The relationship between critical theory and Utopian thought is often misunderstood. The influential theorists of the Frankfurt School, particularly Adorno and Horkheimer, but also Benjamin and Marcuse, were critical of the Utopian novels like Thomas More’s Utopia [1516] because of the latent authoritarianism in the detailed social designs in this tradition. Yet a Utopian element can still be found in their visions of social liberation. Ruth Levitas notes that Western Marxism in the twentieth century ‘has undergone a partial re-ordering of economism and is more sympathetic to the importance of ideas (and thus Utopia) in the process of social change’ (Levitas, 1990: 157). In this context she points in particular to the Frankfurt School. As she puts it, ‘there is a tendency here to use the term Utopia in a positive sense, as a glimpse of a longed-for condition, rather than in the strongly negative sense that has become characteristic of the dominant interpretation of Marxism’ (102). What does Utopia mean, as seen from the perspective of critical theory?
Levitas and others make the following distinction: ‘In exploring existing definitions of Utopia, we can consider three different aspects: content, form, and function’ (Levitas, 1990: 4). The focus on content is certainly the most challenging, because ‘Utopias are reflections of the issues that were important to the period in which their authors lived’ (Sargent, 2010: 21). With regard to the forms of Utopia, it will help to distinguish ‘literary Utopias, Utopian practice, and Utopian social theory’ (5). Sections 1 and 2 of this essay will furnish commentary and clarification with regard to the first two of these elements. A central concern here will be the question of the function(s) of Utopian thinking. A discussion of certain theoreticians of Utopia, notably Ernst Bloch and Karl Mannheim, will take up this aspect. These considerations will be presented in Sections 3 and 4, after which, Sections 5 and 6 will examine the functional perspective on Utopia as presented in critical theory. A concluding segment will respond to Habermas’s (1985: 144) diagnosis of the contemporary ‘exhaustion of Utopian energies’, and the question of the possibility of a re-invigoration of Utopian thought today.
In 1930, a year before his appointment as director of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, Max Horkheimer published his study on The Origins of the Bourgeois Philosophy of History. This work appeared one year after the Frankfurt School’s competitor, Karl Mannheim, published his Ideology and Utopia. Horkheimer argues the following:
If ideology produces deceptive facade, Utopia to the contrary is the dream of the true and just order of life. In this sense, Utopia enters into every philosophical assessment of human society. As perspectives from different social groups, ideology and Utopia need to be understood in terms of the social reality as a whole. (Horkheimer, [1930] 1971: 9)
Utopias are tied to social realities as much as are ideologies; because of this, critical theory can explicate both phenomena. Functional differences are stressed: the ideological facade mystifies the given society; the Utopian dream contributes to the philosophical assessment of it. The materials used to explicate these several theses begin with the classical literary Utopian novels of the Renaissance, starting with More’s Utopia. This is distinctly different from older, e.g. religious, visions of future prospects. Instead, ‘More introduces a new element in the appraisal of reality with his emphasis on the category of reason as an expression of human nature’ (Honke, 1985: 170). Certainly, reason had been a criterion characteristic of the philosophical projects of antiquity, yet there was an additional difference in More’s humanistic and positive image of man, which was in no way hostile to the pleasures of the senses.
But if our authentic humanity, which is more appropriate to us than any other virtue, is constituted by relieving the distress of others, by remedying their sorrow, and thereby giving their life joy again, that is to say, pleasure, why should not Nature motivate each one of us to perform the same service? (More, [1516] 1998: 71)
Unlike Plato, for example, who furnishes a caste system in service to the ideal political order, More desires the unification of reason with happiness. Sensible planning will allow Utopia to ‘reduce working hours’ to six hours a day, and it would be this liberation that would make ‘happiness in life’ possible (More, [1516] 1998: 58). Essential to More’s Utopian vision is the contrast between exploiting labor and conserving labor. With this in mind, Horkheimer develops his account of Utopia’s primary purpose:
Utopia actually has two components: it is the critique of all that is – and an illustration of what should be … [T]he intended result is essentially already included in the critique. A people’s real situation can be inferred from their hopes; from More’s Utopia of contentment, we can see the state of the masses in England, whose aspirations the humane chancellor was shaping. (Horkheimer, [1930] 1971: 64)
Horkheimer accepts Utopia as a valid criticism of a given state of affairs. For example, there is More’s criticism of the expulsion of farmers in favor of the rearing of sheep. These could become ‘so voracious and evil, that they would even eat humans’ (More, [1516] 1998: 26). Many of the aspects of the fictional island of Utopia, from universal education, to the secret ballot in the election of public officials, to public housing, can be understood as the expression of real neediness. This is especially interesting when it comes to hopes that have, over time, ultimately been realized. Horkheimer is careful to consider the stages involved in the historical process. More’s Utopia includes a communist view of life where ‘everyone owns everything’ (106). This Horkheimer judges to be historically premature. He bases his judgment on the Marxist conception that capitalism must break up the order of feudalism, and develop its own productive forces, before socialism can succeed. Horkheimer contrasts this objectivist perspective of chronological periods in history against what he sees as the contrived nature of the early Utopian novels. ‘The actualization of their imaginative visions would have meant an artificial subversion of the developmental process, which still required the unfolding of the creative initiative of the individual within free competition’ (Horkheimer, [1930] 1971: 63). Without justifying the miseries of the past, these hardships were considered to be historically necessary. Utopia is, in 1516, only an ‘expression of impotent longing’ for the ‘ultimate goal’, while individuals ‘suffer during a period that is necessary for historical development’ (67). What More describes as Utopia would become social reality in many places, but only much later, e.g. the prohibition of the marriage of women before the age of 18 and the implementation of a right to divorce.
Just as a Utopia may be ahead of its time, an epoch may also lag behind its possibilities. In this sense, Horkheimer criticizes the Marxism of his time. It was not Utopian hope that influenced the theory of social change of the workers’ movement at that time, but rather the false belief according to which progress, i.e. the transition to socialism, would be guaranteed by the objective laws of history. Ten years later, in exile, Horkheimer criticized the lack of the Will to Utopia: ‘At one time the [Marxian] critique of utopia helped to maintain the thought of freedom as the thought of its realization. Today utopia is maligned because no one really wants to see its realization’ (Horkheimer, [1940] 1968: 75).
Horkheimer is referring to the critique of Utopia made by Marx and Engels. They were less opposed to the literary Utopian novels than to the early socialist settlement Utopias of Charles Fourier and Robert Owen. The latter were rejected as island-type solutions made peacefully – i.e. as unrevolutionary and unscientific. As much as Horkheimer agrees with this, his intention is to rehabilitate the Will to Change. ‘The material conditions are fulfilled. If all necessities for change are at hand …, then the alternative depends solely on the will of men’ (Horkheimer, [1940] 1968: 76). Instead of waiting for history, what really matters is the will and the desire, the hope and the action of the people. The Alternative is defined through critique of what exists, that is, negatively. Neither literary designs nor experimental settlements can anticipate the future. ‘One cannot pre-determine what a free society will do or allow’ (62). Nonetheless it is possible to determine that the liberation of society is feasible; also which Utopias can be made real given the will to realize them. ‘Critical theory explains: it does not have to be this way, human beings can change the world; the conditions are now at hand’ (Horkheimer, [1937] 2005: 244).
