My point is that it was precisely because these societies had a firmly held belief in the objectivity of their utopian visions that they were so appallingly absolutist and coercive.
In Intimations of Postmodernity, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (b. 1925) has attempted to make a series of predictions about what a future postmodernist society might be like. Like Lyotard and T.W. Adorno (1903–69), Bauman is deeply hostile to the political agendas of Modernism and its dream of total order imposed by governments with their naive faith in “progress” and “reason”. Modernism has been a “long march to prison”, producing this century’s “panopticon societies”. Totalitarian States (Modernism’s most devout disciples), are now revealed to us as ecologically disastrous and morally repugnant.
My point is that it was precisely because these societies had a firmly held belief in the objectivity of their utopian visions that they were so appallingly absolutist and coercive.