Chapter 2 - Varieties of Utopian Thinking

Summary

Chapter 2 sets the stage for the analysis of my three cases, by delineating an account of utopianism that manages to withstand the objections raised by anti-utopian critics, both from the Left and the Right. I hold that these detractors miss their target insofar as they fail to acknowledge the actual complexity of utopianism. While utopias can, under specific circumstances, turn out to be impractical or dangerous, it is wrong to assume that this is necessarily and always the case. Drawing on groundbreaking work in utopian studies, I thus claim that anti-perfectionist utopias set into motion forms of social dreaming that productively educate our desire for things to be otherwise. The chapter then continues by investigating what can be considered utopianism’s paramount function: the production of estrangement. In a further step, I scrutinize the other two purposes that utopian visions of the Anthropocene cater to, namely galvanizing (eutopias) and cautioning (dystopias) an audience. Chapter 2 ends with an intermezzo elaborating on utopian practices – social experiments that perform collective life “against the grain.”