When conditions are ripe, however, the absence of change must also be attributed to consciousness. A bitter experience has given rise to the need for the theoretical rehabilitation of Utopia: ‘Not even the situation of the proletariat in this society is a guarantee of the correct awareness’ ([1937] 2005: 230f.). When the development of a will to socialism is not guaranteed by objective processes, the subject’s Utopian Will attains an even greater importance than it had in its earlier form in the Utopian novel.
It may come as a surprise that in 1966 a theoretician like Adorno, who is credited with wanting to ban all depictions of the liberated future society, engages in the editing and publication of the work of Charles Fourier, the most Utopian of all Utopians.
Because the political and power interests of the Eastern Bloc have made the theorems of socialism into a dogma, there is a renewed interest today in concepts that emerged earlier and elsewhere, before they were stigmatized as Utopian. […] The prohibition against thinking through what it should be like to make socialism into a science has not contributed positively to science or socialism. To condemn the imagination as merely fanciful is to conform to a kind of practice that is an end in itself, more and more stuck in that present which it once wanted to supersede. (Adorno, 1966: 6f.)
It is clear that Adorno does not want to go back to the time before scientific socialism – to that of the Utopian novels of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, or to the prototype socialist settlements of the nineteenth century. Robert Owen’s theory and practice reveal also the dogmatism of the socialist settlement idea. ‘In order to achieve all the benefits of cooperation, people must be gathered in small communities’ (Owen, [1827] 1988: 24). What remains to be defended in Owen is his overflowing Utopianism. ‘And the time will finally come, in which […] all individuals will receive what they need – without money and without price’ (30). Even as a recollection, the idea of a needs-based economy without money is still a viable criticism of state socialism, which did not even tolerate such a Utopian idea.
Walter Benjamin also discovered something to recover in the Utopian phantasies of Fourier:
According to Fourier, the well-thought-out and well-executed labors of social humanity would have the effect that four moons would light up the earthly night, that the ice would withdraw from the Poles, sea water would no longer taste salty, and that the beasts of prey would do good turns for all of humanity. This illustrates a kind of work that, instead of exploiting nature, is able to release the creations that slumber as possibilities within it. (Benjamin, [1940] 1965: 87)
Fourier, like the early Utopians, had dreams of reduced working hours; in the novels of More and Campanella – to about six or four hours a day. Not only that, but he and Owen anticipated work in their settlements as ‘healthy, pleasing, and desirable employment’ (Owen, [1927] 1988: 30). Utopia was no longer only measurable quantitatively, but also qualitatively, as an improved experience of life.
The price of happiness for More was the exploitation of women and nature; these are missing in Fourier’s Utopia. ‘Social progress takes place only insofar as progress is made in the liberation of women’ (Fourier, 1846, in Burckhardt, 2006: 107). Likewise, humanity’s inner nature and our diverse human needs should be gratified rather than repressed. ‘The diversity of tastes, which would be totally ruinous in a [monocultural] civilization, will be economically and productively advantageous in a [multicultural] association’, as Fourier prophesies in his Theory of Universal Integration (156). Herbert Marcuse has pointed out that Fourier’s goal of attractive work, which was still pure Utopia for Marx, is an attainable Utopia on a world-social scale today (see Marcuse, [1967] 1980: 17).
The return to early socialist Utopias is interesting in several respects. Adorno sees in them a critique of what had become actually existing socialism. Marcuse foresees the feasibility of earlier Utopias in the future. Benjamin emphasizes that critical theory has an obligation to the social Utopians of the past. He asserts that ‘our generation has a rendezvous, at a time as yet undisclosed, with former generations. They are expecting us on Earth. Like every other generation before us, we have been granted a faint Messianic power that owes an obligation to the [Utopian] pleas of the past’ (Benjamin, [1940] 1965: 78). For him the source of this power is not the ‘ideal of liberated grandchildren’, but the ‘image of our unfree forebears’ (88). Messianic revolution is a reckoning we undertake in remembrance of our ancestors’ unmet necessities and needs. Both Benjamin and his friend Ernst Bloch share this retrospective starting point. But Adorno is mistaken when he makes his appeal For Ernst Bloch that ‘Bloch’s idea is a messianic end of history’ (Adorno, 2003g: 191). Benjamin’s messianic idea is redemption from a history of catastrophes. Bloch’s Utopian idea, on the other hand, is the fulfillment of all the Utopias of history. Vivid parallels are to be found in both, especially in the connections they make between the present day and the history of the world. ‘From the falcon-like heights of Bloch’s philosophical outlook, the utmost metaphysical loftiness and a coarse political grittiness were conjoined’ (192). In the partially realized literary Utopias of the early modern period, Bloch sees an enduring cultural heritage. He also finds that there is a reward still to be gained from the early theories of socialism. In practice, the promise of these Utopias could not be fulfilled through the ‘private idylls and the uncomprehending dreams of the settlers’ (Bloch, [1923] 1985: 305), but Marxism – as a concrete Utopia – does have the capacity to do so.
The relationship between Ernst Bloch and the members of the Frankfurt School is biographically and theoretically conflicted. Even in exile, and despite his own wishes, he did not become a member of the Institute for Social Research; yet he spurred on their work. ‘Bloch, together with Lukács and Karl Korsch, was a key figure […] an important influence on the group of intellectuals (including Fromm, Marcuse, Tillich, and Adorno) centered in the Institute for Social Research in the 1930s’ (Levitas, 1990: 102). Adorno confirms this influence in an essay in honor of Bloch’s eightieth birthday in 1965:
Bloch’s first book (Spirit of Utopia) was his foundation for all that came later, and seemed to me a singular revolt against the [political] acquiescence that at that time threatened all thinking, even that of a purely formal nature. This [activist] intent, which precedes all theory about any subject matter, is something I have so deeply absorbed that I have had it in mind, implicitly or explicitly, in everything I have written. (Adorno, 2003f.: 557)
In 1968 Marcuse also noted that Bloch’s ‘work, Spirit of Utopia, […] influenced my generation … more than forty years ago’ (Marcuse, 1970: 12). Bloch’s ‘Philosophy of Hope’ involved a critique of the German Marxism of his time; just as did the critical social theory of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse. This began in 1914 with his critique of the SPD’s consent to the loans for the First World War.2 In addition to this collapse of Marxist internationalism, some theorists among the Social Democrats defended their conviction that capitalism, through its own internal contradictions, was being driven toward socialism. Bloch’s criticism was directed precisely against this ‘social-democratic automatism, which was nothing but a superstition that the world would improve all by itself’ (Bloch, [1953a] 1985: 168). Contrary to this theory of postponement, he proclaimed that a concrete Utopia had to be a theory of praxis.
