Twenty years ago “High-Speed Trains” (HST) began to spread their network over French territory. Outside the organised and spontaneous chorus of approval, however, some dissenting voices could be heard: small groups who were airing their grievances against what they called the “despotism of speed”. They did not formulate detailed objections but launched a spirited attack on the society that in their view had opened up the absurd and empty possibility of crossing the whole of France in a matter of hours. The levelling of such a comprehensive and completely negative judgement at the way of life that the HST embodied is obviously predicated on the conviction that another, very different, way of life is possible. Generally, those who evoke such a possibility are branded “utopian”, a word that instantly conjures up the “utopian socialists”, the best-known of whom remains Charles Fourier.1
A rejoinder to this pamphlet against the HST was subsequently published by a group of people who also claimed critical purchase on the existing society in the name of a different idea of cohabitation. In this case their ideas drew explicitly on utopian thought, with particular reference to Fourier. They defended the HST, seeing in it the realisation of one of Fourier’s predictions of “harmonious” humanity’s glorious future: he had declared that huge, docile lions, called “anti-lions”, would convey travellers from one end of France to another in a matter of hours, and even from Montmartre to Izmir in thirty-six hours.
These contemporary utopians did not go so far as to use the anti-lion as justification for genetic modification or cyborgs, nor did they evoke the transformation of the sea into lemonade, also predicted by Fourier. This polemic between two approaches (that may be mutually irreconcilable) at least demonstrates that “utopia” is not always on the side of the total critique of the established order; it can equally well rally in some ways to the latter’s defence.
“Utopia” generally conjures up the idea of a radically different, and clearly better, society than the existing one whose inadequacy is thereby implied. Marx and Engels famously claimed to have transcended “utopianism” as an infantile stage in socialist thought and to have replaced it with a “scientific” approach. Ever since the collapse of traditional Marxism, the last few decades have occasionally seen a rekindling of interest on the left for “utopia” as evidenced, for example, in the Dictionnaire des utopies published in 2002.2 Generally speaking, however, “utopia” attracts a bad press and in everyday life, as in big public debates, the word serves above all to discredit an adversary. In the best-case scenario, it amounts to “dreaming up nice yet impossible things”, “being naïve, lacking a grasp of reality”. Often the dismissal is hammered home by the assertion that utopian thought leads straight to terror. This is driven by the idea that anyone imagining a radically different form of collective existence will go on to try and impose it by force, even on those wanting no part of it, and the resistance that the population at large and mere reality put up against those aiming at the swift and comprehensive remoulding of these latter will cause the terror to escalate. The attempt to create utopias would then account for Stalinist and Maoist crimes.
From this angle, “utopia” is usually referred to as “abstract”: purely cerebral constructs and philosophies dreamt up in a vacuum by people who may be strong on logic but woefully lacking when it comes to concrete experience of flesh-and-blood human beings and the way of the world. Utopia is distinguished therefore by a disregard for the real nature of man and by the claim that he can be improved based on a preconception of what he should be. Thus the utopian is convinced he knows better than men themselves what is good for them. As long as he is daydreaming up in his garret (like Fourier) or in prison (like Tommaso Campanella, author of The City of the Sun), he is still innocent. But the moment particular historical circumstances allow the utopian to reshape reality according to his abstract desires, tragedy becomes inevitable. Violence is taken to be immanent in utopian theory itself and in its disdain for human beings in the flesh and their faults. Bloody efforts to turn this theory into reality then merely actualise the violence inherent in the utopian vision. This rejection of utopia presupposes an anthropology that is meant to be disabused, or even pessimistic, but strictly realistic. Immanuel Kant neatly summed it up thus: “Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be built”, which the liberal English thinker Isaiah Berlin chose as the title to one of his works.3 Other, particularly English, liberals have found the origins of utopian totalitarianism in Plato (Karl Popper)4 or in the millenarian sects of the Middle Ages (Norman Cohn).5 In a nutshell, the very principles of utopia are totalitarian, ending up logically in Russian revolutionary proclamations such as: “We will force men to be happy” and in attempts to forge the “new man” that led to one of the greatest disasters in history. Participating also in the same totalitarianism born of the belief that the time had come to remake the world are the avant-gardes described by Jean Clair6 and Boris Groys.7 The latter contends that, far from being the victims of Stalin, the Russian avant-gardes foreshadowed the revolutionary tendency to consider the world as modelling clay, as an entirely new work of art far removed from tradition, common sense and any idea of restraint.
