his exclusive authorship of the main taught material. But
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once again ironically, his textbook will be used as an instrument of pressure on

Carol’s part: she will withdraw the complaint only if he withdraws his book from
the list of academic coursework. Neither has faith or interest in the work of the
other: he ridicules her essay, she wants his book withdrawn from the syllabus. The
written text, its authority and authorship are the battleground in a postmodern
dystopia.
The subject – object relation with its forms of educational power and hierarchy
is accomplished with the control of language. Initially, he appears to have exclusive
control over the ‘correct’ language of learning and communication since he is
the absolute subject of the educational relation. As H. Braun observes, ‘one way he
maintains control is to draw attention to Carol’s inadequate use of language in her
term paper’. In doing so, ‘he emphasizes his own ability to speak fluently a
privileged language that is frequently lost on its primary audience: the students
who are required to read John’s book’ (Braun, 2004, pp. 105-6). But what critics
seem to bypass when discussing the play is the other extreme choice that perpetuates
the linguistic and educational tension. That is, they overlook Carol’s increasingly
conscious reduction of language to a very limited set of everyday terms. On the one
hand, an elitist and complacent professor fails to see that education is, amongst
other things, metalepsis, that is, thematization or, in simpler words, explication,
accommodation and infusion of formal scientific language into daily experience:
clearing up, making clear. As mediation between scientific and everyday culture,
schooling requires that a formal language should not remain for long disconnected
from a natural language. When the scientific term is not accompanied by a
simplification that establishes a connection of the term with already acquired
knowledge, it only leads to a mystification of new knowledge, which might be an
expedient way to preserve power and be immune to critique but it is hardly
edification or cultivation. On the other hand, the option that Carol so forcefully
promotes, i.e. that no formal language be employed at all, reduces communication
to the minimalist, staccato conversation that pervades the play.
John: And what would transpire.
Carol: Transpire?
John: Yes.
Carol: ‘Happen’?
John: Yes.
Carol: Then say it. For Christ’s sake. Who the hell do you think that you are?
(p. 66).
Vividly reminiscent of Orwel’s 1984 and the reduction of language to some

hundreds of words (Newspeak) (Orwell, 1954, pp. 257–268) and starkly contrasted
to John’s exploitation of his fluency in formal language, this command to abandon
intricacies for the sake of simplicity reflects the other side of the same coin. In
dystopian reality, the elitist, class-determined indifference to a metaleptic, i.e.,
knowledge-imparting effort makes common cause with the systemic, populist
encouragement of facile comprehensibility. The expectation that students should be
able to decode messages without extra effort being given to cultivating this ability
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from the beginning of educational life or even earlier and to eradicating the social
reasons for linguistic poverty is matched with the reactionary and totalitarian demand
for employing strictly everyday terms. Unfathomable distance and absolute de-
distantiation co-operate in creating an abyss separating the learned from the learner.
The movement from the formal to the everyday that enriches the latter but also
justifies the existence of the former in the first place is lost in spaces where
explanation, the bridge where they meet half-way, appears expendable.
We must not forget that Freire maintained that ‘students need to be taught the
“standard” form of the language even though that dominant form is impregnated
with ideology and power’. Without a command of ‘elite usage, students will simply
not possess the skills they need to engage in critical reflection on the condition of
their society’ (Hare, 2000, p. 10). Interestingly, for Orwell, the only indication that
the regime he described did not finally win and that dystopia is not inescapable
[and, likewise, the glimpse of hope in an otherwise gloomy text that has been
sweepingly misread as a pessimist anti-utopia (Milner, 2005, pp. 3–4)] is located in
the Appendix by which 1984 truly ends. There it is evident that the Newspeak has
been surpassed and referred to in the past tense (Milner, 2005, p. 3). That the
overcoming of dystopia is subtly and exclusively announced through the survival
of a formally enriched natural language over its artificial and totalitarian reduction
and impoverishment is indicative of the connection between language, freedom and
reflection.
The collaboration of power, hierarchy and language becomes very clear in the
gap separating deciphered and intended meaning and the political exploitation of
this gap. ‘As John reads Carol’s statement to the Tenure Committee, prepared with
the help of her Group, it becomes clear that the terminology of this linguistic
community constitutes an interpretive framework that is powerful enough to
construct a meaning for his actions entirely at odds with his understanding of them’
(Murphy, 2004, p. 130). Likewise, when Carol states that she has come to ‘instruct
him’, he senses that ‘being instructed about what to do creates a situation that only
guarantees his failure if there is only one right answer to please the teacher’
(Skloot, 2001, p. 99). That never seemed to occur to him when he was instructing
Carol. In the master-slave interplay of narcissism and echo, the distance separating
intentionality and construal is decisive the very moment it becomes decided by
means of power and control. Through this we may shed additional light to
Murphy’s discussion of Carol and John as an adjacency pair in dialogue. Following
Lenke Németh’s analysis, Murphy notices how ‘neither has any interest in what the
other character is trying to communicate. Each of them develops his or her topic
independently, and the most frequent connection between them is contradiction’
(Murphy, 2004, p. 129). As they perennially alternate in the positions of authority
acquiring and loosing the kind of voice that enables one to employ confrontational
words and thereby truly convince the other, Carol and John co-habit the same
space but they never meet.
In a dystopian world there is only a sham de-distantiation of social relationships.
John seems to be making a constant effort to de-distantiation (e.g. he brings up the
subject of the weather to break the ice, or he employs the parental metaphor, etc).
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Carol seems to respond to it positively in some instances (e.g. the moment she is
ready to confide in him). Their contact and their effort to come closer to one
another in some form of relationship appears to be directed towards that of a parent
to a child, a relationship involving sincerity, intimacy, care and confidentiality. But
the institutional-legal background of this attempt is the one of a juridified
proceduralism that has replaced the in loco parentis linchpin of school and society.
The post-war rise of students rights gradually questioned the idea that, when
students are in its care, ‘the school has the same level of authority and responsibility
for its students as have parents for their own children’ (Blacker, 2007, p. 22). John
is aware of this and he invokes it in his initial reaction to Carol’s effort to attract
his care and help. I am not your father, he says. But he contradicts it somewhat later
by saying that this is how he would speak to his own son. Yet, this momentary,
self-protective reclaiming of the in loco parentis is totally ineffective to counteract
the alienating effects of the ‘process of juridification across just about every
imaginable area of the schooling process’ and which has, amongst other things,
given ‘liberalism a bad name’ (Blacker, 2007, p. 28).
Nor John and Carol’s common objectives bring them closer. The democratization
rhetoric, the down to earth vocationalism of their implicit ideals and the cultural
proximity that is produced by their shared lifeworld do not suffice to level their
social distance, the asymmetry of their roles. A Mannheimian utopian ecstasy is
continuously suppressed by the cultural value of vocational specialization and
associated ideals that shape and guide the desire of the protagonists. For Mannheim,
as Turner explains, ‘the levelling of purely social distance may enable the purely
“existential distance” to come into its own. When I am no longer compelled to
meet the other in his role as a social superior or inferior, I can establish pure
existential contact with him as a human being’ (Turner, 2003, p. 41). The interplay
of Mannheimian de-distantiation and re-distantiation, namely, the transcendence of
all social categories that sets in motion a transcendence of the here and now,
collapses in a play that portrays such a matter of factness that it makes the world
non-utopian and ultimately inhuman. It collapses because the social difference is
not just a matter of artificial role playing but rather of a much deeper social
construction of the self. Both actors have learned to consider the limits of their
social positioning as the limits of their self and the limits of the world itself.
With Carol as an emblematic figure, students in a dystopia are presented as lacking
cultural capital, being thus unable to decode the educational message. They desire
to know but only for external reasons, for obtaining degrees that will open for them
the way to success. They seek proof of knowledge, not learning itself, going after
whatever is of social value and can be cashed out as distinction. And they are
prepared to seize the opportunities that life offers and to utilize the system for self-
serving purposes. On the one hand, separated from knowledge, the self appears
‘absolutely autonomous, as knowledge has lost reliable meaning for it’. On the other
hand, the self ‘is absolutely ruled by knowledge, which it has to acquire in order to
succeed socially’ (Wimmer, 2003, p. 174). Therefore, it is no surprise that Carol
defends the system against John’s criticisms in the first Act. ‘Carol does not object
to authority or to the institutions that wield power, she simply wants access to them’
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(Murphy, 2004, p. 131); she is the archetype of student that Freire would have
wished to see overcome, the individualist who seeks and values only social mobility
without ever dreaming of more radical change and of more collective happiness.
When social mobility is not gained directly by playing by the rules of the system,
the system will offer other opportunities for worming one’s way to success. Which
knowledge the subject has to acquire, ‘the standards its selection depends upon, are
not due to the subject’s judgmental capacities or the quality of knowledge itself,
but rather lie in knowledge’s externally imposed social function of usability for life
and work’ (Wimmer, 2003, p. 174). Hence, Carol’s keeping notes empowers her
not as a learner but as a player of a political game of gains and losses, one who can
utilise those notes as a weapon. In this respect, Carol is indeed an achiever. She is
also a good student. As Badenhausen remarks, the real education Carol gets from
John is in the art of ‘deception, dishonesty, and skepticism that pervades academia’.
She masters the professor’s tricks ‘including a penchant for intellectual bullying;
an ability to use language ambiguously so as to get her way; and an outlook on the
world informed by a deep-seated cynicism about human relations’ (cf. Murphy,
2004, p. 125).58
It might be true that, while in school, students ‘learn that their ultimate destiny is
“to get a job”‘ (Leonardo, 2003, p. 510). Yet, after all, it is not only Carol who
wants to get on in the world, but John also appears to care about his job more than
about anything else. This becomes evident in the third Act where all he deems
important is the loss of his job (Mamet, 2004, p. 71). Despite the iconoclastic
posture, ‘John poses no genuine challenge to the rules of the university or the
gender codes of the culture’ (Bean, 2001, p. 119). The professor who appears at
first glance progressive and dedicated proves to be deeply conventional and
motivated by a shallow educational ‘fashion’. He seems to conform to the educational
typical figures who might be described as ‘Freirean tourists’ that is, those who use
Freire’s ideas superficially in a de-contextualized way instead of approaching them
as a vehicle for dialogue and reflection (Hare, 2000, p. 9). Thus, ‘in the second
scene of Oleanna when his philosophy of education is articulated, though as yet
untested’, John feels at ease to offer a ‘self-enhancing and smug explanation to
Carol’ (Skloot, 2001, p. 104). His decision to help her by breaking the rules of the
system that expects him to fail her essay, even if well-meant on his part, only
reinforces the asymmetry Carol feels and the uneveness of the control that each of
them has over the educational procedures. That she twists or interprets subversively
his intentions is given further in the play in a way that confirms how easily
academic freedom can be construed as fascination with power and control. When
Carol establishes her own power, ‘she goes on to name John’s actions: “You love
the Power. To deviate. To invent, to transgress … to transgress whatever norms
have been established for us”‘ (Murphy, 2004, p. 131). That he transgresses norms
without even for a moment ceasing to profit from the system can hardly remain
unexploited by Carol.
Typically in accordance with his bourgeois middle-class ethic, in the first Act,
John wants to ease his conscience and give a second chance to Carol to pass and to
move on with her ascending the social ladder. All is about equal opportunities,
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meritocracy and success. What he really cares most becomes obvious in the second
Act, and it is nothing other than the appeasement of Carol. John tells his wife on
the phone not to worry because he is dealing with the complaint. This demonstrates
to Carol that his only interest in her case is to make her recant. 59 All he wants is to
secure his reconciliation with the Tenure Committee which he recognizes as ‘the
source of his institutional and cultural authority’ (Bean, 2001, p. 114). John is
ready to negotiate with Carol in order to preserve what he considers his well-
deserved and meritocratically gained prerogatives and be placed again under the
protection of the system he supposedly loathed. Even his eventual downright
rejection of Carol’s proposal to have his book withdrawn from the list is not an act
of heroism and defiance, as it might seem at first glance. He does not quite see his
book as indispensable to his students, to their learning or to anything other than his
own authority and success.60 ‘No, no. It’s out of the question. […] I’m a teacher. I
am a teacher. Eh? It’s my name on the door and I teach the class, and that’s what I
do’ (Mamet, 2004, p. 76). The name acquires a phallic function; it is on the door
and on the book and this function is not negotiable. His son will see that book some
day. The self and his extensions are at stake, here, in John’s liberal bourgeois
universe of power and success. Even his role as a father, as Bean pertinently shows,
revolves around the provision of material comfort and recognition. ‘In exchange, he
enjoys validation from the community and control of the home. Rounding out this
fantasy is John’s son, “the boy”. John plans to purchase a nice house for his son,
send him to private school and, most importantly hand down to his child his
influence, success and name’ (Bean, 2001, p. 117). John’s repressed and
individualist utopia matches the repressed individualist utopia that imbues Carol’s
desire to get on in the world. The world in which they want to get on enjoys in this
way their indirect approval. Therefore, they appear, in John Stuart Mill’s terms, as
typical ‘cacotopians ’, i.e., coming from or favouring a bad place. Yet, despite their
efforts and adaptive response to this world, ‘neither the male professor nor the
woman student wins in the educational arena’ (Hudgins and Kane, 2001, p. 10); ‘in
Mamet’s world, people lose’ (Skloot, 2001, p. 103), just as in any other dystopia.
Carol’s empowerment through participation in a group of like-minded others
does not amount to emancipation through revolutionary comradeship but rather to
achievement and benefit through sectarianism. And John’s predicament typifies
how a realistic or pragmatist utopia presents a safe questioning of the system; a
protected anarchy that, by leaving true hierarchies unaffected, is shattered by them.
The idea is usually that modest and piecemeal change is much safer than radical
change both for the subject and for society itself, and this idea is further
accompanied with an optimist expectation that one may have the merits of utopia
without the risks of its radicality. ‘In giving an edge to hope and possibility,
however reformist and partial, largely within the framework of liberal capitalism,
American pragmatism, particularly in the Deweyan vein, may provide a more
compelling hermeneutical horizon to ground critical intellectual work in the
American political culture’ (Demetrion, 2001, p. 67). There is indeed merit in the
pragmatic tradition that Demetrion amongst others defends (2001, p. 60ff) and in
the Deweyan melioristic project of liberal political gradualism (p. 61), but there is
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also a major weakness that Oleanna illustrates most forcefully, i.e., that of modest
change becoming subservient to the very system it aspires to mitigate.
The drama plays itself out ‘in anti-institutional energies and talents temporarily
released in violence, anger, sexual desire, furious invective, an almost poetic
creativity’. In doing so, it takes on ‘the quality of Bakhtinian carnival as the lowly
are freed, it seems, to parody the pretensions of the powerful’ (Price, 2004, p. 167).
What Mamet has captured in this play is the return of the repressed within liberal
education, the spectral presence of liberalism’s purportedly radical others and poor
relations. Those poor relations are at times the undeserving achievers and the
expedient gold-diggers; or, to push it even further and beyond the play, the
religious fanatics, the subjects marked by suppressed utopian aspiration; or, at
other times, the partisans, the emotionally involved and those who expect from
politics the supposed impossible. When reform is not directed at the system as a
whole, the latter is given free rein to determine and safeguard that its various
mechanisms will remain effective enough to turn any minimal reform upside down
in the long run. Unluckily, the response of the system to serious but limited and
well-meant minimal change, within which the subject is supposed to remain a
protected rational egoist, is comic bathos. Too much faith in institutions is certainly
problematic but too much faith in individuals who have learned to be rational
egoists, too much faith in their potentialities and the potentialities of their
liberalism tends to ignore that the so called progressive modest reformism that is
taken on board eventually misfires and falls in the ‘hands’ of terror as much as its
classical teleological and far more radical counterpart. Within a system that
remains unchallenged and continues to construct the self-image that it requires for
its perpetuation, all piecemeal efforts seem to degenerate into their disfigured and
grotesque opposites. ‘Educators must consider the total systems that inscribe their
work. […] isolated changes may not alter the larger and intractable problems of
school cultures’ (Leonardo, 2003, p. 520). Well beyond schooling itself, one must
consider the reifying and fetishizing structures of the commodified world in which
education operates (ibid). The lack of awareness of the educational double bind of
the subversiveness operating within a discourse that acquires institutional power
and reaffirms the existent leads to a pacification and domestication of critique.
Education is expected to effect the appropriate societal change of values and
conceptions of the good life; yet education cannot just be the source of such
transvaluation: it has to be simultaneously its effect, since without serious systemic
societal change educational redirection remains an empty letter. For this reason,
Oleanna can be approached as a satire of educational progressivism and its facile
assumptions that good educational ideas are all we need to create a felicitous world
of education. Is any of this in mind when education is designed?
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EDUCATIONAL THEORY AND PRACTICE: THE 2000

CURRICULUM
Pedagogic reflection confronts not only ‘the task of assessing changes in its subject
of study’ but also the quest for a justified response to change. More concretely, it
should respond to the question, ‘what will be our tasks in the future, what kind of
world do we have to prepare future generations for?’ (Wimmer, 2003, p. 167).
This question invites many significant considerations of education’s relation to
reality, considerations that often remain unspoken or under-theorized when educ-
ation is designed. This question is, therefore, paradigmatically curricular, and, in
being so, it justifies a brief comment on the liberal assumptions about education’s
relation to reality regarding change, prior to discussing what kind of world a
liberal curriculum prepares future generations for.
LIBERAL SOCIAL CHANGE
The liberal position on social change usually varies from being affirmative of the
existing reality – accepting only the largely unplanned change that is effected by
the existing state of affairs through anonymous forces – to being committed to an
anaemic, partial and low key conscious modification of reality. More radical,
organized change is less frequently endorsed. With the exception of liberal thinkers
who are influenced by ancient or Renaissance utopias, there seems to be a tacit
consensus among most contemporary liberals that anything more demanding than
piecemeal engineering belongs automatically to the sphere of obsolete and dangerous
revolutionary aspirations. The utopianism liberals have in mind and dismiss is the
one which used to assume a mechanistic and linear account of change and to set a
proletarian redemptive collectivity as a single point of revolutionary reference against a
single enemy: capitalism. Various critics of Marxism have shown how this particular
kind of utopianism suffers not only from a poor and one-dimensional theorization
of social confrontation but also from a metaphysical, finalist conception of the Good
and an exclusivist prioritization of a segment of society as the carrier of redemption.
Judith Suissa proves pertinently that the issue is far more complex. There is no
need to presuppose such a utopianism every time we contemplate on radical
change (Suissa, 2004). Social anarchism, for instance, committed itself to none of
the above and had a conception of social change that is far more tactical and elastic
(Buber, 1985). In educational terms, anarchism was ‘less about creating a vanguard
for the social revolution, and more about establishing alternative patterns of living
which would eventually undermine the hierarchical structures of the state’ (Suissa,
2004, p. 17). The anarchist proposal for educational goal-setting may be just one of
many possible correctives of, or even alternatives to, liberal education and one may
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not subscribe to its overall theoretical foundations. But what matters is precisely
that it proves that the dilemma between a Leninist ossified educational instrumenta-
lism, on the one hand, and a defeatist abdication from demands for any radical
change, on the other, is false, or, at least, not as drastic and limiting as it appears in
liberal contexts. What is important is that, as Agnes Heller has argued, daily life
‘generates a “cognitive” or “cultural surplus” imbued with myriad transformative or
utopian possibilities’ (Gardiner, 2006, p. 25), and education need not be confined
to established drastic choices between anti-utopianism and finalist radical change.
In any event, liberal thought seems largely caught up in such restrictive choices
which it usually resolves in favour of an anti-utopian loathing for radical change
that informs liberal education accordingly. To examine this more closely, let us
search for an exemplary liberal educational curricular text. It must be exemplary in
two ways: it must illustrate some crucial liberal views on education’s relation to
reality most clearly; and it must be an influential one, one of those texts that often
set up a model for the design of education in many countries in Europe, the
Commonwealth and elsewhere. The 2000 British curriculum that came to replace
the 1988 curriculum (Bramall and White, 2000, p. 9) enjoys such exemplarity.
THE 2000 CURRICULUM AND UTOPIANISM
The 1988 curriculum was limited to ‘bland truisms’ (White, 2004, p. 2) but its
successor is far more determinate. The 2000 curriculum is much clearer about its
values, aims and purposes, since those are exposed in a separate section constituting
the ‘opening pages of the Handbook for teachers on the National Curriculum post-
2000’ (ibid).61 Reading through its material, we do not encounter utopia or dystopia
or any mention of education’s relation to reality and the possibility of planned
change. We may safely suspect that the authors of the 2000 text would give an
anti-utopian response to the why of this omission.
To understand this omission more deeply we need to consider how the
underlying rationale is that of a liberal philosophy of modest change (or no change)
popularized and disseminated through the Blairism of the times. Committed to a
moralist rationale, i.e., ‘that it is dishonest to offer people dreams that are incapable
of being enacted, or at least that one has no intention of attempting to enact’
(Crowley, 2000, p. 149), Blairism promises only what can be achieved in a complex,
globalized world. The 2000 curriculum displays a similar modesty regarding planned
change. The word ‘change’ appears only as a fact of economic, social and cultural
reality with which we ‘need to be prepared to engage’ (in White, 2004, p. 3); it is
absent as a signifier of conscious and intentional socio-political project. For much
liberal education, the world – ‘however richly theorized – [is] something which is
simply out there, to be prepared for and adapted to by the education system and its
graduates, rather than to be created or changed’ (Suissa, 2004, p. 22). Likewise, for
the 2000 curriculum, change surfaces only as a fait accompli to engage with, as
students will be enabled by the curriculum to ‘cope with change and adversity’,
i.e., to be resilient and inventive when their plans go awry. There is no account or
characterization of society as a whole (in its local and global manifestations).
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EDUCATIONAL THEORY AND PRACTICE: THE 2000 CURRICULUM
Rather, a positive outlook on society seems to run through the text, as students are
encouraged to appreciate human achievement in varied fields.
In this way, critical thinking is not extended to society itself. This is at first sight
paradoxical, if we consider the fact that liberalism defends the ideals of the
autonomous subject who does not shy away when confronted with any extra-
subjective authority, even if that is the whole society. A possible response to this
paradox I find in Suissa’s apposite explanation of the why of the distinction
between liberal criticality and the criticality of more radical theoretical frameworks,
such as the anarchist. Suissa reminds us that ‘it is important not to understate the
presence, within liberal theory, of a tradition of critical enquiry and reform, and of
the idea of citizens as actively shaping society’ (Suissa, 2004, p. 20). But the often
implicit and at times explicit liberal naturalization of the existing state of affairs,
that is, the assumption that the liberal state is unequalled in its accordance to
human nature and the natural law (and thus the best possible political formation)
shields it from any critical questioning. As liberal philosophy of education has,
over the years, ‘become increasingly concerned with education in the liberal state,
the assumption of the liberal state’s inevitability as a basic framework sets thinkers
in this tradition apart from the radical social anarchists, in spite of their agreement
on certain underlying values’ (Suissa, 2004, p. 20). Thus, critical thinkers stop
short when liberalism is at stake.
Predictably, this difference between liberal and anarchist thought (or other
theoretical frameworks) often goes beyond the mere affirmation or questioning of
the existent generally and is translated into an idiom of ‘socially reproductive versus
critical education’. The liberal curriculum acquires a reproductive social function,
as it seems quite pleased with things as they are. Within it, there is no negative
critique, let alone dystopian accounts of reality, no mention of pathologies. The
word ‘problems’ comes up as something that able students qua critical thinkers
should aspire to solve, as if all problems were of the anodyne, pass-time quality of
a crossword, or a puzzling difficulty one encounters in the process of performing a
task, a pre-set job, or an undertaken research. Education’s relation to reality
remains unspoken and any reference to the actual condition of society, local or
global, is omitted. Thus, the society that is almost absent from the text but to which
the aims are ultimately addressed seems to be, precisely through this lack of any
reference to its condition, an accomplished utopia a further change of which, other
than minor refinements, would be only for the worse.
Possibly, the liberal thought that inspires the 2000 curriculum fears utopianism
because of the latter’s tendency to closure, to an end-state model of world
transfiguration. ‘The classic liberal theory of totalitarianism sees it as a form of
government that develops out of the structures of the positive state - that is, a state
that decides to actively do things for its people, rather than maintain a laissez-faire
stance’. Liberals construe a positive conception of liberty as always leading ‘the
state to promote a single substantive ideal of the good - a description of man as
a spiritual being whose ultimate rationality and reality are grounded in a unified
spirit’ (Olssen, 2003, p. 533). Yet liberal thought appears to presuppose the liberal
state as precisely such an end-state. Unlike utopianism, it does not, apparently, see
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this end-state as an ideal to be approximated but rather as a goal already achieved.

The liberal world appears non-utopian because it maintains the self-understanding
of the best possible world. Being already accomplished, a vision of further utopia is
absent.
Is the world of the 2000 curriculum ultimately a non-utopian one? According to
Karl Mannheim, a non-utopian world is literally inhuman, something like the
Oleanna world: ‘the complete elimination of reality-transcending elements from
our world would lead us to a matter of factness which ultimately would mean
the decay of the human will’ (Mannheim, 1960, p. 236; cf Turner 2003, p. 38). In
the effort to overcome the risk of stability and closure involved in utopianism the
‘disappearance of utopia brings about a static state of affairs’ that dehumanizes
humanity. The consequence is, according to Mannheim, ‘the greatest paradox
imaginable’, that is, the human being ‘who has achieved the highest degree of
rational mastery of existence’ to be left without any ideals and thus to become a
mere creature of impulses (ibid).
However, we should not hurry to brand the subtextual world of the 2000
curriculum non-utopian. Its end-state, namely, the liberal democratic state, has not
yet been fully realized. In the society that corresponds to the 2000 curriculum the
Mannheimian paradox is partly undone because there is margin for improvement,
for some minor refinements of the accomplished best possible world. For, the
pupils educated along the lines of this curriculum will thus be enabled to ‘make a
difference for the better’ (in White, 2004, p. 3). Now a realistic or pragmatist
utopia begins to rise from this text. It has all the typical features of the realistic or
pragmatist utopianism: not only improvement (notice again the ‘difference for the
better’) but also ideality, end-state citizenship, futurity. The 2000 curriculum’s
aims and purposes ‘present a picture of the kind of pupil that the school curriculum
can ideally help to foster’ (emph mine). The ideal pupil ‘is an informed, caring
citizen of a liberal democratic society’ (in White, 2004, p. 4, emph mine).
Knowledge, understanding and skills will equip students ‘for their future lives as
workers and citizens’ (ibid, p. 3 emph mine). Thought through, these statements
confirm that ‘the dreams of neo-liberals, globalizing consumerists and free-traders
and others are no less utopian than those of the communists; no less productive of a
relentless sloganeering redundancy of their own’ (Osborne, 2003, p. 131).They
also verify Ruth Levitas’s assertion that political anti-utopianism bolsters support
for liberal capitalism while concealing the utopian grounds of capitalism itself
(2003a, p. 3). They finally substantiate our initial assumption that the 2000 curriculum
reflects a popularized, Blairist liberal philosophy. For, the Blairist ‘promise only to
promise what can be achieved is not the negation of utopia, because it is based on a
belief, derived from a vision of an ideal world, that what can be achieved is also
what deserves to be achieved in the name of that vision’ (Crowley, 2000, p. 149).
In this case, the anti-utopian defenders of the existing situation appear as ‘cacotopians’,
that is, in the great liberal John Stuart Mill’s words, as coming from, or favouring,
a bad place.
The treatment of change as disconnected from intentional and conscious action
makes this repressed utopia as static as the utopia that liberal anti-utopians had
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chastised. Their first sight difference, that the utopian construction of bygone times
was too static to allow even the kind of piecemeal change that liberalism and
perhaps the 2000 curriculum favour, disappears when analyzed more deeply. For,
as Sargent argues, ‘the overwhelming majority of utopias were not written as
depictions of unchanging perfection’. Every society that believes that it has finally
made things work attempts to occlude any radical, i.e., structural change, but not
necessarily any other change. ‘Change is possible, even expected’ in utopias; it is
radical change that is kept away (Sargent, 2006, p. 13), as much as in the repressed
utopias of the kind of liberal textuality that focuses on the moulding of future
generations.
Like the Blairist utopia, the 2000 curriculum subtextual world is a genuine
utopia in its admission that it concerns an ideal future, an admission that becomes
very clear in the above cited curricular provision about ‘the picture of the kind of
pupil ideally to be fostered’. Blairism makes room for meliorist change and, in so
doing, it deconstructs its own anti-utopian starting point: ‘it is situated at least
potentially in the future, and it can be imagined as a state devoid of contradiction,
one from which no further progress is necessary or even imaginable because
everything has already been achieved’ (Crowley, 2000, p. 149). The end-state in
question is concretized in the form in which it emerges from the 2000 curriculum.
It would obviously comprise informed, caring citizens of a liberal democratic
society. In other words, the curriculum will create the élite class of the ideal society
to come. One may object: the ideal of the informed citizen is addressed to all; there
is no exclusivist or exceptionalist logic of an élite class. But we know from the
curriculum itself, from assessment educational policies and from liberal education
as a whole that equal opportunity is emphasized precisely in order to render the
conditions of the race for distinction meritocratic. No child left behind is a vital
educational precondition of distinction, so that those who will eventually lag
behind in a competitive world of unequal statuses and gains will be those who
could not meet the standards and were meant to be left behind either due to
inherent inferiority or due to lack of motivation and strength of character. The
system addresses all not in order to avoid the creation of an élite class but only in
order to exclude from that class the undeserved membership, or, in order to
legitimate exclusion by presenting it as naturally unavoidable or even self-imposed.
Hence, in yet another structural similarity with their supposed opponents, namely,
the explicit utopians, both the 2000 curriculum and Blairism presuppose a hege-
monic class, a quasi-messianic collective subject of redemption. The democratic,
caring and informed class will be mobile and amphibious. The curriculum will
prepare the future citizens to live and work within and across borders. Like Blair’s
universal class, i.e. the middle class (Crowley, 2000, p. 149), the managerial,
footloose, and globalized self of the 2000 curriculum will be a member of the
hegemonic elites of a borderless world figuring as an earthly paradise.
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CHAPTER 5
The 2000 Curriculum and its ‘Utopian’ Citizen

A repressed, pragmatist or ‘realistic’ utopia emerges from the marriage of Blairist
and educational promise, and now the question can be narrowed down to, ‘what
does this repressed utopia consist of’? We read that pupils should become ‘capable
of contributing to the development of a just society’ (in White, 2004, p. 4). If the
ideal is the informed, caring citizen of a liberal democratic society, does this ideal
extend to the whole world as a just society? Does the curriculum make sure that the
students will be informed enough for such an ideal? Does it provide for the
development of the emotive substratum which is necessary for caring enough for
the world, perhaps for caring enough for otherness so as to overcome a state of
historico-political denial about the ways in which such otherness has been affected
by one’s own community? And what will be the relation of this just ‘society-
in-progress’, so to speak, with politics? Can a politics of the future be achieved
independently of a politics of the past? For instance, could some awareness of
the white Rhodesian colonial sponsoring of destructive counter-movements in
Mozambique,62 resulting in the displacement of 2 million people and the loss of
many lives (McClintock, 1994, p. 259), find a word in edgeways in a 2000
curriculum, a millenium or maybe millenarian curriculum? No, there is no mention
of any pending historical debt to anyone, no ethical handling of memory, no
redirection on grounds of lessons from the past so that the past is not re-enacted;
only vague and en passant reference to knowledge and understanding, amongst
other things, of history and world culture.
Evidently, many critics of the 2000 curriculum (or of education more generally)
detect such lacunae when they demand that the history of Britain’s imperial past be
reinstated at the core of the secondary-school curriculum (Cole, 2004, p. 523) and,
perhaps, when they demand that more time is spent on 20th century history
(Bramall and White, 2000, pp. 25–8). As Peters and Humes interpret Michael
Young’s suggestions about a curriculum of the future, ‘in deciding what to teach in
schools of the future, we must look, paradoxically, not only to reason but also to
history. Utopian aspirations towards a curriculum that will promote equality,
access and inclusion need to be informed by a level of thinking that goes beyond
simple equations of knowledge and power’ (Peters and Humes, 2003, p. 437, emph
mine). And Mike Cole, following Paulo Freire and MacLaren, argues that education
should ‘put social and political analysis of everyday life at the center of the
curriculum’ (Cole, 2004, p. 534).
The consequences of the absence of social and political analysis in schooling
and in society cannot be missed. Several are mentioned by Mike Cole, such as the
ignorance and racism that are reflected in the reactions of football fans when their
teams play with ex-colonies (2004, 523). To expand on the above views, I will give
an example that concerns less expressivist and more tangible and ‘material’
consequences. The money that was ‘transferred from the British government to the
government of Mozambique after the floods of February and March 2000 [was]
referred to as “aid”’ (Dobson, 2006, p. 173). Dobson explains the ‘hands clean’
moral self-image obtained in this way, as well as its political significance, as
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follows. ‘Aid is regarded as the appropriate response to a situation in which others

are suffering, in respect of which the donor can help, and which the donor has done
nothing to engender. The giving of aid is voluntary. The disposition that drives aid
is something like compassion, as in the story of the Good Samaritan’ (Dobson,
2006, p. 173). Then he explains why this money should not be considered within
the structure of aid but rather within the structure of justice. ‘Justice refers us to
giving people their due, in connection with some antecedent action or agreement.
The giver and recipient of justice are, therefore, connected in ways that the giver
and recipient of aid are not’ (Dobson, 2006, p. 174). Generally, justice involves
wrongdoers and victims; aid involves compassionate, good willed moral agents
who rally to a cause. Justice is supererogatory, while aid is voluntary. When a
country is implicated in the misfortune of another, the assistance the former
provides to the latter can in no way belong to the structure of aid. It belongs to the
structure of the political, perhaps even legal, obligation. Then Dobson establishes
how Britain has some responsibility for the intensity and devastating effects of that
particular flood in Mozambique due to the environmental damage and global
warming it has, together with other developed countries, caused. He stresses the
synchronic causal responsibility that undoes the privileged and self-exculpating
positioning of Britain in the place of the benefactor. We may complete and
strengthen Dobson’s argument by stressing the diachronic entanglement of the
British colonialists (via Rhodesia and its support of destructive counter-movements)
and the people of Mozambique in the following way. The causal connection of
Britain with the flood is loose and rather indirect, but its ethico-political connection
is stronger, since the condition in which a country is found (Mozambique in this
case) and its capacity to cope with natural disaster is affected by its socio-politico-
economic condition. Not all countries are capable of dealing with misfortune
effectively – and I assume and hope that few of us would think that the difference
in that capacity is simply due to superior and inferior political talents of local
politicians and citizens. Most theorists would accept that a country’s capacity to
cope with natural disaster reflects its domestic condition, which is, especially in the
case of former colonies, in turn, largely though not exclusively, shaped by the
diachronic repercussions of the colonial past. For instance, the counter-movements
in Mozambique in colonial times have played an important role in the future of the
country and have affected its political capacity to deal with eventualities. And the
colonial exploitation of its resources has affected its financial capacity. A possible
objection here would concern the years that have passed since the early 20th
century colonialism and the expectation that most peoples should be, by now, the
sole authors of their historical course since their liberation, and that they are thus
responsible for their capacity to deal with eventualities. But what this objection
forgets is the peculiar nature of colonialism, i.e., the fact that, in its effort to cling
on power and on the possessed lands, colonialism tended to produce dead-ends or
problems that have been so long-lasting, intricate and so cumbersome that most
subaltern populations are still burdened with them, trapped in a prolonged past and
unable to move on.
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CHAPTER 5
Is political thought in its complexity, beyond simple equations of knowledge

and power, accommodated in the 2000 curriculum? Does the curriculum really
serve the ideal of a just society? One may rush to answer affirmatively, considering
that the curriculum prescribes that pupils ‘develop knowledge, skills and under-
standing through, for example learning more about fairness, social justice, respect
for democracy and diversity at school, local, national and global level, and through
taking part in community activities’ (Hand, 2004, p. 159; emph mine). But such a
prescription accommodates only a civil or a moral-civic dimension of the concept
of citizenship. In a more comprehensive conception of citizenship, the political
dimension demands more than just ‘learning more’ about fairness, social justice,
and more than just ‘respecting diversity’ or ‘taking part in community activities’.
When left on its own, learning has a passivity that disconnects it from political
action. And respecting diversity is the minimum political demand, not the last word
in local and global politics. The comparative ‘more’, as it figures in the citation,
means quite what? It points, evidently, to melioristic achievements. But what is a
melioristic change in a world of environmental damage, of hungry people and of
thousands killed in pre-emptive, ‘justified’ or ‘unjustified’ wars? Is it enough to
translate ‘more’ into having just higher numbers of survivors in conditions of
hunger and death? Does it make a huge difference to a citizen of an aggressive and
predatory country to have 100.000 dead ‘enemies’ instead of 120.000 in a war that
her country unleashes in her name or in the name of democracy or of humanity?
Does it make a difference that she respects the diversity of those dead or of their
immigrant relatives (other than the difference that is made when one avoids adding
insult to the injury)? And are we talking about change at all when we think that it is
enough just to know more about fairness and social justice? Social justice is an
ideal to be approximated not to be simply thought about or learnt. Further,
respecting diversity does not entail consideration of historical debts, of damages
inflicted upon people and the environment, and of material aid and/or redistribution
of wealth so that the diverse others would truly receive justice. It is easy to respect
diversity, especially when it is rendered undemanding and harmless (i.e. liberalized)
or when it adds spice to an otherwise colourless modern life of work measured in
terms of daily gains and losses. Of course, it will be no small feat that the pupils
will be challenging discrimination and stereotyping (in White, 2004, p. 4), the only
cases of pathologies mentioned in the 2000 curriculum. The vociferous, symbolic
violence of discrimination and stereotyping and perhaps the concomitant tangible
implications seem easily to be cured through political correctness and the obsession
not to offend the other. In Oleanna, Carol destroys John’s and his wife’s life but
she is sensitive to John’s politically incorrect way of addressing his wife: ‘Don’t
call your wife “baby”,’ Carol orders the professor.
The liberal citizenship is too anodyne for the Western self and establishment and
too anaemic regarding global expectations for change to merit the name ‘political’.63
Effective participation in a multicultural society is too conservative and apolitical a
conception of citizenship. For, ‘to be political, to live in a polis’ means that
‘everything is decided through words and persuasion’ (Arendt, 1989, p. 26). Apart
from asserting participation as a minimum requirement, this raises the standards of
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what counts as public deliberation. ‘Everything’ means not just the easy, the
convenient and the self-exculpating. Decision by deliberation presupposes the
thematization of public affairs even in such depth that the dominant conception of
the Good is shaken. ‘Everything’ may include issues of spilled blood or of inequality
or of destruction of life and of nature. In such a case, the confrontational words and
the corresponding persuasion do not belong to the order of bourgeois politeness;
the appropriate idiom is the caustic. But the Western self who learns to concentrate
only on recognizing diversity and who is predictably afraid of being rude when
discussing politics becomes equally defensive when a political conversation cuts
deeper. The subjects shaped by a curriculum such as the 2000 who would be
involved in such a ‘risky’ conversation would place themselves in the position of
the martyr, the one who is rudely and relentlessly reminded of being in a state of
political denial of responsibility or of blood spilled in their name. And they would
tolerate such ‘mishandling’ precisely because of their having learnt to value political
correctness and the moralist commitment not to be impolite, without ceasing for a
minute to consider the Other ‘too emotionally involved’, perhaps ‘fanatic’ or ‘too
militant’ and, ultimately, radically Other.64
CURRICULAR AIMS, GOALS AND PURPOSES
Perhaps the best approach to the question about the political and utopia within the
curriculum is to turn to the sections where the curriculum reaches its most
declarative modality, where the ‘political’ connotations of a manifesto are most
vibrant: the section on aims, goals and purposes. The aims of the 2000 curriculum
read as follows.
‘Aim 1: The school curriculum should aim to provide opportunities for all
pupils to learn and to achieve.
Aim 2: The school curriculum should aim to promote pupils’ spiritual, moral,
social and cultural development and prepare all pupils for the opportunities,
responsibilities and experiences of life’ (in White, 2004, pp. 3–4, emph mine).
The list of adjectives that I have italicized does not include the words ‘ethical’,
‘political’ and ‘emotional’. The included term ‘moral’ chimes with the fact that the
development is of the individual. The word ‘ethical’(the set of questions and
answers of the good life) is understandably omitted since it has societal connot-
ations of a communitarian origin and scope, and points to specific conceptions of
the Good regarding which secular liberalism has hypocritically been prohibitive.
More recent and mediating versions of liberalism in education, Blacker’s liberal
contextualism, for instance, are more reconciled with the ethical and more willing
to spell it out or accommodate it in public discourse. On the contextualist view,
‘the good society is best understood as a pluralistic one, where different social
spheres are allowed as much free play as possible within democratic boundary
constraints that are themselves based on relatively thin universal norms of social
equality’ (Blacker, 2007, p. 81). Yet, any evaluation of the possible contents of the
good is still undesirable. ‘A contextualist picture of schooling and social justice
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resists the reduction of educational value to any single good. It proceeds instead on
a eudaimonistic assumption of value pluralism that there is no One Best Way to
live a worthwhile human life’ (Blacker, 2007, p. 102).
True, there is no One Best Way to live a worthwhile human life. However, there
are very few ways (material such as redistribution of wealth, symbolic and cultural
such as the enrichment of conscious choice and desire) to become capable of
approaching what seems to you worthwhile, and this is not thematized by liberalism
even in its most contextualist, eudaemonist or continental-philosophical moments.
Surprisingly, a liberalism supposedly championing liberty and equality empties
equality of any positive content and treats it as an elusive and abstract idea. In turn,
inequality is forgotten for the sake of inclusion and recognition, bringing along
another forgetting, that the deprived and starved, the uneducated and burdened with
intractable political problems could not care less about the inclusions, invitations,
visitations or opinions of their former oppressors or ongoing exploiters. For any
sense of freedom (even the freedom from the kind of systemic interpretation of
desire and emotion that enforces mass culture and serves the culture industry)
presupposes material and symbolic conditions that do not vary across cultures and
time as much as liberalism seems conveniently to believe.
Precisely the freedom to select one’s favourite conception of the Good presupposes
more than the façade of equal opportunities. The latter’s semblance of hospitality
invites all to choose freely from a marketplace of good(s), but, to be in a position to
do so, one has first to achieve, which, in turn, means that some will have to try a
hundred times more for this than their privileged competitors would ever require
to. Apart from the uneven positioning in the battle, this fact discloses that the battle
itself constitutes an absolutized and fetishized conception of the Good. It also
reveals that this very specific conception of the good entails that people should
want to compete and work for achievement (the common of the liberal community
of individuals) regardless of whatever else they might want or strive for. The return
of the repressed is very eloquent and in no way accidental: the curriculum should
develop the pupils’ ‘ability to relate to others and work for the common good’ (in
White, 2004, emph. mine). The secret liberal prioritization of a specific conception
of the Good (the One Best Way to live a worthwhile life is to become an achiever -
the very first aim of the 2000 curriculum) must come in the open and be
reconsidered, so as to truly allow other conceptions of the good to claim the space
of the common good for which people would work, to flourish and to be politically
fruitful by creating the conditions for the underprivileged to exercise freely indeed
their right to existential choice.
The political, i.e., dealing with the affairs of the polis (broadly conceived)
instead of merely affirming common values and societal cohesion, is simply not
mentioned in the aims list. Understood in a platitudinous, modern sense, politics is,
perhaps, taken to denote struggle for governmental power and then rejected as
being outside the proper scope of education. However, politics in a fuller philo-
sophical sense signifies visions of the polis, concern for public affairs or action for
reforming human power relations. Defenders of the curriculum might assume that
the ‘social’, which figures third in the row of adjectives determining what counts as
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individual development in the 2000 curriculum, suffices to fulfil this purpose.