The Social Democrat, a completely non-Utopian type, becomes a slave of the objective tendencies … Objectivist idolatry of the objectively possible just waits with a wink and a nod until the economic conditions have matured. But they never so fully mature or become so perfect that they need no subjective factor, no will to act, no anticipatory dream. (677)
The SPD, according to Bloch bereft of Utopianism, lacked the Will to Act in the revolution of 1918. In his view the will to act is not a substitute for objective circumstances: only a concordance of external and internal, of strength and effort, is concrete utopia. But once all conditions are met, change hinges upon the will. If the knowledge is lacking of what is really possible, or the will to realize the utopia is missing, the momentum of the revolutionary movement is lost, and counter-revolution threatens on the horizon. Instead of building hope for a new era, foreboding will force an evasion into the mythology of the good old days. ‘This is how the Nazis survived, but their deceptions could only go on unchallenged because the all-too-abstract (that is backward) Left had not adequately nourished the imagination of the masses’ (Bloch, [1935] 1985: 149). Certainly people who live in real dread of imagined international Jewish conspiracies may seek security in their vision of ethno-nationalist community; they will not be talked into affiliation with an International of Hope. But it is important for critical theory to do more than just ‘unmask ideologies’, something which Bloch called the ‘chilling current in Marxism’ (Bloch, [1953a] 1985: 240). It must also keep alive the ‘the real political tendencies, that are humanely material –— and materially humane –— i.e., possessing emancipatory substance’; these Bloch called ‘the warming current in Marxism’ (241). If the former can be disheartening, the latter is encouraging; but they both go hand in hand. It should also help to be aware of the historical legacies of earlier (e.g. peasant and bourgeois) forms of Utopia. The terrain of hope, yearning, and desire must not be abandoned to the enemy. ‘For its part the success of German National Socialist ideology shows that the Marxist progress from Utopia to science had become all-too-great’ (66).
In exile in the USA from 1938 to 1947 – during and after the period of German National Socialism – Bloch wrote The Principle of Hope. Its three volumes were later published from 1954 to 1959 in East Germany, to which he had returned after the war. Bloch would subsequently emigrate from East Germany to Tübingen in West-Germany in 1961.
In that year Adorno wrote an essay criticizing Bloch: ‘Hope is Not a Principle’ (Adorno, 2003f: 233). Nothing can be derived from hope alone. Given the new 1960s edition of Bloch’s earlier volume, Indications [sometimes translated as Traces], Adorno also charges that Bloch’s philosophy remains ‘untroubled by what has become of the indications of revolution in the thirty years since the first edition’ (248). In Bloch’s ‘tale of the adventurous journey to our Utopian finale’ (235), National Socialism becomes a mere interruption on this long road. Contempt for Bloch’s ‘hard-boiled naivete’ (247) is combined with mock admiration: ‘He is one of the very few philosophers who does not quake before the thought of a world without domination’ (249) even when ‘the possibility of making real what is promised remains uncertain’ (242).
Uncertainty, however, is far from alien to the philosophy of hope. Bloch’s philosophical system, in fact, takes National Socialism to be a form of the ‘monstrous break with the trend toward progress’ (Bloch, [1975] 1985: 187). He warns, however, that a phenomenon like Auschwitz cannot be causally explained, either by subjective delusion or objective oppression (Bloch, [1968] 1985: 319). Goodness, not evil, impels humanity onward. Bloch, for his part, speaks critically of Adorno’s ‘exalted despair’ (Bloch, [1968] 1985: 324), against which his own theory counter-poses a ‘militant optimism’ (325). This, in contrast to all ‘rotten negativity’ or any ‘automatic positivity’ (324).
What is alien to Bloch’s dualistic philosophy is the idea of a Dialectics of Enlightenment. In his estimation, history remains an open process: Utopia is but delayed by evil. ‘A Nero, a Hitler, any of these flashes of satanic activity, must be understood as outbursts of the dragon in the previous abyss, not as an enduring force in the process of history’ (Bloch, [1953a] 1985: 362). According to this, history itself does not lead to catastrophe, but each catastrophe stood opposed to the course of history and its inherent possibilities of the good. ‘Satan’, the one who contradicts, the one who opposes, is Bloch’s name for this obstructionist evil. As he sees it, the witch trials blocked enlightenment, antisemitism blocked liberation (Bloch, [1961] 1985: 346). He is not persuaded that the Enlightenment’s demand for the rule of reason over humanity and nature has contributed to the failure of progress toward human emancipation.
Above and beyond all Bloch’s social criticism, his philosophy remains primarily a theory of praxis. ‘How can I slow down or prevent the deleterious possibilities that are unfolding? How can I promote the favorable opportunities, opportunities advantageous to us as a people, how can I promote them?’ (Bloch, [1962, 1970] 1985: 410). We are not merely to escape to some haven from the present storm, as this may be determined by criticism alone, but to the attractive force of the telos/sun, around which all Utopias gravitate. This points to Utopia as a ‘not-yet, in the sense of being a possibility that could exist if we were only to do something to make it happen’ (Bloch, [1964, 1978a] 1985a: 352). Bloch answers with a tautology the question raised by critical theory concerning the extent to which people are capable of doing anything [radical, i.e. Utopian] within the existing society for a better social order: if Utopia is a concrete whole encompassing all possibilities of the good, he maintains then that its realization must be both possible and feasible. Karl Mannheim has further advanced this idea by understanding Utopias as the motive force for political action.
The sociology of knowledge, worked out by Mannheim in Ideology and Utopia [1929], must be seen as a rival philosophy vis-à-vis the critical theory being developed at the University of Frankfurt. Horkheimer and Mannheim both joined Frankfurt University in 1930, the former as Director of the Institute for Social Research, the latter as Professor of Sociology. Mannheim participated in discussions with Paul Tillich, and also with his opponents, Leo Löwenthal, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno. Included among the many topics discussed was the social role of the intellectual (Hofmann, 1996: 31). Mannheim knew he would be reproached for trying to make Marxism into a neutral form of social analysis. In spite of Horkheimer’s own ideas and criticisms of the concept of Utopia which were published in his 1930 study of bourgeois philosophy of history, he also wrote in 1930 against Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge. His essay, ‘A New Concept of Ideology’, sharply criticized Mannheim’s theories of ideology and Utopia. For Mannheim, ideologies of the existing order serve domination; Utopias challenge it. He therefore thinks that these two modes of thought may be attributed to the ruling classes or to upwardly striving classes via sociological explanation. Utopias, therefore, are always connected ‘to certain historical stages and to certain social strata’ (Mannheim, [1929] 1995: 180). The Utopia of the Kingdom of God on Earth, which Thomas Münzer had proclaimed, addressed the conditions of the peasants of the early modern era. So too liberalism’s constitutional state met the needs of the aspiring bourgeoisie, as did the socialist Utopia of a free humanity standing in mutual solidarity for workers. Horkheimer comments: ‘The belief that one can understand a Weltanschauung without taking into account its material development within its conditions of social existence, that is, through research solely into mental structures, is idealistic delusion’ (Horkheimer, [1930] 1987: 288). Ideologies and Utopias do not directly correspond to the interests of certain strata, rather ‘ideology and Utopia need to be conceived as attitudes of social groups within the totality of social reality’ (Horkheimer, [1930] 1971: 9). Sociology of knowledge does not attain critical theory’s criterion: to understand society as a whole. It is true that Mannheim does indeed deal with the influence of ideologies and Utopias on social change, but he does so in a one-sided way, according to Horkheimer. Mannheim sees Utopia as an inner-intellectual motivation for political action.
