Archibald MacLeish, who later became the US Librarian of Congress, wrote:
The truth is that there is no substitute for Utopia and no substitute for hope and that the moment men give up their right to invent, however extravagantly, their own future and submit themselves, as the communists and capitalists tell them they must, to inevitable economic law, the life goes out of them.
And Leszek Kolakowski wrote:
to go to the length of imagining that we can design some plan for the whole society whereby harmony, justice and plenty are attained by human engineering is an invitation to despotism.
While the word ‘utopia’ originated at a particular time and place, utopianism has existed in every cultural tradition. Everywhere utopianism has held out hope of a better life, and at the same time questions have been raised about both the specific improvements proposed and, in some cases, whether improvement is possible. Utopianism has spurred people to great efforts to bring about actual betterment, and it has been misused by others to gain power, prestige, money, and so forth for themselves. And some utopias have been turned into dystopias, while other utopias have been used to defeat these same dystopias. Thus utopias are essential but potentially dangerous.
And theorists and writers of utopias have become aware of both the power and danger of utopianism and have presented us with ambiguous, less certain, and more complex utopias – examples of what the Algerian-born French winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature Albert Camus (1913–60) called a ‘relative utopia’ and John Rawls (1921–2002), one of the leading philosophers of liberalism, called a ‘realistic utopia. This approach avoids one of the great dangers of utopia – taking it too seriously. One needs to be able to believe passionately and also be able to see the absurdity of one’s own beliefs and laugh at them.
Utopia can be like Greek tragedy. Humanity in its pride commits utopia and in doing so violates the boundaries of its allotted sphere. Therefore, it must confront nemesis, fail to achieve utopia, and pay for its effrontery in attempting to achieve utopia. As M. I. Finley notes, movements for social reform
turn out not to have attained Utopia, even at their best, and there is an inevitable let-down. Voices are raised against both the social changes and the underlying Utopianism, against the possibility of human progress, against man’s potentiality for good.
This almost inevitable dialectic of hope, failure or at least partial failure, despondency and the rejection of hope, followed in time by the renewal of hope, seems to be the basic pattern of social change and is, perhaps, the actual logic of utopia, combining, as it does, parts of both previous logics. This dialectic is part of our humanity. Utopia is a tragic vision of a life of hope, but one that is always realized and always fails. We can hope, fail, and hope again. We can live with repeated failure and still improve the societies we build.