Against such an assumption, the ground of visions of the polis is not covered by
the social. We know from Arendt’s interpretation of antiquity that political action
should not be confused with social deeds. ‘It is decisive that society, on all its
levels, excludes the possibility of action’. Even if we think that this claim is too
sweeping, we cannot deny that there is some truth in it and that several exceptions,
i.e. moments during which the rule is broken, do not falsify Arendt’s remark
entirely. Society usually does expect ‘from each of its members a certain kind of
behaviour, imposing innumerable and various rules, all of which tend to “normalize”
its members, to make them behave, to exclude spontaneous action or outstanding
achievement’ (Arendt, 1989, p. 40).
Following Arendt, we may assume that the equation of the social with the
political derives from ‘the profound misunderstanding expressed in the Latin
translation of “political” [in Greek politikon – M. P.] as “social” [in Greek
koinonikon – M. P.]’. In her view, such a misunderstanding ‘is perhaps nowhere
clearer than in a discussion in which Thomas Aquinas compares the nature of
household rule with political rule: the head of the household, he finds, has some
similarity to the head of the kingdom, but, he adds, his power is not so “perfect” as
that of the king’ (Arendt, 1989, p. 27). The consequence is that politics becomes
identical with, or equivalent to, management, problem solving and control.
Unlike ancient political thought, which was on this point aneconomical, i.e., in the
sense of transcending economy, oikos and nomos (house and management),
where the division between activities related to a common world and those related
to the maintenance of life was self-evident and axiomatic, in the modern
understanding ‘the dividing line is entirely blurred’. Nowadays ‘we see the body of
peoples and political communities in the image of a family whose everyday affairs
have to be taken care of by a gigantic, nation-wide administration of housekeeping’
(Arendt, 1989, p. 28).
The social realm is neither private nor public (Arendt, 1989, p. 28), and its
employment by liberalism in order to stave off accusations of apolitical and
apathetic individualism cannot replace the political in its public role. Ironically, the
moment liberalism believes that it has reached its secularist peak, that is, in
excluding the political confrontation on competing accounts of the good from the
educational agenda, that very moment liberalism affirms unconsciously its roots in
Christian moralism. ‘Christian morality, as distinguished from its fundamental
religious precepts, has always insisted that everybody should mind his own business
and that political responsibility constituted first of all a burden, undertaken
exclusively for the sake of the well-being and salvation of those it freed from worry
about public affairs’ (Arendt, 1989, p. 60). Typically, Augustine’s City of God is
concerned with sin rather than political organization. And, although commentators
disagree on whether the City of God must be treated as a utopia or not, most of
them recognize in it the source of an influential line of thought to the later anti-
utopia (Kumar, 1991, p. 35). By effacing the political (or by reducing it to the
social) and by effacing the ethical (or by reducing it to the moral), some liberal
educational proposals wish to preserve most of what used to be animated by the
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CHAPTER 5
religious moralist commitment to the Good, while hoping to do without that specific
animating Good. As David Blacker explains, this ambivalence is reflected in proposals
‘which would enforce a certain secularism with an almost religious fervor, even
into the most intimate areas of human life, while simultaneously relocating
questions concerning the ultimate Good as much within the formal-governmental
realm as possible, exquisitely rational regulations that distrustfully direct the
movements of all-too irrational actual individuals’ (2007, p. 38, emph mine).
For one thing, this stance as a whole presupposes an implicit utopian kind of
determinacy of the Good – and in a very one-dimensional sense for that matter.
More deeply, it suffers from the paradox (as Blacker nicely observes) of combining
a love for humanity in the abstract with contempt ‘for the actual human beings who
always fall short by comparison’ (ibid). It is easy to recall here the religious
undertones that show liberalism’s congruence with some traditional utopianism and
with some contemporary continental utopian visions which also face the danger of
transcendence taking the meaning of break, crisis, disruption or epiphany contrasted
to everyday inauthenticity (Eagleton, 2001, p. 155) and to the quotidian world as
irremediably fallen (Gardiner, 2006, p. 27, fn 5). The liberal discomfort with
political debate about the utopian world, about the politicization of everydayness
and about past and present ethical burdens; the liberal despondency regarding the
redemptive potentials within the world; the liberal naturalization of evil and its
accommodation in human nature that reflects a radical contempt for the human
world as irremediably imperfect; all attest to liberalism’s ability to sit comfortably
next to the Medieval contemptus mundi (contempt of the world) apolitical
relegation of perfection to the celestial kingdom.
No wonder that the neat categorizations of the curriculum begin with the spiritual
as a first in a series of adjectives that determine what counts as individual develop-
ment. Despite a usual vagueness in the account of the spiritual, it is largely held
that spirituality overlaps with the moral and emotional development (Hand, 2004,
p. 157) which is associated with religious education. The emotional that is missing
in the list shows up a bit further down in the section where it is stated that the
‘school curriculum should promote pupils’ self-esteem and emotional well-being
and help them to form and maintain worthwhile and satisfying relationships, based
on respect for themselves and for others, at home, school, work and in the
community’ (in White, 2004, p. 4). Apart from the constant expositional priority of
the self over any otherness, we may also notice the silence over any critical treatment
of emotions and the silence over any possible content of the emotive sphere, other
than self-esteem, self-respect and respect for others.
Even when the emotional does appear (not worthy enough to appear independently
from the spiritual in the aim itself but uncomfortably squeezed in the clarifying
comments) it is dissociated from critique or reflection and it thus unveils the rigid
segregation of reason and feelings underlying the curriculum. This becomes evident
in the second appearance of emotions in the text, when pupils are encouraged,
amongst other things, to ‘feel various emotions (compassion, suspense, delight,
imagination-mediated fear)’ (in White, 2004, p. 7). Such emotions are to be felt,
not reflected upon; the cultural artefacts that may produce or nurture them are
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equally beyond critical contemplation. Is the anger at the ‘baddy’ (usually foreign,
aversive or socially marginal) produced by a film or a series a just anger? Should
the delight produced by the filming of a victorious moment of the social imaginary
over the other be beyond any critical consideration or be purely a matter of the
aesthetic subjectivism of the person (i.e., personal taste)? In fact, such segregation
of reason and feelings reproduces the ‘private versus public’ dichotomy and ousts
the emotive from the sphere of education proper, allowing space to the culture
industry to singularly shape people’s desires and feelings on criteria of profit and,
then, to present those desires as natural.
This does not mean that education should organize a pre-programming or
conditioning of the children’s response to emotions and desires. Quite the contrary,
it means that reflection and the education of desire must combat the naturalized
conditioning of the young by the media. For, as things stand now, and untouched as
things are left by the curriculum, children are delivered unconditionally to the
dominant phantasmagorical. What Benjamin and Adorno describe as the phantasm-
magoria of the commodity is no less utopian than its more critical counterpart. ‘The
wish-image continues to channel utopian desire, but in the form of a commodity fetish
that can only be satisfied through a “distracted” and atomized consumption of the
superabundant commodities, mass spectacles and entertainments proffered by
capitalist modernity’ (Gardiner, 2006, p. 20). Thus, for Ernst Bloch, ‘gaining
appreciation for art and a more critical view of popular media can aid children in
beginning to discern the traces of deeper libidinal desires that contemporary society
fails to satisfy’ (van Heertum, 2006, p. 49). This means that schooling has a
responsibility for the education of desire. And conversely, against the rigid separ-
ation between the mind and the body, Dewey and Marcuse defended the view that
‘all the senses are key in the learning process’ (van Heertum, 2006, p. 49).
The current neglect of the education of desire rests on a faulty and populist
interpretation of democracy and freedom regarding one’s private choices. The sphere
of feelings, desires and satisfaction is treated as purely subjectivist, impermeable
and not amenable to public scrutiny. Along with it, there is the avoidance of a
supposed elitism involved in the critique of mass culture. Finally, the questioning
of authenticity also contributes to this neglect of thematization of desire. For,
challenging the satisfaction offered by contemporary commodified culture presupposes
that some desires are more primordial and authentic than those artificially created
ones that capitalism exploits and perpetuates. It also presupposes a description of
how authentic desire leaves its traces even in the most alienating manipulations of
them by capitalism. As van Heertum expresses this point, following and updating
Bloch, vestiges of such primordial yet exploited and twisted desires appear to be
‘the desire to sign on or become part of a larger community (fashion, music,
sports), to be recognized and have a voice (reality television, desire for fame), to
satisfy libidinal desires (pharmaceutical culture and commodified emotions) and to
find love and freedom’ (van Heertum, 2006, p. 48). Many would question this
prioritization of certain needs, emotions or desires as supposedly more authentic
than others. Yet, as Seyla Benhabib argues, precisely since needs are always culturally
shaped, discursive thematization of need interpretations would effect a relativization of
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the ‘sedimented and frozen images of happiness in the light of which we formulate
needs and motives’ (Benhabib, 1986, p. 333). Thus, even if the debate over
authenticity is resolved in favour of the idea that nothing is truly authentic or
primordial, this is no argument for conceding the whole educational space to
‘sedimented and frozen images of happiness’, to established ‘need interpretations’
and to capitalistically cultivated and exploited desire at the expense of a possible
rehabilitation of a more critical and comprehensive treatment of gratification and
happiness.
The rehabilitation of the emotional sphere and its being put back on the
educational agenda ties well with the plea to rehabilitate the political too. For the
manipulated desire of large publics for action films has the political implication
that pleasure makes common cause with ignorance of political entanglement of
cultures or, worse, with an exoneration and sanitization of it, with denial of
political responsibility and with racist, chauvinist and jingoist conclusions about
the past. This connection is well illustrated by Cole in the following argument.
Teaching history must be debated and reconsidered because ‘school students need
the skills to deconstruct pro-British Imperialist and/or racist films and/or television
series, which are still readily available in the age of multiple-channel digital
television’ (Cole, 2004, p. 534). Feeling guilt and shame for humanity’s past or
being led to feel strongly the sense that the hubris of expansion is a tragedy from
which no one is by definition exempted undoes the ‘pleasures’ deriving from the
defeat of the supposed inferior or dehumanized others. To sense this one could just
need to see The Persians by Aeschylus (where the defeated enemy is the
protagonist who throws light on the tragicality of obsessive expansion and hubristic
fallibility of all humanity) and then compare it with the recent Hollywood film 300
(referring to the 300 Spartans who fought and died during the Persian wars (where
the enemy is presented as simply monstrous and animalistic).
The synergy of the emotional and the political where one becomes politically
suspicious of processes of cultivation and perpetuation of specific pleasures could
effect a genuine reorientation of desire toward more public and more durable
modalities of happiness and conceptions of ethical life. For, the reconciliation of
opposites that corresponds to the reconciliation of emotions and politics would be
that of reason and happiness and the One and the Many, where a communal sense
of Eros incorporates libido in such a way that the ‘striving for lasting satisfaction
replaces the need for instant gratification’ (van Heertum, 2006, p. 48).
Such a communal sense of need and desire beyond individual and instant
gratification is less and less acknowledged. The first aim of the 1988 curriculum,
that is, ‘to promote the spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development
of pupils at the school and of society’ (in White, 2004, p. 2, emph mine) remains
intact in the 2000 curriculum, except for the last words: ‘of society’. Now excluded
from the most programmatic part of the curriculum, i.e., from the new aims with
which the 2000 curriculum is inaugurated, society reappears in the section of
values and purposes underpinning the school curriculum. ‘Education influences
and reflects the values of society, and the kind of society we want to be’ (in White,
2004, p. 2). At first sight, one may feel that, at last, school and society are
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reconnected under the roof of vision and futurity. A closer look, however, leads us
to realize that education is reproductive of the existing society whose values it
reflects, for the verb ‘to influence’ connotes modification rather than drastic
intervention and much less redirection or transfiguration. The second part of the
sentence, i.e. ‘the kind of society we want to be’ again seems at first sight to have
the most utopian undertone in the whole text. But placed as it is in the sentence,
connected with the part that has a reproductive relation to society through a mere
‘and’, it loses its possible critical edge. What disarms it is the omission of any word
that would signify tension between how society is and how we want it to be and
that would convey the strength of societal change that is needed or the role of
education in effecting it. We see once again that in such repressed utopias the
critical distance of the real and the ideal is alarmingly short: we have already
encountered this in our account of Blairism’s treatment of vision. To repeat, the
Blairist ‘promise only to promise what can be achieved is not the negation of
utopia, because it is based on a belief, derived from a vision of an ideal world, that
what can be achieved is also what deserves to be achieved in the name of that
vision’ (Crowley, 2000, p. 149).
Before further commenting on the individualism that reproduces the existent by
neglecting the impact of society on private happiness and well-being, let us see
first some more peripheral yet related issues. The curriculum should ‘enable pupils
to respond positively to opportunities, challenges and responsibilities’ (in White,
2004, p. 4, emph mine). The vagueness of ‘positively’ here can be overcome only
through some moral or ethical specification of the seized opportunity that would
bring the Other into play. Does Carol respond positively to the opportunity that is
given to her to achieve her goals by the ambiguity of the professor’s words in
Oleanna? The curriculum also enables pupils ‘to manage risk’ (ibid). But the auto-
affective, individualist and disciplining moralism reflected in the slogan of risk
management says nothing about the risk imposed on others. Does managing risk
mean that we have to strike first so that the others have no chance to harm us (e.g.
as in the case of a pre-emptive war)? Will we have to fight to death to get security
and conservation of the existent? Or should risk management mean that the self is
more prepared to risk her own safety than subject others to the risks and harms of
injustice? Would that be a utopian, unattainable demand on selfhood, a promise
that no honest liberal curriculum would ever make? Of course, the curriculum itself
cannot provide for the kind of detail that gives substance to programmatic
statements and cannot be blamed for the vagueness itself. But the individualism on
which the curriculum rests blocks the relational paradigm that is necessary if the
undesirable interpretations of the curriculum are to be kept at bay.
Does the fight to seize opportunities and to achieve entail that the others
encountered in the battle are mere episodes on the way to success? There is often
reference to sensitivity to otherness, to friendliness and to other-regarding moral
duties in the curriculum (White, 2004, p. 22) – a reference that deserves praise.
But, equally often, the curricular meritocratic utopianism of egalitarian formalism
and the utilitarian utopianism of earthly paradise (rendered as a dystopia in
Oleanna) are expected to prepare the individual for what the future has in store, a
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future that is understood as a sequence of disconnected moments of individual

concerns. And so happiness becomes ‘a private affair; and a matter for here and
now. The happiness of others is no more – or better be no more – a condition of
one’s own felicity’. After all, for the mobile footloose classes, each moment of
happiness is ‘lived through in a company that may still be around, but more likely
will not be, when the next moment of happiness arrives’ (Bauman, 2003, p. 23). A
sense of public happiness (Passerini, 2002, p. 27) is lost. The insistence of the 2000
curricular aims, practically, on pupils’ ‘getting on in the world’, reflects, in my view,
what Olssen calls a ‘privatization of utopia’ (Olssen, 2003, p. 544), as imagination
and hope for happiness are ‘instructed to steer clear of societal harbours and on no
account cast there their anchors’ (Bauman, 2003, p. 21).
Like in most other utopias, in repressed utopias too, all is about happiness. ‘As
befits the liberal outlook, [the 2000 curriculum] puts at the centre of things the
wellbeing of individuals’ (Bramall and White, 2000, p. 12). ‘Foremost is a belief in
education, at home and at school, as a route to the spiritual, moral, social, cultural,
physical and mental development, and thus the well-being, of the individual’ (in
White, 2004, p. 3). In this way, the well-being of the individual seems dependent
exclusively or, at least, mostly, if we pay attention to the social development, on
individual development. Can one be happy in a world of unhappy others? The
individual’s happiness appears to be her own business, not conditioned on the
happiness of others or of the whole world and of the well-being of the planet. And
happiness resembles more the kind of instant gratification that matches a prolonged
present rather than an anticipated future. ‘Happiness and more happiness are
desired now as they used to be in the bygone times of utopia-writing; but happiness
means now a different today rather than a more felicitous tomorrow, as it did in the
past’ (Bauman, 2003, p. 23). It is a today of seized opportunity, achievement and
excellence.
Against the dominant privatization of happiness that comes about when liberalism
misconstrues pluralism about the Good as, to put it bluntly, ‘anyone is entitled to
her own private ideal so long as the established societal ideal remains untouched’,
politics concerns debates about collective ethical life and the common Good. To
become hopeful and visionary, pupils would have to politically consider alternative
visions of society that are not catered for in standard liberal curricular provisions of
citizenship. It is no wonder that ‘citizenship-centric’ theories (Blacker’s term,
2007, p. 104) give such a priority to the right over the good that the pursuit of
happiness appears to be of secondary significance for politics, or, worse, in tension
with it. By emphasizing the private and subjectivist dimension of happiness and by
disconnecting it from the public sphere, liberalism impoverishes the conception of
the good that is allowed to inform political reform. Liberalism thus further
impoverishes the privatized good by relegating it to separate spheres of private life,
e.g. the religious or the aesthetic or the existential sphere beyond educational
deliberation, shaping and renegotiation. In this way, it makes the good purely a
matter of existing worldviews (e.g. the religious ones) and not one of imaginative
construction of new interpretations of what should count as worthwhile. Despite
secularist appearances, individualism, privatism and happiness in much liberalism
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make common cause with a specific, moralist version of Christianity or display, at

least, a deep-seated compatibility with it. The liberal anti-utopianism concurs with
the medieval apolitical anti-utopianism and both promote a privatism of individual
well-being and/or salvation.
The criticisms that the early, pre-Marxist Lukacs directed at Kierkergaard’s
thought, namely that the latter failed to articulate any concept of utopia and found
recourse to private faith as a solution to modern problems of alienation and
reification (Price, 1999, p. 67) can be expanded to much contemporary liberalism
and its introvert educational applications. A privatized happiness is not only egoistic; it
is also impoverished and ultimately ascetic. Just as ‘medieval Christianity, under
the spell of Augustine, tended to downplay earthly bliss and perfection’ (Kumar,
2003, p. 67), liberalism divorces the self from eudaimonia. Just as some conceptions of
Christianity thought of political involvement as a burden undertaken for the sake of
others, so that they would only need to care for their salvation (Arendt, 1989,
p. 60), the curriculum frees the individual from the burden of politically envisioning
collective happiness and along with it from the pleasures emanating from the
collective. The liberal radical hedonism of the achiever, of the successful learner as
a successful member of the ‘society of knowledge’ and, by implication, of the
consumer and the wise chooser of the good(s) that capitalism allows to flourish
deprives the subject of a variety of pleasures that can be derived from a heightened
other-regarding reflection and more open public deliberation. The downplaying of
the pleasures of the political that moralist religiousness may effect has been met
with a parallel appreciation and approval on the part of a politics-averse liberalism.
The only sense of the political both sides, i.e., religious moralism and secular
liberalism, tend to recognize and endorse is the vociferous one of combating
exclusion and fundamentalism and of asserting a facile multiculturalism. Yet, all in
all, the subject becomes thus even more divorced from the Other. Perhaps this
constellation of private happiness and distance from the Other through a truncated
conception of politics can no better be illustrated than by reference to Žižek’s
criticisms of multiculturalism. To him, ‘liberal multiculturalists are made happy
through their identification with their Others, but only to the extent that their
Others remain elsewhere’. Αs Žižek argues, ‘if, say, the “truths of Islam” were to
manifest themselves as a political reality on their own doorstep’, the liberal
multiculturalists ‘would be the first to object’ (cf Turnbull, 2005, p. 144).
However, it should be noted here that, in my view, liberalism is not alone in its
concurrence with moralist religiousness and the asceticism it might entail. Many
critics of liberalism, for instance, Žižek himself, appear to me to be not just against
the capitalist radical hedonism of commodities but ascetically prone to question the
notion of eudaimonia too. Thus, ‘happiness, in Žižek’s view, is a pagan category’:
as Turnbull explains, Žižek would probably concur with the folk-Christian claim
“that we are not put on this earth to have a good time” (Turnbull, 2005, p. 144). It
is not quite that false happiness, or what I would call gleefulness, is set against a
eudaimonia achieved through reflection and knowledge of the self and the world;
what Žižek is targeting is any kind of happiness, the collective one notwithstanding,
so long as it would fall into the category of hypocritical happiness, i.e., happiness
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stemming from the subject’s inability to confront the consequences of his/her desire.
We shall see in another chapter how the incrimination of the quotidian makes
common cause with an anthropology that justifies the assumption of life and society
as an earthly vale of tears. What is important here is only that there is a hegemonic
concordance on the depreciation of collective happiness that does not allow
liberalists as well as their opponents to be critical enough of the educational texts
that voice or perpetuate it. What is thus missed or remains non/under-theorized is
the connection of the lack of faith in humanity with the ascetic denial of happiness,
of a happiness understood as what people may truly desire. Such a denial reflects a
secularized contemptus mundi of the kind that has often characterized Christian
views and has hardly been conducive to political utopianism (Kumar, 1991, p. 35).
The anti-utopian, undemanding relation to society and the world; the privatization
of hope and the limited vision regarding a common, happy future of humanity and
non-human biota; as well as the failure to see that a cosmopolis of global responsibility
requires an antipolis of discontent with life as it is and with the dominant conception
of the good as attainment and personal well being might be defended as political
modesty and safe realism. For many liberals, a radical egalitarian society would
presuppose an education of, and for, beings that would be pure as angels and not
rational egoist human creatures. As usual, the angelic is the typical metaphor of the
radical Other of humanity that is deployed as a weapon against any ostensibly
immodest, uninhibited vision of a perfect world. Yet, the demands this curriculum
raises on the individual, of which 60% are about the pupil’s personal qualities and
the rest are about skills and types of knowledge or understanding (White, 2004,
p. 4), are such that only a society as radical as the egalitarian utopian would be able
to sustain as within reach by all pupils. For pupils need an enabling family and
community starting point if any of the items of those three categories (personal
qualities, skills and knowledge/understanding) is to be realistically expected to at
some point be fulfilled or approximated. The maximalist curricular demands on the
individual can be met only by the privileged few in a society that is minimally
expected to be liberal and democratic (but not egalitarian, redistributive, restorative
and other-oriented). But those in a society who begin from disadvantaged back-
grounds and lack cultural capital (e.g. Carol in Oleanna) need little short of divine
transcendence to be able to meet such standards and ‘compete’ with the privileged
few. The self who will be able to accomplish all the ideals of that curriculum
irrespective of, or, worse, in spite of, the social position (and hindrances) in which
the self is found must be omnipotent. The societal-wise ‘realistic’ curriculum is
theogenic in some of its aspirations or its demands on the individual, the very
moment it sets too modest demands on the society. Liberalism would ridicule an
education of/for angels; yet it expects an education of/for Gods, or, rather, of/for a
God, the God of monotheism for that matter. For, omnipotence ‘is never an attribute
of gods in polytheism, no matter how superior the strength of the gods may be to
the forces of men’. Predictably, ‘apart from its utopian hubris’, as Arendt remarks,
‘aspiration toward omnipotence always implies the destruction of plurality’ (Arendt,
1989, p. 202). The pluralistic secular society of the 2000 curriculum encourages the
real or imagined exceptionalism and perfectionism of the few Übermenschen.
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Let us see how the most declarative part of the 2000 curriculum ends. It asserts
the interdependence of the two aims as follows: ‘these two aims reinforce each
other. The personal development of pupils, spiritually, morally, socially and culturally,
plays a significant part in their ability to learn and to achieve. Development in both
areas is essential to raising standards of attainment for all pupils’ (in White, 2004,
p. 4). It is important to note again the absence of any reference of the aims to
ethical and political sensibilities, to a clearly stated emotional development, to any
form of discontent, to any strong sense of collective happiness, to (local and
worldwide) redistributive and restorative justice and to societal transfiguration and
change. The term ‘critical’ which is absent from the whole section on values, aims
and purposes and from the aims themselves seals, in its absence from the curricular
conclusion, the priority of the learner and the achiever over the critical thinker. The
resonance of Blairism is unmistakable. ‘The idea that capitalism in its modern form
is without fundamental contradiction, and that it can therefore be effectively
regulated, is central to Blair’s idea that his “Third Way” mix of values – individual
freedom, social mobility, solidarity, and equality of opportunity – can offer the
normative basis for a democratically hegemonic project’ (Crowley, 2000, p. 150).
ANOTHER PERSPECTIVE
Now that our brief close reading of the 2000 curriculum has reached its end, let us
confront the question, what would an alternative goal-setting roughly be like?
Through a connection of cosmopolis and antipolis, or utopia and discontent with
reality as it is, and the argument in favour of their synergy in producing a strong
critical outlook on educational textuality and goal-setting, I have already indicated
a possible direction. To flesh it out, I will resort to a brief detour, so as to compare
the 2000 curriculum with the first Western educational text, Hesiod’s Works and
Days. Elsewhere I have claimed that Hesiod’s poetry is the first Occidental effort
to deploying utopianism and to utilizing its educational import (Papastephanou,
2008a). I shall not cover the whole ground here, since the conclusions of that
reading suffice to effect the contrasting depiction of the old and the new. To be fair
to both texts, the contrast can only be limited to the corresponding utopian
underpinnings, since these texts are, of course, different in all their other purposes
and modalities.
Works and Days (ca. 8th century BC) was a lesson in the literal sense, that is, it
was a didactic epic poem addressed to Hesiod’s brother, Perses, in an admonitory
tone. Whilst the brother is the immediate recipient of Hesiod’s advice, the poem
also directly addresses and aspires to teach the rulers. Hesiod’s teaching and
admonition to his brother go far beyond issues of individual success and extend to
his transformation into a just and reflective critical self. When some sense of a
successful and prosperous life enters the picture, it comes as the after-effect of a
commitment to justice and thoughtfulness, not as a precondition of all happiness.
And social order in Hesiod does not derive from an education for social cohesion
and stability but from an education for justice that is recommended to the rulers
first and foremost. Hence, learning, reflection and work are not promoted as
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conservative mechanisms for adaptation in, reproduction of, or minor modification

of, a given order, but, rather, as vehicles of radical change toward a just society.
For Hesiod, injustice, inadequate reflection, limited foresight and lack of vision
produce a social terror that brings along all kinds of disaster.
To convince the recipients of this admonishing message, Hesiod employs the
utopian and dystopian pictures of possible and existing worlds as rhetorical devices
in a pedagogical rather than merely entertaining manner. Thus, Hesiod’s utopian
and dystopian depictions of reality acquire an edifying role regarding the ethical
and political reorientation of his society and the whole human kind. The interplay
of Hesiodic utopian and dystopian vivid images and their implicit ethical contrast
promote a political paideia for justice and cosmopolitanism. In doing so, it is
unique in its awareness of the motivating force of ethical imagery for happiness
and of the deterrent effect of dystopian portrayals of existing reality. For Hesiod,
no divine project for willy-nilly salvaging humanity is available, no cunning of
nature (Kant) or of reason (Hegel) brings human history into relief. Happiness,
social rather than individual and privatist, is a pure possibility, one connected to
people’s conscious commitment to the justice they are capable of by being human.
In this way, Hesiod’s utopianism is more in tune with a post-postmodernist
political futurism rather than with the modern progressivist politics of canonical
utopianism. In this respect, it is no wonder that Hesiodic poetry has not attracted
the attention of modern or postmodern political theory. Educational philosophy can
not only remedy this, but it can also explore the extent to which the aims of
Hesiod’s poetry can infuse and radicalize contemporary educational goal-setting.
For, we have seen that the aims, purposes and goals of contemporary education
revolve around individual success, social cohesion and global action coordination.
Schooling aspires to prepare the future citizens for living and working within and
across borders and to equip them with the appropriate skills for making the best of
their experiences. The current aims of education, as specified by the 2000 British
curriculum, cultivate the model of the knower, the achiever and the adapted social
member. Unlike such contemporary education, which seems to set out from the
assumption that ours is the best possible world, the Hesiodic paideia begins from a
fundamental discomfort over the existing reality. For all these reasons, Hesiodic
utopian and dystopian imagery can serve as an illustration for all sorts of alternatives,
for sure, beyond this example – that is, alternatives to anti-utopian or crypto-
utopian conceptions of what should count as education. Cosmopolis and antipolis
might more generally enrich the recent educational theoretical utopian tendency to
waking institutionalized educational thought from the debilitating and self-
congratulatory anti-utopian slumber that is perpetuated through an impoverished
and system-dependent goal-setting.
I have opted to read the 2000 curriculum as a cultural text the hegemonic voice
of which can be confronted from the perspective of Ideologiekritik (critique of
ideology). For Paul Ricoeur, utopia can be played off against ideology - for one of
the pathologies of ideological thinking is its narrowness and blindness that stems
from its inability to grasp a nowhere as a springboard for critiquing the current
(Ricoeur, 1997). The 2000 curriculum is ideological in its first sight condemnation
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of the nowhere and in its deep-laid, unconscious identification of the nowhere with
the absolute immanence of the here and now. More precisely, what is the ideology
behind the 2000 anti-utopia or crypto-utopia? Through the above reading of the
British 2000 curriculum we are now able to confirm Olssen’s insight that central to
liberalism’s repressed utopian vision is ‘the individualism of its epistemology, its
ideal of a single language and a unified vision for all the sciences, the rationalism
of its philosophical approach, distinct limits on the role of theory and imagination,
[and] its commitment to the uncritical pursuit of a narrowly conceived freedom’. It
also conveys ‘an image of man that is too rationalistic’, and proof of this is, as I
have argued, precisely the set of aims that do not include emotions. Proof of this is
also the ‘peculiar form of social amnesia, which cuts people off from both past and
community’ (Olssen, 2003, p. 544) and which seems exceptionally convenient in
shielding the young from any possible future change, from global demands for
redistribution of wealth on grounds of historical debt and from the responsibility to
long exploited others. Predictably, the word ‘critical’ is missing not only in the list
of adjectives determining individual development but also in all the programmatic
section in question.
But, apart from focusing on the 2000 curriculum ideology, I have also chosen to
read it simultaneously and equally from an enlarged perspective that examines its
utopian power. Thus, beyond the demonstration of the ideological role of the 2000
curriculum, that is, its instrumental function as a cultural object that consolidates
established liberal views of education, we may follow Fredric Jameson and see the
2000 curriculum also as a ‘symbolic affirmation of a specific historical and class
form of collective unity’ (1981, p. 291). The collective unity that is affirmed through
this text, apart from the historical specificity and the class character that Jameson
would recognise, it also comprises a particular way of viewing its diachronic and
synchronic relation to other peoples. Whereas, at first glance, what is affirmed is an
individualist ideal of the successful, productive, knowledgeable and politically
correct self, the fact that the multiplication of this selfhood constitutes the ‘vision’
of a liberal society affirms the indirect significance of collectivity even for this
text. As a whole, such a liberal society remains either unspoken or alluded to in a
skeletal way. Nevertheless, it is implicit in the curriculum and reflects the liberal
solidarity and commonality that protects the established social configuration from
outside challenge, e.g. from the challenge presented by an explicit utopia of a more
manifestly collective demand for change and redirection of British priorities. ‘Even
hegemonic or ruling-class structure and ideology are Utopian, not in spite of their
instrumental function to secure and perpetuate class privilege and power, but rather
precisely because that function is also in and of itself the affirmation of collective
solidarity’ (Jameson, 1981, p. 291). In my interpretation, the 2000 curriculum
affirms something more than collective solidarity, more than what Jameson asserts
and definitely more than what the curriculum itself allows ‘consciously’ to be
deciphered from it. What is also affirmed through the unearthed vestiges of ideality
in the 2000 curriculum is ultimately the human ethical desire for a better or perfect
world, irrespective of the ideological content the latter notion may take.
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CHAPTER 6
UTOPIA, REPRESENTATION AND IMAGE
Can a fragmentary and discontinuous hope suffuse educational practice with a new
impulse and guiding thread? Can we foster a public docta spes, an educated hope,
through cognitive transformation so that social agents ‘are brought to see the
pernicious effects of social mechanisms and institutions’ (Cooke, 2004, p. 418) and
aspire to change them? We have already argued that dystopia helps agents to see
the pernicious effects of the existing reality and we may argue that utopia nourishes
the inspiration and motivation for change. While Oleanna exemplified the idea that
a dystopian portrayal of reality makes the faulty elements of the educational world
stand out and be more easily perceived, what is presupposed by the idea about
the motivational importance of utopia is not necessarily a utopian educational
construction to contrast with Oleanna, but, rather, an illustration of the direction
the societal change and human reform that condition educational change may take.
Yet both arguments, i.e., about dystopia and its corrective role and utopia and its
directive role rely on implicit assumptions about operations of visibility and narrativity,
on the one hand, and of reality transcendence, on the other. Such operations are
inherent in utopianist discourses and have to become explicit if utopian thinking is
to be plausibly thought as ‘the ability to conjure up vivid ethical pictures of a
“good society” that would be possible only if certain hostile social conditions were
transformed’ (emph added) (Cooke, 2004, p. 419). If utopias are always images of
something that is not yet real but imaginary and if it is desirable to theorize utopias
through the Bildschaffende, i.e. the deep-seated and supra-individual (Überpersönli-
ches) human quality of image-creation (Buber, 1985, p. 29), the representational
element within utopianism must be explored.
REPRESENTATION, THE MAP AND LOUIS MARIN
What is to ‘see’ realities through the lens of depictions of actual and possible
worlds? What does this entail about discourse and its relation to reality? Do utopias
and dystopias correspond (on a ‘one-to-one’ basis) to facts and do they depict
details in a representational manner? Does the idea of an image trap us into a
photographic coupling of accounts of desirable change and of targeted reality?
Louis Marin argued convincingly against the totalitarian, ideological side-effects of
utopia as representation, that is, as the formalist organicity and systemic architecture
involved in a decoded, clear image (1993, p. 13). To him, ‘utopia does not transform
the sensible into the intelligible, or reality into ideology’. Instead, utopia ‘is the
infinite work of the imagination’s power of figuration’ (Marin, 1993, p. 12). Since
Marin’s influential intervention in utopian studies and his book Utopiques: Jeux d’
Espace (1973), the employment of visual metaphors and the representational rationale
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that operates in detailed, project-like political utopianism can no longer be treated

light-heartedly. They must be used with caution, for they invite qualifications and
raise questions that cannot be shunted aside.
However, for many utopianists and often for their opponents alike, there is still a
tacit understanding of depictions of alternative realities as detailed and accurate
descriptions of a realizable world, a world to come. Within such a framework, the
metaphor of the map retains all its force, as it is accompanied by the feeling of
warm security that one has when one knows exactly where s/he is going or when
one knows exactly what s/he has sound reasons to fear. In addition, the metaphor
of the map is often accompanied with an exoticism that I term ‘political exoticism’.
It is the exoticism that is expressed when political perfection is assumed to have
already been effected or approximated somewhere in romanticized remote civiliz-
ations or in political configurations that diverge from the basic structures of our
own public sphere. A typical example comes from the blocism of the cold war
(Kaldor, 2004) during which many people invested the whole of their utopian
energy to defending their favourite bloc as if it were a flawless system to be further
expanded and implemented or as if it were impossible for humanity politically to
evolve beyond it. In that case and in most other such cases, the first disillusionment
with the romanticized world and the first encounter with its unpleasant side bring
along a political despondency and eventually the evaporation of the utopian
impulse or its preservation in politically inoperative forms.
What usually nourishes the political localization and exoticization of utopian
desires is that utopian imagination does not distance itself enough from the existing
reality because it is held back by certain metaphysical assumptions. Those relate, in
my view, to the reality principle. Libidinal investment in a specific cause, e.g. the
pursuit of a political utopia may be felt as too dangerous when the utopia in
question is transcendent of any actual society, that is, when it is purely imaginary.
Hence political choice is limited to existing alternative systems that become thus
naturalized. Then, its wish fulfilment is displaced to more tangible causes or to
more accessible political formations – just as the reality principle takes precedence
over the pleasure principle when the self strikes a compromise between the sought
pleasure and the avoidance of its risks. The reality principle operates when politics
is considered a matter of available choice and ideas are judged on grounds of
presence, frequency and repetition, thus acquiring the properties of tried out recipes
and securing the feeling of safety that accompanies the well-rehearsed or even the
static. We may conclude that such yearning for metaphysics directs utopianism to a
pathological displacement of the map (constantly relocating the anticipation of
perfect order to various real places) instead of directing it to a bold overcoming of
the map. Marin describes this operation eloquently. ‘The island map is caught up in
a displacement process within the mapping representation: constantly, unceasingly
displaced, about to be inscribed at the very moment when it is about to be erased
amidst all the real islands that travellers register when they find them, among all
the potential islands which other travellers will discover’ (Marin, 1993, p. 16).
Political exoticism as the search for cartographic detailed depiction and guidelines
for finding the perfect political destination, symbolized by the utopian island, has
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displaced utopia from one Promised Land to another, from America to the Soviet
Union, to the University and May 1968, down to Europe and, perhaps, to China
next. Ultimately, such displacement has often led the political debates of the 20th
century, and will lead those of the 21st, to anti-utopian exasperation. Such
exasperation comes about when, in searching for the actual place of utopia, for an
existing alternative world that needs only to be endorsed and expanded, people
become frustrated and disillusioned. Eventually, in not finding such a ready-made,
real utopia, many people conclude that utopia is simply futile. ‘The ideal future
state, in which the human potential of all would be fully developed’, is then
regarded as inherently impossible to achieve (Crowley, 2000, p. 147). Those who
share this conclusion but see merit in utopia nevertheless still refer to it as an
indispensable regulative ideal. Yet all of them seem to admit that the supposedly
inherent impossibility of the realization of utopia leaves social agents with no
viable and practical alternative to the existing state of affairs. Crowley describes
the predicament the French left confronts in exactly these terms but we may
generalize this description to cover most cases of postmodern disillusioned utopianism.
‘The market is rejected as a mode of social organization because it promotes
selfishness and cannot deal with “absolute” values, but simultaneously embraced,
at least as something to be “regulated”, because of the absence of any practical
competing model’ (ibid). The impact of this new ideology of utopia as impossible-
yet-necessary-although-limited-to-regulative-ideality is noticed not only in philo-
sophical debates but also in everyday political grassroots conversations.
By contrast, outside the representational logic of cartography, utopia may be
understood as a neutral place, located as it is between existing alternatives: u-topos,
no topos is ‘a paradoxical, even giddy toponym, since as a term it negates with its
name the very place that it is naming’ and it designates ‘another referent, the
“other” of any place’ (Marin, 1993, p. 11). For Marin, utopia is not the one of two
antithetical localities: it is the negation of both, the transcendence of any well-
rehearsed and overused pairing of (supposed or true) opposites. [In the case of the
cold war, utopian neutralization would take the form of a negation of both blocs for
the sake of an as yet no topos]. Hence utopia may be associated with the category
of the neutral, which ‘suspends the logic of antithesis and contradiction’ and
precisely because of this ‘it offers to the imagination the opportunity for meditation
and play’ (Bann, 1993, p. 2). In Foucault’s terms, ‘utopias are sites with no real
place. They are sites that have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with
the real space of Society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else
society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal
places’ (Foucault, 2008, p. 3). Ricoeur reads what he sees as the extra-territoriality
of utopia (Ricoeur, 1997, p. 36) in an equally positive manner.
With Marin, we have so far seen that the cartographic guidance associated with
utopia traps it in an end-state rationale where the ideal is argued point for point and
sometimes unimaginatively located in a specific existing political configuration
that has to be proliferated and disseminated throughout the rest of the world. It is
then that utopia finds itself to be too close to ideology. ‘As a Utopia, travel cannot
be repeated; while as an ideology, as an ideological representation, it imperatively
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demands to be repeated’ (Marin, 1993, p. 15). Thus, ultimately, the logic of