From a sociological point of view, such intellectual constructions can take two forms: they are ideological when they are intended to mystify or stabilize the existing social order; Utopian when they lead to concerted collective action that seeks to change reality in such a way that it attains goals that surpass what is established. (Mannheim, [1935] 1986: 115f.)
The function of Utopia is, therefore, the evocation of collective engagement, the motivation for joint practice. Horkheimer by no means denies this motivation for action, but he connects subjective factors to objective conditions. Mannheim fails to examine how the concrete form of social relations ‘affects the adherence to the old way of thinking, and on the other hand, how it influences action’ (Horkheimer, [1930] 1987: 293). Those things that Mannheim investigates as the effect of mental attitudes, Horkheimer understands in a dialectical manner: Utopian thoughts exert influence, but they are themselves influenced by the circumstances.
A certain understanding of the historical alterability of social conditions is quite evident in Mannheim. Instead of connecting change to contradictions and conflicts, however, he connects visions of social Utopia to the historical stages of linear progress. If the Utopian expectations of a social stratum are disappointed, sociology of knowledge does not explain this out of a social dynamic, but solely from the Utopian idea itself. ‘The Utopia of the aspiring bourgeoisie was generally about the idea of freedom. […] And yet today, when these Utopias have become a reality, we now know exactly to what extent the idea of freedom of that time was not only Utopian but also contained ideological elements’ (Mannheim, [1929] 1995: 178). To look back and assert that a failed Utopia was really just ideological would be problematic. Adorno, on the other hand, elucidates an alternative in a later paper, referring also to Mannheim. It is neither the Utopian nor the ideological aspects of a way of thinking as such that are crucial, but rather how Utopias may convert into ideologies. Falsehood is not a statement about thinking, but a judgment about reality. ‘Ideologies become untrue only because of their relationship to existing reality. They can be true in and of themselves, just as are the ideas of freedom, humanity, justice; but they are invalid if they are assumed to have already been made real’ (Adorno, [1954] 2003e: 473). Adorno applies this mode of criticism to liberalism as well, and asks whether ‘freedom is indeed achieved with the establishment of formal civic equality’ (464). This is the approach of immanent criticism in the sense that liberalism is taken at its word. The ideology of freedom is thus measured against at the freedom of Utopia. Here critique is the ‘confrontation of ideology with its own truth’. This is ‘only possible insofar as the former contains a rational element with which critique can operate’ (465).
According to Bloch, such an immanent critique is not possible with German National Socialism because it rejected the Utopian promises of liberalism and socialism, freedom and equality, in favor of the ethno-nationalist community and the persecution of the Jews. ‘Hitler, for example, cannot be criticized by way of Mein Kampf. He has already fulfilled all that was prophesied in Mein Kampf. … In contrast, I can criticize, immanently criticize, Marx, Engels, and Lenin from the writings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin’ (Bloch, [1970] 1975: 140). Mannheim, on the other hand, even in exile in 1935, leaves the ideologies of fascism and German National Socialism unexamined – though his own knowledge of intellectual history spans a broad spectrum from chiliasm, to liberalism and socialism, to conservatism. The longing for a German national community cannot be attributed to any social stratum. Mannheim thus rendered the distinction between ideology and Utopia much more problematic than did Horkheimer’s analysis.
Let us recall: ‘If ideology produces deceptive facade, Utopia to the contrary is the dream of the true and just order of life’ (Horkheimer, [1930] 1971: 9). Mannheim, to the contrary, finds his criterion for this distinction only in a retrospective historical view. ‘We will recognize as a Utopian tendency only a reality-transcending course of action, which is translated into practice, and partially or completely breaks with the really existing social order’ (Mannheim, [1929] 1995: 169). But if this is so, the Utopias of chiliasm, even the Utopia of More, would not qualify as Utopian since they had no success in terms of this-worldly historical impact.
Bloch’s idea of an untapped reward yet to be found in Utopias of the past is unthinkable for Mannheim. He had difficulty enough just trying to distinguish among various modes of thought in his own time. ‘Given the co-existence of rival contemporary social visions, it is extremely difficult to determine that which is a true Utopia of up-rising classes and that which is the mere ideology of dominant (but still aspiring) classes’ (Mannheim, [1929] 1995: 178). This clearly shows the neutrality that Horkheimer criticized. Ultimately, the sociology of knowledge can only distinguish ideologies from Utopias in retrospect. By retracting use of the critique of ideology as a means to distinguish between false consciousness and correct analysis, Mannheim evades this problem. As he himself says, Mannheim thus creates a new concept of ideology that ‘gives up every intention to de-mystify […] and instead tries everywhere to work out the linkages between social strata and social perspective’ (71).
If intellectuals who contribute to ideological critique are no longer legitimately tasked with exposing falsity, then Mannheim regards their new assignment as building a ‘total overview and context within historical change’ (Mannheim, [1929] 1995: 140). Intellectuals, as inhabiting a ‘relatively classless social stratum’ and possessing a ‘socially free-floating intelligence’ (135), are at liberty to construct and assume a universal perspective through independence, education, and sensitivity. This is supposed to obviate the particularism of social-stratum-specific ideologies and Utopias. If, for Horkheimer, it is solidarity with the oppressed that guarantees the truth of the critical theory, Mannheim defends his neutrality vis-à-vis all social strata and classes. For him, socialism is only one Utopia among many. Marx, on the other hand, worked out a method to expose ideologies among competing perspectives. In Mannheim, the actual conditions under which human beings live and suffer are excluded; sociology of knowledge is thus supposed to preserve its neutrality against particular forms of thinking. The intellectuals, who should be able to keep an overview, thus become the real authority. Where critical theory disapproved of Bloch for hypothesizing all Utopias as premonitions of their pending redemption, it reproached Mannheim for diminishing all Utopias to mere viewpoints. What remained valid in Mannheim’s reasoning for a critical theory of Utopia was his notion of a Utopian consciousness that gets beyond Horkheimer’s criticisms and Bloch’s theory of hope, and always urges engagement in action.
The Utopian element fully completes the conscious mind only when it abounds as a form life and experience, as a form of action, as a total worldview; then we can speak not only of forms of Utopia, but of ‘the unity of the known with what it knows’, i.e., of the various stages and forms of Utopian consciousness. (Mannheim, [1929] 1995: 182)
With regard to different forms of Utopia, Mannheim also provides an interesting indication of their different temporal horizons. The chiliasm of Thomas Münzer, whose work was explicitly praised by Ernst Bloch and by Karl Mannheim (Mannheim, [1929] 1995: 185), is characterized by the idea of a historical breakthrough (196). Not waiting for, nor working toward, a better future, the Kingdom of God is to be Now and Here (189). Liberalism, on the other hand, represented the idea of slow progress (196). Socialism represented a synthesis, since messianic hope for salvation was connected with liberal insight into developmental conditions (207). Here, with the socialism of Marx, we come to a multi-dimensional experience of time and history: a consciousness of current conditions, the trends they represent, and a vision of a better future (212).