This anti-utopian thought thus emerges as a defender of the complexity and ambiguity that make up human existence and the scourge of abstract reasoning and the delusions of an overexcited imagination. Its tenants wish to safeguard human nature, thought of as immutable or at least highly resistant to all rapid change, against those who seek to re-educate and correct it.
This polemic seeks in point of fact to identify certain features of the state totalitarianism that has weighed so heavily upon the twentieth century, but it can just as well be applied—against its intentions—to the social order that it is defending: liberal democracy and the market economy. Anti-utopian thought champions man as he actually is, with all his limitations, against those bent on forcing him to be something else. However, if there is one utopia that has actually been realised during the last two centuries, the capitalist utopia is it. “Liberal” capitalism has always presented itself as “natural”: it vows to realise the eternal aspirations of man whose concern always and everywhere is for his own welfare. Man may be fundamentally selfish but given free rein, ego rivalry ends up delivering the harmony of the “invisible hand” which has been such an abiding refrain ever since Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith in the eighteenth century. In its assumed capacity as the only society never to have done violence to “human nature” in the name of a higher principle, capitalism merely follows everyman’s innate tendency to “maximise” his profit and enjoyment.
But if this is the case, why has capitalism nearly always had to be imposed by force on recalcitrant populations? Whether English peasants and craftsmen first turned factory proletarians in the eighteenth century, or today’s Indios, men have very often refused the benefits of “progress”. To get to be the closest self-proclaimed socio-economic order to human nature, capitalism had to fight ferociously to convince men to follow their “nature”. Its entire history is full of laments about the “conservative” character of the populations that it sought to convert to its benefits, their attachment to their traditions and their reluctance to change their way of life. Just about everywhere, the popular masses within and outside Europe have defended their communal ways of life regulated by naturally slow rhythms, forms of solidarity, “reciprocal gifting”, codes of honour, quests for social prestige rather than abstract wealth, “moral economy” (Edward Thompson) and “common decency” (Orwell). In no sense of course could these ways of life be described as free from injustice and violence. But scarcely ever have men willingly ditched them in order to espouse such a “natural” mode of life based solely on the pursuit of individual gain, which is the only real value that exists in capitalist society. Above and beyond open rebellions, there are umpteen everyday activities that evince an often low-level resistance that at some point or other in the day almost everyone sets against the unliveable utopia of a wholly capitalist society. Marcel Mauss was one of the first to analyse this phenomenon in his Essays on the Gift (1924), followed by a still ongoing plethora of studies. From its first theoretical formulations around the end of the seventeenth century, capitalism has taken a particular view of man and a distinct type of anthropology as its basis: that of homo œconomicus. However, at no point has this view, which only began to appear as such after centuries of being instilled into people by violence and deceit, ever had anything remotely natural about it. Homo œconomicus is the greatest utopia ever realised in history. Its geographic extent and duration far outstrip those of the state-controlled utopias denounced by the utopia of the market. Anyone seeking to criticise the present stricken day and age requires no “utopia”; the denunciation of a world entirely subjugated to the economic rationale that has dominated us for more than two hundred years is all that is required. Perhaps it is “naïvely utopian” to believe that humanity could live without private property and hierarchy, without domination and exploitation. It is doubtless terrifyingly utopian to believe that life will be able to continue on the basis of money and the commodity, buying and selling, when the consequences are by now right before our eyes.
1.See Relevé provisoire de nos griefs contre le despotisme de la vitesse à l’occasion de l’extension des lignes du TGV [Provisional List of Our Grievances against the Despotism of Speed on the Occasion of the Extension of the T.G.V. High-Speed Railway Network] (Paris: Éditions de l’Encylopédie des Nuisances, 1991).
2.Ed. Michèle Riot-Sarcey, Dictionnaire des utopies [Dictionary of Utopias] (Paris: Larousse, 2002).
3.Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (London: John Murray, 1990).
4.Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1: The Spell of Plato (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971).
5.Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).
6.Jean Clair, La responsabilité de l’artiste. Les avant-gardes entre terreur et raison [The Artist’s Responsibility: Avant-Gardes Between Terror and Reason] (Paris: Gallimard, 1997).
7.Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond (London: Verso, 2011).