representation, especially when it is unwilling to fly away from the existent and
embrace neutralization, has ongoing negative effects on the utopian imaginary such
as those we described above – plus the well-known ones of blueprint stagnation
and totalitarianism, which anti-utopianism often diagnoses and chastises.
Against Marin and his anti-representationalist approach to utopia, we may
rescue the representational element from the above dangers. We may understand
the image as different from sheer and detailed representation and more appropriate
for utopia due to the former’s fleeting, transient and mutable character and due to
the creative element that is engulfed in that character. Ephemeral presence or
momentary graspability tend to deliver any image to the vagaries of memory, to the
challenge of constant conceptualization, re-creation and modification, and to the
ethical responsibilities which emanate from the struggle to approximate an ideal
that looks hazy in the distance and perhaps ever receding. To think constantly and
debate the blurred contours and the flickering contents of the ideal, to work
collectively towards its realization, and to preserve a commitment and a fidelity to
its determining principles are, in my view, constitutive parts of a ‘keep going’ ethic
(to employ Badiou’s well-known metaphor) and of the awareness that the force of
the truly ethical image (sign or message) holds you captive.
The cartographic guidance accompanying the idea of a journey, the strong
representational correspondence to reality (existing or alternative) and the securiti-
zation it favours are missing from the idea of an image qua vision. When Polo
explains to the Khan that he cannot draw a route on the map, what he conveys is
precisely this fleeting quality of an image beyond mass (re)production, beyond
repetition, the quality that utopian and dystopian imagination share with true art
and fireworks. Here is Adorno on this: ‘The phenomenon of fireworks is prototypical
for artworks’ because fireworks are apparition par excellence. ‘They appear
empirically yet are liberated from the burden of the empirical, which is the
obligation of duration; they are a sign from heaven yet artifactual, an ominous
warning, a script that flashes up, vanishes, and indeed cannot be read for its
meaning’. Afunctional and ephemeral, like art and fireworks, utopian and dystopian
images are not only the other of the empirical world: just as with Adorno’s
fireworks, ‘everything in them becomes other’ (Adorno, 1997, p. 81).
Yet the image as a visual metaphor to which we could adhere belongs to
representational order even in its non-photographic and not cartographic version,
despite its breaking with the static, the detailed, the repetitive and the reproductive.
Aware of this and anxious to avoid it, Marin, and many utopian theorists who
follow him, connect utopia as a category of the neutral with process in anti-
representational terms and dispense with visual metaphors. My insistence on the
image and its minimum yet indispensable determinacy and my connection of the
pictorial segment of representational order directly with the processual order of
reconsidering and remixing pigments constitute a departure from Marin’s specific
conception of utopian neutralization – a departure that has subtly been introduced
in the third chapter’s discussion of determinacy against formalism and needs here
to be explained and defended.
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Through the prism of his notion of neutralization Marin places utopia in the
realm of the infinite and indeterminate. ‘Utopia is the infinite potentia of historical
figures: it is this infinite dimension, this “work”, this potentia, that the Greek
negation “ou” allows to be understood as a prefix to the name topos. Utopia is the
plural figure of the infinite work of the limit or frontier in history’ (Marin, 1993, p.
12). Likewise, referring to Marin, Jameson argues that to understand utopian
discourse in terms of neutralization is ‘to propose to grasp it as a process, as
energeia, enunciation, productivity, and implicitly or explicitly to repudiate that
more traditional and conventional view of Utopia as sheer representation, as the
“realized” vision of this or that ideal society or social ideal’ (Jameson, 1989, p. 81).
In this way, for both Marin and Jameson who follows him on this, utopian
discourse ceases to be about the realization of a specific vision of society and
becomes a discourse about a process and an energeia (Bann, 1993, p. 2).
Realizability and the double connection to reality (i.e., to the reality that must be
superseded and to the desirable reality that constitutes the concrete content of
utopia meant for future realization) lose out in this prioritization of process and of
formalist indeterminacy.
ANTI-REPRESENTATIONAL, FORMALIST PROCESSUAL UTOPIA
Utopia is, then, attacked in the wake of its end-state and blueprint character. It is
either rejected wholesale or replaced by a process model of utopia that often resorts
to a ‘no-model’, i.e. to a purely formalist conception of utopia. The distinction
between the end-state and the process model of utopia usually takes the form of a
distinction between a systemic organization based on a fair degree of knowing
where one is going and a systemic dynamism that is unsure of its direction. In
Crowley’s words, ‘one traditional mode of “knowing where one is going” is to
have a definition of an ideal future state to be achieved, and a clear map of how to
get there’ (Crowley, 2000, p. 145). Whereas the blueprint certainty has historically
been attributed to the left, the processual denial of all direction or planning of
direction has been associated with capitalism and more recently with globalization.65
‘The ideology of the free market rests on a utopia of process, the process of the
market itself’ (Levitas, 2003b, p.140). Thought through, the anti-representational
stance presents us with a drastic choice between stasis and process, thereby
surreptitiously enhancing capitalism. Is this not yet another entrapment into an
either/or that betrays lack of imagination and recalls the inability of utopianism to
spell out the neutralization of existing alternatives that is implicit in the concept of
utopia (no topos)? Why should one be dependent on a drastic choice that introduces by
the back door a system – now even more recuperated through globalization – that
was meant to be transcended?
Another reason for being sceptical about the anti-representational exaggeration
of formalist, processual and indeterminate utopianism and its jettisoning of the
image is that such utopianism runs the risk of a quasi-mystical incommunicability
and, then, of relativism. The negative implication of the emphasis on processual
and formalist utopianism is that it may lead to a state of incommunicability where
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all the features of a utopian image are withdrawn from public intelligibility and
interrogation. This will be taken up again in sections of the book dealing with the
poststructuralist empty signifier, the famous ethical ‘void’, but, here, suffice it to
say that any disregard of the various competing contents of utopias would not only
damage their motivational force, it would also destroy their justificatory seriousness
leading to an ‘anything goes’ of portrayals of desirable life. The image is not only
preferable over the representation metaphor for the sake of the former’s more
limited dependence on determinacy; it is also preferable over the process or ‘void’
metaphor because of the latter’s indeterminacy and its dangerous proximity to
relativism. That details and determinacy must be cautiously handled and limited to
a handful of constitutive and enabling ideas must in no way lead to the conclusion
that all possible utopian contents do not matter as they reflect supposedly individual
or societal preferences that are irrelevant to the perpetuation of the utopian impetus
as such.
More importantly, image and process, content and form are intertwined and
indissoluble if seen from the perspective of a harmonious interplay of thought and
action. Let us see how the need for some determinacy offered by the description of
some utopian handlings and activities is interestingly asserted and connected with
motion against stasis by Socrates. ‘I should like, before proceeding further, to tell
you how I feel about the State which we have described. I might compare myself to
a person who, on beholding beautiful animals either created by the painter’s art, or,
better still, alive but at rest, is seized with a desire of seeing them in motion or
engaged in some struggle or conflict to which their forms appear suited; this is my
feeling about the State which we have been describing’ (Plato, Timaeus, 19b-c).
There, the skeletal account of the ideal city is likened with a picture, motionless
and lifeless that, in being so, it suspends judgment or it makes it difficult. Curiously,
and perhaps ironically, a processual and formalist utopia reverts to a kind of stasis
because the void it presupposes erases the sort of necessary determinacy of action
that is offered by an image in motion, by a vivid, lifelike ethical picture that
activates judgment. Much against the assumption that a utopia of determinacy and
of some detail is static and erases struggle and conflict, a utopian vision can
critically be explored only when it is detailed enough to appear in motion.
Hence, we must be circumspect when it comes to the glorification of processual
utopias (be it formalist, pragmatist or anti-representationist) for this simple but
important reason. While the picture of the desirable world must be indeterminate
enough so as to avoid authoritarianism and its arresting of time, it must be
determinate enough for committed agents to undertake justificatory responsibility
for it. A further benefit: from the moment we abandon a correspondence theory of
utopian representation, that is a project-like, one-to-one association of the desirable
world and the targeted reality; and from the moment we abandon its extreme
opposite, that is, a process-like formalization of the utopian dream, so as to move
to the inspiring vivid ethical image, the rigid segregation of utopia as fiction and
utopia as practice becomes positively blurred. For it no longer appears that, while
utopian fiction simply constructs entertaining, escapist and arbitrary images for
processual playfulness, theory offers concrete directions for humanity’s anchoring
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in the perfect harbour. Fiction and theory are not levelled but they meet halfway
when both are shown to presuppose the image (and the force of its justification)
however different use they may make of it. Then the normative and directive
elements of both fiction and theory and the motivational significance of such
elements stand out better as a common rather than as a separating feature.
UTOPIANISM AND NARRATIVITY
To better explain the need for some determinacy and for the harmony it bestows
upon fiction and theory, let us turn to narrativity. Its connection to human moti-
vation and to utopian imagery is generally accepted, as narrativity is indeed
favoured in portrayals of alternative worlds. Already in Thomas More’s Utopia, the
ideal city is to be promoted ‘not by the elaboration of arid theory but by the telling
of a story’ (Kumar, 1991, p. 24). The primacy of narrativity is also asserted by
Georges Sorel for whom no heroic activity is possible without myths as imaginary
constructions that inspire human beings to battle against the existing state of affairs
(Cooke, 2006, p. 87; see also Cooke, 2004, p. 414). Sorel’s position relies on a
rigid segregation between theory and narrativity where the former reflects the
sphere of rationality and the latter the sphere of emotions. In this manner,
justification becomes dissociated from motivation. ‘In contrast to rational plans for
social order that [Sorel] associates with utopian thinking, such myths are not
analyzable rationally and must be taken as a whole’ [… T]heir significance lies in
their power ‘to stimulate creative – heroic, socially transformative – activity rather
than in what they achieve in fact’ (Cooke, 2006, p. 88). More strongly, Sorel
elevates the empirical-historical evidence of this assumption to a fundamental
psychological law: ‘we do nothing great without the help of warmly-coloured and
clearly-defined images, which absorb the whole of our attention’ (Sorel, 1975,
p. 21). Yet precisely when seen as a psychological law, this primacy must be treated
with caution, if transferred to the ethico-political level. The image and its motiv-
ational power can fulfil our ethico-political expectations only on the condition that
they are in a harmonious interplay with the justificatory level. The latter is served
by the argumentation that goes hand in hand with the persuasiveness of the image.
In my approach, utopian discourse cannot be exhausted in narrativity. It has to
present a cogent argument in keeping with a standard of scholarly argumentation,
and implication or rhetoric should not be preferred in its place. In other words, to
be worthwhile, vivid ethical images must not only be images but also truly ethical
and this cannot be decided on purely pictorial and narrative modalities, outside
criteriology and action. We must not forget that heroic transcendence is not the
prerogative of ethically acceptable motives but equally of morally repugnant
standpoints. Thus, it is not that any ethical image is a good candidate for action
stimulation; motivation and justification are equally necessary co players in the
drama of worthy and thoroughgoing transformation.
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CHAPTER 6
WHY THE IMAGE IS ETHICAL?
The socio-historical and, consequently, the educational context favour practical-

technological instead of ethico-political aspirations to perfection (Wimmer, 2003,
p. 167). Whereas much futurism revolves around an unhindered flow of
communication (ibid) and a pharmacological (Milner, 2005) or genetic (in fact,
eugenic) ‘enhancement’ of humanity and prolongation of vitality, society recoils in
the idea of political vision. Precisely for this, my interest will not be directed to
technological utopias, cybertopias and the like, but to what is, in my view, most
needed yet largely missing, i.e., a preoccupation with rehabilitated ethical utopian
images.
What kind of ethics is compatible with utopianism now that the moral and
ethical philosophical debates have become so complex? To answer this question
we would need the length of a book. Thus here only some basic parameters of such
a possible answer will be indicated. Usually associated with liberalism, moral
theory focuses on duties and rights. It distances itself from the ethical construed as
a discourse that privileges unity when promoting the common good and a
communitarian ethos. We have already detected the unspoken and repressed utopian
element in standard liberalism. We have also argued in the 5th chapter that even
more recent and mediating versions of liberalism, which are more contextualist and
reconciled with the ethical as a set of questions and answers of the good life, seem
to normalize inequalities. Consequently, whilst the discourse on duties and rights is
indispensable to utopia, it is inadequate to cover the whole ground of ethics and
justice in utopia.
Let us consider an alternative possibility. Communicative utopias rely on a
deontological, cognitivist and formalist communicative ethics that emphasizes the
deliberative process of agreement on moral principles. Those utopias have too
much faith in institutions as such, mostly overlooking the educational-existential
preconditions that are necessary if communicative power is to become institutional
without losing its ethical significance on the way. In simpler words, dead, starved
and uneducated people cannot ‘participate’ in rational deliberation in the same way
as the alive and the contented. In a world of uneven share of power, the ethical
order of agreement presupposes, in my view, the ethical order of treatment which,
in turn, requires specific visions of the common good or an ethic of responsibility.
The latter takes us to the Levinassian face-to-face ethics which seems, however,
to be also, and to an important degree, ill-seated in utopian discourse. It lacks the
direct relevance to politics and to collectivity, not quite for lack of the appropriate
terminology but rather because of a prioritization of ethics over ontology that
places politics in the order of egology tout court (Papastephanou, 2005b). The
incrimination of ontology aside, Badiou’s accusation of contemporary ethics (both
the Levinassian and the liberal variety) of anti-utopian tendencies makes things
clearer. Such ethics ‘confirms the absence of any project, of any emancipatory
politics, or any genuinely collective cause’ (Badiou, 2001, p. 31). ‘Politics is
subordinated to ethics, to the single perspective that really matters in this
conception of things: the sympathetic and indignant judgement of the spectator of
the circumstances’ (Badiou, 2001, p. 9). Anti-utopianism is the predictable conclusion
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of an apolitical morality or ethics. ‘If our only agenda is an ethical engagement

against an Evil we recognize a priori, how are we to envisage any transformation of
the way things are?’ Badiou claims that, in reality, the price paid by ethics for this
obsession with evil ‘is a stodgy conservatism’. Apart from the fact that ‘its found-
ation is either biological (images of victims) or “Western” (the self-satisfaction of
the armed benefactor)’, the standard ethical conception of the human being ‘prohibits
every broad, positive vision of possibilities’ (Badiou, 2001, p. 14). To forbid the
human being to ‘imagine the Good, to devote his collective powers to it, to work
towards the realization of unknown possibilities, to think what might be in terms
that break radically with what is, is quite simply to forbid him humanity as such’
(ibid). No wonder that cosmopolitan concern today signifies, for many, only
‘vogue’ issues such as terrorism, fundamentalism, fractionalism, global warming,
intense religious and political controversy and other similar topics that attract
globalist attention after having acquired the status of fact by becoming perceivable,
actual risks for the Western subject. Virtues and responsibilities, positive duties
toward the world and hope or endeavour to attain the best are out of the agenda as
supposedly too lofty and dangerous ideals.
Thus, the account of ethics we require for a revisited utopianism must not suffer
from such narrowness. It must deal precisely with the good life instead of dealing
with the eradication of the standard evils that place the Western subject conveniently
in the alternate position either of the victim or of the mighty intervening force.
However, as said above, this is not the place for the development of an ethical
theory. Besides, if the rehabilitation of the idea of the common good is to avoid the
authoritarianism of the self-appointed prophet, it must first avoid the temptation to
determine a possible common good. The suggestive and evocative qualities of
utopian literary textuality can serve the indeterminacy that is necessary for the
avoidance of blueprints better than a detailed philosophical argumentation could
ever do.
THE ETHICAL THROUGH HERMANN HESSE’S ‘STRANGE NEWS

FROM ANOTHER STAR’
The pictorial aspect that is necessary for a vivid ethical approximation of the good
society can be enhanced by contrasting an ethical utopian construction with a
dystopian depiction of reality. Criticism of imperfection presupposes a more or less
determinate idea of perfection (Cooke, 2006, p. 166). The significance of this for
education is made very clear by van Heertum’s grounding of the reinvigoration of
pedagogy of hope in both critical and affirmative politics (van Heertum, 2006). A
form of perfection negates a specific form of imperfection or, in Sir Francis
Bacon’s famous dictum, ‘in order for the light to shine so brightly, the darkness
must be present’. Geoghegan employs also the metaphor of light and darkness
precisely in order to illustrate the productive tension that is born when utopia is
contrasted to a critical dystopia. Immersing in some of the gloomiest writing does
not necessarily lead to wallowing in despair but to isolating ‘ways in which
darkness can give way to light’ (Geoghegan, 2003, p. 156).
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Such a productive contrast of utopia and dystopia is present in the earliest

western juxtapositions of utopian and dystopian pictures, i.e., in Homeric and
Hesiodic epic poetry. In Homer’s Iliad, God Hephestus designs the shield of
Achilles by placing contrasted worlds, utopian and dystopian topoi and topicalities,
side by side, thus giving, literally, a God’s eye view of human earthly reality.
Within the bounds of the Ocean, earth comprises topoi of happy daily life of work
in the fields, of songs, wedding ceremonies, etc. But it also includes cities in war,
spaces of mourning and despair. There are not many details, but within such a
chora, there are images of collective joy, on the one hand, and images of misfortune
as well as images of cruelty on the other. Such an over-view exposes the implicit
tension between natural evil having existential effects and human evil resulting
from unnecessary strife. In so doing, it reminds us the value of peace and the
destructive power of war. Looking down from above, the contrast of happiness and
misery and the distinction between misfortune and humanly effected disaster sets
off humanity as the main author of its own existence.
A similar contrast of utopian and dystopian images is found in Hesiod too.
Works and Days proceeds through weaving utopian myth with dystopian portrayal
of Hesiod’s cotemporaneous or anticipated reality. Hesiod’s paradigm of the two
cities of speech-endowed human beings, the one based on dike and the other on
hubris (Naddaf, 2002, p. 351) to which correspond collective happiness and
collective misery, anticipates all future literary utopias and dystopias that have
revolved around the form of the polis and have been contrasted to one another. His
depictions of utopias and dystopias are largely indeterminate and avoid those
details of life that are not connected to ethics and to a just order. Hesiod may not be
as explicit as his modern successors regarding the blueprint of such cities (and I
register this as a merit) but he is clear enough about the relation of their citizens to
knowledge and learning. The citizen of a utopia is one educated for emancipation
and freedom by becoming an independent, reflective mind or, at least, a good
listener of sound advice. The citizen of a dystopia excels neither at reflective
introspection nor at critical receptivity and responsiveness. Messages to her/him
fall on deaf ears. The result of the corresponding citizenships is happiness, peace
and prosperity in the utopian city and destruction, despair and death in the
dystopian city. Not that the utopian citizen is less vulnerable to death or decay than
the dystopian; but it is more the case that harm and destruction in a utopia occur
due to mortality and misfortune, whereas in a dystopia these occur due to human
cruelty and lack of wisdom. Thus, Hesiod places utopian worlds in stark contrast to
lived nightmares for political reasons. The dystopias he expounds have a critical
edge, so as to show that a life without justice (even the life of an achiever and of a
successful social member), a world where ethics and politics based on the cognitive
transformation of the self are absent, is an unbearable dead-end.
Hermann Hesse’s short story ‘Strange News from Another Star’ (1976) is
canvassed in like manner, contrasting a lived nightmare, for which the human
being is responsible, with a perfect society of ethical humanity. What Hesse’s short
story shares with the Homeric and the Hesiodic corresponding narratives is: the
contrast of utopia and dystopia that activates textual mechanisms of correction and
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direction; the limited determinacy of the corresponding representations; and the

implicit distinction between cruelty and misfortune. Interestingly, the Golden Age
escapist individualism of perfection and security with which ancient myths are
usually charged was more present in modern accounts of utopia rather than in the
Hesiodic, the Homeric or the one of Hesse’s short story. Both, the Hesiodic – Homeric
and the Hesse utopias in question, without being purely formal conceptions of
utopia have adequately blurred the defining lines of the world they sketch so as to
leave open all other variations of characteristics of a just and largely happy order.
But, while I place the utopias found in Homer, Hesiod and Hesse together regarding
such themes, here I shall focus on Hesse’s story precisely because, being a modern
utopian story, its departure from modernity’s priorities on crucial points is striking.
It is emblematic of the operation of undercurrents in modernity that constitute
counterfactual possibilities, i.e. intellectual contents and forces that had not been
taken up. This does not mean that Hesse’s short story does not suffer at all from
weaknesses associated with modernity. Before explaining how I deal with its modern
ideological entrapments, let me briefly introduce the main points of the story.
In Hesse’s short story, a dystopia and a utopia are contrasted as two distinct and
parallel worlds. Written in 1919, this is a story about a utopian province of a star
that suffers great loss in human life because of an earthquake. The custom demands
that the dead be decorated with flowers, but most gardens were also destroyed. The
people of the utopia send an adolescent to the King of the star to inform him and
ask for help. On the way to the King, the messenger is accidentally diverted to
another star, where he encounters destruction, misery and the amassed bodies of
killed soldiers and civilians. The adolescent, who was accustomed to destruction
due to misfortune but not to destruction due to cruelty, was shocked by a situation
that he only knew from stories. Hence, he meets the King of this dystopia and talks
about the meaninglessness of war and antagonism. He thus delivers a different
message from the one assigned to him and to a different recipient from the one
initially imagined. He then leaves, and, after the dystopian interval, he accomplishes
his mission through a second act of message delivery (this time according to the
initial plan) and returns home. There, after a while, the visit to the dystopia seems
more like a nightmare rather than a fact.
To justify the preoccupation with this story, despite the fact that, as previously
mentioned, it does bear some questionable ideological marks of modernity such as
the dated romanticist undertones of organicism, moralism, wholeness and unity,
and the gendered emphasis on the male characters, I shall draw briefly from
Jameson who deploys the arguments which permit us to approach some utopian
constructions somewhat eclectically.
In his most recent book, Archaeologies of the Future, Jameson (2005) distinguishes
between ‘Utopian science’ and ‘Utopian ideology’. He first analyses Coleridge’s
distinction between ‘Imagination’ and ‘Fancy’, the former made more relevant to
the architectural, overall project of utopian change and its shaping power and the
latter to the specificity of decorative elements of utopian detail. Then, Jameson
filters Coleridgean imagination through a Freudian perspective so as to make it
designate an objective effort that meets the expectations of the public. The same
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operation effects an association of fancy with the rhetorical detail that expresses or
projects in the utopian work the dimension of the writer as a private dreamer.
Jameson pushes these distinctions further to make them correspond with the
Marxian opposition between science and ideology in order to transfer those
distinctions from the individual to the collective level that is so crucial to utopia
(2005, pp. 42–49). Following Althusser, he then argues that a utopian work can be
both science and ideology at once. To register the relevance of these categories to
utopian literature, Jameson compares the readerly reactions to moments of utopian
ideology in the utopian text with the responses to moments of utopian science in
the very same text. Barely perceptible movements of irritation or annoyance
‘are aroused by this or that detail of the Utopian scheme, by momentary
withdrawals of credibility and trust, by punctual exasperation that can only
too easily be turned against the writer in the form of contempt or amusement.
Paradoxically, these are not the reactions one brings to the principal
proposals and as it were the very scaffolding of the Utopian plan itself (2005,
p. 49).
Transferred to the short story, this argument would explain that the utopian
ideology related to this or that detail of the narrative construction may not affect
the ‘utopian science’ involved in Hesse’s overall architectonic, that is, the
imagination might be more captivating and stronger than the fancy involved in
Hesse’s story.
This of course remains to be justified by reference to points where Hesse departs
from modern ideology. Before doing just this, a further argument for giving
Hesse’s story this exemplary role and for bypassing the ideological elements of
19th and early 20th century literature concerns the treatment of utopia as a heuristic
device that allows us such eclecticism. Utopias are treated as heuristic by Raymond
Williams when they encourage us to rehabilitate undercurrents in contemporary
thought that have been blocked by dominant trends (see, Halpin in 2001b, p. 310).
In this way, utopia as a heuristic mechanism becomes an estranging device
marking out the problems of the present and strengthening reflection (Halpin,
2001a, p. 115). After all, so long as it is not accomplished, utopia must be seen as
‘a heuristic or educational device for perfectibility, an epistemological model, a
figura veritatis and not an ontological reality’ (Fischer, 1993, p. 17). This means
that its ‘reality’ does not impose on us the restrictions that a depiction of an
ontological reality would require. In other words, we can, legitimately, be critical
and selective in a different sense from the one in which we are, wrongly, critical
and selective regarding, say, a historical event.
Thus, when we approach Hesse’s story heuristically and not didactically, and
when we transcribe Jameson’s enabling distinction between imagination and fancy
into philosophical hermeneutics, we find elements that illustrate the content of
utopia as a specific conception of the good that voices the non-fashionable or
neglected undercurrents of modernity. First and foremost, Hesse’s utopia is not
detailed and determinate in the manner that modernity dictated. It has been noted
that the specification of the utopian content requires some indeterminacy in order
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to give human finitude its due but also some determinacy in order to motivate
critique and action. Contrary to the modern assertion that ‘the utopian writer is
under an obligation to present a fully developed and detailed picture of the happy
world that is expected to result from the application of particular principles’
(Kumar, 2003, p. 70), the strength of Hesse’s metaphors and images comes
precisely from the lack of detail.
The utopia that Hesse depicts is indeterminate in many respects. First, although
it is a post-Enlightenment short story, it does not draw on the resources of the
times, namely, science, technology and a specified, possible global order. Unlike
other utopian fantasies, it is not about a land of plenty. Its idea of perfection does
not conjure a condition of complete sufficiency, a capitalist dream of all material
deficiencies belonging to the past. Unlike Hesse’s futuristic utopian Bildungsroman,
The Glass Bead Game, which is marked by the modernist dream of a universal
language (Peters and Humes, 2003, p. 429), this short story is not about an
educational utopia. It concentrates exclusively on ethics and not on sophistication
or on intellectual, aesthetic and technological perfection. Yet, it acquires an
exceptional educational relevance, since, within it, utopia is symbolized by the
child, this young messenger that encountered the dystopia.
Second, and in relation to the above, the merits of its utopia are ethical and the
suffering in its dystopia is not subtle, e.g., the unpredicted ramification of an
inhuman perfection, as in Lyotard’s Megalopolis in his Postmodern Fables (1997).
On the contrary, it is obvious and ordinary: the usual trials of humanity such as
war, antagonism and destruction. What marks the difference between the utopian
and the dystopian world is not the absence of evil in the former unlike in the latter,
but, rather, the fact that the evil that is present in the former is existential, whereas
that of the latter is ethical. In truth, one needs the existence of evil as misfortune in
order to show the qualities of the utopian self, the ways in which the utopian
citizen responds to the vagaries of life, and this is precisely what happens in
Hesse’s short story. The blemishes Hesse consciously allows to crop up in his
perfect society concern misfortune (existential plane), not cruelty (ethical plane),
and, in this way, they cannot be described as signs of ethico-political imperfection
but rather as instances that make ethico-political feat stand out.
Third, time is connected in the story with pure possibility, not with any
necessity, but the co-temporality of the contrasted utopia and dystopia intensifies
the feeling of obsolescence of utopia as much as a teleological utopia would do,
without carrying, however, the ideological baggage of the understanding of time
that operates in modern travel utopia. To explain: there is no predictive or planning
emphasis in the story, no teleological linearity, no set date for the landing to the
utopian space, but rather a comparative relational sense of historical improvement.
The utopian space is a symbol of a higher level humanity, one that has overcome
the past in which other spaces (otherwise co-temporal) live. Whilst in other utopian
narratives the travellers sleep their way to the perfect world which is set in a distant
future [e.g. the hero of Mercier’s L’ An 2440 awakens after a sleep of 732 years
(Mazlish, 2003, p. 51) and Edward Bellamy’s (1986) Julian West in Looking
Backward awakens after more than a century of sleep]; or in some other narratives
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utopian and dystopian worlds are separated by a temporal gap, in Hesse’s story, the
concurrence of the two worlds is another originality for modern utopia, reminiscent
of the first, heterotopian depiction of contrasted worlds: the shield of Achilles in
Homer. In this way, dystopian space is not just surpassed, it is not just a stirring
memory of humanity’s unhappy childhood; it is, rather, a prolonged past, a
protracted and re-enacted past, an uncanny entrapment into repetition.
Louis Marin’s study of the semiology of utopia would be helpful here. Utopias
begin with a travel, a departure, a journey mostly by sea, interrupted by something
[e.g. a storm, or a sublime way of opening a neutral space, one which is absolutely
different (1993, p. 14)]. In Hesse’s story we have conformity to this pattern, to
some extent, and, to another extent, we have a very interesting reversal. The neutral
place is already there, since utopia is the narrative starting point; and the space that
is opened by the sublime, evental interruption (the meteoric, cosmic accident) of
the smooth course of everydayness is the historically surpassed and forgotten
dystopian land. In conformity to the genre convention, to the ideology of travel that
‘implies a departure from a place and a return to the same place’, Hesse’s traveller
sets out from utopia, finds himself in dystopia, and leaves dystopia to find himself
again in his place of origin. But, whereas in the established travel semiology ‘the
traveller enriches this place with a whole booty of knowledge and experience by
means of which he states, in this coming back to the “sameness”, his own
consistency, his identity as a subject’ (Marin, 1993, p. 14), in utopian travels the
ideological circle is opened up, i.e. the new knowledge is valuable and undoes the
dominant identity and ideology. In yet another interesting reversal, however,
Hesse’s protagonist does not gain a model of life from his travel because what he
had encountered was precisely the ideology that his utopian home had overcome.
The reversal goes even further to its logical conclusion: the child-traveller-symbol
of utopia delivers the experience of the existing nightmare to its rightful place, that
is, to oblivion.
Reminiscent of Arcadia,66 Hesse’s utopia is not about eternal life but about a
special way of viewing mortality and the lived experience of the distinction
between existential and ethical evil, misfortune and cruelty. Like in Hesiod’s
utopia, where mortals die peacefully, the citizens of Hesse’s utopia do not fear
death greatly. Most people approach it ‘willingly and happily, but never would
anyone dare to kill another’. To this, the King of dystopia responds that killing is
also considered the worst of crimes in his world, although it is not rare among
them. But he explains that reconciliation with death in the battle is not easy. ‘If you
look into the faces of our dead, you will see. They die hard, they die hard and
unreconciled’ (Hesse, 1976, p. 57). Unlike communicative utopias, in Hesse’s
utopia, what matters is not how the citizens talk with, or about, each other or how
they reach decisions and set laws; what is rather highlighted is how they treat each
other. Reminiscent of Adorno’s statement in Minima Moralia that ‘there is
tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that no-one shall go hungry any more’ (cf
Levitas, 2004a, p. 613), Hesse’s story is premised on a salient ethic of mutual help,
disinterestedness and avoidance of harm.
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Thus, the utopia that inspires Hesse’s story is not an abstract metaphysical idea
of all-round human perfection up to the transcendence of death, but rather ‘the
inner-worldly product of the realization that human beings can do something to
relieve misery on this earth’ (Turner, 2003, p. 32). In other words, it is a utopia of
political perfection through human/ethical perfectibility. It does not negate the
conditions of finitude that make the citizens of the utopian world recognizable
human beings and not subjects of another ontological order, Gods, for instance.
They appear so only to those who commit themselves to a particular onto-
anthropology that treats competitiveness and egoism as constitutive elements of
human finitude and not as historically contingent impediments to the good. It is
precisely to the members of dystopia that an ‘other-oriented’ being appears inhuman
and, conversely, that to be human goes hand in hand with being self-absorbed.
Not only the utopian citizen but also the sincere activist or the committed
reformer of an existing unsatisfactory, unjust and flawed collective life would be
treated as a radical Other by the ‘realist’ anti-utopian advocate of the existing
order. This takes us to the misrecognition of the utopian thinker on the part of the
citizen of a dystopia as either a deluded hysterical, in Lacanian terms – and here
one would only need to consider Lacan’s such criticisms of Socrates [see,
Rajchman’s account (1986)] – or as merely a figment of imagination. We may
safely assume that, to the King of the dystopia, the messenger appears more or less
as the impossible figure of Rousseau’s lawgiver. In order to recommend the best
society, the lawgiver ‘would require a superior intelligence who saw all of man’s
passions and experienced none of them, who had no relation to our nature yet knew
it thoroughly, whose happiness was independent of us and who was nevertheless
willing to care for ours’. Reflecting modern exceptionalism, the figure of the
utopian law-giver would be ‘one who, preparing his distant glory in the progress of
times, could work in one century and enjoy the reward in another’. Predictably,
such a figure could be only Other to humanity. ‘It would require gods to give men
laws’ (cf. Lassman, 2003, p. 51). Given such theo-logical treatments of effected or
suggested utopian citizenship, it is not surprising that, when the theo-genic
aspirations of the modern subject receded, revolutionary enthusiasm (derived from
the verbs ‘entheazo’ and ‘enthousiazo’, both composed by the words ‘en’ and ‘theos’,
God, and combined in the root ‘enthous’, which means to ‘be possessed by God’,
‘to have God in me’, to ‘be ecstatic’, οr, in a more transitive sense, to ‘cause
enthusiasm’, to ‘inspire’, to ‘inculcate, breathe, God in the other’) fell back in retreat.
The utopian visitor to the dystopia ponders the possibility that ‘some unique
mischance, some horrid error, prevailed on this star’ (Hesse, 1976, p. 57). The
messenger wonders whether the dystopians whose lives ‘passed like a convulsive
shudder and ended in slaughter’ (p. 58) had any intimation of a better future or
dreamt of gods and he finally asked the King: ‘have you not in your souls an
intimation that you are not doing what is right? Have you not a longing for bright,
serene gods, for understanding, for cheerful leaders and mentors? At night do you
never dream of a different and more beautiful life in which no one wants anything
save for the common good? Where reason and order prevail, where people always
meet one another with cheerfulness and consideration?’ (p. 59). Setting aside the
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primal narcissism of wholeness, the romantic organicist undertones and some

implicit aristocratic intellectualist politics, we may take these questions as
encapsulated in an archquestion: have you not a utopian impulse? The King’s
answer is positive, yet only to be accompanied with a speech act of repression: ‘go
now’, he cried to the messenger, ‘go now and leave us to our wars and our
murders! You have made my heart soft, you have put me in mind of my mother,
enough, enough of this’ (ibid). His promise to the utopian messenger, whom he
calls a ‘beautiful friend from afar’, comes as a return of the repressed: ‘I shall think
of you when blood flows and cities burn, and I will think of the world as a whole
from which even our blindness and our rage and our ruthlessness cannot cut us off’
(p. 60).
The ethical content of utopia and the precondition of all attempts at educational
change, the minimal determinacy required for judging various utopian aspirations,
can be found in the chasm that separates the utopian and the dystopian citizen and
becomes evident from their dialogue. In addressing the ruling elite of dystopia, the
messenger states: ‘a dream of terror, so your life seems to me, and I do not know
whether you are ruled by gods or demons’ (Hesse, 1976, p. 58). The King of the
dystopia appears to me as the negative, the inverted image of the Gramscian
radicalization of the charismatic leadership as organic leadership committed to a
‘liberative’ (Leonardo, 2003, p. 521), i.e., utopian imperative. In being such an
inverted image of the charismatic leader, he is unable even to recognize the
seriousness of a possibility for something other than the existent. To the King of
the dystopia who took his lived reality for granted as unchangeable and ‘natural’,
the child (messenger and symbol of utopia) seemed a paradox: in many ways this
stranger ‘seemed a cultivated, mature, and incredibly enlightened spirit, but in
others like a small child whom one must spare and not take quite seriously’ (Hesse,
1976, p. 58). When adulthood concretizes the unimaginability of something better
as a sign of adaptation to, and unreflective immersion in, the existent, childhood is
equated with an immature, unrealistic albeit charming authenticity that is forever
repressed, never to be taken seriously.
The opposite holds for Hesse, for whom childhood concretizes a new promise
and a new impetus of imagination, as well as for the utopians of the story, for who
childhood symbolizes effortless persuasion by the force of the image. ‘Whom shall
we send to the King?’ they wonder. ‘He must be young and vigorous for the
journey is long […]. However, he must also be handsome and pure of heart and
bright of eye so that the King’s heart will be unable to resist him. He need not say
much, but his eyes must know how to speak. No doubt the best thing would be to
send a child’ (Hesse, 1976, pp. 48–9). Echoing a Platonic unity of ethics, noesis
and aesthetics and chiming with Virgil’s idea that ‘virtue is more attractive or
seductive when encountered in a beautiful body’ (Gratior est pulchro veniens de
corpore virtus), the choice of the messenger rests on the belief in the possibility of
a reconciliation of modes of existence, of the mind with the body, and of persuasion
by proof with persuasion by seduction.
The subtext of the story suggests that the King of the utopian star acts as the
inhabitants of the utopian province predicted. But, what is significant is that the
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one who remains unmoved by the combination of wisdom, beauty and goodness
and is able to resist it is the King of the dystopia in which the child was diverted.
As Calvino helped us illustrate in the 3rd chapter, in the dystopia of the living, the
response to the evental is not guaranteed. On the contrary, it needs to be cultivated.
One has to seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno,
are not inferno.
EDUCATION AND ECSTASY
Education as the plasticity of humanity is at the heart of any vision for change.
Jameson argues that programming (and the Skinnerian terminology here is justified
by his discussion of Skinner’s Walden Two) may be seen as the very essence of
childhood pedagogy and formation. ‘The theme of reprogramming (or deprogra
ming) is a neglected feature of Utopias that repress the problems of their transition
or emergence, just as it is an essential feature of any Cultural Revolution, which
must substitute new habits for those of the past and the old order’ (Jameson, 2005,
p. 50). Rather than being repressed, the question of the ‘route or the date of the
landing’ must be theorized and debated away from any teleological solace. Cultiv-
ation places education centre stage not only regarding utopian citizenship but also
regarding any defence of critical imagination. ‘The reflexive paradoxes of re-
programming’, which ‘are common to revolutions and Utopias alike’ and concern
the fact that ‘the educators must themselves be educated or reeducated’ (Jameson,
2005, p. 50), make education (understood as a democratic, inclusive process) a
universal call. The term ‘universal’ here does not reflect the ‘no child left behind
rationale’ that suffers from abjection (Popkewitz, 2008) and perpetuates the assump-
tion of those who set the pace and those who hurry, or are pressed, to catch up.
Utopianist education should be universal in the sense of assuming no privileged
subject of effecting change, no law-giver and no specific redemptive collectiveness
(such as a soteriological, revolutionary group).
For, what is missing in much educational theory and practice, as we saw in the
chapter on the 2000 curriculum, is ‘ecstasy’ (Turner, 2003, p. 41) in a non-
individualist and non-sectarian sense, and a glimpse of life as it might be for all. If
in a depiction of a dystopian reality, in Oleanna, students desire most to ‘get on in
the world’, then, the proper space of utopia is the education of desire. Desire in a
dystopia is oriented to success and presupposes that only the other be changed or
reprogrammed. The professor expects Carol to write a good essay through last
minute teaching and, then, to withdraw her complaint, while Carol expects John to
give her a mark and, then, to withdraw his book. Just as in Oleanna change is
expected only from the other, likewise, in the 2000 curriculum, change concerns
only those others that remain unspoken in it, since the society it addresses seems to
require no alterations. Perhaps, for the 2000 curriculum, only fundamentalists or
partisans of some sort seem to be the subjects whose desires must be changed or
‘de-programmed’. In like manner, personal change is absent in Oleanna, either
because its protagonists, like the despondent King of Hesse’s dystopia, have no
faith in its possibility or because they see themselves as in need of no change. In
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the latter case, change is recommendable to the radical others who will either
change or be eliminated. The Oleanna characters see each other as such radical
others: initially, for the professor, Carol seems more like a child who must not be
left behind, and, possibly, like an abject and potentially dangerous figure, and
Carol tries her best to confirm and realize his fears. Then again, to her, the
professor is the threatening masculine figure of a fetishized power, the possessor of
a feared and hated but much needed knowledge that opens ways to success and
control through the acquisition of symbolic capital, i.e. the university degree.
Amongst others, as Cooke notes, Sorel offered us the insight that ‘human beings
are creators, fulfilled only when they are creative, and unfulfilled when they
passively receive or drift unresistingly with the current’ (Cooke, 2006, p. 88).
Equally inhabitants of Hesse’s dystopia and citizens of (post)modern dystopian
reality, the Oleanna people are unfulfilled because they ultimately lack creativity
and, first and foremost, they lack the creative impetus and the means to change, to
shape their selves into what a critical imagination might allow. For, being a site of
promise, the pliability of humanity places utopia at the heart of education. In the
absence of such promise Oleanna becomes an educational dystopia. However, the
presence of such promise would presuppose that the Western subject, the one
educated at some point in life but also aspiring to a lifelong learning, is not just a
subject of knowledge, or a subject of action but it must be seen as a subject of
desire too. ‘This is not the same as “a moral education” towards a given end: it is
rather, to open a way to aspiration, to “teach desire to desire, to desire better, to
desire more, and above all to desire in a different way”‘ (Thompson, in Levitas,
2003a, p. 7). In alliance with a morality of obligation and rights, yet beyond it,
ethics signifies, ultimately, libidinal investment in eudaimonia as public happiness
and ecstatic engagement with the possible. Perhaps the enterprise of education to
cultivate an ‘uncompromising marvellous otherness’ (Geoghegan, 2003, p. 156)
will be set on course, only if or when humanity realizes that the ultimate secret of
seduction is a vision that transcends the mundane.
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CHAPTER 7
UTOPIA AND REALITY
We have seen that Louis Marin associates utopia with infinity, process and
indeterminacy and distinguishes it from ideology understood as utopia’s degener-
ation and as the fall into the circle of repetition and stasis. On this, and despite the
overall originality of his connection of utopia with neutralization, Marin reproduces
a well-worn tendency within utopianism to contrast utopia and ideology or to
remedy the ills of ideology by the merits of utopia and vice versa. Instead of
following this convention, we have opted to contrast utopia with dystopia and to
spell out the benefits of their productive tension. We may further focus on, and
explore, their distinct relation to reality. Such an approach diverges from the
common practice to employ ideology as a counterweight to, or an inverted image
of, utopia.
In the educational-philosophical context, Tyson Lewis has already argued against
the tendency to frame most educational philosophical discussions of utopia in
relation to ideology (2007, p. 1). Lewis goes beyond this tendency by turning to
power and examining the notions of biopower and biopolitics. My interest in the
ethico-political category and in the image directs me, however, in the path of the
juxtaposition of utopia to a redefinition of dystopia (as specified in previous
chapters). The pictorial aspect that is necessary for a vivid ethical approximation of
the good society can be enhanced by contrasting an ethical utopian construction
with a dystopian depiction of reality. This shift in perspective neither rules out
associations with the standard contrast of utopia and ideology nor precludes fresh
associations of utopia and power such as those by Lewis. What it effects, or so I
hope, is a strengthening of the motivational level and an enrichment of the
justificatory level of political thought by placing side by side the pinpointed
grotesque of the unreflective acceptance of social currency and the beautiful and
sublime nature of human potentiality. To better justify this move, I would like to
comment on the received practice of contrasting utopia and ideology and to explain
my departure from it as a step that makes the critical relation of utopia to reality
stand out more clearly.
UTOPIA, IDEOLOGY AND REALITY
First, let us briefly review some instances of the association of utopia and ideology.
For orthodox Marxism, utopia is subsumed under ideology and contrasted to the
scientific character of Marxist socialism (Ricoeur, 1997, p. 23; Buber, 1985,
pp. 40–200). By contrast, when discussing the Marxian dipole of ideology and
science, Louis Althusser detects much utopianism in the idea of an anticipated non-
ideological society, imagined as a state of affairs in which science would eliminate
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CHAPTER 7
any system of symbolic representation. For Althusser, such an idea would not only
be utopian but it would also be ideological itself (Leonardo, 2003, pp. 508–11).
In another juncture, the first and second generations of Frankfurt School Critical
Theory subscribe to a version of critical Marxism that combines utopia and
ideology in a relation where the former promotes a vision of a better world that
unmasks the regressive and faulty commitments of the latter (Gardiner, 2006). If it
were possible to realize utopia, such a development would presuppose so radical a
critique of ideology that society would overcome ideology or, at least, the kind of
ideology that was produced by the unresolved contradictions and distortions of that
specific society.
But the orthodox Marxist identification of utopia and ideology has, famously
and more drastically, been broken by Karl Mannheim, who rescues the notion of
utopia from the charge of ideology by placing it in a different relation to reality.
Both are distortions of reality as it is but, while ideology is past oriented and
impossible, utopia is future oriented and realizable (Mannheim, 1960).67 The other
major thinker who adhered to the Marxist tradition but renewed it regarding the
concept of utopia, of which he maintained a positive outlook throughout his work,
was Ernst Bloch (1986). He had, at some point, discussed utopia alongside with
ideology too. Yet, unlike Mannheim, who historically connected the role of utopia
and ideology (as two distinct forms of reality transcendence) with the emergence of
modernity, Bloch saw ‘a “utopian surplus” in ideology which carries the “not-yet”
of human potential’ (Geoghegan, 2004, p. 123) in a transhistorical manner. For
Bloch, as Geoghegan explains, ‘ideology and utopia grow out of the same soil, and
interpenetrate in the conceptions of an age’. Amidst the ideological, however,
‘Bloch posits a “utopian surplus” – the gold-bearing seams of hope and promise.
He thus looks at historical ideologies with the eyes of gold prospector, distinguishing,
for example, within eighteenth-century liberalism, the ideological dimensions of
the “bourgeois” from the utopian dimensions of the “citizen” (Geoghegan, 2004, p.
128). Amongst others, van Heertum has shown the significance of studying those
utopian traces for an affirmative politics and a critical pedagogy (van Heertum, 2006,
p. 46).
The tendency to place ideology and utopia alongside is much wider. Following
Clifford Geertz, Ricoeur connects human action with meaning ascription and with
the symbolic functions pertaining to social life; he then equates the set of symbolic
structures of a community with ideology (Ricoeur, 1997, pp. 335ff).68 In order to
offer a legitimacy that is beyond its true capacity, ideology is prone to distort
reality. The counterweight to this distorting possibility is ideology’s complementary
pole: utopia. Utopia exposes ideology’s ‘credibility gap’ (Dauenhauer, 1989,
p. 29). Within the Ricoeurian framework, when ideology is confronted with utopia,
utopia ‘subjects the socio-political status quo to a critique located in a “nowhere”‘
(Dauenhauer, 1989, p. 30).
Mannheim’s, Bloch’s and Ricoeur’s positions offer the best-known and influential
treatments of the constellation of utopia, ideology and their relation to reality. They
depart significantly from the standard Marxist approach and better serve the
purposes of this section as stated above.
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UTOPIA AND REALITY
KARL MANNHEIM AND ERNST BLOCH
Mannheim approaches the above constellation through the presupposition that