A thesis which Mannheim shares with critical theory is the demise of Utopia. Horkheimer explained this with reference to the bureaucratization of the party and the union; Mannheim linked it to the integration of social democracy into the state. ‘The more a party strives and grows into parliamentary co-rule, the more it gives up the vision of totality that radiates from the primordial energy of Utopian thought, all the more its transformational force is reduced to bare survival in concrete individual cases’ (Mannheim, [1929] 1995: 216). Mannheim’s fear of a world without Utopias has a certain affinity with the critique of instrumental reason: ‘The disappearance of Utopia leads to a desiccated business mentality in which human beings become mere commodities and the Will to History is lost’ (225). He declares that intellectuals need to protect and preserve Utopia, so that they will not need to criticize its abandonment.
Because of the diminished Utopian thinking that he witnessed, Karl Mannheim raised a question as to the future bearers of Utopian thought. His answer – the intellectuals – was not much different than the perspective of critical theory. In his reflections on the revolutionary failure of the mass organizations, Horkheimer concluded: ‘The activities of political groups and isolated individuals may contribute decisively to the preparations for freedom’ (Horkheimer, [1940] 1968: 54). He may have been thinking of the circle of the Frankfurt Institute. But even more weighty than the question of who carries Utopian consciousness forward, was the question of how. An alternative avenue is suggested emergent from a more modest view of theory. Adorno remarks in a conversation with Bloch: ‘As little as we are able to pin-point all the features of Utopia, as little as we know what Justice would be, still we do know exactly what is wrong’ (Bloch, [1964] 1978a: 362f.). But how is it possible to recognize the wrong without the criterion of right?
Prior to all theory is the often-overlooked physical experience of suffering. ‘The physical dimension reports that suffering is to be alleviated, that it must not be’ (Adorno, [1966] 2003c: 203). Knowledge in this sense represents a kind of mediation between the experience of suffering and the hope of Utopia, without either of the two dimensions being reduced to the other. Christian Kreis (2006: 11) calls this the ‘self-constraint of Utopia’ within critical theory. Take, for example, hunger as a painful experience – from which we envision Utopia as a world without hunger. This makes something explicit – that ‘the feeling of compassion does get roughly generalized: no one should go hungry’ (Adorno, [1951] 2003b: 178). This means that Utopia is something entirely apart from the established social order, and that its realization must include the eradication of world hunger. This is no pin-pointing of Utopia’s features, it is at most a general outline of the Not-Yet. This is the foundation that precedes all thought. It is perfectly evident, but this is still not knowledge. Knowledge is only possible through theoretical critique. One example is the critique of the Enlightenment that Horkheimer and Adorno undertook in Dialectic of Enlightenment, written between 1939 and 1944. ‘The criticism of Enlightenment thus undertaken is intended to formulate a positive concept of it, liberated from its entanglement in blind societal domination’ (Adorno, [1947] 2003a: 16).
It is true that Horkheimer and Adorno do not think they can say what reason is, in and of itself, but they believe they can turn our attention to the social contradictions within which reason has historically been interwoven. This is especially interesting when developing a critical theory of Utopia, since beginning with More, Utopia has been animated by the idea of individual happiness gained through the rational reorganization of society. If utilized as a mere means, however, reason can devolve into an instrument. Reason, as a capacity of subjective human beings, can step away and outside of them toward the world which has become an object. Control over the social world through reason gets converted into a new world of social control. This conversion is only possible because reason as such already bears features of control: social control and self-control. Control over nature begins with control over our innermost human nature, through discipline and work, which were already of central concern to Thomas More. This critique of reason is purposive; it is not a renunciation. It takes particularly seriously the claim of reason to be able to contribute to a better world, especially through immanent critique. ‘At the same time, however, reason forms a version of calculative thought by which we may control the world for the purpose of self-preservation, and which acknowledges no further function than transforming an object from being mere sensory material to being material under its command’ (Adorno, [1947] 2003a: 16).
The Dialectic of Enlightenment does not describe the decline of reason. Reason’s claim to freedom is not invalidated because of its entanglement in the haphazard and indiscriminate; it remains – as Utopia. This dialectic is deeply historical. ‘The French Revolution had been given much of its hopefulness through Utopia. This was also evident in the empowerment – and disempowerment – of German music and philosophy. In the aftermath, however, the established bourgeois order reduced reason completely to an instrument’ (Adorno, [1947] 2003a: 108). Humanity’s Utopianism in 1789, which took the shape of the Declaration of Human Rights, endures in both classicalism and idealism, but the powers of the existing order sharply emphasized the impotence of refined culture vis-à-vis the mighty. Reason has forever been connected with self-preservation in relation to nature; so too, a customary competitiveness becomes the rational means for the preservation of capitalism. ‘For the powerful the struggle for Fascist power is but cunning self-preservation; for the rest, survival means adaptation to injustice at any cost’ (110). A promise of deliverance is not to be found in the abandonment of reason, but rather in critical theory, which can distinguish between really existing forms of instrumental reason and the sensible and rational possibility of establishing a social order of solidarity. Reason must liberate itself from its entanglement in domination. It will be measured by the demands it makes of itself, and these are understood to be thoroughly Utopian.
Reason as the transcendental, super-individual self, contains the notion of human beings living together freely, that is, where they have organized themselves into the general subject and sublated the contradiction between pure and empirical reason in the conscious solidarity of the whole. This would be the idea of the true universality, Utopia. (102)
But how is this Utopia, embedded as it is within the mandate of reason, to come to consciousness? For Horkheimer and Adorno there is a residue of Utopia in art and philosophy. The Utopia of a rationally organized society, whose pre-theoretical criterion is an abolition of suffering that makes happiness possible, miscarried in the revolutions of the eighteenth century. Art cannot be a substitute for such unrealized happiness, but it can be, as it was for Ernst Bloch, a kind of foretaste. ‘Art is not only the emblem of a better way than that which prevails today in practice, but it is also a critique of that practice which means the rule of brutal self-preservation within the existing order and for the sake of the existing order’ (Adorno, [1969/1970] 2003d: 26). But art is neither merely an emblem, nor a sampling of what is to come; rather, it is a form of critique, for its own sake, not for the sake of something else. ‘The Utopian quality of art resides in assemblage of that which exists and that which does not exist’ (347). In this sense, art, like philosophy, is not merely a niche phenomenon or game. Precisely because art is a part of a world in need of being brought together, it is a critique against the world as it is.
Our lack of a liberated society is called to our attention in art – and philosophy. Just as art wants to convey more than it can actually display, true philosophy encompasses the objects of its study, but never defines them fully. Philosophy and art share the property of not bringing their content to manageable forms; instead they require that we apply ourselves and make an effort. ‘Knowledge that wants to apprehend reality must want also to apprehend Utopia’ (Adorno, [1966] 2003c: 66); ‘Utopia is that kind of knowledge that tries to capture in its concepts that which cannot be comprehended, being aware that its concepts are not identical with what is real’ (21). The intention is not to bring material under a single concept, instead concepts must approximate their object. If thought carefully approaches what it is thinking about, that which it is thinking about will go directly into thought. The purpose of critical theory is not to make what is known functional but to liberate what is known via its conceptual approximations.