‘thought should contain neither less nor more than the reality in whose medium it
operates’ (Mannheim 1960, p. 87; also quoted by Geoghegan, 2004, p. 126).
Ideological thought exerts its representational power over reality by silencing
whatever is not supportive of its basic claims and of the interests it serves. In so
doing, it communicates too little. By contrast, utopia foresees what is not yet
available in reality, what belongs perhaps to a future reality, and thus communicates
too much – although it is possible for utopianism to silence certain inconvenient
aspects of reality and thus to function in a communicatively minimalist fashion too
(Turner, 2003, p. 35). Conversely, a thought escapes utopia and ideology only by
knowing reality as it now is. All else displays an incongruence with reality and
belongs to the category of distorted thought. Why epistemology must be trapped
into this favourable descriptive treatment of the present is not so clear and it
generates more questions than it answers. All Mannheim offers in the direction of
justification is an analogy drawn from the literary style: ‘the true beauty of a sound
literary style consists in expressing precisely that which is intended – in
communicating neither too little nor too much’ (Mannheim, 1960, p. 87; Geoghegan,
2004, p. 126). Such justification appears to Geoghegan, rightly in my view, as lame
and unsatisfactory.
Be that as it may, what matters here and must be kept in mind is that ‘the claim
that ideology and utopia are incongruent with reality entails the epistemological
claim that these two modes of experience are “distortions” of reality’ (Geoghegan,
2004, p. 126). Thus, Mannheim reserves the accurate depiction of reality for the
relatively rare ‘state of mind that has been sociologically fully clarified’ (Mannheim,
1960, p. 175). As I see it, there is a strong echo of the old dichotomy between
explanation and understanding, and, consequently, a positivist privilege of description
(facts) over critique (values), which shows the narrow character epistemology may
often acquire within various sociological perspectives. Those overlook that to
detect societal pathologies – a task that presupposes or entails axiological and
critical accounts of reality and, by implication, imaginary constructions of how
reality might or should be – is ultimately no less a form of understanding and
knowing reality. More than that, can one have an accurate picture of reality when
one fails to employ qualitative terms to convey the axiological gravity of some
‘facts’ that constitute a segment of reality?
With an educational example: can illiteracy be simply stated as a fact without
having its description accompanied with a critical discourse of the why of this
social phenomenon? Conversely, can we arrive at the conclusion that whoever
moves in this critical direction is simply in the grip of ideological/utopian distortions?
Mannheim seems to reach such conclusions in thinking that this is exactly what
happens on most occasions and then he is predictably forced to admit that an ideal
of congruent thought entails the very destruction of ideality. Thus, he is led to a
paradox. For, the overcoming of distortions does not simply lead to the end of
ideology but also to the end of utopia. But, and here is the paradox, the humanizing
overcoming of ideology is also a de-humanizing overcoming of utopia. For
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Mannheim, the loss of ideals and hope ‘would be a disaster for the whole of
humanity’ (Geoghegan, 2004, p. 126). Consequently, utopia appears incongruent
with reality, yet valuable nevertheless, perhaps in the same way in which a
comforting denial, a cherished untruth or a white lie might be useful to somebody.
Utopia, then, is an indispensable, non-circumventible and enabling fiction.
Bloch avoids Mannheim’s paradoxical dilemma ‘that the triumph of analysis in
congruent thinking would rob the world of the hope provided by the lost non-
congruence of the utopian’ (Geoghegan, 2004, p. 129) by drastically modifying the
initial premise of the argument. For Mannheim, as we have seen, here is a rare yet
congruent thought which is sociologically informed; and there is its inverted
image, i.e. ideologies and utopias as modes of distorted thought. For Bloch, this
rigid segregation of spheres of valid representation of reality and the concomitant
relegation of both ideology and utopia in the sphere of distortion is totally un-
convincing. Whilst agreeing with Mannheim about the distortions of ideology,
‘Bloch claims that the truly utopian in its most developed mode is an undistorted
form of thought, embodying both the analytical and the aspirational - docta spes
(educated hope)’ (Geoghegan, 2004, p. 129, emph mine). Predictably, then,
Mannheim and Bloch differ on other crucial issues and in crucial ways. Some of
those issues touch upon the constellation that constitutes our focal point, as set in
the beginning of the section, and have to be addressed.
What is implied above is that Bloch distinguishes between developed and
distorted modes of utopianism. In my view, this already brings justification and
criticality centre stage, because such a distinction within utopianism assumes a
possibility to judge various utopias on grounds of their content and its inherent
plausibility. Mannheim’s distinction is, however, somewhat different. I would
characterize is as ‘external’: the utopian itself is not nuanced but rather uniform
and contrasted to the ideological, thus the criteria for judging the utopian are not
related to its own provisions, i.e., its own contents. Bad utopianism differs from
good utopianism in that the former is eventually proven to have been ideological.
Its unrealizability is detected in hindsight and cannot be decided on grounds of
immanent, internal critique of the ideal construction itself. To distinguish between
utopia and ideology Mannheim introduces a ‘realizability criterion’ (Turner, 2003,
p. 34). Whereas ideologies have a past-oriented character, as they are antiquated
modes of belief corresponding to surpassed versions of reality, utopias are future-
oriented, since they transcend the existing reality by being in advance of it
(Geoghegan, 2004, p. 124). For Mannheim, ideology is superseded by history,
while utopia is eventually realized.
Therefore, the realizability criterion further involves a retrospective criterion for
deciding which ideas are ideological and which are utopian. The distinction is not
made on grounds of the content of the ideas themselves but on grounds of their
actual, inherently teleological realizability in later times. Ideological sets of beliefs
are destined to obsolescence as the course of history itself transcends them (Turner,
2003, p. 34). In Bloch’s case, however, the distinction between ideology and utopia
does not rely on the divisive line of historical realizability. For him, as Geoghegan
expresses this idea, ‘historical defeat does not invalidate the utopian credentials of
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a particular vision. Indeed some of the greatest human visions have, for Bloch,
been constantly defeated, representing as they do, a fundamental challenge to
existing power relationships. Defeat, therefore, is more likely to be the fate of the
most radical and the most sublime, and not success’. Hence, the distinction
between ideology and utopia is made on internal grounds concerning the ideas and
constructions themselves and ultimately ‘rests on the difference between delusive,
anti-human conceptions, and an authentic humanism’ (Geoghegan, 2004, p. 128).
Bloch’s insight is particularly significant for education now, because, in an era of
performativity and glorification of applicability, many educationists tend to forget
that a demanding goal-setting is more difficult to achieve than the mediocre and
safe, yet the former should be considered more preferable and worth striving for
than the latter.
Unlike Mannheim, Bloch believes that the validity of utopian ideas is not
absolutely determined by their temporality, and this places utopia in a different
relation to temporalized reality, keeping away both the prioritization of the
epistemological congruence with the reality of the present and the historicist
privilege of a futurist criteriology. As Geoghegan explains, for Bloch ‘history is a
storehouse of utopian moments, and therefore, the archaic can still have a utopian
charge in the contemporary world’. Without being less sensitive to bogus and
reactionary uses of the past than Mannheim, Bloch does not share Mannheim’s
conclusion ‘that the archaic is merely the discarded material left by the builders of
the house of humanity’ (Geoghegan, 2004, p. 129).
Bloch’s thesis on this point is fundamental for our purposes for two reasons.
First, because the internal, content-oriented criteriology for distinguishing utopian
ideas chimes with our previously stated intentions to avoid some relativist
conclusions lurking when utopias are treated in formalist, anti-representational and
historicist-teleological terms. Accused of relativism by Bloch, Mannheim denies
the characterization, but, as Geoghegan remarks, Mannheim relies heavily indeed
on the court of history in making judgements (2004, p. 127). Second, through
Bloch’s theory, the rehabilitation of those Golden Age utopias whose implicit
political significance has been ignored (as well as of those modern utopias such as
Hesse’s that has been discussed in the previous chapter) is thus better justified.
More deeply, Bloch’s approach is fundamental because it opens a passageway for
considering the relation of ideology and utopia with reality in a fashion that is more
attuned with the less determinate character of our conception of utopia and the
overcoming of the end-state metaphysics. In breaking with Mannheim’s faith in
linearity and in assuming that belonging to the past does not tarnish a utopian idea
automatically as ideological, we reach a theoretical position from which to act as
gold prospectors and revisit older utopias searching for material that might still be
valuable. For Bloch, past utopian traces can be redeemed and gain the recognition
that was denied to them when they first appeared, suppressed as they had been by
other, more victorious narratives or constructions. Thus, the idea of counterfactuality
that we encounter in the second generation of Frankfurt School thinkers is better
couched in the utopian idiom, if we opt for Bloch’s rather than Mannheim’s
connection of utopia to historical time. Interestingly, I think that this is exactly
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what had happened in Bloch’s own utopianism. His was a theory of utopia that
went against widely-held assumptions of his day, i.e., against the orthodox Marxist,
well-known ambivalence regarding utopia and against Mannheim’s influential
teleological historicism – which has hitherto exacerbated the problem of Bloch’s
reception in political theory. This historico-theoretical contre temps did not help
the propagation of Bloch’s ideas and of utopia in general, but things have changed
now. Now Bloch’s approach to utopia, despite the various shortcomings, a listing
of which is beyond the scope of this book (see, Habermas, 1983, pp. 61–77), is in a
better position to influence, and intervene in, utopian studies because of the
postmodern overcoming of the eschatological metaphysics by diverse persuasions,
e.g. by postmodernist trends, neo-pragmatism, post-Marxist critical social theory
either of the Frankfurt kind or of the Heller-Feher kind, and so on and so forth.
UTOPIA, IDEOLOGY AND PAUL RICOEUR
Ricoeur’s theory also goes against the grain regarding Marxist thought on ideology
and utopia, as well as against the liberal lack of theoretical interest in them. It does
so quite drastically by acknowledging a positive function of ideology and utopia as
well as by leaving behind the tendency to present both merely and exclusively as
distortions of reality. In Ricoeur’s approach, the function of distortion covers only
a small corner of the whole surface of social imagination (Ricoeur, 1997, p. 26). In
all systems of legitimacy of authority there is a problem of credibility which makes
room precisely for the emergence of utopian social imagination (Ricoeur, 1997,
p. 37).
Utopia and ideology collaborate in producing integration and identity and
contest each other (Dauenhauer, 1989, p. 32). Being creative and not exclusively
distorting, ideology and utopia cannot be suppressed. Ideological and utopian
functions are constitutive of social imagination and reality: we cannot rid ourselves
of these functions. Furthermore, by contesting each other, the two, ideology and
utopia, can be mutually corrective in solving what some American authors, as
Ricoeur explains, have called ‘Mannheim’s paradox’ (Ricoeur, 1997, p. 26), i.e., if
all discourse is ideological, then how can a discourse (in Mannheim’s case, Marxist
discourse) escape ideology? It cannot and does not need to escape ideology as
such, answers Ricoeur, but it can escape the rigid and even ossifying side-effects of
ideology by means of utopia, i.e., in Ricoeur’s conception, by means of the total
rupture between the present and the proposed future (Ricoeur, 1997, pp. 406–411;
Dauenhauer, 1989, p. 27). In Dauenhauer’s phrasing, ‘at its deepest and best level,
ideology’s function is to establish and maintain the identity of a group. Utopia’s
best function is to explore possible alternatives to what is admittedly actually the
case’ (Dauenhauer, 1989, p. 31).
Utopia offers the perspective of the nowhere which permits us to take a
reflective distance from the cultural system (Ricoeur, 1997, p. 37). Nevertheless, in
Ricoeur’s approach, no escape into a discourse divested of distortion and fantasy is
possible. In this way, the epistemological incongruence with reality remains intact
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and utopia is regarded positively only when seen as function, i.e., when its social
operations are in question. Not only dystopian operations are left out; but also
utopia itself is divested of any serious epistemological claims that would make its
contents defensible in terms of desirable realizability (understood post-meta-
physically as non-teleological) and legitimate possibility. It is no accident that, in
Ricoeur’s prose, the terms ‘chimeric, folly’ etc (Ricoeur, 1997) often accompany
and concretize utopia. Just as in Mannheim, in Ricoeur too, utopia is ultimately an
indispensable, non-circumventible and enabling fiction.
In discussing Ricoeur, we confront some problems of Mannheim’s thought
again. Through the Mannheimian elevation of realizability to the primary criterion
of utopia’s distinction from ideology, the utopian relation to reality is not
epistemological but rather teleological and sociological. Utopia does not know or
depict the current reality adequately; in more general and abstract terms, it is
epistemologically incongruent with reality. Yet, some utopias anticipate something
that will eventually be realized and are proven to engulf a potential future
congruence with the reality to come; it is then that they serve path-breaking
sociological operations. The teleological, Messianic, undertones of utopia as
preparation for the eventual anchoring of humanity in the right port are hard to
miss. Of course, Ricoeur does not share Mannheim’s teleological utopianism but
he does share much of what is elemental in Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge.
We may extrapolate that, for Ricoeur too, the relation of utopia to reality retains
the standpoint of epistemological discrepancy, and the sociological coupling of
utopia and reality still revolves around the social function of fictive imagination, as
both, utopia and ideology are useful to stave off social fragmentation.
The accurate utopian understanding and depiction of reality (i.e., an emphatically
epistemological relation of a critical Ought to a consolidated Is) is not just
unspoken in the Mannheimian theoretical universe (and in that of followers). It is
radically absent and even unwanted in utopias. ‘In the utopian mentality the
collective unconscious guided by wishful representation and the will to action
hides certain aspects of reality. It turns its back on everything which would shake
its belief or paralyse its desire to change things’ (Mannheim, cf Turner, 2003,
p. 35). In this way, Mannheim accommodates self-deception in utopia as much as
in ideology and so does Ricoeur to the extent that he also overemphasizes the
fictive qua non-epistemological relation of utopia to reality. Such a theoretical
commitment might be sociologically useful for explaining the social-psychological
reason why most utopias of the past were so one-sided and self-indulgent in their
detailed account of the good life, but it is very unsatisfactory in its supposed
approximation of what is constitutive of utopian thought irrespective of its various
historical exemplifications. We may revisit all conceptualizations of utopia that had
relied on such an assumption. A true utopia does not need to hide any aspect of
reality that could be knowable and analyzable.
On the contrary, if utopia in its pictorial, mimetic dimension is to resemble true
art, it must have a better, more accomplished epistemological relation to reality
than the one available to uncritically descriptive accounts of the real. Rather than
hiding certain aspects of reality, utopia’s truth redeems the neglected, the coerced
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and suppressed elements of reality that are put down by totality, by the ‘police’, as
Ranciere (1999) would term it. In Adorno’s terms, totality is favoured by an
identitary logic that affirms the existent and celebrates a kind of rationality that is
inimical to the particular. Mimesis, on the other hand, is the openness to the non-
thematized, the recuperation of the excluded. Like the artist of the highest rank, to
paraphrase Adorno (1997, p. 9), the utopian of the highest rank combines ‘the
sharpest sense of reality with estrangement from reality’.
Estrangement from the existing reality is crucial because the latter exercises a
sort of ontological power over human existence. That is, the real in its current
version becomes naturalized and presents itself as an inescapable ontological
constant, shaping any actual or possible existential situation and limiting any
alternative human choice. To give an example: from the empirical observation that
there have always been wars, one may move to an ontological conclusion that the
kind of antagonism that leads to war is a permanent and insuperable feature of the
human condition. So, the hitherto inauspicious record of humanity on wars grounds
an anticipation of a likely future and ridicules the irenic, ethical cosmopolitanism
as chimeric and childish. Such is, for instance, the fundamental presupposition of
the political theory that is known as realism (Lu, 2000, p. 247). Against this, in the
most developed and refined utopian and dystopian thought, the finest epistemo-
logical relation to reality (e.g. the fullest possible awareness of what determines
conflicts and the sharpest acknowledgement of historical empirical data on wars)
must be accompanied with a discontent and a rejection of existing reality’s onto-
existential grip. In other words, it must be accompanied with a rejection of the
naturalistic fallacy that is involved in the political-realist prediction about war that
is based on determining the Ought in virtue of the Is and of its ethico-political
repercussions (e.g. the affirmation of unethical Realpolitik).
Via another route, then, we have again arrived at a previously stated conclusion.
Not all utopias concretize hope for change in the same way; thus, what the
Mannheimian framework fails to accommodate is precisely what Bloch’s approach
achieves. The latter is able to distinguish between the utopias which truly merit the
name and which are not self-deceptive in the above stated sense of ignoring
theoretically ‘inconvenient’ realities, on the one hand, and the utopias which fail
most tests of criticality (the test of depicting reality accurately notwithstanding), on
the other.
UTOPIA, REALITY AND EPISTEMOLOGY
Most theorists, especially those who draw heavily from Mannheim on this point,
Ricoeur among them, conflate the various ways by which ideology and utopia
represent what is not real. As I see it, what they conflate is the epistemological and
ontological-social way of relating to reality. In the case of ideology, the real that is
missing is indeed epistemological. Ideological thought entertains a distorted image
of reality, where a surplus of truth is glossed over, bypassed and excluded. Hence it
represents something that is not quite real: the nationalist re-enactment of the most
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favourable part of the realities of one’s collective past while conveniently silencing
whatever is not flattering to the social imaginary is a well-known example of such
ideological thinking and of its faulty epistemological relation to reality.
However, in the case of utopia, the incongruence with reality is ontological and
social. Utopias tend to avoid the ontological claims of the dominant features of a
current social reality. Let us take an educational example of the rationalizations
involved in current reality and its interpretation, which a utopia might challenge.
Much neglect of the learning needs of large numbers of students is due to the
implicit, hegemonic assumption that, for some, the barriers to learning are
insuperable because they are ontological barriers, i.e., they are owed to supposedly
inherently limited capacities, to lack of gift and to inadequate innate intelligence. A
fact of reality, in this case, low performance, which could be attributed to all sorts
of contingent and modifiable factors, is thus naturalized and elevated to an
ontological constant in a way that ultimately exculpates existing practices and
realities. We shall always have large numbers of learning ‘failures’, so the
rationalizing argument goes, not because we do something wrong as a social and
educational system but because this is the (supposedly) inevitable reality of human
genetic diversity. This anti-utopian naturalism involves biopower as its simple next
step. By contrast, a utopian stance to low performance would shed epistemological
light on those bypassed contingent causes of the phenomenon that are obscured by
the self-exculpating ideology of the ostensibly inherent inability to learn that
supposedly characterizes all those numbers of students who fail to meet the
standards. Of course, a utopian stance would also question the ontologization qua
naturalization of the standards themselves that often occurs in education. Such a
utopian stance would be guided by a more encompassing and inclusive ideal of
learning that contests the elevation of the current social reality to an inescapable
ontological condition humaine. More generally, true utopianism tries to know
reality better than those theories which uncritically affirm the real could ever do. In
undertaking such an effort, utopianism goes against the ontological and social self-
understanding of the established reality that functions as a petty excuse for
reproducing rather than transforming the existent.
Therefore, the missing epistemological link to reality concerns ideology and
ideological utopianism exclusively. What must remain methodologically separate
and in no way conflated are: on the one hand, the epistemological failure to grasp
the existent multidimensionally that characterizes ideological thought; and, on the
other hand, the ontological and social rejection of the existent that is performed
when utopia declares the current ‘real’ unsatisfactory. And I emphasize the word
‘methodologically’ because I do not imply that the separation of ideology and true
utopia is so rigid that there is nothing ideological about the latter or that utopia is
an infallible and non-revisable interpretation of reality. I am referring exclusively
to their corresponding methods of approaching reality and to our methodology of
discerning and spelling out their different directions. With a final example: in the
past, the then utopians of the abolition of slavery knew well that the paltry excuses
for slavery’s social currency that proclaimed slavery an inescapable ontological
constant (supposedly, due to the natural makeup of some people) was simply
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wrong. It was a blatant rationalization of self-serving habit. Already in Greek

antiquity (Keyt, 1996, 129), some argued for the abolition of slavery strongly
enough to cause Aristotle’s response and his infamous defence of slavery in
Politics. We know from that text that Aristotle felt obliged to respond to some who
‘maintain that it is contrary to nature to be a master [over slaves]. For [they argue]
it is [only] by law that one man is a slave and another free; by nature there is no
difference. Hence it is not just; for it rests on force’ (cf. Keyt, ibid). Aristotle did
not specify those thinkers to whom he responded but we know from other sources
that this impressive argument against slavery can be attributed with certainty at
least to the sophist Alcidamas and the poet Philemon. Thus very many centuries
before the arguments against slavery or against the colonial racialization of the
subaltern as fierce, lazy and brutal children naturally inferior to their colonial
masters (Cole, 2004), undercurrents of ancient thought offered insights that had not
been taken up. In his Messenian Oration supporting the liberation of the Spartan
helots in 370 BC, Alcidamas had said that ‘no man is a slave by nature’ (Dawson,
1992, p. 136) or, in Keyt’s more detailed rendering ‘God left all men free; nature
has made no one a slave’ (Keyt, 1996, p. 129). And a fragment from Philemon’s
poetry reads as follows: ‘Even if one be a slave, he has the same flesh;/For by
nature no one was ever born a slave;/But chance enslaved the body’ (cf. Keyt,
1996, p. 140, fn 3).
Theirs was a more accurate depiction of reality than that of their ideological
opponents. That is, they saw that, in reality, there is no inherent, non-social (e.g.
genetic or psycho-metaphysical) explanation and justification of slavery; therefore,
the rule over slaves rests solely on force. And their views were epistemologically
more congruent with reality understood as the truly valid against the conventional
‘wisdom’ of the social current. Their incongruence with reality concerned the
ontological claims of the reality with which they were confronted, that is, with a
reality understood and construed in the terms of social currency. To sum up, both,
ideology and utopia are incongruent with reality, but, in each case, the sense of
reality from which they distance themselves takes a different meaning, and the
angle (epistemological, ontological) from which it is approached differs decisively.
Ideology and utopia relate to reality: the one might be a distortion of reality; the
other at its best presupposes the most accurate depiction of reality and demands a
radical transfiguration of the existing reality. We must not forget that, as Halpin
remarks from an educational point of view, the ‘gap between “reality as it is” and
“reality as one would like it” […] seems to provide the necessary creative tension
that is both a source of institutional hopefulness and a means to transform the
present. To have this effect visions have to be bold, optimistic and ambitious’
(2001b, p. 115). If the high tension between the ideal and the real (Kumar, 1991,
p. 96) is indeed constitutive of utopias, then, contra anti-representationalism,
representation is indispensable to the best kind of utopia, and some determinacy of
content and detail is indispensable, if the various versions of the tension between
the Is and the Ought are to be scrutinized on justificatory grounds.
In fact, Ricoeur empties utopia from content and emphasizes utopia’s function,
just as Habermas, from the perspective of communicative utopia, and Jameson
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from the perspective of post-Marxist utopia do. For all these theorists, in one way
or other, the responsible political or social thinker is distinguished from the
ideologue and the utopian by the former’s refusal to embrace a particular content of
the regulative ideal of the good life. We can better illustrate and critique this by
reference to Ricoeur’s discussion of utopia and religion. Ricoeur brings up the
issue of whether any utopia can be shown to be some sort of secularized religion.
He argues, as Burdett sums up (2003, p. 95), that the spiritual location of a utopia
as a vision of an ideal society may lie between two religions: ‘an institutionalized
religion in decline and a more fundamental religion that remains to be fully
uncovered’. As Burdett rightly remarks, this view chimes with conceptions of
modernity as transferral of the sacred from established religious doctrines to
politics. A paramount case that demonstrates this is ‘Fascism’s ability to infiltrate
the symbolic universe of Roman Catholicism’ (Burdett, 2003, p. 95). The Ricoeurian
insight that connects utopia and religiousness is valuable if seen as a socio-
historical remark. However, I believe, it is highly problematic when taken as a
phenomenological clarification of the supposedly essential conceptual status of any
utopia. Socio-historically, we might expand and generalize the Ricoeurian observation
to hold for most utopias of a palingenetic jingoist character, of forms of irredentism
and of millenarian-like utopias. But Ricoeur’s remark stops being productive when
other kinds or possible conceptions or constructions of utopia are at stake.
Concerning past utopias, it would be indeed too far-fetched, for instance, to
interpret, say, Hesiod’s utopian inspiration as theogenic, i.e., a God-making-of-
humanity, religious vision transferred to the political realm, and there is no reason
to assume that any new utopian conceptions would have to adhere to such
transference any more than the Hesiodic did.
The privilege of utopian form over utopian content and the concomitant
inattention to axiological nuances of various utopian contents ultimately damages
the motivational and justificatory force of utopia. To explain this claim, let us see
how Dauenhauer combines the Ricoeurian discourse on ideology and utopia with a
more explicitly functionalist domestication of utopian energies that may lead to the
enervation of utopia and the self-affirmation of the existent. Following Ricoeur, but
thinking his ideas through to their implications, Dauenhauer suggests that ideology
and utopia be entertained and held hypothetically, not asserted and held categorically.
To embrace an ideology categorically is to deny the necessity or even the
utility of considering alternatives to the present reality. It is to treat the
always contingent present as the necessary. To embrace a utopia categorically
is to deny the connection which utopia must retain to reality if it is to be
senseful. It is to treat the real as though it were devoid of merit and thus to
destroy the rational basis for accepting any contingent actual distribution of
power (Dauenhauer, 1989, p. 36).
The invariable indictment of utopian content seems inevitable if one regards utopia
as either anarchic or tyrannical. For, Ricoeur singles out two principal modes that
utopia has at its disposal in order to de-institutionalize principal human relationships
and formations of power. These modes are anarchy and tyranny (Dauenhauer,
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1989, p. 31). This strengthens the distinction between hypothetical and categorical
endorsement of utopia and, further, it ushers thinkers into a proper theoretical
place: those who endorse a specific content of ideology or utopia are the ideologues
and the utopians; those who simply entertain the appropriate measure of challenge
of the existent are the responsible political and social theorists. At first sight, the
distinction is useful and convincing, especially the part of it that concerns ideology.
But can a utopia inspire and regulate human action when any possible content that
it may take is incriminated (as supposedly oscillating between anarchy and
tyranny) and resisted instead of being endorsed?
Let us now turn to the implications of the distinction between the hypothetical
and the categorical endorsement of utopia for education. Dauenhauer sees those
implications as entirely positive, and predictably so, since he understands political
education in functionalist terms as primarily caring for the social integration of the
young. ‘The practical importance of distinguishing the hypothetical embrace of an
ideological or utopian representation from the categorical embrace of it shows up
clearly in the important symbolic action of political education, the process by
which newcomers are incorporated into a community’ (Dauenhauer, 1989, p. 36).
First, there is no compelling argument why political education should be thus
defined. Integration or incorporation is only one of the possible tasks political
education should undertake. More critical and more transformative tasks can be
more necessary and appropriate with regard to certain societies and the definitions
of the good life that they presuppose. For instance, a society that is technologically
capable of destroying the environment and ethico-politically unable to control the
forces that lead it to destruction needs a political education for urgent redirection,
not for the reproduction that is involved in the idea of integration. Second, the
assumption that utopias oscillate between anarchy and tyranny is too restrictive and
does not do justice to the elasticity of political utopianism. Again, there is no
compelling argument why any utopian content, if endorsed and become part of
political education, will eventually lead to cultivating extreme political tendencies.
Had Dauenhauer and Ricoeur not taken for granted the inescapable oscillation of
utopia between anarchy and tyranny, they would have seen other mediations and
connections of utopianism and political education. Third, the minimization and
attenuation of the appropriate challenge of the existent that occurs through the
distinction between the hypothetical and the categorical embrace of utopia, so
reminiscent of the Rawlsian realist utopia, or the Rortyan pragmatist utopia, blunts
the critical edge of social theory and, further, of political education.
If political education is to be responsible, then both the teacher and the
student must (a) pose alternatives to the actual distributions of power, since
these distributions cannot be definitively legitimated, without at the same
time (b) destroying the possibility of rationally accepting some distribution,
that is, without precipitating anarchy (Dauenhauer, 1989, p. 36).
Again, this conclusion is important and even self-evident. Yet, given the previous
distinction between entertaining and endorsing a utopia, we understand that to pose
alternatives to actual distributions of power is not quite the same as endorsing
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them. ‘Posing’ here seems more like carrying out thought experiments in order to
relativize ideological claims but not necessarily in order to strive for actual change
along the suggestions of the specific thought experiment. If thought along with the
distinction between the responsible social thinker and the utopian (in virtue of the
fact that the latter seems to go further than the relativization of the actual
distributions of power and to suggest no distribution at all), the finishing lines of
the above quotation entail that utopia’s role stops in its negation of the present,
leaving out its possible positive illustration of power distributions that are neither
anarchic nor tyrannical.
Specific and, indeed, limited contents of utopia need to be critically constructed
and endorsed, if utopia is to have any motivational force, to justify and convince
about its whys and to avoid relativist conclusions. For, what makes the difference
is the content of utopias and this is where a formalist rehabilitation of utopia fails
and a phenomenology of the actual social function of utopia becomes inappropriate
to cover the whole set of utopian issues. Maybe all utopias are about a mobilization
of people toward a struggle for a better future, about an anticipation of a good new
society and about a longing for a fresh start. But the meaning of the good and the
new is decisive for discerning which utopian plan expresses a dangerous
secularized religious fervour and which is about a more defensible futurist desire.
To elaborate further, Lewis praises Ricoeur for connecting ideology and utopia
in such a way that they both end up being about legitimation and therefore power,
thus positioning power at the centre of both notions. But he rightly notices that, in
Ricoeur’s approach, power operates within a juridical framework and concerns
regulations and action coordination instead of being about issues of self and body
governmentality pervading social relations (Lewis, 2007, pp. 4–5). My emphasis,
however, is more on criticality rather than on legitimacy. My criticism of Ricoeur
(and Dauenhauer’s reading of the concomitant political education) goes beyond his
omission of biopolitics and centres around: his limiting criticality to the negative
task of uncovering the ideological sedimentation of actuality; and his neglect of the
positive critical force of ideality and of the significance of critically comparing
various motivations and justifications of suggested change. In a way, such theories
attribute singularly to utopia what a critical dystopia and a counter-utopia (either as
a separate construction or as an image implicit in, or presupposed by, utopia) do,
that is, to negate the existent and embody a corrective mode addressed to the status
quo and to unveil the dangerous tendencies within utopian dreams correspondingly.
E.g., the dystopian representation of the existent uncovers as yet non-thematized
modes of power– and domination-regulated human relations, exaggerates them and
prepares the ground for directing human desire to transcendence. But the directive
mode is taken up by utopia, not dystopia as such. It is the utopian construction that
directs to concrete suggestions for alternative conceptions of the good life and
society.69
Thus, again, we encounter the determinacy vs indeterminacy, the form vs content,
the objective vs relativist and the representation vs process themes. Such themes
return like ripples on water surface and accompany the utopianist (dystopian/
utopian/counter-utopian) journey from beginning to (provisional) end. My treatment
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of them has stressed the need for acknowledging the qualified rehabilitation of the
poles (determinacy, content, objective, representation) that are currently overlooked
in the relevant literature. To better explain the aspect of my argument that concerns
how the ideology vs utopia scheme limits utopia to negativity, thus blocking the
suggested rehabilitation, I focus on another influential theory of utopianism and its
relation to reality, that of Fredric Jameson.
UTOPIA, NEGATIVITY AND JAMESON
For Lewis, in considering acceptable only that function of utopia that indirectly
leads the subject to awareness of ideological limits and closure, Jameson is trapped
into the utopia and ideology framework as much as the other thinkers of the dipole
are (Lewis, 2007, p. 3). The very dialectical interdependence that Jameson detects
in utopia and ideology, the fact that ‘every ideology contains a utopian bribe, and
every utopia is always already politically tainted by the ideology of the present’
(Lewis, 2007, p. 4)70 is, as I see it, similar to Ricoeur’s view.
Indeed, in his later work, Jameson writes,
utopia is somehow negative; and […] it is most authentic when we cannot
imagine it. Its function lies not in helping us to imagine a better future but
rather in demonstrating our utter incapacity to imagine such a future – our
imprisonment in a non-utopian present without historicity or futurity – so as
to reveal the ideological closure of the system in which we are somehow
trapped and confined (Jameson, 2004, p. 46; emph mine).
Apart from being defeatist as Jameson himself admits (2004, p. 46), I believe that
this position derives from an unacknowledged and deep-laid Platonist absolutism
that leads to a tacitly liberal enervation of utopia. The metaphor of the
imprisonment in the present and the inability to escape the ideological closure, so
reminiscent of the Platonic cave and its idols, seems to me to be just another way
of stating the Ricoeurian conclusion that utopia should be philosophically accepted,
so to speak, only when it is hypothetically endorsed, that is, when it is liberalized
as a thought experiment that secures awareness that things might be different and
aloofness as to what such a difference might be about.
To a certain extent, Jameson is right that unimaginability of something better is
a sign of our adaptation and unreflective immersion in the existent. This is a truth
known since ancient times, a truth that figures prominently in Plato’s Timaeus, a
work known for its utopian depiction of Atlantis and ancient Athens. There it is
stated that ‘that which is beyond the range of a man’s education he finds hard to
carry out in action, and still harder adequately to represent in language’ (Plato,
Timaeus, 19e). But the difference between these two positions, the Jamesonian one
that reflects the Platonic narrative of the cave and the other that is found in Timaeus,
is that the negativity implicit in Jameson’s coupling of utopian authenticity and
unimaginability removes utopia from public interrogation and intelligibility and
limits it solely to a deconstructive role.
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Yet, even this deconstructive role is an empty letter, since it does nothing other
than to affirm the inescapability of closure. By contrast, that it is hard adequately to
represent in language what one has not been taught is more open-ended than
(post)modern utopian negativity; it is open-ended in, at least, two ways. First, there
is open-endedness in the theoretical and political implications of the idea (implied
by Plato in Timaeus) that unimaginability is a matter of prior education, that is, a
matter of the conditioning effected by a contingent and cultural process of shaping
humanity (ironically, very much unlike the metaphysical conclusions of the other
utopian Platonic work, the Republic). In other words, in Timaeus, if a specific
education makes it difficult to imagine and articulate what is beyond it, then, a
different education might open new possibilities for fresh representations and for
ways out of the specific closure. Second, there is open-endedness owed to the
employment of the phrase ‘hard adequately to represent’ – hard but not impossible.
Such open-endedness is entirely ruled out by the absolutism of Jameson’s phrase
‘utter incapacity to imagine such a future’ in the above quotation.
Now, if unimaginability is taken by Jameson to be inherent in utopia, meaning
that utopia has exclusively the negative function of an empty transcendental
signifier, revealing only inescapability from the circle of ideology, then this view
suffers from the problems of formalism and relativism that we have encountered
above. It also suffers from the conventionalism that we encounter in some post-
structuralist conceptions of utopia, as we shall see later on upon discussing Laclau
and Mouffe. However, in Jameson’s earlier work there is a potential for developing
a more positive role of utopia. According to the Jameson of such an earlier text, ‘a
Marxist negative hermeneutic, a Marxist practice of ideological analysis proper,
must in the practical work of reading and interpretation be exercised simultaneously
with a Marxist positive hermeneutic, or a decipherment of the Utopian impulses of
these same still ideological cultural texts’ (Jameson, 1981, p. 296). To stave off
Mannheimian connotations, as Jameson himself asserts, he offers the following
alternative formulation (to Mannheim’s) in which ‘an instrumental analysis is
coordinated with a collective-associational or communal reading of culture, or in
which a functional method for describing cultural texts is articulated with an
anticipatory one’ (Jameson, 1981, p. 296). The anticipatory method re-appropriates
the collective energies that are stirred by the utopian appeal of ideological
constructions and frees thought from political impotence (p. 298). This does not
entail a real escape from ideological circle: Jameson borrows Walter Benjamin’s
insights so as to argue that the undiminished power of ideological distortion persists
even within the restored utopian meaning of cultural creations, ‘reminding us that
within the symbolic power of art and culture the will to domination perseveres
intact’ (p. 299). Whether all ideological distortion is automatically an assertion of a
supposed will to domination is a very problematic equation the dismantling of
which would presuppose a discussion of ideology and its philosophical treatment
that is far beyond the scope of a book on utopia. But what is important here is that,
although the tension between the desire to escape ideology and the entrapment into
it is already dramatically felt in Jameson’s more explicitly Marxist work, it has not
yet been resolved in favour of the negativity and debilitating unimaginability
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asserted in his latest work. Thus in his recent book, the Archaeologies of the
Future, Jameson writes: ‘the more surely a given utopia asserts its radical
difference from what currently is, to that very degree it becomes, not merely
unrealizable but, what is worse, unimaginable’ (2005, p. xv).
What underlies this connection of radical break and unrealizability as well as
unimaginability is, in my interpretation of Jameson, the loss of faith in any
epistemology that could go hand in hand with the desire of an ontological radical
break with the existent. The idea I formulated above, that, in utopianism, the
sharpest sense of reality should tie with estrangement from reality, would only
presuppose and reintroduce, in Jameson’s eyes, epistemological distinctions with
which he dispenses. The ‘ancient Platonic idealism of the true and false desire, the
true and false pleasure, genuine satisfaction or happiness and the illusory kind […]
at a time when we are more inclined to believe in illusion than in truth in the first
place’ appears expendable. As he writes, he tends ‘to sympathize with this last,
more postmodern, position’ and wishes to avoid ‘a rhetoric which opposes the
reflexive or self-conscious to its unreflexive opposite number’ (2005, p. 4). His
confinement of epistemological distinctions of truth and validity to Platonism, as if
Plato were the only epistemologist ever, or as if the very distinctions Jameson
mentions were not constitutive of the thought of the early, anthropological Marx
who discerned first order and second order needs and desires, is bizarre, to say the
least. If one’s problem is with the rigid demarcation of right and wrong that one
may trace in Plato’s middle and later work and in the concomitant rigid distinctions
between doxa and episteme, and if one does not wish to abandon Plato, there is
always the earlier, more Socratic Plato (e.g. Gorgias) of pistis and episteme
presupposing one another.71 Or, there is the mitigated fallibilist dealing with
validity that we encounter in more recent and postmetaphysical, but less post-
modernist theories of truth; or the option of anti-postmodernist theories of truth(s)
such as that of Badiou (2005a) that leave room for such Platonic distinctions
without committing themselves to the Platonic metaphysics of the One. As we have
already explained, some epistemological distinctions are necessary if we are to
perform a critique of ideology and to avoid relativist conclusions that level all
utopias, make their content irrelevant and weaken utopia motivationally and
justificatory-wise.
Such epistemological distinctions are precluded and the related critique of
ideology jettisoned in an Althusser- and Lacan-inspired poststructuralist connection
of ideology, process, narrativity and the Real. While commenting on the utopian
literary text and its relation to the Real, Jameson urges us to accustom ourselves to
thinking of the narrative text ‘as a process whereby something is done to the Real,
whereby operations are performed on it and it is in one way or another “managed”
[…], or under other circumstances articulated and brought to a heightened
consciousness’ (Jameson, 1989, p. 81). Then the idea of the always textually
mediated relation to reality is pushed to predictably anti-representational conclusions
that cut off any possibility for an epistemological challenge of what counts as reality
and for a decision (carried out on justificatory grounds) about the plausibility of
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ontological renderings of oppositional texts. For Jameson, narrativity and process

lead us
to begin to think of the Real, not as something outside the work, of which the
latter stands as an image or makes a representation, but rather as something
borne within and vehiculated by the text itself, interiorized in its very fabric
in order to provide the stuff and the raw material on which the textual
operation must work (Jameson, 1989, p. 81, emph mine).
That such conclusions lead Jameson, in turn, to a relativism regarding possible
contents of utopia that aspire to escape ideology as a specific class position is
shown by the way he discusses the example of a possible content of utopia: the
fantasy about universal employment (Jameson, 2004, p. 47). He brings it up and
contrasts it to the case of the fantasy about the absence of labour, the ‘right to be
lazy’ and to technological utopias aspiring to the elimination of alienated labour.
Surprisingly, the contrast leads in a very undialectical manner to the relativist
conclusion that both antithetical positions simply affirm their own standpoint and
seem to be mere undecidables. But contents of utopias do not only bear witness to
the fundamental dynamic in the utopian process, as Jameson implies (ibid, p. 48),
and they should not only be contrasted to one another. They can also be debated,
decided, even provisionally superseded, combined, mitigated or abandoned on
grounds of cogency. That they will still be derivative form standpoints, that they
may still reflect commitments of situated human beings of a certain upbringing and
culture does not annul their thematizability and universalizability, that is, their
capacity potentially to inspire and charm, on grounds of plausibility, those who
began from a different standpoint. Once again, at a far more subtle level, we
encounter the distinction between power and domination. When domination has
the upper hand, the conclusion of the dialogue is predictably conditioned on
the ideological force of the hegemonic class; when it becomes a question of power,
the force of the better argument and the spell of the better image make the
discursive struggle politically unpredictable.
When arguing that Jameson’s position on utopia is formalist, it has to be
explained that I do not mean that the Jamesonian negativity [or Žižek’s (1998,
p. 997)] qua utopian unimaginability is identical with that of Adorno’s position,
who rules out any, be it facile or sophisticated, content of utopia. Jameson reserves
a use for the various contents of utopias which is, in my view, double. On the one
hand, the contents of utopias concretize characteristic oppositions that are fed by
temporal and local determinations (e.g. the fantasies of rural or urban perfection,
the hope for global employment or the total transcendence of labour, simplicity vs
abundance). However, this first sight rehabilitation of content is nothing other than
an examination of how its function uncovers the formal properties of utopian
processual dynamism. The set of polar oppositions does not seem to be discussed
in its own right on grounds of plausibility, desirability and epistemological
criteriology regarding which pole draws humanity, indeed, into something better.
On the other hand, various utopian contents preoccupy Jameson’s political thought
as archaeological findings. As Lewis very pertinently describes this Jamesonian
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point, utopia then is ‘the premature memory of the present as the distant past of a
possible future’ (Lewis, 2006, p. 13). ‘Rather than abstain from the question of
utopian content, Jameson argues that it is in the archaeology of ruins and fragments
(no matter how distorted by the present) that flashes of the future are glimpsed’
(Lewis, 2006, p. 14).
True, Jameson does not abstain from the question of utopian content in the sense
of being indifferent to its functions. But this is precisely the point: that the content
of a utopia seems again to have just a use value, as this time it helps Jameson to
rescue some of the old historicist utopian optimism without succumbing to teleology
or messianism. That is, it helps him accommodate concerns of realizability and
utopian predictability. It can be better explained if we place Jameson’s position
between those of Adorno and Marcuse (as Lewis does but for other purposes).
Through Jameson’s archaeology, ‘the future is not simply empty, as in Adorno’s
persistent ban on utopian content, yet nor is there the prophetic certainty of
Marcuse’ (Lewis, 2006, p. 14).72 Jameson does not quite retrieve utopian content as
such but he uses utopian content as a vehicle for retrieving some of the futurist
predictive functions of utopia – in a Mannheimian manner, minus the strict teleology.
The contents of utopias are undecidable in themselves and in their comparison, yet
they ‘serve as a spark of the future, even if that spark is effervescent’ (Lewis, 2006,
p. 14). We may understand this as a socio-historical mode of discussing a content
that limits it to its functional role. It is not an epistemological mode of approaching
the possible and often oppositional contents of various utopias. By contrast, we
may approach the utopian content as important in itself not just in what it formally
facilitates. We may do so regarding the material it offers for contemplation on what
better might mean. When it comes to the socio-historical mode (or the temporal
axis), we may argue that there is nothing in the valid qua desirable and acceptable
content of a utopia that speaks for or against its realizability.
(IM)POSSIBILITY, THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE: EDUCATED FEAR