Ever since Critical Theory has had a Utopian aim: the anticipation of a condition in which human beings are reconciled with themselves, each other, and nature. ‘Such a Utopia emerged with the revolutionary avant-garde from its cover in German philosophy’s rationalism and irrationalism, and proclaimed a reconciliation between nature and the self and the idea of an association of free men. Thereby it drew upon itself all the fulminations of the ratio [deformed rationality, where all is reduced to quantitative and calulative reasoning]’ (Adorno, [1947] 2003a: 110). In thought that is both rational and irrational, Marx makes concrete his vision and goal: an association of free people as the realization of philosophy. The fulfillment of human needs is the basis for this association. Instrumental reason, which fails to recognize humanity as an end in itself, provided what was needed for the murder of Jews as a means to an end. Benjamin translated Jewish messianic power into revolutionary power, but it was too weak. It was not the association of free people, but the Volksgemeinschaft [this community of blood and soil] that prevailed in Germany. Critical theory foresaw the failure of emancipatory politics in the coming collision with barbarism, and this led to the question of the absence of the revolution. If the external circumstances were at hand and are still present, ‘the Alternative depends squarely on the will of human beings’ (Horkheimer, [1940] 1968: 76). It is precisely this question of the Will to the Alternative, or I should say, the deformation of this will, through (1) its adjustment to the social-psychological influences of authoritarianism, (2) the affirmative character of the culture-industry, and (3) its barely recognized but bedazzling amalgamation of all this, that leads back to the question of the meaning of Utopia. Here it is difficult to accept Adorno’s prohibition against any depiction of a future Utopian freedom, as he himself acknowledges in a conversation with Bloch. This is because ‘prohibition of concrete statements about Utopia tends to defame Utopian consciousness itself, and to obscure what is really important, namely, this will, that is the Will to the Alternative’ (Bloch, [1964, 1978a] 1985a: 363). Making the Alternative real, i.e. into Utopia, is possible only by changing what exists. This begins, according to Adorno, not with Utopia as idea, but with critical negation. ‘What Utopia is, what Utopia can be imagined to be, is the transformation of the whole’ (353).
If we think of something as having been totally transformed, we should not imagine that it represents all of the possible alternatives that might be seen as total transformations. Even Thomas More and Charles Fourier, who are so esteemed by Horkheimer and Adorno, could only think of a few possible alternatives. Experiences of misfortune do fuel Utopian thought and give rise to images of alternative possibilities for happiness. ‘Happiness has its own truth in and of itself. It is essentially an effect. It unfolds with the suffering’ (Adorno, [1947] 2003a: 81f.). Utopia would therefore be a desirable condition in which suffering is eliminated, but which can only be conceived through the negation of the really existing order. What Adorno calls reconciliation cannot be described through specifics. Utopia is not to be thought of as the sum of all historically present possibilities, but as the very goal of history. It cannot be anticipated in thought, but must be determined by criticism. ‘In all events, Utopia is to be found essentially in the determinate negation of that which merely is, and inasmuch as it concretely discloses what is as false, it always points at the same time to that which should be’ (Bloch, [1964, 1978a] 1985a: 362).
Determinate negation is the task of critical theory; hence ‘for the sake of Utopia it is forbidden to depict Utopia in an image’ (Bloch, [1964, 1978a] 1985a: 361). But how then can Adorno’s Will to the Alternative – It Must Be Different! – be preserved? How can the indeterminate Utopia be willed? Adorno resolves this problem through a scarcely noticed dual use of the concept of Utopia. On the one hand, he speaks of a Utopian consciousness, that is, on the subjective side, the capacity to engage in Utopian hope. ‘Utopian consciousness means a consciousness for which the possibility that people no longer have to die does not have anything horrible about it, but is, on the contrary, that which one actually wants’ (358). The question is not how the abolition of death would be feasible, but that it might well be desired in a consciousness capable of Utopian thought. This subjective side, because of its unbridled desires, makes possible one sort of Utopia. On the other hand, there is an objective side that Adorno says can sustain multiple sorts Utopias. Adorno’s Utopian consciousness is similar to Mannheim’s Utopia as an inner-intellectual motivation for political action; they both come close to Bloch’s concrete, action-building Utopia of the possible. Adorno considers the task of Utopias to ‘concretely say what would be possible in the present state of the productive forces of mankind’ (363). In this way, his Utopia, in the tradition of More, Owen, and Marx, asks about the possibilities of human life in solidarity and common work, which Herbert Marcuse further extends.
In contrast to Horkheimer, who always maintained his reserve vis-à-vis the Utopian, and Adorno, who saw Utopia as an unknowable gravitational force around which art and philosophy revolved, Utopia was explicitly central in Marcuse’s critical theory. In his posthumously published papers we find the following considerations:
I believe that the Utopian is today not only an historical concept, but also an historical imperative – a categorical imperative that must serve to prevent the fossilization of socialism under new forms of rule. Only when the enormous capacities of science and technology, of the scientific and artistic imagination, guide the construction of a sensuous environment; only when the work-a-day world loses its alienating character; only when productivity is supplanted by creativity, only then will the roots of domination within humanity wither away […] The transformation of the [economic] foundations cannot proceed without the subjective factor – the human sensibility as a productive force. (Marcuse, 1999: 102f.)
The ritualization of socialism as dogma, which Marcuse analyzed in Soviet Marxism in 1958 (Marcuse, [1958] 2004a), formed the impetus for his rehabilitation of the Utopian. Like Bloch, Marcuse distinguishes between objective and subjective conditions that can make Utopia concrete. Technology and science belong to the side of the objective, creativity and sensibility to the subjective factors. The desire for a liberated society is not simply a Will that may be present, but a need, which is first developed and articulated in Utopian thought. With regard to these areas, Marcuse broadens the scope of critical theory. There are not only the blockages, which oppose liberation, but also the potentials that must be sketched-out. ‘Social theory is expected to be an analysis of existing societies […] but also an illumination of trends (if there are any) that could lead beyond the existing state of affairs’ (Marcuse, [1969] 2004d: 244). In 1967, Marcuse talks about ‘The End of Utopia’ in a lecture in Berlin. By this he meant that objective and subjective factors have really come into existence, and as such Utopia can be attained – thus the end of Utopia as Utopia. ‘Since the technical and intellectual forces are present for this revolution now […] we can indeed speak of an End of Utopia today’ (Marcuse, [1967] 1980: 12).
At the same time, he talks about the emergence of ‘Utopian possibilities’ (Marcuse, [1967] 1980: 14). What Bloch designates as abstract and concrete Utopias – dream and wishes on the one hand, and possibilities of Alternatives on the other – are not sharply distinguished in Marcuse. As Peter-Erwin Jansen remarks, Marcuse instigates some ‘confusion’ here. This can be remedied if we recognize that Marcuse’s insights from the mid-1960s onwards are nonetheless ‘strongly based on ‘Bloch’s notion of a concrete Utopia’ (Jansen, 2006: 37–8). A few years later in An Essay on Liberation, in 1969, Utopia and possibility coincide.
It is the dynamism of productivity that deprives Utopia of its traditionally unreal content; what is pejoratively labeled as Utopian is no longer that which has no place and cannot have any in the historical universe, but rather what is prevented by the power of the established societies from coming into being. The technological powers of advanced capitalism […] possess latent Utopian possibilities, and the rational utilization of these powers on a worldwide scale would end poverty and scarcity in the foreseeable future. (Marcuse, [1969] 2004d: 244)
It is not technological progress alone, which Marx called the development of the productive forces of the base, that is responsible for this advance; tendencies in the cultural superstructure and the psychological infrastructure of society also contribute. Marcuse looks at the pacification of the struggle for human survival through communal living as the foundation of Utopia. The power of the Utopian imperative is manifested in the aesthetic dimension which makes clear the ‘difference between artistic and social reality. The break with the latter, its magical or rational contravention, is an essential quality’ of art (Marcuse, [1964] 2004c: 83). Because art liberates the New from the existent social sphere, it is an ideal example of the Utopian mentality. On the attachment of the Utopian to objects of art, whether literature, painting, or novel, it is the need for beauty that can potentially nourish the need for social change. ‘Moral and aesthetic needs become fundamental necessities, and these mandate new relationships among peoples, generations […] and nature’ (Marcuse, [1972] 2004e: 25). Marcuse’s use of the term need is unusual. Needs can only be understood historically, so that their expressions and satisfactions can be altered. But the need for a qualitatively new life is in the first instance something satisfied by having basic needs met, such as eating, drinking, sleeping, sexuality, security, and social bonding. The development of Utopian needs is ‘only possible after these requirements have been satisfied, so that time, place, and energy may be released for a realm beyond necessity’ (Marcuse, 1999: 104). Still, Marcuse is not speaking here in terms of simplified hierarchical stages that would rise above well-known survival needs to new kinds of living needs. Needs for recognition, self-realization, and peace do get added, but also new dietary habits, forms of sexuality, and forms of associated living will change with history. But it is always a question of a possible needs development that is by no means guaranteed. Possibility is an ambivalent concept. It includes the Utopian and the dystopian. Here, the goal and the path to the goal are crucial: ‘The goal is human happiness’ (Levitas, 1990: 133) and this means ‘shortening the working day and the active participation of individuals’ (Marcuse in Levitas, 1990: 144). But the following holds true: ‘If the demand for the abolition of (alienated) labor does not exist, then what is to be expected is only that the new technical possibilities will in fact become new possibilities of repression and domination’ (Marcuse, [1967] 1980: 15). Technical progress alone does not yet determine the direction of social change. Here Marcuse is referring back to Walter Benjamin’s critique of technological progress. ‘Instead of dredging and channeling rivers, technological progress directs a torrent of men into the beds of its trenches, instead of scattering seeds from its airplanes, it peppers cities with firebombs’ (Benjamin, [1935] 1963: 44).
Now, it is not as if a need for trenches and incendiary bombs outweighed the need for canals and seeds. The use of productive forces as destructive forces has more to do with the failure to concretize the need for social transformation. This is made more difficult by the capacity of capitalism to integrate the oppressed through partial need satisfaction. Of his time, Marcuse maintains that ‘the absorption of the greatest part of the working class into the capitalist social order is not a superficial phenomenon’, because the working class ‘benefits from the super-profits of neocolonial exploitation, military spending, and immense governmental subsidies’ (Marcuse, [1972] 2004e: 15). Neither needs nor their satisfactions are neutral. Needs can be fulfilled by struggling against each other or by cooperating with each other. In any case, Marcuse proposes that some needs already suggest alternative forms of satisfaction. It may well be true that an individual’s victories within a system of permanent societal competitiveness bring prosperity and recognition, but the price for this comes at the expense of repressed needs, whose expression is the business of Utopian thinking. Along with Mannheim’s motivation to action and Bloch’s concrete Utopia, for Marcuse ‘Utopia is primarily negation’ (Levitas, 1990: 118). A recognition of new needs requires the determinate negation of established needs. ‘Negation of the need to earn a living, negation of the need for a wasteful, destructive productivity … negation of the need for fraudulent instinctual oppression’ (Marcuse, [1967] 1980: 15).
Marcuse emphasizes that wage labor, productivity, and the repression of instincts here function as modes of need satisfaction under capitalism. He contrasts these with entirely new needs and feasible modes of gratification, which under capitalism go completely unrecognized. These include, for example, the need for ‘rest’, the need for ‘being alone, with oneself or the self-chosen other’, the need for the ‘beautiful’, for ‘uninvited happiness’, and the need for ‘peace, which is today not a vital need of the majority’ (Marcuse, [1967] 1980: 15). What distinguishes these needs from the everyday? His attempt to address this question involves a particularly suggestive perspective: ‘We can distinguish true and false needs’ (Marcuse, [1964] 2004c: 25); false needs are those whose satisfaction is at the expense of ourselves, our environment, and others, because they ‘make it necessary to continue the frenzied chase to keep up with the Joneses and scramble over the detritus of planned obsolescence’ (25). In the aftermath of neoliberalism, which presents capitalism itself as a machine for the production of ever new desires, Marcuse’s criticism of purely private desires is, in the best sense, Utopian. It is interesting to note that, despite Marcuse’s insightful criticisms of the absorption of the individual into the one-dimensional society, he still appeals to the personal responsibility of individuals in order to bring about change: ‘What are true and what are false needs must be answered by the individuals themselves’ (26). No philosopher-kings can, as in Plato, prescribe the criteria for correct needs; the fulfillment of needs remains a question of individual experience and political advice at the same time. Appropriate needs point toward Utopia; new needs are its substance.
The critical negation of prevailing needs, the articulation of new needs, and the concretion of alternative satisfactions are the tasks of Utopia; yet the outcome and resolution require discussion. Utopian hope can only be really substantiated by critical theory; otherwise ‘the controlled and manipulated productivity of labor and the controlled and manipulated satisfaction of needs mobilize not only consciousness, but also the instinctual structure to replicate the existing social order’ (Marcuse, [1974a] 2004f.: 157). Because capitalism not only influences the economic base and the cultural superstructure, but also our psychological foundations, Marcuse is in search of Utopia’s conditions of possibility.
In Eros and Civilization (1955), Marcuse worked out a theoretical foundation that enables aspects of the instinctual structure to be mobilized against existing society. He connects this to Freud’s late analysis of human instincts, which distinguishes life-instincts and death-instincts, Eros and Thanatos. Both types of instinct, the drive toward creativity and social bonding, the drive to destruction and aggression, are, according to Freud, guided into forms that are socially acceptable. An internalized superego limits sexuality to marriage, aggression to the state of war. Marcuse expands upon this model by examining the reverse or reciprocal impact of society upon the assemblage of instincts in the individual. The death instinct and aggression, as they exist and persist in our society, are interpreted by Marcuse as an ‘unconscious flight from pain and want’ (Marcuse, [1955] 2004a: 33). In his retrospective view, the abolition of scarcity, which is now increasingly possible technically, should result in a weakening of the aggressive instincts and the strengthening of the life instincts. In this way Eros would become an ally of Utopian fantasy in humanity’s psychological infrastructure. This is where the Utopian idea ‘arises and is sustained of a culture based on free libidinal associations and bonds’ (178). The energy of Eros is understood by Freud as extending beyond the sexual, and as nourishing sublimated forms such as the bonds of solidarity and creative achievements. Marcuse uses this to more fully understand society. To him the categorical imperative of Utopia does not demand new people, but, that the ‘roots of domination wither away in people’ (Marcuse, 1999: 102), as has been mentioned above. The presupposition here is not that people are good by nature; instead it is a matter of the social dispositions gained through social learning. Freud identified the aim of the Erotic instincts as ‘creating and maintaining ever greater social groups and bonds’ (Freud, [1938] 1970: 12). Marcuse saw this as an opportunity for our ‘self-sublimation into expanded and enduring relationships’ (Marcuse, [1955] 2004a: 190).