AND EDUCATED HOPE
A desirable ethico-political utopia, for instance, is not impossible in the onto-

anthropological sense, that is, in the sense of what is humanly possible. But it is
impossible in the socio-historical contextual sense of the here and now, so long
as, in the consciousness of its agents, the current order remains naturalized or
rationalized as inescapable. In such a context, ethico-political utopia is unknowable
because we cannot know when or whether at all this bad faith in its impossibility
will ever be lifted. For nothing guarantees that such utopia’s motivational qualities
will be activated, let alone fulfil their purpose and inspire the consistency and
commitment that is presupposed for the effect of any serious change. In fact, what
would help in that direction is not a militant optimism but rather a militant
pessimism, a political, not an anthropological pessimism – pessimism not
regarding what is humanly possible but what is politically possible in a global
context where any sign, any glimpse of disaster, economic, environmental, ethical,
indeed, any warning falls on deaf ears. Instead of hope, discontent and anxiety
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must take over here, and this is where dystopia enters the picture as the
indispensable and complementary other of utopia. Unlike Jameson, Adorno and
Lewis, who seem to replace hope with anxiety as the emotion of the future, I see
the emotion of the future as necessarily, dialectically and productively split
between fear and hope. On the one hand, there is the anxiety caused by the
awareness of a dystopian present. On the other hand, there is the hope generated by
the awareness that people as utopian thinkers might have that what is humanly
possible extends far beyond what the dystopian citizen can imagine.
What is also evident from this is that the possibility of utopia should not be
regarded as so much depending on contingent socio-economico-political conditions
but rather on more lasting and pre-sketched educational reforming effects. To give
an example, unlike some Frankfurt School thinkers who conditioned the
imminence of utopian realization on the crises of capitalism and its possible failure
to recover from a period of disintegration,73 I believe that any such reorientation
might be doomed to fail, without the preparatory role of a different education. It
would be caught up in a circle of repetition, given the ethico-existential deficits of
the existing societies, if some change of ‘heart’, cognitive redirection and ethical
transvaluation does not first take place to prepare the ground for systemic and
institutional change. Societal and educational redirection are intersecting and
mutually reinforcing conditions of utopianism, as each misfires when disconnected
from the other.
The jettisoning of the critique of ideology encountered in the later Jameson
would cause discomfort when transferred to an educational context where change
and social redirection should be cherished and prioritized against blatant or subtle
affirmations of the real. Thus, even when Lewis stresses the need for a shift in
perspective, i.e., a turn from ideology and utopia to a power and utopia frame, the
critique of ideological interest is not given up. Yet, it is rather subordinated to a
claim of reshuffled power and rendered secondary. Lewis defends a ‘form of
utopianism that no longer rests solely on the critique of ideological interests but
also and more fundamentally on the restructuring of power relations’ (Lewis, 2007,
p. 11, emph mine). However, in my approach, such restructuring needs a
redirection of the dominant priorities and thus presupposes a critique of ideological
interest as a fundamental, inaugural act, if restructuring is to be neither a mere
reversal of power nor a mere substitution of power structures leaving things intact.
And this is precisely where my position simultaneously comes closer while parting
company from Lewis’s. I also believe that the ideology and utopia frame should
not be held as all-encompassing, yet I argue that the necessary critical element that
would justify hope and faith in new forms or distributions of power can be found in
the dystopia and utopia interplay, and not in a head-on treatment of re-channelling
power via utopia.
To tackle Lewis’s suggestion to turn to biopolitics and utopia as a focal point
that frees us from the theoretical constraints of the ideology vs utopia frame of
thought, I would like to discuss its ultimate conclusion: that the emphasis on
process along with the dispersal of power should become central to a renewed
Deweyan utopian pragmatism. Manifest in the idea of the global public as the
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multitude, process and dispersal of power are educationally embodied and served
by the Deweyan emphasis on the teacher as a guiding factor against the traditional
teacher as an enforcing factor of sovereign control.
Let us consider the following quotation from Lewis’s text and the Deweyan
phrase that Lewis selects to include in this short passage.
For Dewey, the role of the teacher is not to master or control but rather to
guide a process tied to student experience. Dewey writes that the teacher
assists by cooperating with the “natural capacities of the individuals guided”
(Lewis, 2007, p. 13).
Before it, Lewis has argued against the biopower involved in the performative
control that is centrally organized. Yet, how radical is, indeed, the break of the
above quotation with biopower? Is the assumption of the pedagogical cooperation
with the natural capacities not a transformation of political power into biopower
conditioned on a discourse that: assumes natural capacities as a recognizable and
appraisable reality, a biological datum; and legitimizes the political implications of
such an assumption? The identity of the individual is tacitly, partly though
importantly, defined above through the supposed natural capacities, which usually
evoke a system of biological propositions that enables the exercise of biopower as
political power over the masses. It is biopower not just because it is all inclusive
(notice the plural of ‘capacities’ and of ‘individuals’ in the quotation) but also
because it addresses the productivity of life. Thought through, guidance and
assistance in cooperation with the naturally given produce outcomes and social
benefits such as a meritocratic distribution of social and professional roles.
Thus, while the decentering of the teacher in the above quotation points to an
apparently progressive dispersal of power, the educational functionalization and
valorization of the supposedly natural capacities of the individuals opens space for
performing taxonomical operations of sifting which part of the population can
progress and which is ‘naturally’ lagging behind (or beyond educational help). The
assumption that capacities are natural amounts to giving them the force of an
inevitable biological law and, then, to naturalizing the identity of those who failed
in the learning process as well as to lending to learning failure the strength of
natural necessity. This reveals the danger of a deep conservatism threatening all
theories that believe that politics is a matter of simple decentralization of control
and dispersal of power, where criteria for judging a process and unveiling its secret
ideological complicities are secondary to the supposedly unpredictable and
revitalizing force of the process itself. In that case, do we not need a centralized
and directed transvaluation, so as to undo the prejudice of the natural and its social
force, to overcome the ultimate and deepest biopower which lingers, usually
unobserved or unspoken, in the global toleration of hunger and deprivation for
some? One wonders whether such realities would be so tolerable on the part of the
Western self (i.e., of those who can collectively do more to alleviate the effects of
such realities), if, deep down, the Western subject did not think that the
unhappiness of the suffering others were deserved.74 Suffering others do not merit
attention, so the rationale goes, because they are, supposedly, responsible for their
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condition, either de to their supposed natural inferiority or due to their supposed

social backwardness and lack of enlightenment, i.e., their self-inflicted immaturity
for which they are themselves exclusively responsible.
Consider further those supposed natural capacities of the individuals with which
the Deweyan teacher cooperates, and the positivist materialism reflected in
the speculations behind them. Are such capacities pre-given, shaped prior to
socialization, as the term ‘natural’ connotes? How are they determined? What
gives the teacher the ‘capacity’ to discern them and work with them and what gives
the teacher the power to safely do so, avoiding misrecognition? Is that, in turn, a
natural capacity or, perhaps, a skill [that is, a consciously controlled, systematically
and educationally proceduralized mental activity that extends normal capabilities
for performing a task – and all that shrouded in a (pseudo)scientific aura that
renders the implicit racism invisible]? Does the teacher have the ‘natural
capacities’ of the individuals in front of her (in the face-to-face relation with the
student) unmediated by cultural capital, social position and existential situation,
identifications, mass culture, parental expectations, cultivated desire and playful
interest?
This is not to say that the teacher as an enforcing factor of sovereign decision or
performative control is a preferable option to the teacher as a guiding factor. It is
rather a problematization of the assumption that performative control is overcome
just by reshuffling power without any prior critical reflection on, and challenge of,
dominant and deep-laid conceptions of the self, the human and the non-human
world. I believe that it is precisely because of his awareness of this that Lewis uses
the comparative ‘more fundamentally’ when he prioritizes the redistribution of
power over the critique of ideological interest instead of exclusively and absolutely
asserting the former. He sees the dangers of ruling out or relativizing the critique of
ideology and grants it space albeit a limited and secondary one. What would
correspond to it is, as I interpret an earlier relevant text of his, the notion of
cognitive mapping and cognitive estrangement that he has very appropriately
connected to pedagogy (Lewis, 2006, p. 15).75 These terms seem to me to be
similar76 to my understanding of what I stated in previous sections as cognitive
transformation and estrangement from reality. And he seems to me very right in
suspecting that Jameson, especially in his latest work, does not think that cognitive
mapping and utopia ‘meet at all’ (Jameson, 2006 p. 15). Yet, where my approach
differs from his is on the secondary role that is attributed to such critical operations
in the citation with which we began to discuss Lewis’s position and which,
perhaps, explains the lack of any theorization of dystopia’s critical significance for
education (of course, not exclusively in Lewis’s theory but in all philosophy of
education).
My questioning of the over-reliance on power reshuffling at the expense of
criticality is also a problematization of the pragmatist tendency to ascribe
potentialities of a metaphysical calibre to the desire for democracy. Such
potentialities of changing the world as if by a magic wand are often, largely and
arbitrarily, attributed to decentralization, dissent and mobility without any ethico-
political qualifications. The metaphysicalization of democratic process underpins
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the oft-encountered assumption of globalized utopian optimism that all it takes for
democracy to materialize is the decision to embrace the overcoming of modern
political configurations (e.g. the nation state). And this would be not for the sake of
revitalized and ethicized overarching political formations of international right (e.g.
a reorganized and ethically accountable UN) but for the ability to plunge into the
depths of the ‘dystopian-utopia’ of the Empire. Underlying it is the idea that the
process itself suffices to effect change, without any explanatory accurate detection
of the societal symptoms, any criteriology or radical ethical, cognitive and emotive
transformation.
My questioning of the expectations from democracy is not a questioning of the
political value of democracy as such or of its appropriateness for the shaping of
political environments in which freedom, criticality and autonomy flourish. It is
even less a concession to any anti-democratic and conservative tendencies toward a
centralized ethics and politics of control. The idea is, rather, that we must not
expect exclusively from the utopia of democracy the merits of utopias that are
compatible with, and complementary to it, yet different enough so as to deal with
sets of problems beyond democracy. For, it might be true that the ailments of
democracy are cured with more democracy - as Dewey famously stated. But not all
ailments are ailments of democracy. Epistemological problems of true and false
cultivated desire and other such issues that Jameson and the poststructuralist trend
so easily dismiss haunt the democratic process for a very simple reason. The
valuable political right to express one’s view is a precondition for the existence and
flourishing of epistemological debate; but the political right to air a view does not
make the view as such valid, acceptable, convincing, pernicious, insidious, lame
etc. One must not expect from the political to go beyond its province and deliver
the goods that other spheres such as the epistemological should deliver. But even
within the political sphere, we notice that simply to air one’s views does not
amount to those views acquiring institutional power and shaping global policies. A
sad reminder of this is the 2003 demonstrations in global cities (and in,
unfortunately, less noticed localities) against the Iraq war, the failure of decision
makers to take them seriously and the despondency or even abdication that such a
fact caused to most global publics, to the effect that the later disclosures of the Abu
Graib and Guantanamo situation did not lead to large scale global mobilisation.
CRITICAL EPISTEMOLOGY AND ITS DEMANDS ON THE PUBLIC
A critical epistemology is necessary in utopian discourse if we are to avoid the

danger of the bad utopianism that lurks when the utopian construction or its
theoretical underpinnings fail ‘to offer reasons that its addressees can find
affectively and intellectually compelling’ (Cooke, 2006, p. 162). I believe that a
healthy utopianism would work both ways: it would offer such reasons indeed; but
it would also prepare educationally the subjects for a more reflective and critical
preoccupation with the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of their finding something affectively and
intellectually compelling. Thus I consider the ethical, cognitive and emotive
transformation as more urgent than any attempt at restructuring power relations.
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For, after all, rather than being a point of divergence among utopias (or purported
utopias), the restructuring of power relations is an ambition that all utopias share.
What marks their difference regarding the validity of their claims to desirability,
however, are, in my view, the demands they raise on the self and the force of their
portrayals of the good. Both must be approached via critique and public interrogation.
This can better be shown by the following example. In Sargent’s words, ‘George
W. Bush is as much a utopian as the Taliban and other Islamic extremists’ (Sargent,
2006, p. 12). The markers of utopia, so to speak, that I have set above, i.e., self-
critique and the content of the suggested change, are better suited to distinguish
utopian from non-utopian restructuring of power relations than the simple
assumption that any conception of a different world is automatically utopian could
do. Bush’s New World Order and fundamentalism do indeed envision a restructuring
of power relations. However, such first-sight ‘utopians’ deploy their ‘utopianism’
only regarding others, those they want to change. But true utopia is self-directed as
specified above and does not aspire to change primarily or exclusively the other.
Through it one (the subject or the collective will) aspires to change one’s own
society, one’s immediate lifeworld that she finds wanting. One does not consider
one’s own society an accomplished utopia that only needs to be expanded and
imposed on others. To treat your world as the best possible, a further change of
which would make it only worse, is typical of anti-utopianism rather than of
utopianism. Thus, I would rephrase Sargent’s statement as follows: ‘George W.
Bush is as much an anti-utopian or crypto-utopian as the Taliban and other Islamic
extremists’. Instead of utopianist, their discourses and visions are merely expansionist.
Fundamentalists of various kinds are more anti-utopians or crypto-utopians than
utopians in the sense that their exclusivist utopias, i.e., their demands that all others
be changed except for themselves, take it for granted that the familiar is already the
good.
Hence the question I put is this. In the case of western utopia (that concerns me
from the western philosophical standpoint), what are the demands raised on the
western public? Is it just to transcend existing power relations and move to a
restructuring of global relations? What are the western citizens asked to transcend
that they have not already to a significant extent transcended (e.g. the nation-state)
or they had not already transcended when, as citizens of empires, they moved about
unobstructed, for reasons of profit? What does Western thought and philosophy
expect from the Western citizen? Lumping everybody together and placing them
into the category of the multitude may transcend some operations of the nation-
state (by now a small feat) but it does not transcend the internal borders, the
hierarchization of interests and human needs that generates the specific biopower
of existing social and global relations.
I believe that this gives a new meaning and a new philosophical justification to
the Marxist demand [renewed by Nancy Fraser (cf. Cooke, 2006, p. 190)] on the
utopian social critic to supply the missing explanatory link of the causality of social
pathology and the suggested transformation. For Marx, a case of bad utopianism is
instantiated ‘when a utopian theory fails to identify the real causes of the social
evils it describes’ (Cooke, 2006, p. 162). Cooke takes issue with this position and
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argues that the causes of social evils are not a fruitful focus of enquiry for
contemporary critical theories (ibid). She is right to point out the authoritarian and
positivist undertones of the 19th century explanatory plane and its reliance on the
process of history as the guarantee of validity. ‘Rather than attempting to explain
the normative deficits of a particular social order as the result of key features of
that social order, contemporary critical social theory might be better advised to
endeavour to describe the various complex ways in which dominating power is
distributed and reproduced in the social order in question’ (Cooke, 2006, p. 207).
Yet there is something important that is missing when the explanatory perspective
is declared inadvisable. True, grand explanations are no longer appropriate, but
explanations need not be grand. Precisely if the normative plane of utopian
constructions as regulative ideals is not to slide into dogmatism, it has to take
seriously into consideration the explanatory plane – minus, of course, the historicist
descriptive ground. For, the simple description of ways in which power is distributed
reveals too little, perhaps next to nothing, regarding the caused harm and injustice
or the desirability of alternative distributions, thereby rendering the suggestion of a
direction toward such an alternative distribution a matter of preference. Arbitrary
preference, i.e. a preference that is not grounded in an account of how the
distributions to be replaced have caused unacceptable injustice lacks epistemological
justification and it ends up being dogmatically asserted. The awareness of the
causality of harm is important for pragmatic, ethical and anthropological reasons,
i.e., for obtaining the appropriate focus on what has to change, for avoiding self-
exculpating treatments of western agency and for keeping away the anthropological
excuses that rationalize failures to change. When such reasons are not seriously
taken into account, the new distributions of power run the risk of becoming just
new variations on oft-rehearsed and by now well-worn old themes.
The paradox of utopia is that it is about ideals of a collective and systemic
radical change that has to go through individual radical change and education of
desire, if it is to avoid the eternal repetition of some of the faults of previous end-
state utopian constructions such as the excessive faith in newly formed institutions,
in the introduced reforms themselves and in processes freshly set in motion.
Utopias do not just have alternative distributions of power; they also have citizens.
The citizen of a utopia differs from a citizen of an already established regime,
amongst other things, in a way that invites a further comment. As a subject who
merits the name of a utopian, the citizen must have undergone some cognitive
transformation, part of which is a different understanding of the human self and the
self’s relation to the other (humans and nature).
This is often obscured by the fact that, in most past utopias, the demand for a
transformed self derived from a psychologistic detection of the supposed root of all
evil (e.g. greed) in the anthropological makeup and it then involved an
institutionalized repression ostensibly banishing all evil and sanitizing social life.
Jameson discusses such ideas very pertinently and contrasts them to the Marxist
perspective which ‘does not include a concept of human nature; it is not essentialist
or psychological; it does not posit fundamental drives, passions or sins like
acquisitiveness, the lust for power, greed or pride’ (Jameson, 2004, p. 37). This is
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UTOPIA AND REALITY
truly so for Marx, especially for the early, anthropological Marx who questions the
entrenched idea that people desire profit, property and control over others (thus he
considers such an account of desire faulty presupposing, very much unlike
postmodernism, that we can discern right and wrong conceptions of human desire).
And it is true that he employs no other essentialism than the minimal one of needs
fundamental to one’s being alive. Therefore, for Marx there is no question of
repressing or fundamentally changing the self in an alternative social configuration.
All that is needed is structural change and socio-political rearrangement. However,
this leads to passing tout court to changes that do not presuppose the educational
reorientation of the self, since it is assumed that if there is a well-intended or
appropriate reshuffling of power, the people’s response will automatically be
adaptive. But we must take notice of the fact that, unlike Marx, the contemporary
world still holds either essentialist views about the human self (determining, that is,
individually and collectively one’s self-image) or existentialist views of socially
constructed greed that, because of the anti-epistemological concessions to con-
ventionalism, they converge with the essentialist conclusions about the self. For,
what Jameson and others bypass (or seem to totally forget in moving gradually to
their relativist conclusions) is the political effect of relativism as such, i.e., of the
idea that nothing can shake conventionalism, as there is no epistemological
springboard for questioning what is socially current. The effect of both essentialism
and the relativism that leaves the currency of conventional views of the self
unchallenged is a kind of subjective political inertia that corrodes all structural
change. When people believe that the human self – their selves – will always be
profit-seeking and antagonistic (either due to an essentialist natural condition or
due to a social determinist construction of the self), they turn this belief into an
alibi for all sorts of rationalizations which secure that even the newest or more
radical structures will be harnessed to the individual interests of those who either
accidentally or by dint of the new distribution of power will find themselves in a
position to do so. Simply put, either essentialistically or sociologically grounded
and upheld, the self-image of the rational egoist will effect and rationalize
corrosions of even the most radical and bold institutional change. This, further and
predictably, effects a defeatism (compare here the Jamesonian unimaginability of
utopia). Thus, the oscillation between the Marxist faith in new social and political
arrangements and the poststructuralist impossibility-yet-necessity approach to
utopia (seen as process and form) overlooks the possibility and necessity for
changing the human self-understanding. It overlooks also the possibilities such a
change would open for thinking utopia differently. Utopia is not just inclusive of
changes in the institution of education; utopia is (re)education.
Essentialist or existential-conventional, the conception of the self as ineluctably
profit-seeking is (re)productive of the existent even in the most politically daring
utopias. To overcome it and open paths for utopian citizenship, we need, along
with anti-essentialism, epistemological distinctions as well as cognitive, emotive
and ethical transformation along the lines of such distinctions. It is possible to
recast today the discussion of the self in an idiom that breaks with the metaphysical
and moralist psychologism of the vice as well as with the conventionalist surrender
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to social currency. If utopia is about the good life, a good life that nothing in reality
renders impossible, we need to sharpen our critical stance to the existing reality
and our imaginative power before grappling with new distributions of power. To
explain via a reworking of one of Murdoch’s ideas, ‘the realism (ability to perceive
reality) required for goodness is a kind of intellectual ability to perceive what is
true, which is automatically at the same time a suppression of self’ (Murdoch,
1970, p. 44). We may replace suppression with transcendence, not of the self as
such, but of the particular and dominant construction of the self. There is nothing
to be suppressed if human nature is not ethically pre-given and self-love is not
automatically incriminated and judged as unsocial. Thus, true utopia can be judged
on grounds of the demands it raises upon the self and of its content understood as a
rough specification, a minimally determinate image of what counts as a good life
within its purview.
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THE FOUL STAIN OF OUR SPECIES:

ANTI-UTOPIANISM AND ANTHROPOLOGY
We have so far seen that utopia need neither be teleological, detailed and static nor
escapist, empty of content, absolutely processual and uninspiring in its defeatism.
Given the anti-utopian criticisms that have revolved around such charges, we may
liken utopia to a moving target. For instance, Popper’s attack on rationalist utopias
misfires when directed at constructions which do not focus on rationalism, and
Derrida’s or Foucault’s objection that utopia may lead to escapism misfires when
directed at utopias of reconstruction and utopias of pragmatist piecemeal change.
However, much anti-utopianism grounds its attacks in the basic assumption that
utopia is humanly impossible, no matter how realizable its ideas may appear in
theory. Thus, ‘utopia is treated with suspicion as impossible in principle’ and,
consequently, as ‘potentially dangerous and totalitarian in practice’ (Levitas, 2004a,
p. 605). That a perception of humanity is crucial to such a position is shown by the
fact that Isaiah Berlin stresses the totalizing character of utopia in a world of
conflicting worldviews, a character doomed to bring disaster, chaos and suffering
(Turner, 2003, p. 27; Cooke, 2004, p. 414). He does so especially in his book with
the very revealing title The Crooked Timber of Humanity (1991). The nuance that
is often added is that, at best, utopia is an abstract ideal of a potential that concerns
only depressingly few human beings. Hence, Ricoeur, Hayek and Popper (Olssen,
2003) as well as Nagel (Nagel, 1991; Lassman, 2003, p. 49) argue for the
impossibility of utopia for most of humanity.
ESSENTIALIST ANTHROPOLOGIES
We may term this charge, which has had the most influential and lasting impact
upon theory, ‘anthropological’. We encounter it in ancient times often expressed as
a stated objection of which the utopian thinker is aware and to which s/he responds
by reducing the objection to a side effect of utopia’s evocative sublimity. Such is
the reaction of the Stoic Chrysippos who wrote in his On Justice that ‘because of
the eminence of its power and beauty, what we say seems like a fiction, and not a
doctrine that accords with man and man’s nature’ (cf Dawson, 1992, p. 160; emph
mine). Anti-utopian determinations of human nature (that is, determinations that
raise anthropological obstacles to utopia’s imaginative reach) have appeared in
most philosophies which attempted to define the human condition as a taken
for granted, essential quality. But even utopian thought has, to a significant
degree, been determined or influenced by rigid descriptions of humanity. From
Schopenhauer’s ‘description of spontaneous human egoism, and his sense of the
inevitable subordination of our reflective capacities to the powerful promptings of
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the instincts’, down to ‘Badiou’s characterization of the human being as a “mortal

and predatory animal”‘ (Dews, 2006, p. 116), the seemingly anthropological
obstacle to perfectibility is often taken into account by non-utopian and utopian
thinkers alike.
To begin my discussion of the anthropological charge, I tease out the ambivalences
which mark both much contemporary utopian thought and much of anti-utopianism,
and which help us discern the following main versions of anthropological essentialism.
A very influential anthropological essentialism has asserted that human beings
are inherently motivated to act according to the imperatives of survival and self-
preservation. Emblematic of this version is the Hobbesian thesis ‘that naked self-
interest is the sole motivating force in human affairs, and that state authority is
merely the outcome of a contract entered into for the sake of limiting its more
destructive effects’ (Norris, 1991, p. 157). The state of nature is a state of human
equality in the sense that all people would be equally driven by their needs and thus
equally capable of destroying one another. There enters law and contractuality to
strike a compromise between human satisfaction and human safety.
Freud’s theory of civilization is remarkably similar to this Hobbesian idea. For
Freud the pleasure principle would be exercised freely, without inhibition, in a
state of nature. The self in its natural state would be directly and aggressively
pleasure-seeking. But, as this would hold for any self, the outcome would be a
destructive collision of unbridled instinct-driven selves, a war of all against all. To
counter this risk, human beings renounce partly the satisfaction of their instincts
and build up civilization. Not only sexuality, but also aggressiveness is seen by
Freud as exchanged for security. The reality principle makes sure that pleasure is
obtained only indirectly and in diluted form in return for security and self-
preservation. Ethics is then nothing other than the ‘cement’ that keeps together the
subdued, civilized humanity.77 That the Freudian view of the human self has anti-
utopian implications can no better be shown than by reference to Freud himself
who sought to refute communism precisely by resorting to Plautus’ dictum homo
homini lupus (a human is a wolf to another human) which was, evidently not by
accident, Hobbes’ favourite metaphor too. In a text dating back in 1927, ‘Das
Unbehagen und der Cultur’, Freud argues: ‘the human is a wolf to another human:
who would dare to question this phrase given all the experiences of life and of
history?’ To him, ‘the human being is not a tender, loving Essence’ but rather a
being whose natural endowment of drives also comprises a powerful inclination to
aggression (Aggressionsneigung) (Freud, 1990, p. 87). Then Freud proceeds to
criticize communism and its belief that private property cultivates egoism on the
grounds of his above stated anthropological essentialism. He states somewhat
sarcastically that ‘the communists think that they have found the way to the
dissolution of evil’ (ibid, p. 88) by recourse to the overcoming of private property
(wenn man das Privateigentum aufhebt: notice the Hegelian term here) to further
explain that he does not deal with the economic aspect of the argument but that,
from the psychological point of view, he sees this assumption as an ‘unfounded
illusion’ (p. 89). It is rendered an illusion by fact that the human being has the
essential need to externalize not only love but also aggression (p. 90).
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THE FOUL STAIN OF OUR SPECIES: ANTI-UTOPIANISM AND ANTHROPOLOGY
Surely, there have been weaker forms of anthropological essentialist accommod-

ation of aggression than the Hobbesian. Perhaps Freud’s position might be described
as such a weaker version. However, either in its strong or in its more mitigated
forms, anthropological essentialism underpins much anti-utopian criticism of the
play with human potentialities, especially when the latter is directed at ‘aneconomic’
paths. A more mitigated such version of anthropology is the one that involves also
a psychological accommodation of ‘evil’ passions and drives within the self, without
being necessarily led to anti-utopianism. Yet, it does lead to a particular kind of
utopia of repression by law that introduces authoritarianism and control. It is
usually assumed that ancient utopias, to some extent, along with the early modern
ones (e.g. the Renaissance utopias), to a greater extent, are of this kind. But,
surprisingly, the earliest Western political utopia, the Hesiodic, refrains from the
psychologization of politics. Thus, whilst gold for much later utopias (influenced
either by the Herodotian ethnographic ones or by More’s Utopia) is the symbol and
root of all evil by activating greed or lust for power, gold in Hesiod operates as a
symbol of transcendence for a humanity (the golden race) that, unlike animals, is
capable of justice. In a passage that anticipates modern, Humean rejections of
naturalistic fallacies, Hesiod implies that we should not confuse the natural world
with the human world (the Is and the Ought). ‘This is the law that Cronus’ son has
established for human beings: that fish and beasts and winged birds eat one another,
since Justice is not among them; but to human beings he has given Justice, which is
the best by far’ (cf. Papastephanou, 2008a). In any event, unlike the Hesiodian
utopianism, much older utopianism revolved around the moral psychology axis and
assumed a protective and repressive sense of law. It did so for reasons of essentialist
understanding of human nature as impure due to humanity’s disposition to animality
that often goes out of hand and turns survival into temptation to vice.
A third variation of essentialism shares with Freud the belief in the love – hate
dipole, while stating it in clearer political terms. The idea is that human beings are
characterized by an endemic doubleness as they are capable of both, saintly and
heroic altruism up to self-denial as well as extreme hostility to fellow human
beings and servility to egoistic passions. A similar idea is encountered in Kant’s
notion of human unsocial sociability (1992, p. 44, 227, and 321). The relation of
this position to utopia can be as ambivalent as the notion of humanity it engulfs.
The anti-utopian conclusion we may derive from it would assert that because of its
unsocial element, humanity will always stumble on its dark side, despite the efforts
for betterment (which are genuine, of course, as they stem from sociality). The
unsocial sociability thesis is complementary with another Kantian thesis, the one of
radical evil. The latter refers to a universal moral propensity to evil rooted in the
human species. Kant terms this evil ‘radical’ in the sense of ‘rooted-in’, and not in
the sense of ‘extreme’, because he considers it so deeply ingrained in human nature
that, as Paul Formosa puts it, ‘it corrupts our power of choice at its very root. For
Kant the “radical innate evil in human nature (not any the less brought upon us by
ourselves)” comprises our “innate guilt” and is “the foul stain of our species”’
(Formosa, 2007, p. 225). The radical evil thesis aims to explain why sociability
turns unsocial (Formosa, 2007, p. 245) by means of formal proof rather than by
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means of empirical generalization (e.g. the generalization we saw above in Freud’s

view that nobody should dare question that man is a wolf to another man given all
the experiences of life and of history). Hence, the radical evil thesis is deduced by
Kant as a synthetic a priori claim.78
It is important for our understanding of this version of anthropological
accommodation of evil that it does not rely on inductive generalization but uses it
nevertheless to corroborate the formal deductive proof that Kant feels he has given
by reason and not by ‘the multitude of woeful examples that the experience of
human deeds parades before us’ (cf. Formosa, 2007, p. 227). Induction and
deduction collaborate in showing us that phenomena of sociability turning unsocial
are not just contingent manifestations of socio-historically produced evil. Even
when this does not lead to anti-utopian conclusions, e.g. when the emphasis is put
on sociality and on interpreting evil as possible but not necessary (allowing for
saintly exceptions to the rule of standard human frailty), this version makes room
for a repressive sense of law just as the second version does and leaves the
interpretive possibility of radical evil being non-eradicable open.
The tension produced by the inherent ambivalence of unsocial sociability can be
illustrated even by philosophical positions that antedate it, such as that of Spinoza.
We may immediately extrapolate this by briefly discussing Spinoza’s position and
by showing how it both differs from the first version we saw, i.e., the Hobbesian
one, while conceding too much to it. And we shall argue that this is an unproductive
tension.
The Hobbesian state of nature ‘is a chaos of conflicting wills, interests and
desires, a perpetual warfare of all against all which can only be restrained by the
sovereign imposition of state authority and power’. By contrast, Spinoza’s ‘“natural
condition” is a life conducted in free-willed accordance with the dictates of reason,
or in pursuit of common goods – like justice, liberty and truth’ (Norris, 1991,
p. 158). Yet, for Spinoza too, because human nature does not allow people to wish
only what true reason prescribes, ‘no society can exist without government and
force, and hence without laws to control and restrain the unruly appetites of men’
(Spinoza quoted in Norris, 1991, p. 157; emph mine). Whilst, at first sight, Spinoza
seems to break with the Hobbesian account of human nature and the natural
condition, Spinoza also accepts some of Hobbes’s anthropological parlance and
empirical pragmatics for the sake of a realist account of politics (just like many
contemporary theorists do). Thus, between the two positions, the Hobbesian and
the Spinozist there is only a difference in degree. Neither Spinoza nor many modern
and postmodern theorists who might agree with him would accept that naked self-
interest is the sole motivation of humanity (i.e., the Hobbesian thesis described
above as a first version of anthropological essentialism). But they would still grant
self-interest a large motivational role. Thereby, they would not avoid a static
conception of what counts (and how it comes to count) as self-interest. Even in
cases where there is no issue of direct influence, or even in postmodern accounts
that are at first sight dismissive of it, the Hobbesian thesis ‘that naked self-interest
is the sole motivating force in human affairs’ seems to have somehow imbued
much of Western thought. To produce a similar effect, even a more mitigated form
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of this thesis would suffice, one that reformulates it as follows: ‘even if naked self-
interest is not the sole force in human affairs, it is nevertheless an important and
inescapable parameter of human affairs’. The unqualified welcome of this thesis,
owed to the exaggeration of empiricist conclusions about history, leads, by
implication, to the impossibility of true goodness, that is, of the kind of goodness
that is presupposed by a truly ethical utopia of the good society.
Consider Spinoza’s words, as quoted by Norris (1991, p. 157, emph mine): ‘if
human nature were such that men desired nothing but what true reason prescribes,
a society would need no laws whatsoever’. Apart from noticing the repressive and
protective conception of law, we should wonder here whether there is such a thing
as a fixed human nature that delimits what people desire prior to their acculturation.
What kind of philosophical research is most appropriate to, or decisive for, the
question of human nature? In my opinion, before any attempt to reconstruct this
notion, we need first to deconstruct the received view, i.e. the one about the
immutable, fixed and known nature of humanity, down to its ultimate conclusions.
Going only halfway leads to uneasy concessions to the kind of political pessimism
that sees the passage from ethics to politics as always forced and inexorably
externally imposed. Or, it imposes a drastic choice between ethics and politics – as
we may extrapolate from the way in which such a half-hearted break with Hobbes
works in Spinoza’s theory. When asserting that human nature does not allow
people to wish only what true reason prescribes (cf. Norris, 1991, p. 157), and in
some proximity to the larger-scale (post)modern failure to question Hobbesian
essentialism, Spinoza seems to arrest time by unwittingly elevating history- and
context-dependent ideas to the status of unshakable truths. This is all the more
ironic for a thinker who had been cautious: to distinguish between philosophical
research in contingent contents of thought (sub specie durationis) and philosophical
research in what can be held as universal or essential truth (sub specie aeternitatis);
and to avoid the hasty elevation of the former to the status of the latter. Unlike his
usual practice, when the human condition was at stake, he viewed some contents of
thought from a quasi-divine perspective of pure, disinterested knowledge, and not
as revisable conjectures under dominant interpretations of socio-political conditions.
Due to their deceptively intuitive self-evidence, their naïve sense-certainty, those
contents of thought enjoyed hegemony, then as now, and they forced a passage to
some of Hobbes’ empirical pragmatics as a reasonable concession to a realistic
political account.
What is thus effected, both in Spinoza and in more recent cases, is an immurement
in ideological onto-anthropological thought. The notion of ideology can be understood
here as equivalent to Spinoza’s ‘knowledge of imagination’, i.e., ‘the kind of
“natural” or pre-reflective attitude that accepts what is given in a commonsense
way, and finds no reason to question or to criticize the grounds of naïve sense-
certainty’ (Norris, 1991, p. 35). Hence we may reach an immanent critique
(namely, a critique from within Spinoza’s thought) of the Spinozist talk about
the ‘unruly appetites of men’ (that are ostensibly endemic to human nature) and we
may identify it as ideological, since it is unquestioned and taken for granted once
and for all.
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Something similar can be performed (and will be performed as we proceed)