Just as Thomas More’s Utopia had previously sought the condition for happiness in his (veiled authoritarian) vision of reason, so too Marcuse says that the actualization of a Utopian happiness will hinge on rational thought. But here repressive reason ‘is supplanted by a new rationality of gratification, in which happiness and Reason coincide’ (Marcuse, [1955] 2004a: 191). Marcuse’s intention is to identify the technical, aesthetic, and psychological conditions of a concrete Utopia. A concrete Utopia makes possible our activist interventions. Still, critical theory can only identify latent possibilities, point out problems, and designate trends. Utopia must outline the range of existing possibilities, which have yet to be recognized by people or desired by them. ‘Within the framework of objective conditions, the alternatives […] depend on the intelligence and the will, the consciousness and the sensibility of the people’ (Marcuse, [1972] 2004e: 35). Of course, Utopian thought itself contributes its part to this development. As Levitas emphasizes, referring back to William Morris, all of this belongs to the ‘function of Utopia, which is not just the expression, but the education of desire’ (Levitas, 1990: 124).
The question of Utopian consciousness again becomes a question of its bearers. Marcuse mentions the New Left of the 1960s, the non-integrated, underprivileged peoples of the global South, and the racially oppressed (Marcuse, [1967] 1980: 46), and also the students availing themselves of the privileges of education (Marcuse, [1967] 1980: 47). If some persons claimed that the laws of nature afforded them the satisfaction of their basic needs through struggle, others required new ways of life to meet their concrete needs. In the 1970s, Marcuse sought Utopian potential to be found in the youth and environmental movements and above all in the women’s movement as the ‘potentially most radical political movement’ (Marcuse, [1974b] 2004g: 131). These various and partial aims may well be merged together. Critical theory would need to elevate them into a long-term Utopian goal that could bridge the contradictions and needs articulated then and now by these social movements. ‘The goal would be the development of socialism as a movement away from alienation and toward creative work, away from the mastery over nature toward a cooperation with nature, away from repression toward the emancipation of the senses, away from rationality of exploitation to the rationality of social solidarity’ (Marcuse, [1974a] 2004f: 153). The specific intermediary political goals needed to make progress along this path are not task of Utopia, but rather political debate.
In contrast to the confidence which kept scientific Marxism buoyed-up even in its decline, critical theory found it had to work to strengthen the sense of its Will to an Alternative. Just as for Horkheimer, ‘the Alternative depends only on the will of men’ (Horkheimer, [1940] 1968: 76), and for Adorno the essential feature of Utopian consciousness is what Bloch called ‘willing the other’ (Bloch, [1964, 1978a] 1985a: 363), so too for Marcuse the alternatives depend on ‘the intelligence, the will, the consciousness, and the sensibility of the human beings’ (Marcuse, [1972] 2004e: 35). What Bloch identified as the importance of the subjective factor became even stronger, early on, in the development of critical theory. ‘An objectively real possibility is on the verge of its factual being, yet it requires a subjective factor, so that the possibility is enriched precisely by those conditions which it requires to be factual’ (Bloch, [1971, 1978a] 1985b: 281).
At the same time, critical theory knows that the odds do not favor such transformations. If the entire society reinforces its mechanisms of ideological mystification and its fetishized inversions of reality, such that exploitation appears as equal exchange, structured inequality as equal opportunity, domination as justice, and in which revolution can take on an authoritarian quality that leads from bad to worse, the chances of a Utopian upsurge are not good. The real theoretical challenge is to visualize the Alternative only as an outline, a plan, not as a finished work of art. In contrast to the latent authoritarianism of Thomas More’s Utopian novel or Robert Owen’s Utopian settlements, the restraint of critical theory is easily understood. In the end, it is left up to us. ‘If a future society really does not function through the immediate of mediated use of force, but instead through agreements that it has itself settled on, we will not be able to anticipate theoretically the culmination of these agreements’ (Horkheimer, [1940] 1968: 72). On the other hand, it is already Utopian to expect a qualitative difference between the present organization of society and the hoped-for agreements of the future. In spite of his critique of Mannheim’s idealism, Horkheimer does agree with a concept of Utopia that finds its meaning in inspiring social groups toward action. Despite criticism of Bloch’s optimism, Adorno must agree with a concept of Utopia which locates its meaning in the actualization of objective possibilities.
But neither the subjective factor of inspiring ideas nor the objective factor of circumstances that may be concretely transformed can guarantee the actualization of Utopia as the determinate negation of the existing order. In the search for those who could carry on with hopefulness, Marcuse recognized that the Utopias of the New Left – seeking liberated individuality, a new morality, different attitudes in terms of gender relationships and in terms of our bonds with the natural world – could be reintegrated into the established order as steps toward the modernization of the state, capitalism, and patriarchy. Against these false satisfactions, which stand opposed to the real pacification of life’s struggles, critical theory must call upon the as-yet-to-be claimed rewards within the Utopian impulse. Like any critique, a Utopia is always a child of its time, not an image of the future, but a product present conducive to the future. The challenge is: ‘To abolish the mechanisms that reproduce the old needs, there must first of all be a need to abolish the old mechanisms’ (Marcuse, [1967] 1980: 38).
After the death of Bloch and Marcuse in the 1970s, Jürgen Habermas tried to lead critical theory out of the dilemmas of subjective philosophy. On the one hand, he diagnoses the ‘exhaustion of Utopian energies’ (Habermas, 1985: 144), given the disappearance of the hopes which, in the protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s, brought critical theory and political practice closer together. On the other hand, he displaces the potential for societal transformation – away from the contradiction between instrumental reason and Utopian reason – into the field of communicative rationality. A tendency toward reconciliation is to be found in language itself. In order to release this tendency, however, subjects would still be required to communicate without – under conditions free of domination – but according to certain rules. Communication that is without any trace of domination, assuming that humans are capable of this, is yet another Utopian thought to be assiduously pursued. Instead of retreating to an ostensibly anthropological basis, however, it might be better to look for those who are carrying forth a Utopian consciousness today. Oskar Negt’s (2012: 13) proposition that ‘Utopias are the decisive sources of power for every movement of emancipation’ has guided this exploration of Utopian theory. The question is: where are critical Utopias now to be found in contemporary social movements? To guard against the absorption of (new) Utopias into the established social order, we must heed the advice of Charles Fourier that Marx used as a criterion of social freedom – ‘Reject restraint on thought and restraint on desire!’ (Fourier, [1846] in Burckhardt, 2006: 116).
1. Translator’s note: Translations of all German language reference materials are mine, and remain sourced to the original German language texts; so too the parenthetical remarks [in brackets] are my additions. All iterations of utopia are rendered Utopia. Completed January 20, 2017 in honor of the day’s massive, Utopia-inspired protests against the US presidential inauguration.
2. SPD was and is the Social Democratic Party of Germany.
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