regarding contemporary theories that accommodate essentialisms, despite the anti-
finalist and anti-metaphysical assertions they issue when ideas other than the
human self are at stake. The ontologization of the kind of anthropology that derives
from the intuitive, an intuitive that is constructed point for point through the hitherto
inauspicious record of humanity, is sheer ideology. For, instead of questioning the
time-honoured reliance on how human affairs have so far been and instead of
exploring the counter-intuitive, political thought consolidates the amassed empirical
evidence as an ahistorical anthropological constant that determines futurity. Within
such approaches, for instance, if there have always been wars, then wars will be
breaking out forever and, at best, the only possible constraint would be a repressive
and protective sense of international right. The need to avoid utopian reverie and to
acknowledge realistically the barriers that the translation of ethics into politics
confronts leads many contemporary thinkers, just as it had led Spinoza, to an
unconscious slippage from a diagnosis of undesirable empirical realities to their
onto-anthropological elevation to a human constant. In this way, what should fall
into the category of sub specie durationis philosophical research becomes sub specie
aeternitatis content and the break with Hobbesian ontology is not radical enough.
Tensions such as those noticed in Spinoza can be traced not only in positions that
have later enjoyed hegemony but also in some undercurrents of Western thought
such as essentialist anarchist assumptions about humanity. It is through those that I
shall conclude my brief, first and more descriptive, approximation of the relevance
of anthropology to utopia. Judith Suissa explains that ‘anarchism is often dismissed
as holding an unrealistically “utopian” or “naïve” view of human nature’. Against
this, she shows that, for most of 19th century social anarchists (e.g. Bakunin,
Kropotkin, Proudhon), human nature is twofold ‘involving both an essentially
egotistical potential and a sociable, or altruistic, potential’ (2004, p. 15). Instead of
regarding this as a contextualist view of human nature (although, admittedly, it is
so to the extent that it entails an activation of motivated conduct that varies across
time, space and circumstances), I treat it as an anthropologically essentialist view.
True, it is mitigated by the qualification ‘potential’, but it affirms nevertheless the
location of egotism within the human subject (along with altruism) and, in this
way, it determines human nature as essentially (un)ethically loaded.
Thus, whereas my position on philosophical anthropology is closer to the anarchist
than to any other utopian anthropological thought, it is somewhat different from it.
Egotism or altruism (sociability) are not ‘two opposed instincts’, as Bakunin put it
(cf. Suissa, 2004, p. 15) that are mobilized and surface through context.79 In my
interpretation, contra the anarchist essentialization, egoism and altruism are created
cultural interpretations of what counts as instinct. Furthermore, self-preservation as
an instinct is not by definition identical with, let us say, egoism as its supposed
manifestation. It can take this expression, but egoism is neither an instinct nor an
essential psychological trait. It is rather a socio-linguistically influenced relation of
one to oneself and, more than that, a socially constructed and maintained attitude
that presupposes a particular interpretation of what counts as self-preservation or
self-serving need.
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THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL ANTI-UTOPIAN ARGUMENT
Any version such as the above three by which we began this chapter can be used
as the ultimate justification of anti-utopian positions. However, as the case of the
realist trend in political philosophy proves, it can also be used against any political
ideal branded as utopian (e.g. against the ethical cosmopolitanism that envisions
some change of world politics). In other words, realism ‘utopianizes’ any political
ideal that does not glorify the Is.
Jameson describes the deployment of the anthropological argument against
utopia step by step. First, ‘a politics which wishes to change the system radically
will be designated as utopian’. Then there comes the naturalization of the system, a
naturalization that presupposes and serves a specific ideological commitment:
using utopia as a charge has ‘the right-wing undertone that the system (now grasped
as the free market) is part of human nature’. Therefore, to aspire to eradicate
something natural, i.e., a deep-seated characteristic of humanity, is not only futile,
it is fundamentally violent: ‘any attempt to change [human nature] will be
accompanied by violence’; and ‘efforts to maintain the changes (against human
nature) will require dictatorship’ (Jameson, 2004, p. 35). I would call this widely
held argument an ‘inverted or twisted Aristotelianism’. It is Aristotelian to the
extent that Aristotle used to justify a political measure or form of government,
institution (e.g. slavery) and the like by ultimately appealing to nature. Liberal
political theory is fraught with such recourses to nature when capitalism and its
basic tenets are at stake. However, unlike much liberal political theory, Aristotle
linked the natural with the just. He assumed that everything natural is good and that
the unjust is unnatural. He could thus embrace an ‘anticoercion principle’. ‘Coercion
is not, in Aristotle’s eyes, an essential feature of political rule. It is no more the
function of a ruler to coerce his subjects than it is for a physician to coerce his
patients’. As Keyt remarks, ‘for someone brought up on Thomas Hobbes this idea
can be difficult to grasp’ (Keyt, 1996, p. 139). Indeed, it is no accident that from
early modernity onwards, the Aristotelian connection of nature and justice is by
and large inverted, since now the natural tendency is presented as being towards
injustice, and nature (the unruly appetites of men) becomes the ultimate argument
for a coercive and protective sense of law. Thought through, when politics is at
stake, the inverted Aristotelian recourse to nature often leads to anti-utopianism.
Thomas Nagel has expressed an anti-utopianism of precisely this kind. However
attractive it may be to contemplate, an ideal ‘is utopian if reasonable individuals
cannot be motivated to live by it’ (Nagel, 1991, p. 21, emph mine). It seems that, in
such a universe, an individual is reasonable only when s/he is motivated to live by
the standards that the Western conception of the self has set. Any ideal that shakes
the established priorities appears too lofty. Consider, here, for a moment, Eagleton’s
reaction to Badiou’s incrimination of the everyday: ‘are there really no contradictions
in this quotidian realm? Is there no selflessness, compassion, extraordinary
endurance?’ (Eagleton, 2001, p. 159). We may push further this question and ask:
are the subjects of such selflessness, compassion, and extraordinary endurance not
reasonable individuals? There is textual evidence that quite safely helps us to
imagine that Nagel would concede the existence of such individuals and their
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reasonableness. But he would claim that they are not simply reasonable but rather
exceptional. If they exist and if they display a consistency of action, they are
nevertheless a divergence from common humanity. For him, utopianism describes
a form of collective life that humans, or most humans, could not lead and
could not come to be able to lead through any feasible process of social and
mental development. It may have value as a possibility for a few people, or as
an admirable but unattainable ideal for others. But it cannot be offered as a
general solution to the main question of political theory: How should we live
together in society? (Nagel, 1991, p. 6; emph mine).
Such elitist exceptionalism that sets too modest demands on human beings’ efforts
to live together in society and too limited a task of education as a process of social
and mental development entails that what is attainable by few is not teachable but
rather available to them directly through nature (or, perhaps teachable because of a
corresponding natural but individuated predisposition). For if the exceptional few
were an effect of acculturation processes, that effect would be a manifestation of
the feasibility and attainability of the ideal, not an argument against futile effort.
One wonders whether liberal thought realizes how close it sometimes comes to
‘natural masters and slaves’ rationales, to fascist assumptions about superior and
inferior beings or to those Platonic assumptions of the Republic that had been
usurped and twisted by Nazi supporters such as Günther (for the latter, see Forti,
2006, pp. 16ff). When liberal thought perceives or confronts the danger of its
bordering with fascism, its immediate response would involve, I believe, recourse
to its democratic commitment, the fact that it takes the side of the (supposed)
majority, that is, precisely, that it speaks for the mass and not for the supposed
exception. But the distinction between the few, who are born to attain (whatever
the ideal), and the many, who stand in the shadows and admire them, remains intact.
Apart from the politically undesirable, even dangerous, implications, the problem
of Nagel’s anti-utopian position on what is humanly possible is that it tries to
maintain that the character of the human species is evil while dispensing with its
universality claim. Yet, as Kant himself knew, ‘if most, but not all, humans have an
evil disposition, then the human species has no uniform moral character’ (Formosa,
2007, p. 239). Like Nagel, and unlike Kant, Formosa sees in this lack of uniformity
a possibility to render the radical evil thesis more plausible. I believe that it
exposes simply its incoherence. To be a transcendental anthropological thesis and
not an empirical generalization, the radical evil thesis requires uniformity. For if
evil is a mere possibility which is not activated in some specimens of humanity,
there can be only two logical conclusions: that either those exceptions are other
than human or that, while being human, they have had the kind of socio-historical
conditions of life that enabled them to estrange themselves from what is (supposedly)
common to the rest of humanity. The first conclusion is absurd because it elevates
the human exceptions to a species of their own, as they do not share with the rest a
property that is supposedly constitutive of humanity. It also bestows to few
individuals the self-image of the (genetically or metaphysically) privileged, golden
race. The second conclusion automatically removes evil from the characteristics
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that would be essential for recognizing the human species and renders it contingent.
But a contingent radical evil thesis is not only self-contradictory; it is also inoperative,
since it cannot explain evil as indeed deeply ingrained and it cannot sustain the
claim that no feasible process of social and mental development can uproot it. An
onto-anthropological argument that loses its essentialism loses any possible
explanatory force. This loss reveals what is really true about the essentialist anti-
utopian anthropological argument, namely, that it is simply an attempt to turn an
empirical generalization (e.g. the hitherto inauspicious record of humanity, the so
far accumulated experience of evil that parades before us) into an eternal truth or a
transcendental condition of what is humanly (im)possible.
If the main question of political theory is how we should live together; and if, in
answering it, political theory must escape the danger of approximating its spectral
others (slavery defence, exceptionalism, fascism, etc), no essentialist anthropological
distinctions along the axis of attainability should be allowed. It is true that a
utopian ideal that would have some motivational force needs some sense of
feasibility and attainability. It needs a connection with reality and some faith in
realizability, if it is to be something more than just a momentary respite from the
existing state of affairs that offers nothing more than discharge and leads to a
domestication of critique. But such attainability must be universalizable. We have
already explained in a previous chapter that a realizability such as the Mannheimian
which becomes a criterion for the quality of the utopian ideal retrospectively is
untenable. However, we must preserve some relation to realizability (other than the
Mannheimian) and presuppose it in order to avoid an inoperative day dreaming that
enhances the self-recuperative mechanisms of the existent.
My solution out of this dilemma is the realizability that is offered by a different
anthropology, that is, a realizability which has nothing predictive or futuristically
imminent about it and which points only to sheer possibility. And it is thus that is
shown, in yet another way, why the anthropological objection to utopianism
constitutes a separate chapter in its own right. That specific societies fail to realize
an ideal does not mean that the ideal is faulty or necessarily unattainable. Our
criteria (ever revisable) of realizability have to be related to the content, the
provisions of the ideal itself. Before we proclaim an ideal unattainable as ostensibly
precluded by human nature, we must first examine how much we know about
human nature so as to safely conclude that the ideal is futile. For instance, probably
what we now know about humanity would make an ideal of biological immortality
appear as a chimera. But we cannot say the same about ethical matters and about
political questions concerning how we should live in society, for the simple reason
that while immortality belongs in the sphere of the objective world with the laws of
which it is difficult to always play successfully, the good society belongs in the
sphere of the social world whose laws are no longer (after positivism) treated as
quasi-natural. Therefore, when ethico-political issues are at stake, humanity’s leeway
is immensely more extended than with regard to issues of the objective world.
We may assume that there is nothing ethically prohibitive in human nature as
such because human nature is mutable and pliable, i.e., not essentially predetermined.
Apart from the whole arsenal of arguments against essentialism with which
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postmodern thought equips us (even when it fails itself to apply them to its own
deep-seated onto-anthropological essentialism), we have the following good reason
to assume the above. We have, in the previous chapter, mentioned how the
anthropological arguments for defending slavery as an inescapable reality of a
fixed human nature of slaves and masters have historically collapsed, and the same
can be said of various anthropological views that once claimed to thoroughly
explain and pin down humanity, yet have now been superseded.
CONTEMPORARY UTOPIANISM AND ESSENTIALISM
In what follows I shall show that, instead of revisiting implicit essentialisms about
anthropological obstacles to human perfection, some very influential utopian ways
of tackling anti-utopian anthropological criticisms suffer from tensions and
ambivalences such as those mentioned in previous sections. For they have been
rather reactive and simply defensive regarding anti-utopianism thus not going far
enough in challenging the opponents’ position. Many thinkers who are sympathetic to
utopianism concede much to the anti-utopian standpoint because they do share with
the anti-utopian conventional wisdom much more than they would be willing to
admit or perceive at first sight. They share the idea of the split subject, the split
humanity (torn between unsociability and sociability) that we saw above, and they
differ from their detractors of utopia in the emphasis that is put on the edges of the
anthropological dichotomy, the social or the unsocial.
For instance, Laclau and Mouffe attack the essentialist economism and mechanistic
determinism of the Marxist tradition (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985) and maintain a
conceptual and epistemological anti-essentialism which allows them to leave back
the traditional rationalist utopianism (Brockelman, 2003, pp. 185–188) and the
stabilization of meaning it assumes. Yet, I argue, this does not necessarily entail a
break with anthropological essentialism or an incompatibility of their theory with
the kind of liberalism that relies on such essentialism. I will show this here by
examining how they treat antagonism as a human constant. To hold such a view
without accommodating onto-anthropologically self-interested opposition and violent
othering,80 a nuanced notion of antagonism is required. Antagonism understood as
controversy might be ethically neutral and thus compatible with a possibility of a
non-violent world (without entailing a rationalist organization where no space for
dispute is left). Or, antagonism might signify a condition of perpetual conflict and
preclude the possibility of a non-violent world. However, a consistent distinction
between conflict and controversy cannot be maintained within Laclau and Mouffe’s
view because it would presuppose ethical criteria for judging dispute as a
manifestation of violent or non-violent antagonism. Such ethical contents are
unavailable in their approach because they conceive the good to which an ideal
must aspire as void. The void is occasionally filled only by the conventions
produced by the democratic process itself. Laclau and Mouffe argue ‘that the
ethical goal of democratic struggles is an “empty signifier” – an object devoid of
any particular determination’ (Cooke, 2004, p. 419). Through these commitments,
and due to the absence of a differentiation between controversy and conflict, the
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ambivalences we described in a previous section as typical of the unsocial

sociability thesis do not only remain untouched, but they also acquire onto-
anthropological citizenship via the quasi-transcendentalization of antagonism.
It is helpful to recall, first, that, for the Hobbesian version of antagonism,
struggle of all against all is constitutive of human nature and manifest in the state
of nature. For Freud, too, ‘conflict is thought to be inevitable’, as people will
sooner or later come to conflict with others due to the power drives exert on them
and which civilization tries to dam (Freud, 1990, pp. 87–90). For Laclau and
Mouffe, the reason why the rational organization of life of the sort that was
chastised by Popper is obsolete and dangerous is because it goes beyond conflict
and, therefore, beyond politics as struggle. They perceive politics mainly as agon,
i.e., as antagonism, taking the term from antiquity but perhaps forgetting that the
term was then meant to describe either litigation, games and athletics or exchange
of confrontational words, and that politics proper makes use of the latter rather than
of the former. Laclau, in particular, makes clear that unevenness of power is
constitutive of the hegemonic relation. Thus he takes for granted that any act
aspiring to be political must presuppose some clash ‘between antagonistic wills’
(Laclau, 2001, p. 7). As we have seen in the fifth chapter, the Greek sense of
politics is given very accurately by Hannah Arendt as controversy and open debate
over the collective ideal, and not simply as conflict over power or governance qua
enlarged household management as it is usually seen in modern times (Arendt,
1989, p. 26ff). We also saw in the second chapter that the modern sense of politics
recommends that one be ‘engaged in or taking sides in the struggle for govern-
mental power’ (Dawson, 1992, p. 6) unlike the Greek sense which had been more
encompassing, as it concerned deliberation over the ideal city. Although the
struggle for power can be very important, it is nevertheless normatively dependent
on the quality of its agenda and it must derive ideally from a decided commitment
to an acceptable sense of struggle. Already in the most ancient political text, that of
Hesiod, there is a distinction between the struggle which is destructive in fuelling
idle quarrel, sterile dispute or even unnecessary damage, and the struggle which
urges people to constructive criticism and emulation. Significantly, in Hesiod’s
anthropology, it is the latter that is closer to human desire and hope, and not the
former.81 I discuss Hesiod’s utopianism on this particular point elsewhere
(Papastephanou, 2008a), but here suffice it to explain that I reserve the term
conflict for the first kind of struggle and I describe the second kind of agonistics as
controversy. The Latin etymology of the word ‘conflict’ (conflictus is the past
participle of confligere which means ‘to strike together’) shows us why the word is
relational and bears connotations of a clash or a disagreement that is often violent
or connotations of an incompatibility between opposing ideas, interests, groups or
individuals. Within the concept of conflict lies the need or possibility of resolution,
because one cannot always be (or remain for too long) in such a relation with
others. By contrast, ‘agon’ in Greek means originally any human gathering or
congress, the topos of that gathering, and then litigation, athletics and so on, but it
usually has a more general sense of striving for something without the relational
connotation of doing so against somebody. ‘Agonisma’ means emulation and only
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‘antagonisma’ involves the struggle against (or emulation regarding) a concrete

other. As for strife, the corresponding word ‘eris’ has a triple meaning: the one of
quarrel, that of emulation and the entirely positive meaning of passion for something,
as in the phrase eris agathōn, that is desire, zest, for the good. Thus: antagonism
may denote conflict (which must at some point be resolved) or controversy (which
might signify open-ended democratic, ongoing debate and could, amongst other
things, be based on emulation as well as desire for the good and true).
In my approach, utopianism can, and must, preserve controversy, constructive
criticism and emulation. Yet, it must, equally, render one kind of conflict superfluous,
that is, the aggressive and sterile kind of conflict (such as contemporary unresolved
political conflicts that perpetuate the effects of wars or even conflicts such as the
one we encounter in Oleanna). We must not forget that agon should ideally be
accompanied by eu agonizesthai (what is usually translated as fair play). If we pay
attention to this eu (which means the good) while keeping in mind that utopia is for
Thomas More eutopia that is, a good topos, we realize that we need a conception of
the good if we are to have agonistics. Political struggle understood as controversy
rather than as conflict then requires ethics not as a transcendental void but as
concrete and specified (albeit revisable) content. And political emancipation cannot
just mean, as Laclau seems to assume (2001, p. 8) the mere ‘displacement of existent
relations of power’. In his more recent work (Laclau, 2000) and in his earlier
collaboration with Chantal Mouffe (1985), Laclau does not seem to maintain a
nuanced account of conflict, and this is predictable given the general premises of
the theory: such a distinction requires criteria that are not allowed by an anti-
metaphysical conception of the ethical as void.
As Cooke argues and explains in far more detail (2006, ch. 4) than it would be
appropriate here, the object of antagonism in Laclau’s and Mouffe’s theory is
empty; it is ethically void. Due to the poststructuralist antipathy to justificatory
issues that inspires much of their thought, they fail to engage with the question of
context-transcending validity which is so much required by radical democracy
(Cooke, 2006, p. 5). Laclau prefers to preserve the transcendent object as an empty
place because he wishes to avoid any vision that would delimit in a universalistic
manner the normativity of transcendence prior to actual, practical and democratic
collective verdict (Laclau, 2000, pp. 81–2). Yet, the inevitable implication of this is
the elevation of a populist conventionalism to the status of an essential and eternal
(recall here the Spinozist sub specie aeternitatis) political principle. And, in
assuming the transcendent object as void, Laclau ‘denies the possibility of an ethical
relation between object and representation, with the result that the transcendent
object loses its regulative functions’ (Cooke, 2006, p. 93). This anti-represent-
ationalism is subject to the critique that is already familiar from our discussion of
Marin in the sixth chapter.
Laclau and Mouffe join anti-utopianism in chastising old rationalist utopias
because, to them, in a rational utopian organization of life, conflict is unimaginable
(Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). Apart from rehearsing Ralph Dahrendorf’s anti-utopian
concern that utopias aspire to render conflict superfluous (1967, p. 139), Laclau
and Mouffe seem to have a conflict-centred sense of political struggle (based on
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the existence of an enemy) which is at odds with a conception of politics as

grounded in a controversy-centred sense of struggle (based simply on the existence
of a different argument that must be voiced and have the chance to convince). In
their political theory, the old essentialism of a universal, end-state toward which all
human efforts are driven is rightly condemned as an illusion, but, to preserve
utopian change as a desirable political telos, a quasi-transcendental condition of the
possibility for meaningful struggle is required. To this ambivalence, Laclau and
Mouffe respond by offering a kind of transcendental justification. For much of
their later work, as Brockelman remarks, ‘the possession of a common “enemy”
serves as condition for the possibility for the joining of various groups to create a
movement’ (2003, p. 188). Thus, enmity becomes transcendental, and the assumption
that every collective identity inescapably requires the opposed other in order to
exist or become articulated ultimately places antagonism and competitiveness at
the heart of democracy. Yet, a non-nuanced antagonism, one deprived of the
qualifications that a fuller transcendentalism supplies, creates more problems than
it solves. To illustrate this, we may say that Carol’s empowerment in Oleanna
comes from the fact that she joins a group with which she shares the impression of
the professor as a common enemy. The lack of any information about other
common features or commitments of Carol and the group speaks for a mobilization
of an otherwise unrelated and disparate group membership guided by nothing like a
universal utopian telos. The motivating power is simply the particular articulation
of the demands Carol raises upon the antagonist, i.e., the professor as the opposed
other. In this sense, the ‘struggle’ we encounter in Oleanna seems to qualify as a
manifestation of antagonism as precondition for democracy. A possible objection
here would be that Laclau and Mouffe might assert that such a struggle, being
violent, is to be avoided, as they argue that only non-violent struggle (Brockelman,
2003, p. 188) would qualify as a precondition of a democratic vision. However,
what counts as violence, whether violence is the most blatant predicament in the
situation described in Oleanna and how a non-violent struggle looks like are
precisely matters that cannot be decided simply on conventionalist grounds.
Distinctions of that sort presuppose some specification and determinacy of ethics
as well as of democratic vision. The assumption of the ethical void attenuates
critique to such an extent that no neutral standpoint (outside the struggle itself) is
left from which to be able to expose the systemic ‘guilt’ or the complicity of both
parties in Oleanna.
Such an enervation of critique ultimately damages any utopia, not just the
reprehensible rationalist end-state. No matter how motivating and powerful an
ideal might be, it cannot dispense with the justificatory ‘pause for thought’, the
moment when the perennialism of deconstructive undecidability is suspended and
the argumentatively besieged void is filled with the most convincing content. That
is, there has to be a strong connection between justification and motivation, for if
the former is inadequate, the motivating power of an image of the good is too weak
as well as too arbitrary. When the transcendent object is divorced from the force of
the better argument or described as void, the problem that arises is that the distance
separating its various approximations appears invariable, enforcing relativist and
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conventionalist conclusions. Ultimately, in such universes, all theories are equidistant

from validity. Thereby, validity and social currency are perceived as identical.
Laclau and Mouffe’s idea of the ethical void blocks the possibility for distinguishing
between controversy and conflict with the immediate and visible implication that a
struggle such as that between the academic and the empowered sectarian group of
Carol in Oleanna might be expected to advance democracy or, to say the least, it
cannot be shown to be ethico-politically undesirable compared to other, possible
struggles or to its very overcoming. In other words, in a world such as that of
Oleanna the main requirement is not just conflict or any conflict and its perpetuation,
but, instead, another education of the whole of society. Rather than the vicious circle
of a perennial struggle within a consolidated value system, it is the productive circle
of society, education and transvaluation that could invigorate vision and hope.
The need for some determinacy of what is ethical that I have, once again,
asserted does not reintroduce essentialism. The ethical is revisable and publicly
debatable. And it is not fixed by any supposedly ethical or unethical human nature
or stability of human identity or conventionalist closure, where context-transcendent
validity claims are ruled out. On the contrary, anthropological anti-essentialism on
these points facilitates the exposition of the essentialism that is implicit in Laclau
and Mouffe’s emphasis on antagonism. To make things clearer, let us contrast their
view with that of Žižek. Žižek also accuses them of subverting their anti-essentialism
by relying on antagonism, but he refers to the reintroduction of essentialist utopia
through the notion of antagonism, not to an emphasis on antagonism that
reintroduces anthropological essentialism against utopia (as I would argue). My
objection is quite different from the one Žižek raises and it is helpful to unravel
Žižek’s argument against them before unfolding mine.82 Žižek points out that
Laclau and Mouffe’s conception of antagonism means more or less that if the
opposed other is a product of the identity’s need to constitute itself via an other,
then, even if the oppressive other within a particular struggle were to disappear,
another such oppressive other would take her place. Žižek sees in this a more
radically critical notion of antagonism that is overlooked by Laclau and Mouffe.
Where they see only conventionalism in all struggles, there Žižek finds a universalism
of a structure of antagonism that is omnipresent in societies beyond any historicism.
Brockelman sums it up concisely: antagonism judges the concrete other (e.g. the
capitalist) innocent, for he or she merely personalizes or represents the Other. ‘In
truth, even were she or he not there, we would fail to achieve identity with ourselves.
Another “other” would take her or his place’ (Brockelman, 2003, p. 190). Yet this
structure always carries within it the paradox of its own impossibility, its resistance
to becoming a useful tool for determining the imaginary. When this structure does
appear to becoming such a tool, Žižek detects a psychoanalytic return of the
repressed, that is, a crypto-utopianism of a situation where the symptom will
finally be cured (i.e., self-representation will be transparent and identity will
acquire a sufficiency and wholeness regarding the subject it masks).
Žižek’s quite abstract account can be concretized with an example of his that is
very pertinent to a theme encountered both in Oleanna and in the 2000 curriculum:
the theme of political correctness. The repressed utopianism of a rationally
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regulated conduct is associated by Žižek with a hypocritical relativist universalism

(notice the oxymoron) operating in much leftist discourse today, from liberalism
(Žižek, 1998, p. 1001) down to radical democracy. Repressed utopianism is
associated with the political correctness understood as ‘the kind of symptomatic
puritanical behavior we associate with the “culture wars” in the USA in the 1980s
and 1990s’ (Brockelman, 2003, p. 193). For Žižek, radical democratic theory
enforces a kind of ‘political correctness’ politics that suffers from chauvinism.
Contemporary leftists constantly discover new forms of discrimination. ‘Such
discovery is in fact necessary to maintain the apparent “naturalness” or “reality” of
the open ideal’. Otherwise, closure will lurk around and block the utopianism of
the critic. The latter can be supported ‘only so long as (1) the factual opposition
between the idealized identity and a concrete “other” and (2) the illusion that this
other could be defeated (since otherwise we are confronted with the indestructible
Other) are both present’. These two preconditions are met precisely by means of
political correctness and the ‘ever advancing battles for more minuscule forms of
identity and against ever more subtle forms of discrimination’. With political
correctness, ‘there will always be another hyphen to add to dead-white-heterosexual-
male, etc., in order to maintain the battle against discrimination. But, also, this
battle will always appear to be winnable: “one more hidden form of discrimination
and, maybe we’ll have licked the problem”. Thus, for Žižek, “the pc attitude is an
exemplary case of the Sartrean mauvaise foi of the intellectuals: it provides new
and newer answers in order to keep the problem alive”‘ (Brockelman, 2003,
pp. 193–4).
My interpretation of this kind of political correctness differs from Žižek’s and
highlights another kind of political danger, beyond the ‘return of the repressed’
rehabilitation of traditional utopianism. I would draw attention to a self-exculpating
and self-congratulatory exoneration of the west that is thus accomplished.
Exaggerated political correctness performs a facile self-accusation that keeps more
serious accusations at bay and secures the self-image of the progressive and the
leftist, a protected and protective anarchy of the kind we saw in Oleanna’s
educational context, but this time projected to local as well as world politics. Just
as the professor in Oleanna enjoys the self-image of the radical by accusing the
system generally only to glorify it later when he needs it, we condemn easily
detectable discriminations only to avoid the confrontation with the spilled blood or
the material deprivation, all having occurred or still occurring elsewhere – effected
by a system that still ‘pays our rent’, that is, a system that turns the others’ losses
into ongoing material and symbolic profit for us. We secure the academic visibility
and international bond and comradeship of the radical and all the benefits deriving
from it, and all we have to do in return for such prestige is to mind the way we talk
about those exploited by the collective formation in which we belong and for
which we work. It is much easier to avoid using the term ‘developing’ for countries
such as Guatemala or Mozambique than to make the effort to learn the historical
facts (metonymically the cold war and colonialism respectively) that led to the
problems they face and involve the political handlings of our societies. And it is
much easier, I suppose, to say along with Nussbaum (2004, p. 45) (who is arguably
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right to do so in the particular context within which she writes that specific text)
that liberals must focus on public rhetoric so as to foster tolerance and respect,
while being silent (in that text at least) about the possibility to focus on the recent
thousands of dead civilians in Iraq.
Too much talk over political correctness obfuscates even more the little
acknowledged diachronic and synchronic responsibilities of the strong, just as we
saw in Carol’s ‘don’t call your wife “baby”‘ and in the 2000 curriculum’s emphasis
on erasing discrimination. Unlike Žižek, I claim that the utopianist ossification of
certain political demands that crops up in Laclau’s work and in some political
correctness discourse is not the only risk that controversy confronts. On the
contrary, it is antagonism for antagonism’s sake (given a transcendental theoretical
privilege in Laclau and others’ work) that jeopardises the true challenge of
privileged political positions. Such risks become obscured by the obsession with
the eradication of phenomena that are easier to combat (such as politically
incorrect phrasing) and that bestow upon the western subjects a better moral image.
Apart from a communicative utopia of cautious and respectful rhetoric, of publicly
expedient choices of language and images, one should also defend a utopia of no
one being hungry any more; of acknowledgement of historical responsibility and of
taking the respective measures; of restorative justice and redistribution of wealth;
and of care for the environment and non-human biota.
My position becomes clearer now as to where it differs from the Lacanian83 side
of Žižek’s thought. For Žižek, the reintroduced essentialism within Laclau’s
theoretical framework is the one of the return of the repressed closure of traditional
utopianism. For me, the reintroduced essentialism concerns the fact that, on the one
hand, we have the anti-essentialist and politically valuable assumption that the
nature of an identity is indeterminate and thus resists closure; on the other, this
openness of identity does not seem to be extendable to the identity of being human
as such. If being human is also open to ceaseless redefinition, then, how do we
know that antagonism is irreducible or inevitable? That the other who has to
always be present for the construction of our identity is not one of con-sensus but
one of dis-sensus? The difference that is necessary for the construction of identity
is very much present in con-sensus, and not only in dissent, for the ‘con’ of con-
sensus and the idea of feeling-with it involves presuppose different agents who find
and found themselves in relation, neither in identity nor necessarily in opposition.
If such a possibility can be explored, then, why do the Hegel of the master-slave
narrative and its particular account of the construction of the self still seem to the
Western mind so enduring and non-deconstructible?
The supposed need to form a real or illusory identity through a fundamental
opposition to the other accommodates ontologically Hobbes’s notion of the
struggle of all against all, thus reintroducing an anthropological essentialism
regarding what is constitutive of the human self. Although not idealized by Laclau
and Mouffe (Brockelman, 2003, p. 188), an ethically unqualified notion of an
omnipresent antagonism becomes a precondition of radical politics, irrespective of
the ideas over which antagonism will be deployed. In this way, a perennialist
notion of struggle ends up being the last word in politics. For me, rather than
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antagonism-as-conflict gaining the only permanent position in human ontology and

becoming a priority in politics, an antagonism-as-controversy is discerned and
extracted from the ethically undifferentiated account of antagonism so as to simply
be posed as a self-evident first step for debating and democratically deciding what
a more desirable collective life might be like. If controversy resembles a
transcendental moment, it is only for serving justificatory purposes, i.e., for setting
in motion the process of selecting or composing a concrete ideal, not for a
perennial struggle over a void that the transcendentalization of conflict entails.
Rather than being obsolete, concrete accounts of utopia are far more significant for
realizing the full extent of harm inflicted on others and for distinguishing what is
worth striving for than any transcendentalized ethical void might ever be.
ANTHROPOLOGICAL ESSENTIALISM AND COOKE
I believe that through my criticisms above, Cooke’s critique of Laclau and Mouffe
and her own emphasis on rescuing utopia as ethical image make better sense. As
she writes, ‘lacking any pictorial aspect, the “good society” would amount to the
“empty object” that some poststructuralist thinkers’, Laclau, for example, postulate
as the goal of ethical activity (Cooke, 2004, p.419). Laclau ‘seems reluctant to
allow any ethical content to the transcendent object for fear that singling out certain
goals in advance as ethically valid ones would lead to a closure of the democratic
process’ (Cooke, 2006, p. 94). I have argued that, apart from blunting the
motivational power of Laclau’s ideal, as Cooke rightly observes (2004, p. 419),
such a reluctance concedes too much to anthropological, traditional liberal
essentialism by concurring with the latter’s ontologization of conflict.
However, although Cooke rightly emphasizes the problems of the ethical void
and defends the justificatory merits of some utopian determinacy, her own
concessions to liberal anthropological essentialism exemplify how critical social
theory may overlook the danger of reintroducing a rather conventionalist and
inoperative sense of utopia by the back door. To explore those concessions I begin
with a brief comment on her discussion of Sorel’s views. ‘Sorel reminds us
repeatedly that revolutionary myths are not blueprints for a good society; in
contrast to utopian schemes, they cannot be subjected to rational analysis but must
be taken as a whole’ (Cooke, 2006, p. 88). She brings up such ideas from Sorel
only to compare them to Laclau’s views and highlight their similarities and
differences. Yet, in performing that task, Cooke bypasses some points that Sorel
shares with Laclau and which invite criticisms. What Cooke does not discuss
regarding the above citation from Sorel is the distinction as such between
revolutionary myth and utopia where the former lacks the blueprint character that
the latter has. The blueprint character denotes detailed representation and precise
determinacy. Rational analysis, that is, analysis on justificatory grounds, is
reserved for the blueprint kind of utopia and not for revolutionary myth, which has
to be taken as a whole. Thus, the less determined seems also less available to
justificatory examination and rigidly separated from utopia proper, which seems to
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be the blueprint utopia. Consequently, for Sorel, the motivating power of

revolutionary myths
does not reside in their power to convince but in their power to excite the
passions. Moreover, their motivating force derives at least in part from their
unattainability: in addition to arguing that it is unimportant whether the hopes
and ideals expressed in revolutionary myths are ever realized, Sorel suggests
that lack of realizability is part of their very attraction (Cooke, 2006, p. 88).
Like Sorel, Laclau preserves a distinction and allocation of different space between
revolutionary myth and utopia in a sort of an ‘either/or’ that eventually speaks for
the unattainability of the otherwise desirable limited determinacy of ideals that
escape the blueprint trap. In fact, the motivational and the justificatory planes
appear rigidly separated and disconnected, presenting us with a drastic choice
between the desirable but unattainable and non-analyzable myth, on the one hand,
and the analyzable but obsolete and dangerous end-state, on the other. By taking
unattainability and non-analyzability for granted, it appears as if the other of the
blueprint is inspiring precisely due to its pure negativity. On this, Sorel and Laclau
come closer to Jameson as well as to Ricoeur, who treats utopia – along with
ideology - as one of the constitutive functions of socio-cultural imagination (Ricoeur,
1997; Dauenhauer, 1989, p. 26). As we saw in the previous chapter, utopia for
them has a negative dimension that is more apparent than its positive one.
Cooke’s work undoes very effectively, as I interpret it, the distinction between
revolutionary myth and utopia so long as such a distinction is based on the
prejudice of utopia as inescapably blueprint and of myth as inescapably divorced
from justification. To have some motivational force, any kind of utopia must involve
enough determinacy to constitute an ethical vivid image and enough analyzability
to be available to public scrutiny. But Cooke seems to me to concede too much to
the unattainability and negativity of utopianism (myth or blueprint) that those
thinkers take for granted. I shall first explain this point and then move to argue that
the reason for such a concession lies in the liberal onto-anthropology that is
implicit in her utopianism.
Cooke shows that utopianism stands accused of denying ‘the contingency of
human knowledge and the creativity of human free will, leading to a closure of the
historical process’ (Cooke, 2004, p. 414). She then moves to endorse unconditionally
the charge of the belief in the actual possibility of a good society with finalism and
thus to couple tout court attainability with blueprint utopia exclusively.
Critical social thinking that sees the “good society” as a condition actually
attainable by human beings stands accused of “finalism”, of an absolutist and
ahistorical conception of human knowledge that gives rise to “totalitarian”
models of social order (Cooke, 2004, p. 414, emph mine).
I take issue with Cooke’s unqualified acceptance of this criticism, with her rejection
of the possibility of utopia ever turning into actuality and with her reluctance to
acknowledge the dependence of attainability on the actual semantic contents of the
utopian good. Aspirations to attainability are indeed a fault of utopian thinking but
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only when this attainability concerns all possible contents of various utopian visions,
when it concerns every detail of a specific imaginary construction and, above all,
when it concerns the supposedly unshakeable, unchallenged and unchangeable
character of the vision. It is only then that there is a tension between the image of a
social condition that must appear attainable in order to be inspiring and the
awareness of the unattainability of a ‘condition beyond the influences of history
and context’ (Cooke, 2004, p. 422).
But why should we conceive utopia as a condition that leaves the influences of
history and context behind? In a world without war or other types of political
violence and in a world with radical rearrangements of resources, benefits and
wealth there is plenty of space for variations in custom, habits, identities, memories
and diverse lifestyles and choices. Especially an ethico-political utopia does not
stand or fall on grounds of socio-historical influences, unless the latter are theorized
as by definition inimical to ethics. That is, unless they are theorized in an
essentialist manner, as manifestations of natural necessities or, in other words, as
inductive proof of what we otherwise ostensibly know from deductive thought
(consider here the Hobbesian tenet of self-interested humanity down to Kant’s
radical evil argument).
Attainability may concern only a particular utopian priority, leaving the rest of
desirables in the dark. For instance, there is no compelling argument that an ethico-
political utopia of the no-one being hungry anymore, of a world with no wars or no
environmental destruction presupposes or must be followed by the actualization of,
say, a technological utopia of galactic travel. But faith in the attainability of the
prioritized utopia is necessary for a reason that had been already given in the 6th
century BC by Heraclitus, as we saw in the introduction: that if you do not believe
in the unexpected, the unexpected will never come. This does not legitimize its
opposite, its degeneration and reversal to the illusion and naivety that all you need
in order to achieve something is just to believe in it, that it will happen just by
imagining it. But it does say that if a utopia is not considered humanly possible and
attainable, it loses its motivating power.
Ironically, the certainty of unattainability that we notice in much contemporary
utopianism might be explained to some extent precisely by the modern obsession
with the extension of the scope of the possible and the theogenic aspirations that it
masks. Contemporary science seems immersed in questions of, and experiments
with, what the human being can accomplish, and this ‘what’ covers a spectrum of
things that humanity used to attribute to the potentialities of its radical Other,
namely, deity/deities. What is significant is that culture and science, in particular,
focus on the possible versus impossible axis instead of exploring the useful/enabling
versus disabling axis. In like manner, contemporary utopianism appears obsessed
with the axis of the possible and the impossible (or at least highly improbable),
even if only eventually to negate possibility. My suggestion is that utopianism take
attainability seriously, not as something that predetermines a ‘homecoming’ of
humanity that will inevitably occur in a set future date or designed by any
providential invisible hand, but simply as meaning that ethical utopian possibilities
are not by definition precluded by onto-anthropological obstacles. If utopia is
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viewed from the lens of sheer possibility, i.e., as something that is neither secured
by a supposed teleological historical course nor blocked by insuperable barriers,
the next step of utopianism is to shift its emphasis to the axis of alternative and
preferable (to the current reality), that is, to the justificatory plane of what is worth
striving for, instead of remaining trapped in the ‘attainable vs unattainable’ dilemma.
The issue of redemption concretizes my claim that the notion of attainability
must break free from the onto-anthropological shackles and my criticisms of
Cooke’s overlooking of variations in what counts as obstacle. For Cooke, and for
much contemporary critical theorists and opponents alike, redemption is understood
as the situation where ‘all relevant obstacles to human flourishing would finally be
removed’ and humanity ‘would be released from present suffering’. Further,
redemption is associated with perfection as a state of ‘absolute sufficiency, a
condition in which deficiency would once and for all have been overcome’ (Cooke,
2004, p. 418). But, to have a grasp of what redemption might refer to, we have to
flesh out the semantic content of ‘all relevant obstacles’, of the ‘human flourishing’,
of absolute sufficiency and overcome deficiency. Ultimately, should utopia address
just any present suffering in a holistic manner? Is the notion of imperfection as
clear-cut as such discourses assume? To unpack these themes and their connection
point for point, consider, for instance, that one’s sense of redemption may not
include a pharmacological and surgical utopia of purportedly eternal youth nor a
geneticist utopia of a supposedly enhanced humanity where you predetermine the
colour of your child’s eyes or her height according to the imperatives of the market
so as to improve her chances to become a super model. One may justifiably see any
such marketization of aesthetics as enslavement and tacit racism. For such a
person, redemption would seem more appropriate to the overcoming of aesthetic
marketization than to the overcoming of what a marketized aesthetics brands ‘an
obstacle to human flourishing’. More generally, redemption cannot be theorized
just in formal quantitative terms (all, absolute, once and for all), as if there has
been a universal, supra-cultural, unanimity on what counts as freeing humanity
from chains of necessity or of causality. In Cooke’s phrasing above, most of the
terms need interpretation and approximation of their meaning: ‘all relevant obstacles’
– such as?; ‘flourishing’ – meaning quite what? (e.g. being 5 foot 8 instead of 5 foot 3
is included in the sense of flourishing?); and ‘release from present suffering’–
suffering befalling due to earthquakes, for instance, or suffering inflicted by human
beings on other human beings for reasons of gain?
It is necessary to draw some distinctions within the notion of suffering – and
those by Freud remain quite apposite and conducive here. As Freud writes, we
are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body,
which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without
pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage
against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally
from our relations to other men (cf. Cho, 2006, p. 22).
Should utopia be all-encompassing, targeting any suffering or any conceivable
human dissatisfaction with reality? Should it not begin, rather, its redemptive work
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with the task of releasing humanity from its self-inflicted present suffering, that is,
from the suffering that is owed to cruelty rather than to misfortune and explained
through false self-understandings and profit-oriented priorities? Why should
redemption and perfection mean absolute sufficiency? Why does sufficiency seem
to be legitimately or self-evidently a predicate of perfection? Does this not
implicitly rely on a standard western putting the blame on scarcity84 for a suffering
that can perfectly be explained by the hierarchical and uneven organization and
distribution of natural resources?
It is possible that the dream of absolute sufficiency (along with the dream of a
condition beyond all influences of history and context) has simply been an old, Ur-
excuse for failing to undo the conditions of unnecessary suffering. Supposedly,
scarcity leads to inequality of distribution. Eradication of inequality would
presuppose an overcoming of scarcity, reaching a stage of absolute sufficiency; the
latter chimera predetermines the equal distribution as chimera, or so the argument
goes. Modernity radicalized that argument, either to justify the status quo or to
aspire to transcend it by introducing the faith in technological utopias radicalizing
productivity or by rationalizing a utopianism of expansion in foreign lands to
multiply resources. From antiquity and Telecleides’s gadgets that free people from
the need to work, to modernity and Marcuse’s technological rendering of surplus
repression redundant, the idea has been that the (dis)solution (of) to unnecessary
suffering is somehow outside the re-forming of the self. Or, it is made to lie outside
the community: the dream of the fertile land rationalized its treatment as terra
nullius, as empty land that remains unexploited by its ‘savage and ignorant’
inhabitants. The idea of a land that, if taken from its inhabitants, will feed the
expansionist community’s hungry became a Western ideal and often a priority that
led the Western world to very dangerous paths, destructive of other peoples and
nature. If this interpretation of sufficiency is even partially right, then the inclusion
of sufficiency in the concept of perfection renders the latter more of an
imperfection, that is, it makes it automatically flawed.
Thus, the idea of redemption I would defend is not as quantitatively holistic as
to meet all the unqualified priorities and fantasies of the western thought that
parade as constitutive components of perfection. It has to be debated and specified
as to what it promises to free us from. At first sight, this would seem to bring us
closer to defending a eutopia of a better life (Milojevic, 2003) rather than a perfect
life and make us side with a pragmatist realistic utopia. This is not true for the
following reasons. First of all, the trend of a realistic utopia of betterment rather
than of perfection is as much immersed in Western logics and logistics of
perfection as its more radical sibling rivals (such as Cooke’s). They differ only in
the degree of faith in perfection’s realizability and the priorities they emphasize.
Like Cooke, they see perfection as absolute sufficiency, but, unlike Cooke, they
replace perfection with far more modest utopian aspirations. Away from the
primacy of ethics that we encounter in Cooke, pragmatists often seem to consider
material, practical sufficiency of technological perfection, genetic enhancement
and piecemeal political change as more possible and feasible than the more radical
political and ethical change. Like Cooke, I also consider perfection as ethically
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oriented. Unlike Cooke, and unlike pragmatists who understand perfection more or
less as Cooke does but differ from her in that they dismiss it far more fervently, I
have a notion of perfection that concerns less holistic and more attainable change.
Ethical utopia concerns a perfection that is not all-encompassing: it does not
depend on perfectibilities other than those of the shaping of the ethical self.
Yet, ethical utopia is fundamental for those utopias which deal with other
perfectibilities, since the latter may, in absence of ethics, turn into nightmares.
Ethical utopia is conceivable without a prior actualization of, let us say, a cosmetic-
surgical utopia. But the realization of a cosmetic-surgical utopia prior to an ethical
utopia, or without presupposing it, would with mathematical accuracy lead to
dystopia, and this is perfectly illustrated by Marius von Mayenburg’s theatrical
play The Ugly One (2007). In seeing perfection as focused on ethics and politics so
as to radically changing them, a conception of utopia that breaks with both holistic
perfection and pragmatist comparative betterment raises maximalist ethico-political
demands regarding human redirection there where other conceptions raise only
minimalist ones. Within such a conception of utopia, ‘better’ when it comes to
global political transformation is not enough. And ‘better’ or ‘perfect’ when it
comes to a more effective fridge or to being less dependent on others in a ‘do it
yourself’ mode (where being entangled with others in relations of mutual
interaction would have been expendable) is of minimal or even of no interest.
When it comes to possible existential choices and relations we may wish an open
society always reshuffled. When it comes to wars and unjust treatment of peoples
and individuals we would like closure, we would have been perfectly satisfied with
a society in which such things would have been archival data of historical concern
and future risks to be avoided and to inspire constant vigilance and effort to their
opposites. Neither the end-state quality of this particular suggestion, nor the
finalism and absolutism of ‘no one being hungry anymore’ becoming fact should
cause us consternation. But this is now a maximal demand of change, not a
minimal one, and a pragmatist ideal differs from a perfectionist one in that it is
pleased with less than this maximalism, with less than this kind of perfection. That
some are hungry and will remain so, that the environment is destroyed for material
short-term gain, that some are denied justice and that effects of war are legitimated
in the name of some others’ benefits are seen as necessary evils of a humanity that
cannot change dramatically because of the stumbling block of its supposed insuperable
proneness to profit. Then, change acquires the meaning of improvement, an affront
to humanity with all the consequent rationalization of harm inflicted upon cosmos.
As concerns the idea of a static utopia beyond the social and historical context,
i.e., a state of affairs where any contestation is redundant, the very fact that it is
taken as a predicate of perfection shows how under-theorized utopia still remains.
A problem of contemporary talk about utopianism and anti-utopianism is that there
seems to be commonly shared a kind of tacit assumption that a necessary aspect, a
predicate of the notion of perfection, is a supposed uncontestability of its
representation or realization. I explain this as a metaphysical residue reminiscent of
the medieval arguments for the existence of God – ens realissimum: A God as the
most perfect entity cannot lack the predicate of existence for, then, such an entity
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would be deficient and thus imperfect. Likewise, for many theorists, perfection
means stasis because they understand change exclusively in qualitative, axiological
terms as born by inadequacy. A utopia as the most perfect society cannot have a
predicate such as an amenability to change because, supposedly, only inadequate
and imperfect things require contestation or engulf change. They thus imagine a
world-in-time (thus subject to critical reshuffling and change) as necessarily imperfect.
But a deeper engagement with the connection of perfection, transcendence of
context and contestability would show that the political right to contest something
and the epistemological task of considering contesting views are not only possible
in a utopia but even indispensable to its perfection. A society denying its members
the political right to contest its structure or consider its change would be auto-
matically imperfect. Awareness of this places contestability squarely within any
respectable account of utopia.
Yet, a right to contest and to consider redirection exerted within a utopia would
presuppose epistemology, if it was not to lead to terror. For instance, a specific
theory or worldview may contest the desirability or pertinence of the demand that
‘no one go hungry anymore’. However, very unlike our societies which take the
hunger of people in the Third World or of people of the poorest social strata for
granted (or mitigate it through the supposed inevitability of some going hungry), a
perfect society would demand nothing less than perfect reasons for proving the
supposed validity of a view that would contest that ‘no one should go hungry’.
Besides, a society achieving the level of perfection described by the demand that
no one go hungry would still have a large set of issues to consider, from its very
beginning to its lasting durability, if it were to avoid letting this demand degenerate
it into the kind of utopia that Lyotard (1997) chastises in his Postmodern Fables,
the megalopolis of safety, abundance and control where nothing is further desired
and no one is left to differ.
Finally, the rejection of the thesis of radical evil does not amount to the
eradication of ‘evil acts’ as an always possible response to various and mutable
situations in the course of life. That human nature as ethically neutral does not
predetermine evil as an inescapable natural part of our identity supposedly setting
insuperable limits to goodness in no way secures that evil as unreflective and
harmful response to the vagaries of life and to the stakes of intersubjectivity will be
kept at bay. It rather gives more emphasis on the handling of wrongdoing and on
the demands that are raised upon intersubjective relations. Time cannot be arrested;
change is thus inherent in any community within time; change of conditions of life
might be as such ethically neutral but it activates ethics by creating different
situations that demand response and handling. A perfect society is not judged as a
motionless picture but, on the contrary, as a world in motion.
For a society is perfect not when it reaches a state of no further change but, on
the contrary, when it leaves cruelty behind and reaches a state of reflective and
sensitive response to time, that is, to suffering involved in existential misfortune. It
is the kind of misfortune that accompanies humanity as being-in-time and thus as
often experiencing time as pain, as something to be endured. It can be illustrated in
the experience of time that passes when people are buried alive under debris in an
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earthquake and their families wait for news from rescue teams, when one is in
hospital and waits there until the illness is over or when one sits in waiting places
before s/he (or loved ones) enters a closed space (a train, an aeroplane) that
involves life risk for oneself (or others), as it happens with transportation. In a
perfect society where, amongst other things, the human cruelty that produces dead,
wounded or starved ones has been overcome, existential misfortune will still
remain. For the latter is not a social imperfection but rather a constitutive part of
being a spatiotemporal entity and, as such, it is the frame within which the very
challenge to reach and maintain social perfection takes place.
ANTHROPOLOGICAL ANTI-ESSENTIALISM AND CRITICAL THEORY
An anthropological anti-essentialism is crucial for the consistency of a critical

theory that connects redemption with perfection. To begin the exploration of this
argument let us consider the following. ‘The redemptive dimension of critical
social theory consists in its evocation of an idea of the good life that would be best
for human beings. Not “best” in the sense of most adequate to our present needs
(for our present perceptions of our needs might be distorted) but best in the
transcendent, absolute sense of “incapable of being bettered” (Cooke, 2004,
p. 418). Redemption here is connected with perfection as the word ‘best’ indicates,
away from the pragmatist or realist utopia of comparative improvement. Notice
also the tension between what is ‘best’ in the conventionalist sense and ‘best’ in the
transcendent sense, which further distances Cooke’s position from pragmatist
immanence. But who decides on the semantic content of the phrase ‘incapable of
being bettered’? If one does not shake the prejudice of the inherent impossibility of
human perfectibility one has no other choice but to confirm the existent and its
ways of voicing our present needs. Instead of reaching transcendence by
overcoming present interpretations of needs, one thus dons those needs with an
underserved transcendence. Thus, here the break with immanence in favour of
transcendence is not radical enough.
This occurs, in my view, when Cooke gives in to the conventional wisdom of
perfection’s unattainability and asserts that a regulative idea is ‘an idea of perfection
that compels the human mind to endeavour to attain it but that transcends all its
powers to do so’ (Cooke, 2004, p. 423). That there is a pessimist essentialist
anthropology underlining what is considered humanly impossible (transcending all
the powers of humanity) in the above passage is shown by Cooke’s explanation of
the why of unattainability. ‘Regulative ideas are inherently unattainable because
they negate essential features [such as? – M. P.] of what it is to be human and thus
some aspect of the unavoidable finitude of human existence’ (ibid). That this is
mainly about the anthropological limits to ethics is proven by the example she
gives. ‘The Kantian idea of moral freedom is inherently unattainable because it
negates the self-directed motivations of the empirical will, which are, in Kant’s
view, anthropologically grounded’ (ibid). Thus the tensions that we saw in the
beginning as produced by Kant’s unsocial sociability and the radical evil thesis are
reproduced here in Cooke’s commitment to Kantian liberalism.
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Her other example takes the case of a communicative utopia, the Habermasian
ideal speech situation, so as to argue that its unattainability is also due to anthro-
pological reasons but this time associated with the finitude of human knowledge
(ibid). Why Cooke reaches a dead end by attempting to preserve the tension between
attainability and unattainability is shown by her conclusion that is extremely
reminiscent of the deconstructive ‘impossibility yet necessity’ philosophical vogue.
On the one hand, critical theory
must acknowledge the need for motivational utopian images of a condition in
which transformative social action would finally have overcome socially
produced obstacles to human flourishing; on the other, it must recognize that
such utopian visions are imaginative projections that negate essential features
of what it is to be human and that, as such, can be imagined but never
achieved by human beings (Cooke, 2004, p. 424, emph mine).
I locate the problem of this conclusion in the tension between the belief that the
obstacles to be overcome are socially produced and the assumption that this belief
is in fact an illusion, an anthropological misrecognition. What is implicit in the
‘never’ above is that the attainability of the best society people could dream of
would require not just heightened consciousness, cognitive transformation,
institutional and structural change and the like; it would require, in fact, nothing
short of a dispositional revolution! The latter would amount to requiring a species
other than the human, perhaps a species of angels, as the radical Others of liberals’
self-conception.
A first impasse: if utopianist thinkers such as Jameson, Laclau and Cooke
believe in the finitude and precariousness of human knowledge, then, how do they
know with so much certainty and conviction what it is to be human or that
something can never be achieved by human beings? Why does the only infinite
knowledge (notice again the ‘never’ that I emphasized in the above quotation from
Cooke) that people have seem to be humanity’s incapacity to achieve something
beyond what the human self has not yet achieved or what the Western self (posing
as exemplary in our current world) deems unattainable? Is this not an indirect,
deep-seated, unconscious and extremely effective exoneration of the empirical
western self and a projection of its current inabilities and of self-serving reservations
to the whole of humanity, past, present and future? Is this not, in turn, reminiscent
of the strong conviction Aristotle had that slavery cannot be abolished for anthro-
pological reasons? Was he not at pains to detail that conviction so as to counter
ideas of his time encapsulated in undercurrents against slavery such as those of
Alcidamas, of Philemon and of some later ancient Greek utopian constructions
such as the Stoic and Iambulus’ Heliopolis?
As Cooke herself remarks, ‘whereas finalists see absolute and final knowledge
as a human possibility, fallibilists maintain that even propositions that are rationally
justified can turn out to be false in the light of new experiences, evidence, etc’
(Cooke, 2004, p. 426, fn 5). Is the only finalism that she allows, then, the finalism
of knowing that human beings are anthropologically beset so radically by evil that
they can never attain a regulative idea? Why not opting to be a fallibilist on that
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issue too? An immediate answer might be that there is no evidence pointing in that
direction at all. But this is precisely the point: that holding such views blocks the
very possibility of trying to produce the evidence. Evidence regarding human
affairs is not to be found out there; it is not discovered. It is created; it is moulded,
sculpted point for point.
Therefore, I see in much utopianist discourse today, even in one such as
Cooke’s which is very well-constructed, a conflation of epistemological and ethical
limits.85 Both are attributed to anthropology but if thought more deeply we realize
that they belong to a different order, despite their interplay. They even contradict
one another. To explain: awareness of the finitude of knowledge should question
the absolute certainty that what is humanly possible is transparent to us. The
finitude of human knowledge can be shown to be to some extent anthropologically
grounded because of the peculiar nature of knowledge which usually consists of
being related to something that lies outside the knowing subject. But the ethical is
not anthropologically grounded because the ethical concerns stances and actions
that can ultimately be decided. Apart from the hitherto inauspicious record of
humanity, we have no other reasons to believe that the obstacles to ethical decision
are inherent and anthropological. But, precisely for Kant (1992), what has so far
happened in the empirical world does not predetermine what can happen and it
cannot delineate what is humanly possible. This has been the reason why he
attempted painstakingly to derive his radical evil thesis not from empirical
generalization but from deductive treatment of maxims. Thus, it is true that we
cannot know everything (although the human capacity for accumulated knowledge
can be stretched well beyond the limits that ordinary life sets) for reasons of
finitude, of knowledge’s complex nature and of human life span. But precisely
because this is the case, equally, we cannot assume – let alone claim that we know
– that the self-directed motivations of the empirical will are by definition unethical
and negate moral freedom. And we cannot assume that when motivations take
indeed this unethical character this is due to factors other the effect of particular
social conditioning.
That we are finite beings who lack knowledge and err does not make us
necessarily inherently bad and incapable of ethical perfection. Unless, of course,
one takes as a model the absolute Christian idea of goodness that would assume
that one never makes a mistake or that ignorance is as such ethically loaded. But
such absolutism of goodness is not goodness, if thought through, because goodness
is precisely amongst other things to realize a mistake and be able to transcend it
and try to make amends, not quite to never commit one. And ignorance may often
have ethical repercussions without being itself a moral condition. Awareness of
epistemological finitude and awareness of ignorance and misapprehension may
even be especially ethically enabling because they make us cautious to avoid self-
righteousness and ready to reconsider our position in the face of new evidence, not
to stick doggedly to it. In other words, goodness and aspiration to perfection urge
us to action, whereas the automatism of moralism (its assumption that true
goodness is automatic, as it seems to be treated by Kant and his radical evil thesis)
is inimical to ethics as action. Simply put, a utopian society is not one which has
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reached such a level of transparency and automatism that people never quarrel or
disagree. But it would be a society in which quarrel is handled in reflective ways
and where all possibilities of dealing with it constructively and not violently would
be open (reconciliation, parting of the ways, legality). Even if one would see this as
radically different from the existing situation enough to appear as absolute, one
could in no way characterize it as absolute in the sense of the static and the
deterministically detailed.
The assumption of human nature as a historical construction that varies according
to the shaping it receives by means of human praxis rules out the essentialist
accommodation of ethical obstacles to perfectibility. The way we describe humanity
has implications for the way we understand normativity and for whether we can
take seriously humanity’s ideals. Cooke, like most liberals and poststructuralists,
has succumbed to Western widely held views (sub specie durationis) that appear as
eternal truths (sub specie aeternitatis) and conceded too much to the anti-utopian
current. Instead, what is required by contemporary utopianism is not to be caught
off guard regarding anti-utopianist anthropological alibis of the existent provided
by negative ethical descriptions of humanity and limiting the imaginative reach of
normativity. Utopia requires us to balance out not only the motivational and the
justificatory but also the descriptive and the normative planes. That is, it requires
us to examine which description of the self and humanity is at the same time
accurate, to our knowledge, and enabling regarding the normativity of ideality,
while also examining how commitment to aspecific normative account of society
motivates us to reconsider consolidated and self-exculpating descriptive accounts
of the self and humanity.
ANTHROPOLOGY AND EDUCATION
Why the balance of the descriptive and the normative would be useful is shown by
the fact that the accommodation of evil leads, at best, to an impossibility yet
necessity thesis about utopia and, at worst, to anti-utopia through a faulty employ-
ment of dystopia. Since the former has already been explained, let us briefly
comment on how the latter is effected. A philosophical notion of evil becomes
accommodated in political discourse as an omnipresent and inescapable constant
of human reality. Thereby, the role of dystopian discourse loses its critical edge
and becomes simply diagnostic, thus sliding to anti-utopianism. It reflects an
‘earthly vale of tears’ account of reality, without transcendent suggestiveness and
hope. The absence of the latter generates political abdication and a ‘so what’
attitude: as Khan says in the passage from Calvino, ‘it is all useless, if the last
landing place can only be the infernal city’ (emph mine). Thus, a precondition for
a discussion of utopia and dystopia as complementary rather than oppositional
images is the prior development of a more nuanced and anti-essentialist account of
anthropology.
This is crucial for philosophy of education because it unmasks the problems of
the descriptive frame (i.e., the depiction of the self in its relation to the world) that
informs tacitly the current talk on utopian thought in education. The dominant,
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CHAPTER 8
faulty descriptive frame of what counts as human impediment has led to

suggestions of pragmatist or realistic conceptions of utopia in education that blunt
the normative and critical force of the concept ‘utopia’. The outcome is that a
venture such as education, which presupposes the pliability of humanity and is
placed in a better position to help people reform themselves and their societies,
relinquishes its creative aspirations and rights.
To what extent, however, would students be free to shape themselves in a
thoroughly transformative educational context? True, human freedom as constant
creative reaction to empirical reality precludes a totalizing and non-revisable
determination of utopian contents (Cooke, 2004, p. 421). Education should not be
seen as a behaviourist pre-programming of future citizens for the sake of a detailed
and fixed utopian conditioning. But Cooke’s apposite remark can be directed at the
opposite side too. It is precisely freedom that pushes thought in the direction of
utopia and offers utopia some minimal determinacy. Freedom in various shapes
has a special position in an ethico-political account of the desirable world and
justifies a strong transformative education rather then exposing it as restrictive.
Justice demands much freedom: freedom from prejudice of all sorts, e.g., from the
prejudice that is responsible for the neglect of human finitude as well as from the
exaggeration of the limits finitude sets on human agency (epistemological sphere);
freedom from unjust anger, vindictiveness, indifference and callousness (emotive
sphere); freedom from contingent social interpretations of what counts as right and
from uncritical, unreflective attachment to tradition and convention more generally
(social sphere); freedom from the imposed and early cultivated self-image that
permits you to find rationalizations and excuses for tolerating or condoning the
wrong suffered by others (psychological sphere); freedom from socially built,
thetic aspirations of power and domination (political sphere); and freedom from the
kind of laziness mixed with indifference (existential sphere) that makes you bypass
all the necessary research and information that is needed if you are to have a better
picture of a case that invites justice. Education as we now know and experience it
is, to an important degree, responsible for the underdevelopment of such freedoms.
Consequently, the task of a more critical education would be redemptive also in
the sense of cultivating freedoms such as the above. Critical social theory ‘seeks to
liberate human beings from the social chains that bind them by showing them how
certain social mechanisms and institutions prevent them from fulfilling their
potentials as human beings, and by drawing attention to the essential contingency
of these social arrangements’ (Cooke, 2004, p. 418). I have argued that utopia can
be recruited so as to produce the corrective effect of revealing the faulty
assumptions that lie behind the resilience of such social arrangements. Utopia has a
special role to play and a special relation to the kind of education needed for such
reconsideration because, by extending what is ethically humanly possible, and by
revisiting dominant anthropologies, it mobilizes a cognitive transformation that is
prior to action for change. For, those affected by a situation and, therefore, rightfully
allocated space in dialogue concerning that specific situation, must first become
able to see what attached them to the harmful social mechanisms and to see the
harm involved in the bad faith underlying their anthropological despondency. This is
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why we should approach optimism in a way that is the opposite of the dominant
one. Within the dominant framework, anthropological pessimism is coupled with
an unwarranted and unfounded political optimism. Unlike it, anthropological
optimism should be coupled with political pessimism. Anthropological optimism
should not stem from a blind faith in a supposed goodness of human nature (which
only needs to be freed from the chains of society) but, rather, from the view that
human nature does not determine ethics. Yet, such optimism must be accompanied
with a political pessimism that emanates from the fact that the anthropological
alibis of humanity for its reluctance to redirect its processes and mend its ways are
still entrenched and people continue to interpret what counts as interest, need and
desire in, regrettably, too narrow a way.86 If utopia as a thought experiment has so
far been conceived as asking the question, ‘how would social reality look if we
reconfigure it in radical and improved terms and from a different position than is
normally adopted?’ (Halpin, 2001b, p. 311), my anthropological point of departure
formulates this question somewhat differently. How would the world be, if our
conceptions of ourselves were different, offering us a less self-exculpating viewpoint
than it is normally adopted and raising constant demands on us, reminding us of
what we might universally be capable of?
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CONCLUSION: UTOPIAN UNIVERSALISM
We have distinguished between utopian impetus and utopian thought: the former
concerns any hope for a life as it might be and can be traced even in the most
unreflective cultural expression of a desire for happiness and for a new beginning.
This is an important dimension of human experience, even when it is exhausted in
individualist escapism, and has to be studied in its own right. Ernst Bloch’s (1986)
work is valuable to that effect. But the urge to utopia is not identical with its
articulation into a project (Bauman, 2003, p. 11), its expression through a literary
narrative or its channelling into political thought. Thus, whereas the distinction is
usually between utopian urge and its modernist specification through redemptive
projects, we have distinguished the utopian urge that can be studied independently
from its political canalization, on the one hand, and political utopianism that
predates modernism, includes it and overcomes it, on the other. We have argued
that, like utopian impetus, the political utopianism of a discontent with the present
and a longing for a perfected future society has been expressed prior to, and
beyond, the Western space and time. It has thus been treated throughout this book
as a transhistorical and universal, thoughtful articulation of the human yearning for
perfection.
The universalist character of political utopianism will now be emphasized, not
only as an empirical-historical cultural fact, but also as a characteristic of, and a
precondition for, a worthwhile imagined world. Political utopianism might be
particularist rather than universalist in the following, divergent yet connected,
ways. It might be quantitatively restricted to betterment rather than perfection, to
piecemeal change rather than drastic human redirection. Or, its promise might
concern a limited instead of a global scale change in a spatial sense, as utopia has
more often been imagined as an island or a city, at most a continent, rather than a
planet. And it might presuppose a specific class or group of people who would
facilitate or even carry out the advent of the society it promises, thus leaving out
the rest of the people.
Against the above particularisms, the utopianism I have expounded and defended
in this book is universal and inextricably linked with education. Education pre-
supposes the plasticity of humanity and, in so doing it acquires an automatically
universalist quality: it addresses all and concerns all, the whole of society. Just as
in a dystopia such as Oleanna all are complicit in systemic pathology, i.e. teachers,
students, academia and society alike, in utopia, too, it takes nothing less than the
transformation of all, if the good society is ever to be approximated. However, a
problem that comes to mind first when pondering this assertion, one that impacts
on universalism, is the issue of transvaluation. There seems to be a vicious circle
involved when education is expected to effect radical societal change of values and
conceptions of the good life, whilst education itself can only be the effect rather
than the source of such transvaluation.
This is how Lassman puts the problem in relation to political theory and its
vicious circle generally.
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CONCLUSION
How is it possible that a people who are not themselves just or good can
create a society which is both just and good? What makes this problem so
interesting and intractable at the same time is that the creation of a just or
good society seems to require the action of people who are themselves just
and good in some measure. But if such people exist here and now then the
existing society cannot be so irredeemably bad that it requires total
transformation (Lassman, 2003, p. 52).
From this it is extrapolated that
what makes this transformation possible at the same time makes it unnecessary.
But, on the other hand, what makes the transformation necessary, the current
state of injustice and lack of virtue, seems, at the same time, to make the
desired transformation impossible (ibid).
A first answer I would give lies in the possibility that the issue is wrongly
premised. The phrasing reflects a moral psychologism which describes societal
pathologies in terms of the goodness or badness of the social agent. It then
mistakes the existence of good-willed individuals as proof that radical change is
not necessary. Perhaps without distancing oneself from this psychologism, one can
subvert it and show that things could very well be the other way round. Rather than
rendering radical change expendable, the existence of goodness proves that the
necessary radical change is possible and that there is some hope for it emanating
from goodness being at least partly realized. What is then needed is something like
Calvino’s advice: to locate what and who is not inferno, to make it endure and to
give it space. Yet, if narrowly interpreted and then exaggerated and turned into a
rule, this runs the risk of an elitist subjectivism and an exceptionalism that has
exclusivist effects (the goodies and the baddies) – which gives us a further reason
for tackling the problem supra-individually.
Beyond moral psychologism, we may explore the possibility that people not
being just and good does not quite amount to being bad or, worse, inherently bad.
We may recall here how the situation in Oleanna is unravelled beyond good and
evil understood as individual intentions of supposedly badly socialized beings. On
the contrary, it is precisely the absolute success of their socialization that makes
Carol and John dependent on the main societal imperative: to get on in the world.
Likewise, the King of the dystopia is presented by Hesse not as a hateful and evil
subject but as a perfectly socialized self: a man who has taken for granted the
realities of his world and is driven by the current.
A further mistake within the moralist frame of thought and its vicious circle is
that it adds a curious abstraction to the issue of the social condition. It is as if one
expects to find out whether the world is in need of radical change or not by abstract
speculation on quantities of good and evil, irrespective of the urgency of detectable
pathologies. Facticity, the sharpest sense of reality, is appropriate here. Let us look
at some statistics and facts that determine our gobalized realities and speak for
radical change:
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840 million people are malnourished. 6,000,000 children under the age of 5
die each year as a consequence of malnutrition. 1.2 billion people live on less
than $ 1 a day and half the world’s population lives on less than $ 2 a day. 91
out of every 1,000 children in the developing world die before 5 years old. 12
million die annually from lack of water. 1.1 billion people have no access to
clean water. 2.4 billion people live without proper sanitation. 40 million live
with AIDS. 113 million children have no basic education. 1 in 5 does not
survive past 40 years of age (Tully, 2008, p. 27).
And the contrasted realities (i.e., another possible way of juxtaposing accomplished
‘dystopias’ and ‘utopias’):
the wealth of the richest 1% of the world is equal to that of the poorest 57%.
The assets of the 200 richest people are worth more than the total income of
41% of the world’s people. Three families alone have a combined wealth of $
135 billion. This equals the annual income of 600 million people living in the
world’s poorest countries. The richest 20% of the world’s population receive
150 times the wealth of the poorest 20% (ibid).
As for consumption,
‘the richest fifth of the world’s people consume 45% of the world’s meat and
fish; the poorest fifth consume 5%. The richest fifth consume 58% of total
energy, the poorest fifth less than 4%. The richest fifth have 75% of all
telephones, the poorest fifth 1.5%. The richest fifth own 87% of the world’s
vehicles, the poorest fifth less than 1%’ (ibid, p. 28).
And it is estimated ‘that Internet users in Africa number approximately 1.5 million.
Of these, 1 million are in South Africa, leaving the remaining 500, 000 among the
734 million people on the continent. This equates to one Internet user for every
1500 people compared to a world average of one user for every 38 people, and a
North American average of one in every four’ (Lelliott, Pendlebury and Enslin,
2000, p. 48). [So much about cybertopias.] Finally, just in case one thinks that all
that is thus proven is that improvement is slow and takes time or that all is needed
is simply a more consistent yet slow pace to betterment, encore un effort and we
are getting there, consider the following. ‘In 1960, the share of the global income
of the bottom 20% was 2.3%. By 1991, this had fallen to 1.4%’ (Tully, 2008,
p. 28). The urgency for change and transformation derives from such realities, not
from abstract speculation on whether change is deemed necessary or unnecessary
by the thinking self understood as a rational egoist.
Many contemporary utopians,87 especially of the pragmatist persuasion, reject
universalism and claim that a processual utopia of betterment (rather than of the
kind of perfection that is imagined along lines of a global conception of the good)
overcomes the dilemmas and avoids the pitfalls of universalism by embracing
pluralism and dynamism. The idea is that when utopian efforts aspire to something
beyond the axes of neo-pragmatism and of some versions of realism, by some kind
of anthropological necessity, dystopian terror will be the inescapable conclusion.
Yet, the question of who goes hungry and who does not, which might crop up
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CONCLUSION
when considering the above stated statistical facticity, is not just a question of
process but a vital question of the specific content of utopia in universalist terms.
And it is a question that cannot be circumvented. We may opt not to pose the
question at all, since we may bypass it as too materialist in an age that deals with
post-material needs, the knowledge society and virtual realities. But if we do decide
to turn to this question, we cannot but founder upon its implicit universalism: no one
shall go hungry anymore.
Let us reconsider this question then through the prism of a pragmatist, anti-
universalist utopianism of betterment rather than of perfection. Writing from such a
perspective McKenna explains: ‘rather than seek perfection, the process model of
utopia seeks to create and sustain people willing to take on responsibility and
participate in directing their present toward a better, more desirable future’
(McKenna, 2001, p. 3). How are we to relate the comparative words ‘better’ and
‘more’ to Adorno’s absolute imperative that ‘no one shall go hungry any more’?
And why should the guiding line be that of relative betterment instead of radical
change? In a world that millions go hungry, can utopia be a matter of lesser
numbers going hungry? That now the fed are a lesser number but later, through a
step by step process, the numbers of the fed will augment is more wishful thinking
and speculation (subject to a ‘Zenonian paradox’ criticism) rather than a sound
response.
Let us rephrase the issue so as to highlight the same question from a somewhat
different aspect. Rorty’s neo-pragmatism approaches utopianism from the perspective
of a paradigm change that is not arbitrary. For reasons that will become clear
presently, I discuss this through Maeve Cooke’s handling. As Cooke describes Rorty’s
view, ‘intellectual and ethical paradigms replace their predecessors to resolve
difficulties that could no longer be made sense of within the earlier framework’.
Rorty accepts that ‘paradigm shifts are learning experiences, not “leaps in the
dark”; they succeed one another as a result of the need for new ways of thinking
that are necessary to make sense of accumulated anomalies’ (Cooke, 2006, p. 34;
emph mine: the reader may suspend reading momentarily here to apply the
italicized terms, i.e., difficulties and anomalies, to the above cited statistics so as to
feel how they understate the realities a utopia should target – M. P.). Cooke
highlights how this metaphor of leaps in the dark evokes negatively an image of
enlightenment and turns changes into measured steps toward the light. She rightly
also points out, however, that such evaluative language does not have, for Rorty, a
universalist character. Thus, the image of enlightenment depicts the ‘internal
perspective of the inhabitants of a particular, local context (from a perspective
external to this context, paradigm change would have to appear as random)’ (ibid,
pp. 34–5). Yet, Cooke astutely shows that learning experiences in the Rortyan
framework presuppose a specific conception of rationality that cannot cover the
ground of the rationality of context-transcendence and account for paradigmatic
change. Rorty’s context-bound conception of reason cannot apply to paradigm
change, because a change of this kind ‘calls into question the very standards of
rationality that, in the preceding period of epistemic stability, determined what
should count as rational – what should be regarded as “light” and “darkness”’
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CONCLUSION
(p. 35). In a situation of paradigmatic change ‘what counts as a good reason

becomes a matter of dispute. Since, on the radically contextualist view, reason is
simply what counts as good reason, the concept of rationality cannot be applied to
such disputes’ (p. 35). To Cooke’s criticisms, that I endorse here, I would like to
add that what counts as anomaly and difficulty in need of resolution, the question
about the hungry, for instance,88 can easily be bypassed in a context-bound
interpretation of change that does not call into question the very standards of
rationality set to justify what a society takes as rational.
Further, I would like to raise the following objections to the pragmatist
arguments that discard universalism to replace it with globalism. For it seems, as
Žižek argues, that ‘the true opposition today is rather between globalization (the
emerging global market new world order) and universalism (the properly political
domain of universalizing one’s particular fate as representative of global injustice)’
(Žižek, 1998, p. 1007). Rorty argues in a negative utopian manner that, in Cooke’s
words, ‘philosophical inquiry should be driven by concrete fears of regression
rather than abstract hopes of universality. The memory of how parochial our
ancestors have been, and the fear that our descendents will find us equally so,
should encourage us to strive for a critical rather than dogmatic attitude and a
global rather than parochial perspective’ (Cooke, 2006, p. 214, endnote 43). Our
descendents may find us parochial not only regarding our repetition of old faults
but also regarding what we could have done if we had not been blind enough to
measure our successes and failures with retrospective rather than futurist criteria.
For immanent, context-bound rationality traps us into judgements that recycle the
here and now of critique; it cannot explain that kind of reflective dynamic that
stems from the imagination of what is not yet available within our world. And the
piecemeal notion of change that goes hand in hand with the claim of context-bound
rationality as expressed through the pragmatist ‘trial and error metaphor’, in other
words, with just small, meliorist changes cannot save us from being considered
parochial by the new generations.
Surprisingly, proponents of such piecemeal change against the universalism of
radical demands, who also happen to condemn old utopias for their rigid hierarchies
and exclusions, do not see that a process, meliorist utopia is ultimately an exclusivist
utopia rather than an inclusive one. If we apply a piecemeal tactic to the demand
‘no one shall go hungry anymore’, we see that the assumption that, at least up to a
point in the utopian developmental process, ‘some must inevitably go hungry’ is
not only tolerated but even condoned or defended. Only radical change, no matter
how hard or demanding on the Western subjectivity and societal organization
might be, is not exclusivist and elitist. The notion of universality we may extrapolate
from Badiou’s discussion of terror is telling and apposite here. To him, terror arises
when a proclamation of truth is addressed to a determinate audience, rather than
being addressed to all (Badiou, 2001).
Against any enlargement of the demand for the required change, pragmatist
utopianism is determined by yet another particularism. We have seen above that
Rorty’s image of enlightenment depicts the ‘internal perspective of the inhabitants
of a particular, local context’ (Cooke, 2006, p. 35). Is utopia meant for a specific
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CONCLUSION
social configuration, for the particularity of a single society (an association and a
limited community, of an eco-village or a club), for the middle ground of a city or
a region or a nation-state, or for the universality of an international community and
a cosmopolitan ideality? Perhaps a particularist utopia is a first but incomplete step,
but the aim must be a universalist utopia. Ultimately, a utopia within a dystopian
world, a utopia that is pleased with itself but unable to perceive how human beings
are entangled with one another globally, is not worthy of the name. To see why, let
us think of a patriotism that is such that it creates a better or perfect condition for
the insiders of the community. For instance, one may safely argue that current
western societies are toward their own citizens better than the totalitarian regimes
of the past had been. However, to what degree is this satisfactory to citizens who
are by now familiar with the images of victims of collateral damage in wars carried
out in the name of freedom? Suppose further that a community reaches such a level
of betterment that is rendered harmless to non-members, or even hospitable and
inviting to those outside, in other words, a promised land that simultaneously meets
the demands of Taylor’s communitarianism and Derrida’s anti-utopian utopia of
cities of refuge. Should a human being be contented with a situation in which the
‘we’ are happy but the ‘they’ are suffering and have no other choice but to leave
their place to join the privileged? Mobility for the Western subject who ideally
learns to live and work across borders is a pure existential choice usually (yet not
always) exercised freely within a utilitarian framework of gains and losses. Would
one not want everybody in the world to have the same freedom of choice of roots
and routes – even if not the same motives for moving about?
Mobility is somewhat different in other contexts. ‘Some 200.000 children are
sold into slavery every year in West and Central Africa. They end up working on
plantations, on farms, in factories and in sweatshops. In addition, thousands of
young girls from Nigeria and elsewhere end up as child prostitutes in Europe,
having been shipped from Nigeria via the United Kingdom’ (Cole, 2004, p. 535,
fn 2). Even when things are not as dramatic as that, for the vagabonds of the planet
[Bauman’s (1998) term], movement is the only choice left in their lived dystopias.
In a suffocating economic and political impasse, where even remaining alive
cannot be taken for granted as it is in the everyday normalcy of the western life, the
subjects of the statistics of malnutrition, of war and of lack of water seek only a
glimpse of light and hope: they seek the islets of happiness, the islands of the
blessed. Even if their reception by the footloose inhabitants of the ‘perfect’ patria
were ever one of unconditional hospitality, that one can in no way undo the lack of
choice being the founding moment of their forced journey.
The true happiness of any community worthy of the title of utopia would be
conditional on the happiness of the whole world. Against all anthropocentrisms, the
latter well-being is inconceivable without radical measures for environmental
protection. Ironically, despite the fact that utopia has often taken the form of an
island, utopia is endemically inimical to the isolationism of the detached, self-
contained land. It concerns the kind of happiness that is never complete when
others suffer or when nature is destroyed.
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Thus, utopia is by definition universal or ultimately cosmopolitan. This is at the

same time its trap, i.e., to imagine the good in such comprehensive terms that it
runs the risk of eurocentrism (the west imposing its principles and fantasies on
others) and of totalitarianism. As concerns the former, the western world can rest
assured that a vision of a good society is not a Eurocentric projection of its own
desires. Long before the articulation of such desires in the West, practically all
people around the world had longed for and imagined the collective ideal in
various ways. As concerns the latter, my suggestion is something like Russian dolls
of spatiality, minus the element of identical look. A utopia within utopia, versions
of perfection that are compatible on their constitutive elements enough to deserve
the characterization of an ethico-political utopia but adequately divergent to escape
the danger of hierarchy and control that is implicit in the overarching pattern of
smaller size included in a larger set. And they should be different enough in ways
that are not costly. In a world where deprivation can no longer be defended as a
difference for the sake of difference, there is ample space for all sorts of varieties
and pluralisms to flourish.
But how is such a universalist utopia promoted, let alone effected? Education is,
again, put centre stage: ‘from Plato to Rawls, political philosophy has been a
project of political education in which the theorist speaks as a lawgiver or, what
amounts to the same thing, as educator’ (Lassman, 2003, p. 58). However, now we
must view the inexorable persistence of the problem of transvaluation and its
vicious circle from yet another perspective. ‘Plato’s way of “breaking into this
circle” [in The Republic] is through the medium of education. But this does not
really remove the problem of “who educates the educators”‘ (Lassman, 2003,
p. 52). How do we avoid the educator as a figure of the self-appointed prophet?
How do we keep away the carnivalesque of the global law-givers and ‘educators’,
the crusaders for peace and democracy, the bathos of a new world order that would
simply be comic, if it had not been proved too tragic? The need to consider the
dangers of the intervening aspirations of the contented going in the wrong direction
reminds us that a true utopian aspires to change her/his own society instead of
treating it as an accomplished utopia that needs only to be expanded or imposed on
others. A better answer might be the suggestion to remember that in a utopia that
deserves the name there is always space not only for counter-utopia but even for
the right dose of anti-utopianism. In yet another circle, like ripples on water
surface, we come across the question: how do we separate the kind of anti-
utopianism that combats a facile and even dangerous bad utopianism from the anti-
utopianism that is itself dangerous? We must notice that the latter singles out
terrorism and fundamentalism as the only problems of the world and combats them
theoretically by attacking all utopianism. In doing so, it forgets that these
phenomena thrive precisely as a spectral presence of a badly buried desire for
meaningfulness, vision and transcendence in a world that offers no alternatives to
fallen idols and miserable realities. For, pernicious self-images that radicalize the
narcissist exceptionalism of the Western subject live off the remnants of utopianism.
Consider as an example a plea for anti-terrorist action aiming to establish
volunteer networks of spies and connoting the associations of the surveillance and
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CONCLUSION
disciplining power of the term ‘Archangel’ (de Maeseneer, 2003, p. 511). As de

Maeseneer explains, the slogan of that particular, New York based private security
agency is: ‘become a Crusader for the preservation of Western Culture and Values.
Become an Arch Angel and Fight Terrorism’ (2003, p. 511). Consider also other
New Age, ‘pulp’ utopianisms like those which assert the existence of Indigo and
Crystal children who are supposedly multiplying now, as more and more of them
are born, and aim to save the world. We may notice the twisted, subtle and
emergent idea of collectivity of the exceptional race and of the desire for the better
through the charismatic leader and the effortless conformity to his/her summons.
But we may also notice the proximity of the above to the excitement that is often
caused in educational circles by more composed, reserved, ‘scientific’ manifestations
of exceptionalism as giftedness. From the discourse on giftedness down to the
intervention of the indignant spectator of terrorisms here and there the guiding
thread is the longing for the exceptional, for the positively radical Other of humanity
who will be its soteriological subject. Just as we have negative othering that aims
to exclusion or justifies exclusion, we also have its complementary force, the
positive othering that justifies privilege. The sliding of this into new forms of terror
is not as farfetched as it seems at first sight. Against such current and forthcoming
‘angelic’ delusions of grandeur, a world without some activation of anti-utopian
arguments at the right moment is indeed a world in which the concentration camps
(either the colonial like that designed by Earl Kitchener which introduced the camp
as a practice, or the Nazi ones or the Gulag kind) beckon. One must be downright
anti-utopian towards exclusivist utopias of bad faith (that is, to utopias that
presuppose a soteriological subject and its exceptionalist, distorted self-image of
the self-appointed saviour of the world). The appropriate response to such a
futurism is the dire warning.
The above are nothing other than extreme cases of what Badiou has critiqued as
the position in which the Western subject has been put by ‘human rights and
politics of difference’ discourse. This discourse places the Western self in the
position of the distant voyeur, a position that can be better illustrated, I believe, by
the metaphor of the angelic in yet another version, although Badiou himself
refrains from drawing any such analogy. ‘Politics is subordinated to ethics, to the
single perspective that really matters in this conception of things: the sympathetic
and indignant judgement of the spectator of the circumstances’ (Badiou, 2001,
p. 9). Failing in its theogenic aspirations, the Western self goes for the second best,
the angelic power of a detached viewer. This self is the observer who has not,
supposedly, created the circumstances of the watched drama but is found in the
morally privileged position of the intervening rescuer or the independent judge and
referee. In front of ‘the good-Man, the white-Man’, lies the ‘victim-Man’: ‘on the
side of the victims, the haggard animal exposed on television screens’; this ‘ethics
which rests on the misery of the world’ always ‘assigns the same roles to the same
sides’ (Badiou, 2001, p. 13, emph mine). The spying apparatus that employs the
archangelic metaphor we saw above is only an extreme instantiation of this world
division into the looking down ‘angels’ and the observed ‘recipients’ of their
possible benevolence or ‘just’ retribution.
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CONCLUSION
A better answer to the paradoxes of the vicious circle is universalism, i.e., the
fact that there is no single lawgiver (no exceptional subject who sets the pace for
the others, namely, the followers should be assumed), and that the call for
education is addressed to all, the educators notwithstanding. The hysterical kind of
utopia such as the one that Lacan chastised for its unwillingness to move to real
change and for its seeking a new Master is a particularist utopia of auto-exclusion.
Expecting change from authorities such as the law-givers and the educators is an
exclusivist kind of utopia as much as its counterpart, i.e., the kind of utopia that
assumes a redemptive collective subject – carrier of revolution that belongs to a
particular social class or category. Both exclude some segments of the population
or subordinate them to the transformative will of the few.
Utopian ecstasy (Ec-stasis, going beyond stasis) is precisely to be drawn into
something better, opened as a space of a realizable universal possibility when
realizing that the human condition is not static. Can utopia be worthy of exploration
if it is only about ‘seeking meaning, not any final aim’ (McKenna, p. 3)? A prag-
matist affirmative answer to this question would present us with an absolute choice
between utopia as ongoing task and utopia as resting place. Instead of being
dispensable, the resting place is the content of utopias on the grounds of which they
should be judged.89 It is inescapable so long as utopia is not just an empty
placeholder; for an ethico-political process should always be a process in some
direction. ‘Any utopia which is materialized represents a closure, both socially and
spatially, even if temporarily; and this is an authoritarian act’. Perhaps not quite;
or, perhaps, not always. In any case, ‘to refuse closure is a political evasion,
implying permanently unfulfilled longing’ (Levitas, 2003b, p. 142). Is there
anything else for humanity, other than the consistent, thorough and circular,
difference-sensitive universalism of education for all and of the education of
desire, the desire of the educators’ first and foremost?
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NOTES
1
Unless otherwise specified, all my references to ancient Greek texts will be limited to Stephanus
numbers and other such standard categorizations because I have followed the original Greek text as
it has appeared in local rather than international editions.
2
For more on these, see, Milner (2005).
3
See, for instance, Sauer`s (2005) discussion of the play.
4
Such has, for instance, been the main argument of a recent workshop on literature and education
organized by Lemettais and Denise Egea-Kuhne for the 11th ISSEI conference July 2008 in Helsinki,
Finland.
5
Of course, there is the danger in both empathetic and utopian imagination of educational or literary
instrumentalism but this cannot be treated here without getting sidetracked. A solution to this
predicament is to refer to David Blacker’s excellent discussion of educational instrumentalism and
non-instrumentalism (2007, pp. 82–86) which I largely endorse.
6
For more on the latter exceptions and for the corresponding references see Milojevic (2003, p. 447).
7
Therefore, what I propose is: (1) an association of a redefined utopian thought with the role and aims
of education, (2) an exploration of the notion of dystopia as a critical device for detecting societal
and educational pathologies and as a corrective of possible utopian blindness regarding its own risky
implications and (3) a philosophical justification of this educational intersection of utopia and
dystopia through a new anthropological account of the self.
8
‘The early works do not, for instance, claim to know the proletariat’s destiny better than it knows it
itself. In fact, they do not even claim that utopia may be conceived of as the outcome of any
identifiable process of social change’ (Price, 1999, p. 68).
9
Lewis supplements Hardt and Negri’s position with a theory of authentic democratic education,
drawing from Dewey so as to offer an avenue of actualization.
10
In Max Weber’s sense; see Crowley (2000, p. 151).
11
I provide here three categories for the content of which (yet not the terms themselves) I owe much to
Doyne Dawson’s (1992) theorization of similar distinctions. The three categories are by no means
exhaustive and they do not entail that all known figures of utopian discourse today can conveniently
be placed in either of them.
12
Some of the historical material that I shall be using here I have also employed in Papastephanou
(2008c).
13
Surprisingly, Jameson’s view that utopias ‘come to us as barely audible messages from a future that
may never come into being’ (2004, p. 54) does not bear fruits when the issue of the conceptualization and
genealogy of utopian thought is at stake. Had it done so, it would have meant that such barely audible
messages are not only those of modern utopias but of ancient and non-western utopias too.
14
She writes: ‘We therefore find it difficult to realize that according to ancient thought on these matters,
the very term “political economy” would have been a contradiction in terms: whatever was “economic”,
related to the life of the individual and the survival of the species, was a non-political, household
affair by definition’ (1989, p. 29).
15
Various conceptual contents of utopia and dystopia on an egalitarian basis are encountered in most
cultures from antiquity to the present. Back in 1968, Chesneaux had already discussed the utopian and
egalitarian element in the thought and political action of ancient China, in the Burmese protest against
British colonialism, in early Islamic movements or figures that demanded redistribution of wealth (e.g.
Badr-ed-Dîn) etc.
16
See, for instance, Cheneaux’s citations of the passage from the Chinese Book (1968, p. 79).
17
A last resemblance is nevertheless noteworthy here: in China there is the utopia of T’ ao Yuan-ming
(c. 365-427) entitled The Source of the Peach Garden (Chesneaux, 1968, p. 83) that has some
similarities with utopias of hellenistic times (e.g. Iambulus’s Heliopolis) describing imaginary journeys
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to societies with a strong communal element, justice and no war, and with utopias having a touch of
anarchism and promoting rejection of governmental power (e.g. the Cynic ones).
18
Hesiod’s first-sight millenarianism (Papastephanou, 2008a) belongs more to the category of dystopian
warning for shaking his contemporaries rather than to millenarianism proper precisely because the
avoidance of disaster and the attainment of utopia are to come through human action alone, not as a
divine providence.
19
‘Science was the means to both a better knowledge of God and the creation of a truly Christian
society’ (Fischer, 1993, p. 14).
20
Kumar seems to expect an ancient utopia to be identical with More ‘s in order to merit the name
(2003, p. 68) and of course there is no such thing. More was an innovator and an original thinker,
but this does not mean that only the modern utopia is utopia. Modern utopia is a subdivision of
utopianism in general, and a very important one, but this in no way justifies its use as a means for
arresting time in the sense that all that preceded it is pre-history and all that followed it has to give
its credential to it in order to deserve to be placed alongside.
21
Consider, for instance, Reinhold Bichler’s two volume work on ancient Greek utopias and Dawson’s
400 pages on communist utopias in Greek thought.
22
Unlike his later publications, which are far more accurate in their accounts of the history of utopia,
Kumar’s earlier work, known chiefly through his influential book on utopianism (1991), approaches
utopia through a strictly modern and Eurocentric lens. Whereas Kumar now acknowledges that it is
the modern utopia (rather than all utopia) that begins with More who drew from the older traditions
but added a distinctive element of its own (2003, p. 63), in his earlier text he restricts utopia proper
to modernity alone, classifying the tradition that preceded it to non-utopian (either millenarian or
ideal-city) categories. Yet, although he now acknowledges that More is the father of modern utopia,
again in his more recent work, he curiously reasserts that the ideal city is the pre-history or the
unconscious of utopia and places it in the same position with the Christian millenium.
23
He writes that the ‘egalitarian and Utopian traditions in the East could not allow a real establishment
of modern socialism in all these countries. For modern socialism is profoundly innovating; it implies
a fundamental technico-sociological change, even more than an upheaval of values and political and
ideological systems; those archaic protest movements and those Utopian dreams were not capable of
preparing for such a change’ (Chesneaux, 1968, p. 101).
24
I have discussed the educational significance of this elsewhere (Papastephanou, 2008a), thus I shall
not cover the same ground here.
25
Utopias are not personal ideals or narrow ideals about specific issues of life and action, despite the
fact that utopias logically require utopian citizens, i.e. persons with specific ideals and virtues that
are to some extent compatible or not inimical to the utopian citizenship.
26
See, for instance, how McKenna connects the passive faith in a better future with all sorts of social
ills, (2001, p. 1).
27
Thus a utopian narrative which does not reflect an inoperative and passive escapism is preferable to
its opposite because of its content, not because it is supposedly more or less utopian than its opposite
might be.
28
Thus utopia is described as a ‘Bildprojektion eines Wunschraums auf eine imaginäre geographische,
als eben noch möglich erdachte, Fläche’ (cf Bichler, 1995, p. 181).
29
By not differentiating between utopianism and utopia, Bichler applies the latter term in a way that is
broad enough to encompass all the traditions and the many forms that utopia has taken from
antiquity to the present (1995, p. 7), that is, he employs the term in a rather loose way.
30
Parenthetically, anti-utopianism is not as modern as it is usually taken to be. It is found in antiquity
too, e.g. as the ironic element in Aristophanes’s utopias of the Wealth and Ecclesiazousai which,
significantly, while it has been interpreted as a satire of the Platonic Republic, it antedates it (see Moses
Hadas 1935, p. 121) (and indirectly indicates the possibility of much utopianism that has not survived
time). Then again, Aristophanic comedy has strong aspects of counter-utopia as well as critical dystopian
elements that can not be taken up here for reasons of space. I would see Aristophanes’s Wealth and
the Assemblywomen as the first counter-utopias but this is beyond the scope of this book.
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Neverhteless, anti-utopianism is also found in satires of Golden Age narratives, such as those by
the poets Crates and Telecleides.
31
On how this happened, and on Rabelais’ interesting contribution to that evolvement, see Bichler
(1995, p. 6 and p. 180).
32
However, we should avoid overgeneralizations, since the literature of modern utopia is so vast and
difficult to manage that it is possible that some works do not conform to this pattern.
33
Cyber-topia and the utopia of free and open markets have become the privileged utopian discourse.
In my view, utopia is not the cyberspace but a precondition for the cyberspace not turning into a tool
that serves the existent.
34
In a similar way, communicative utopias break more radically with the modernist progress than the
technological counterparts because the former prioritize communicative action oriented to mutual
understanding over instrumental/strategic action oriented to success whereas the latter often presuppose
success as a starting point.
35
For a discussion of More’s utopia, see (Kumar, 1991; Marin, 1973) and of its relation to education
see Halpin (2001b).
36
Yet, we must keep in mind Levitas’s warning that the extent to which spatial utopias are descriptively
distinct from temporal or processual utopias should not be overstated (Levitas, 2003b, p. 148).
37
From now on, much of the material that will be discussed up to the section on the interplay of utopia
and dytsopia has already appeared in a shorter version in Papastephanou (2008a).
38
‘The appearance of the novum, in however fleeting or mystified a fashion, […] circumvents
officialdom’s resistance to change and fuels […] the “principle of hope”‘ (Gardiner, 2006, p. 4).
39
In educational discourse, Milojevic (2003) speaks for the abandonment of utopia as the blueprint of
the ideal, perfect and uniform society and defends the need for dystopias of critique, heterotopias of
diversity and eutopias of improvement.
40
For instance, the idea that socialism would come when time was ripe was politically detrimental for
the chances of the Austrian left to oppose Nazism. See Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies
or, for a brief account of this point, see Magee (1985, pp. 11–12).
41
For a concise account of it from an educational point of view, see Lewis (2007, p. 3).
42
On utopia as a possibility, see, for instance, Adorno’s view of utopia (Lewis, 2006) and Lukács’ early
writings. Unlike Lukács’ later ones, characterized by the determinacy with which they predict utopia as
a future possibility, his early writings do not claim that utopia should be theorized as the outcome of
an identifiable process of social change. ‘Utopia is instead used only as a hermeneutic device, a ground
upon which to criticize the dystopian present and a means by which to stretch the critical imagination’
(Price, 1999, p. 68). As Leonardo expresses Lukacs’ position, ‘a true utopia is not the preoccupation
with details that may appear coherent, but targeting the cohesive, concrete system of relations’ (Leonardo,
2003, p. 519). Like the early Lukacs, I believe that we should deliberately avoid any systematic theory
of society and the temptation to elaborate a course of social action that is supposedly likely to realize
utopia. Like his, my goal is also to simply allow ‘utopia to appear as a possibility – albeit one among
many – in spite of the alienated, dystopian quality of life in the present-day world’ (Price, 1999, p. 80).
43
A very early example of joining utopia and its dystopian degeneration is Aristophanes’ Wealth (Pluto).
44
Yet, even in such cases, where all internal hope is crushed, ‘an extrinsic hope can be generated, with
the dystopian society constituting a dreadful warning of what might happen (but need not) if certain
paths are taken. This external hope may have been intended by the author, or it may not, but the
possibility is there for the reader’ (Geoghegan, 2003, p. 153).
45
This is Jameson’s term for the uncovering of the instrumental function of cultural objects.
46
I mean the terms somewhat differently from Jameson, as he refers strictly to the possible function of
any cultural object beyond the mechanistic Marxist analysis of this function as purely ideological,
whereas I refer more generally to the specific interplay of direct discourse about reality, the existing
and the possible.
47
For an account of educational pathologies that utopian thought might help us confront, see Halpin
(2001a, p. 105).
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48
Braun gives a very interesting account of how surprise functions in the play in subversive and
revealing ways (2004, p. 106).
49
On the latter possibility see Murphy’s (2004, p. 135) discussion of Thomas Goggans’s ‘backstory’
interpretation of Carol’s reactions to John’s expressions of ‘paternal’ concern.
50
Yet, when Pinter himself directed the play in London, he opted for another version of Mamet’s
script that ended with John signing a McCarthyist confession. For more on this, see Price (2004, pp.
165-6) and Murphy (2004, pp. 133–6).
51
On Orwell’s 1984 as a critical dystopia, see Milner (2005).
52
The furthest employment of education I have noticed in literary criticism of the play concerns Skloot’s
references to Freire’s banking system of education (Skloot, 2001, p. 99).
53
The lyrics of Oleanna:
(Translation from the Norwegian by Pete Seeger)
Ole, oleanna, ole, oleanna

ole, ole, ole, ole, ole, oleanna
Oh to be in Oleanna,
that’s where I’d like to be
Than to be in Norway
and bear the chains of slavery
Little roasted piggies

rush around the city streets
Inquiring so politely
if a slice of ham you’d like to eat
Beer as sweet as muncheners

springs from the ground and flows away
The cows all like to milk themselves
And the hens lay eggs ten times a day
The women there do all the work
As round the fields they quickly go
Each one has a hickory stick
And beats herself if she works too slow
In Oleanna land is free

The wheat and corn just plant themselves
Then grow a good four feet a day
While on your bed you rest yourself
Source:
www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/song-midis/Oleanna.htm
54
For more on this as well as on why the play should not be dismissed as antifeminist, see Hudgins
and Kane (2001, p. 5).
55
This has led, I believe, to interpretations of Oleanna that are irreparably narrow and completely off
the point. Regardless of the interesting issues that Bean raises in her article and some well-argued
remarks, her overall understanding of Oleanna that accuses the play for obsessive focus on ‘the
potentially corrosive influence of feminism upon the university tradition and the patriarchal family’
(2001, p. 115) misses entirely Mamet’s irony and his critical postmodernism.
56
Yet, it is important not to take Oleanna as an anti-utopia or even counter-utopia because, just as in
the case of Kierkegaard’s thought, mobilizing a fierce anti-system rhetoric ends up in systematically
precluding certain possibilities, especially the possibility of utopian social change (Price, 1999, p. 73).
Taking it as a critical dystopia, instead, we remain more faithful to the spirit of the play itself which
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supports the interpretation of it as a stirring warning regarding the existent that opens up space for
vision rather than any alternative interpretations beyond dystopia.
57
For more on this see Braun (2004, p. 104).
58
Skloot also comments on the ‘splendid irony in seeing how successfully John has transmitted to
Carol the facts, customs and feelings of their “professional” situation’ (2001, p. 98).
59
For a pertinent analysis of this fatal self-revelation see Murphy (2004, p. 131).
60
On his appeal to academic freedom and on how hollow this appeal rings given his previous views on
it see, Murphy (2004, p. 132).
61
The curriculum is also available on the Net but my references to it and especially to the Opening Pages
will be drawn from John White’s edited collection of essays Rethinking the School Curriculum (2004)
which includes the whole text of the Opening Pages.
62
For some different examples of historical events related to imperial colonialism that are not catered
for in the curriculum, see Cole (2004, p. 535).
63
Much of the chapter’s argumentation from now on will reflect the ideas that I have discussed
elsewhere (see, Papastephanou, 2008c).
64
This paragraph has constituted the basic focal point of a presentation of mine (‘The Cosmopolitan
Self does her Homework’) at the PESGB Oxford conference in 2009. Thus, for a more developed
argumentation on these issues, see the relevant paper.
65
For the latter and its lack of direction see, for instance, Bauman, 1998.
66
On Arcadia as a utopia of a simple life that is not free from the constraints of materiality and the
destiny of death, see Bann (2003, p. 109).
67
For more and diverse discussions of Mannheim see Lewis (2007, p. 3); Turner (2003); Fischer,
(1993, p. 17); Geoghegan (2004).
68
For a discussion of this, see Dauenhauer (1989, p. 27–8).
69
Of course, in its own, limited and often unspoken way dystopia presupposes utopia too.
70
For passages in Jameson’s texts asserting this, see (Jameson, 1981, p. 289 and p. 299).
71
See, for instance, Jeff Kochan’s (2006, pp. 399–402) reading of such distinctions.
72
Parenthetically, the latter assertion is questionable. Marcuse in his text on the end of utopia does not
appear certain at all – see, Paris (2002, p. 177).
73
On how this opens up utopian possibilities in Marcuse’s theory see, Paris (2002, p. 177).
74
By implication, undeserved happiness is the kind of happiness that is not justified by one’s capacity
or willingness to perform socially beneficial tasks.
75
Cognitive mapping amounts to naming the system and enables us to see its regressive and progressive
tendencies within the variety of its contradictions. Through cognitive estrangement the present is
made to lose its identity with itself and to become historicized (Lewis, 2006, p. 15).
76
A possible difference is that I see such transformations more subject-oriented (as I think that I am
more suspicious of Althusserian and Lacanian orthodoxy) as well as more encompassing than the
treatment of contradiction through the prism of the movement of class struggle would allow.
77
For Freudian textual evidence and for a more detailed discussion of Freud’s position on civilization
see, Cho (2006, pp. 20–1).
78
It is worth noting that even supporters of Kant’s radical evil thesis such as Formosa do not feel that
Kant succeeds in providing transcendental deduction to establish that evil is universal and not just
widespread (see, Formosa, 2007, p. 236ff).
79
Arguably, this is one of the points where Marx diverges from utopian socialism if we follow Jameson’s
description of Marxist structuralism as anti-essentialist and anti-psychological (Jameson, 2004, p. 37).
80
By othering here I employ Gayatri Spivak’s term to refer to the overemphasis of the other’s differences
from the self, so that the self may be realized in opposition to the other and I connect it with a
Hegelian- inspired understanding of the construction of identity through the master-slave narrative.
81
To Hesiod, although no mortal loves the bad kind of strife, human beings pay tribute to it because it
is the gods’ will (Works and Days, 13-16). This is philosophically-anthropologically very interesting
because, unlike modern theories of human motivation or proneness toward evil (from Hobbes, Hume
down to the more mitigated Kantian idea of human inherent unsocial sociability), Hesiod does not
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install antagonism within the human self. Therefore, there is no onto-anthropological obstacle to human
perfectibility; contingent obstacles are more easily removable through a remoulding of human perception,
in other words, through education.
82
A fuller account of Žižek’s position can be found in Brockelman’s work (2003, pp. 190ff) from
which I shall draw while departing from it on crucial points.
83
Due to Lacanian theoretical commitments that he shares with poststructuralism, Žižek detects the
above essentialism only in order to speak for a utopian negativity as much as Jameson does.
84
For a pertinent discussion of how Marcuse challenges the ideological employment of scarcity by
those who wish to justify inequality, see Cho (2006, p. 21).
85
A side issue, which is, nevertheless, quite relevant, concerns here communicative utopia and the way it
demarcates the limits of change and of human possibility. Dewey conceives of democracy mainly as
full and free communication, that is, as pointing to a communicative utopia. Now this communicative
utopia is expected to lead to the ‘fullest possible realization of human potentialities’, as Demetrion
explains using Dewey’s own terms (2001, p. 58). Whether communicative utopias suffice for such an
aim is a debatable issue as such. But what is more important here is that this ultimate aim makes
explicit the tacit anthropology that operates underneath pragmatist piecemeal and episodic change. Who
defines the meaning of the fullest possible and who decides the content of the notion ‘human
potentialities’? On what grounds? Are they determinable as supposedly predetermined and given, i.e.
hardly variable?
86
Like the early Lukacs, teleologically speaking, I see in utopia nothing more than a possibility - one
among many and perhaps not the most likely of them. The odds as I see it are more in favour of
political pessimism rather than political optimism given how things are globally at the moment. But
this is no anthropological pessimism. The relation is more complex. Due to anthropological pessimism
and the self-understanding it consolidates the current situation is uncritically asserted and even
exacerbated. This enhances the historical futurist possibility to be closer to destruction rather than
betterment. But anthropological optimism tells us that things need not be so without stopping us from
mapping realistically the political tendencies of our times.
87
The term ‘realistic utopia’ encountered in Rawls, McIntyre etc and the term ‘pragmatist utopia’ in
Rorty and McKenna exemplify simultaneously the presence of utopian energies in political philosophy
and their attenuation through a less imaginative invocation of the potential for changing historical reality.
These approaches seem to have determined the course of the revival of utopian thought in general
philosophy and philosophy of education.
88
Or other questions that have not been taken up here for reasons of space, such as those about the
environmental apartheid (the practice of exporting hazardous waste to societies where environmental
safeguards are lower than in the West) and the nuclear colonialism (testing nuclear weapons in the
South Pacific with seeming indifference to the health of local populations) (Linklater, 2002, pp. 330–1).
89
As Price asks, ‘what, ultimately, is the value of a utopian fantasy, however sound in theory, that prescribes
no concrete course of action for the living individual in the here and now?’ (Price, 1999, p. 80).
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INDEX
A Čapek, K., xiv

Adorno, T., xiv, 4, 5, 14, 54, 69, 71, 93, 106, Chesneaux, J., xvi, 28, 31–2, 35–8, 187n15,
116, 128, 137–9, 180, 189n42 188n23
Aeschylus, 94 Cho, D., 7, 166, 191n77, 192n84
Ainsa, F., 27, 29–31, 34, 52–3 Chrysippos, 147
Alcidamas, 130, 171 Cicero, 32
Al-Farabi (Avennason), 37 Clement of Alexandria, 35
Althusser, L., xix, 114, 121–2, 136, 191n76 Cold War, 5, 9, 104, 105, 161
Anarchism., 12–3, 81, 152, 188n17 Cole, M., 86, 94, 130, 182,
Andreae, J. V., xviii, 35 191n62
Apel, K.-O., vii, 18, 24, 57 Coleridge, S. T., 113
Arbenz, J., 9 Comenius, J. A., xviii, 35
Arendt, H., xv, 10, 13, 31, 88, 91, 97–8, 157 Confucius, 32
Aristophanes, 38, 188n30, 189n43 Cooke, M., x, xiii, 3, 7, 15, 16, 19–21, 24, 39,
Aristotle, 31–2, 130, 153, 171 57, 59, 103, 109, 111, 120, 142–4, 147, 156,
158, 163–8, 170–4, 180–1
B Crates, 32, 35, 189n30
Bakhtin, M., 80 Crowley, J., 21, 52, 82, 84–5, 95, 99, 105, 107,
Bacon, F., xviii, 35, 111 187n10
Badenhausen, R., 68, 78 Cynics, 25, 32, 35, 188n17
Badiou, A., ix, 10–1, 15, 53–5, 58–9, 106,
110–1, 136, 148, 153, 181, 184 D
Baeten, G., 45 Dahrendorf, R., 6, 9, 15–7, 158
Bann, S., 69, 105, 107, 191n66 Darwinism, 11
Bauman, Z., 4, 26, 43, 49–52, 96, 177, 182, Dauenhauer, B. P., 122, 126, 131–3, 164,
191n65 191n68
Bean, K., 70, 73, 74, 78, 79, 190n55 Dawson, D., 24–6, 28, 30–3, 35, 40, 45, 130,
Becker, H., 4 147, 157, 187n11, 188n21
Bellamy, E., 62, 115 Davis, R., xvi, xvii
Benhabib, S., 93, 94 De Maeseneer, Y., 184
Benjamin, W., xvi, 15, 28–9, 55–6, 61, 93, 135 Demetrion, G., xviii, 19, 79, 192n85
Bentham, J., 45 Derrida, J., 6, 13, 18, 24, 54, 57, 147, 182
Berlin, I., xiii, 6, 11–2, 147 Dewey, J., xviii, 6, 19, 79, 93, 139–142, 187n9,
Bichler, R., 27, 29, 33, 44, 188n21, 189n31 192n85
Bildung, 74, 115 Dews, P., 148
Bion, 32 Diderot, D., 62
Blacker, D., 8, 77, 89, 90, 92, 96, 187n5 Diodorus, 33
Blairism, 82, 85, 95, 99 Diogenes, 32
Bloch, E., x, 4–5, 29, 43, 49, 53–4, 60, 70, 93, Dobson, A., 86–7
122–6, 128, 177 Dorens, A., 44
Bramall, S., 82, 86, 96
Braun, H., 66, 72, 75, 190n48, 191n57 E
Brockelman, T., 9, 16, 156, 159–162, 192n82 Eagleton, T., 54–5, 92, 153
Buber, M., xv, xx, 12, 43, 44, 81, 103, 121 Egalitarianism, xvii, 28, 30–5, 38, 95, 98,
Burdett, C., 58, 131 187n15, 188n23
Butler, J., 57 Egea-Kuhne, D., 187n4
Butler, S., 68–70, 72, 74 Eliav-Feldon, M., 28
Enlightenment, 29, 37, 115, 141, 180–1
C Enslin, P., 179
Calvino, I., xiii, 51, 54, 56, 59, 61, 69, 119, 173, Escapism, 6–7, 12–3, 24–5, 28–9, 31, 38, 40,
178 43, 52, 70, 147, 177, 188n27
Campanella, T., 33 Euripides, 53
199

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INDEX
F I
Filarete, A., 33 Iambulus, 27, 32, 171, 187n17
Finalism, 2, 14–5, 25, 39–40, 43, 52, 59, 81–2, Iftody, T., xii
152, 164, 168, 171
Fischer, R., 33, 35, 114, 188n19, 191n67 J
Formalism, xiii, 6, 15, 20–1, 24, 57, 95, 103, Jacoby, R., 5
106–8, 110, 125, 133, 135, 137 Jameson, F., xii, xiii, xvi, 3, 12, 27, 58, 60, 62,
Formosa, P., 149–150, 154, 191n78 101, 107, 113, 114, 119, 130, 134–9, 141–2,
Forti, S., 154 144–5, 153, 164, 171, 187n13, 189nn. 45,
Foucault, M., 6, 17–8, 47–8, 52, 105, 147 46, 191nn. 70, 79, 192n83
Fourier, C., xvii, 30 Joachim of Fiore, 34
Frankfurt School, 7, 14, 122, 125, 139
Fraser, N., 143 K
Freire, P., xviii, 64, 72, 76, 78, 86, 190n52 Kaldor, M., 104
Freud, S., 113, 148–150, 157, 166, 191n77 Kane, L., 71, 79, 190n54
Kant, I., x, 100, 149–150, 154, 165, 170, 172,
G 191nn. 78, 81
Gardiner, M., 12, 15, 29, 54–6, 61, 82, 92–3, Kelly, S., 13
122, 189n38 Keyt, D., 130, 153
Geoghegan, V., 4–5, 21, 45–6, 49, 56, 58, 60, Kierkergaard, S., 97
67, 111, 120, 122–5, 189n44, 191n67 Kochan, J., 191n71
Giroux, H., x, xviii, 4, 5, 19 Kumar, K., xv, 12, 21, 27, 32–9, 44, 48, 50, 51,
Golden Age, xvi, xvii, 7, 25–31, 33–4, 36, 38, 53, 58, 71, 91, 97–98, 109, 115, 130, 188nn.
40, 43, 50, 56, 69, 113, 125, 189n30 20, 22, 189n35
Gramsci, A., 118
L
H Lacan, J., xix, 15, 17, 57, 117, 136, 162, 185,
Habermas, J., 3, 6, 17–8, 20, 24, 57, 126, 130, 191n76, 192n83
171 Laclau, E., 3, 16, 19, 57, 135, 156–160, 162–4,
Hadas, M., 30, 34, 188n30 171
Halpin, D., xvi-xviii, 21, 27, 30, 50, 60, 62–3, Land of Cockaygne, 30, 69
69, 114, 130, 175, 189nn.35, 47 Lassman, P., 50, 117, 147, 177–8, 183
Hand, M., 88, 92 LeGuin, U., xv
Hardt, M., 19, 187n9 Leibniz, G., 35
Hare, W., 76, 78 Lelliott, A., 179
Harvey, D., 12 Lemettais, M., 187n4
Hegel, F., 34, 52, 54, 100, 148, 162, 191n80 Leonard, G., xviii
Heidegger, M., 54 Leonardo, Z., xvii, 78, 80, 118, 122, 189n42
Heller, A., 55, 82, 126 Lewis, T., xviii, 19, 23, 25, 45, 121, 133–4,
Hellman, L., xiv 137–141, 187n9, 189nn. 41, 42, 191nn. 67, 75
Heraclitus, ix, 165 Levinas, E., 54, 110
Herodotus, 30 Levitas, R., 12, 21, 46, 59, 84, 107, 116, 120,
Hesiod, 15, 27, 29–31, 36, 40, 48, 50, 59, 67, 147, 185, 189n36
99–100, 112–3, 116, 131, 149, 157, 188n18, Li-Ju-chen, xvi
191n81 Linklater, A., 192n89
Hesse, H., xiii, 48, 67, 111–120, 125, 178 Lu, C., 128
Hewlett, N., 11, 15 Luce-Kapler, R., xii
Hippodamus of Miletus, 31, 33 Lucian, 35
Hobbes, T., 148–153, 157, 162, 165, Lukacs, G., 14, 97, 189n42, 192n86
191n81 Luke, 35
Homer, 27, 34, 48, 112–3, 116 Lyotard, J.-F., 54, 115, 169
Honneth, A., 20, 57
Horace, 53 M
Hudgins, C. C., 71, 79, 190n54 Magee, B., 189n40
Hume, D., 11, 149, 191n81 Mamet, D., xiii, 62–80, 190nn. 50, 55
Humes, W., xviii, xix, 4, 86, 115 Mann, J., xviii
200

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INDEX
Mannheim, K., x, xiii, 4–6, 14, 40, 43, 49, 70, Osborne, T., xiv, 46–7, 61, 84
77, 84, 122–8, 135, 138, 155, 191n67 Owen, R., xiv, xvii
Manuel, F. E., 29, 43 Ovid, 27, 29
Manuel, F. P., 29, 43 Ozmon, H., xviii
Marcuse, H., 7, 93, 138, 167, 191nn. 72, 73,
192n84 P
Marin, L., xiii, 47, 51–2, 69, 103–7, 116, 121, Paris, J., 191n72
158, 189n35 Parry, B., 51
Marx, K., x, xvii, 6, 12–3, 34, 54, 56, 114, 136, Passerini, L., xviii, 3, 96
143, 145, 191n79 Pendlebury, S., 179
Marxism, xix, 3, 6, 12–4, 17, 49, 56, 81, 97, Peters, M., xviii, xix, 4, 86, 115
121–2, 126, 131, 135, 143–5, 156, 189n46, Phaleas of Chalcedon, 31
191n79 Philemon, 130, 171
May, 68, 3, 105 Pinter, H., 17, 66, 72, 190n50
Mazlish, B., 30, 50, 62, 115 Plato, ix, 25–7, 29, 31–2, 36–7, 40, 108, 118,
McClntock, A., 27 134–6, 154, 183, 188n30
McIntyre, A., xix, 3, 192n87 Platonov, A., xiv, 61
McKenna, E., 39, 180, 185, 188n26, 192n87 Popkewitz, T. S., 119
McLaren, P., xviii Popper, K., 6, 9–10, 147, 157, 189n40
MacLeod, C., 71 Pragmatism, xviii, xix, 3, 6, 13, 18–20, 56, 63,
Mencius, 31, 36 79, 84, 86, 108, 126, 132, 139, 141, 147,
Mercier, L.-S., 50, 62, 115 167–8, 170, 174, 179–181, 185, 192
Messianism, 25, 28, 43, 49, 58, 85, 127, 138 Price, S., 71, 80, 190n50
Mill, J. S., 8, 45, 79, 84 Price, Z., 8, 14, 97, 187n8, 189n42, 190nn. 49,
Millenarianism, 28, 33–4, 37, 40, 86, 131, 56, 192n89
188nn. 18, 22
Milner, A., xiii, 59, 61, 62, 76, 110, 187n2, R
190n51 Rabelais, 189n31
Milojevic, I., 46, 167, 187n6, 189n39 Racine, L., 33–4
Moralism, 40, 82, 89, 91–2, 95, 97, 113, 145, Rajchman, J., 117
172, 178 Ranciere, J., xvi, 128
More, T., xvii, 27, 29–30, 35–7, 39–40, 44, 48, Rawls, J., xix, 3, 24, 132, 183, 192n87
51, 109, 149, 158, 188nn. 20, 22, 189n35 Renaissance, 28, 32–3, 35–7, 39, 81, 149
Mouffe, C., 16, 135, 156–160, 162–3 Ricoeur, P., xiii, 3, 100, 105, 121–2, 126–134,
Moylan, T., 45, 46, 58, 67 147, 164
Mumford, L., 25, 28, 40 Rorty, R., xix, 6, 18–9, 132, 180–1, 192n87
Murdoch, I., 71, 146 Rosenthal, D., 69
Murphy, B., 66, 68–72, 74, 76, 78, 190nn. 49, Rousseau, J.-J., 33, 69, 117
50, 192nn. 59, 60 Ryberg, I. S., 29
N S
Naddaf, G., 112 Saint-Simon, H., 34
Nagel, T., 147, 153–4 Sargent, L.T., 3, 8–9, 45, 52, 85, 143
Nazism, 11, 154, 184, 189n40 Sauer, D. K., 71, 187n3
Negri, A., 19, 187n9 Sartre, J.-P., xiv, 54, 161
Németh, L., 76 Scarry, E., xv
Neo-liberalism, 5, 84 Seel, M., 57
Norris, C., vii, 148, 150–1 Seneca, 29–30, 52
Nussbaum, M., xv, 161 Shklar, J., xviii, 27, 35, 43
Simmel, G., 56, 61
O Skloot, R., 66–7, 69, 72, 76, 78–79, 190n52
Olssen, M., 9–11, 17–8, 21, 39, 46, 83, 96, 101, Smith, A., 12
147 Socrates, ix, 26, 53, 108, 117
Oneisicritus, 32 Sorel, G., 109–120, 163–4
Origen, 35 Spinoza, B., 150–2
Orwell, G., 66, 75–6, 190 Stalinism, 12
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INDEX
St Augustine, 91, 97
Stewart-Harawira, M., xviii, 62
Stoics, 25, 32, 147, 171
Suissa, J., xvii, 21, 81–3, 152
Sumara, D., xii
T
T' ao Yuan-ming, 187n17
Taylor, C., 182
Telecleides, 188n30
Tibullus, 29
Totalitarianism, 2, 4–5, 8–10, 12, 15–6, 46, 51,
56, 59, 67, 76, 83, 103, 106, 147, 164, 182–3
Tully, J., 179
Turnbull, N., 97
Turner, C., 4–5, 56, 77, 84, 117, 119, 123–4,
127, 147, 191n67
Turner, N.45
U
Universalism, 16, 23, 25, 29, 32, 43, 158, 160–1,
177, 179–183, 185
W
Weber, M., 187n10
Wells, H. G., 32
White, J., 82, 84, 86, 88–90, 92, 94–6, 98–9,
191
Wilde, O., 51
Williams, R., 114
Wimmer, M., xi, xiv, 4, 74, 77–8, 81, 110
V
Virgil, 27, 118
van Heertum, R., 46, 93–4, 111, 122
von Hayek, F., 6, 9, 11, 147
von Mayenburg, M., 168
Y
Young, M., x, 86
Younge, H. L., 45
Z
Zamyatin, Y., xiv
Žižek, S., 3, 8–9, 16, 97, 137, 160–2, 181,
192nn. 82, 83
202

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Educated Fear and Educated Hope Papastephanou

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Educated Fear and Educated Hope

Marianna Papastephanou - 978-90-8790-976-5

Michael Apple, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

Marianna Papastephanou - 978-90-8790-976-5

Marianna Papastephanou - 978-90-8790-976-5

ISBN 978-90-8790-974-1 (paperback)

Published by: Sense Publishers,

Printed on acid-free paper

Note on the cover:

All Rights Reserved © 2009 Sense Publishers

Marianna Papastephanou - 978-90-8790-976-5

Marianna Papastephanou - 978-90-8790-976-5

1. Anti-utopianism as a Current Theoretical Challenge.............................................1

2. The Course of Utopian Thought .........................................................................23

3. Utopia and Dystopia: Conceptual Clarifications .................................................43

4. Education and Dystopia: Mamet’s Oleanna ........................................................63

5. Educational Theory and Practice: The 2000 Curriculum ....................................81

6. Utopia, Representation and Image .....................................................................103

7. Utopia and Reality .............................................................................................121

8. The Foul Stain of Our Species: Anti-utopianism

Marianna Papastephanou - 978-90-8790-976-5

Marianna Papastephanou - 978-90-8790-976-5

Marianna Papastephanou - 978-90-8790-976-5

Marianna Papastephanou - 978-90-8790-976-5

The neglect of utopian thought and of utopian literature

Marianna Papastephanou - 978-90-8790-976-5

Marianna Papastephanou - 978-90-8790-976-5

RESPONDING TO THE NEGLECT OF UTOPIANISM. POLITICAL-PHILOSOPHICAL

Without underestimating the qualities of our world and its educational

Marianna Papastephanou - 978-90-8790-976-5

standard problems that anti-utopianism justifiably chastises (chapter two). This

Marianna Papastephanou - 978-90-8790-976-5

epistemological tenets that enforce scientistic positivism (e.g. the dehumanization

Marianna Papastephanou - 978-90-8790-976-5

pharmacological, surgical or genetic (in fact, eugenic) ‘enhancement’ of humanity

Marianna Papastephanou - 978-90-8790-976-5

Marianna Papastephanou - 978-90-8790-976-5

THE NEGLECT OF UTOPIANISM, THE EDUCATIONAL CURRENT, AND THE AIMS

As we have already seen, utopia relates to education by definition as both assume

Marianna Papastephanou - 978-90-8790-976-5

Marianna Papastephanou - 978-90-8790-976-5

favouring piecemeal pragmatist utopian change. Overall, a number of educational

Marianna Papastephanou - 978-90-8790-976-5

Marianna Papastephanou - 978-90-8790-976-5

ANTI-UTOPIANISM AS A CURRENT THEORETICAL

Anti-utopian is largely the kind of political discourse that treats utopias as

Anti-utopianism kept at bay: A more Detailed Commentary on the Structure

Marianna Papastephanou - 978-90-8790-976-5

substantive discussion of utopianism and education (chapters 4 and 5) and the

Marianna Papastephanou - 978-90-8790-976-5

ANTI-UTOPIAN ARGUMENTS AND POLITICAL UTOPIANISM

Marianna Papastephanou - 978-90-8790-976-5

utopian thinking to state terrorism and progressive visionaries to unrealistic, if not

Marianna Papastephanou - 978-90-8790-976-5

of ecstatic experience in favour of a culture saturated by vocational specialization,

THE MAIN ARGUMENTS AGAINST UTOPIA

Marianna Papastephanou - 978-90-8790-976-5

Marianna Papastephanou - 978-90-8790-976-5

THINKING OVER THE ANTI-UTOPIAN CHARGES

Marianna Papastephanou - 978-90-8790-976-5

Marianna Papastephanou - 978-90-8790-976-5

of anti-utopianism, despite the latter’s claims to being simply realistic. ‘Ideology is

Marianna Papastephanou - 978-90-8790-976-5

Marianna Papastephanou - 978-90-8790-976-5