/ii,roq of Ewopean Idea,. Vol. 14. No. 2. Pp. I@-201. 1992 0191-6599/92 S5.M) + 0.

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Printed in Great Britem (0 1992 Pergamon Press plc

SOCIALISM, UTOPIANISM AND THE

‘UTOPIAN SOCIALISTS’

DAVID W. LOVELL*

Socialism and utopianism have had a long and complex relationship.

Speculation about, and the desire for, an ideal society are springs that have fed
the turbulent river of socialism.’ But socialism is perhaps the only political
movement or social theory which relegates its earliest phases to obscurity under
the title ‘utopian’. ‘Utopianism’ has been used to convey a range of meanings,
some of them conflicting. Its major use as a shorthand critique has not been
confined to the critics of socialism, but has been embraced with alacrity by all
sides in intra-socialist disputes. In the employ of critics, ‘utopian’ is an all-
purpose reprimand, redolent of fanciful communities; of a feeble grasp of human
motivations; and above all, of ‘impossibility’. Despite some recent attempts to
revive less disreputable associations with ‘vision’ or ‘ideals’, ‘utopian’ remains
chiefly a condemnation.
The plausibility of characterising the early French socialists as ‘utopian
socialists’ -a widespread practice-lies partly in their general emphasis on
community, partly in their appeal to the goodwill of men (especially wealthy
men) to implement their schemes, and partly in the ndivety and wearying detail of
the blueprints drafted by some of them. Yet the title has stuck less because of its
attractions for conservatives than its incorporation into a Marxian-inspired
account of the development of socialism. The potency of the charge, on the other
hand, seems to derive from the more recent attempts by disciples of Marx himself
to found socialist societies: attempts which have uniformly resulted in
authoritarianism and misery.
The problem this essay addresses is whether the charge of utopianism has been
a useful one in the conceptual analysis of early socialism, or whether it functions
in political and historical discourse rather to tell us more about the maker of the
charge than the project against which it is directed. Is ‘utopianism’, in other
words, merely an ideal ‘misliked’? Its deployment both within and outside the
socialist movement alerts us to possible imprecisions. In particular, there seems
to be a fundamental confusion over whether ‘utopianism’ is a property of
socialists’ means or their goals. It is worthwhile, therefore, to disentangle some of
the strands in the debate over ‘utopianism’ by documenting, in the first section,
the charge against the early French socialists, and how they understood and
responded to it. In the second section, I shall criticise the widespread tendency to
treat ‘utopianism’ as a characteristic of means. And in the third, I shall draw
upon the liberal pluralist tradition to construct an account of utopian ends which

*Politics Department, Australian Defence Force Academy, Canberra, ACT 2600,

Australia.
18.5
I86 David Love11

does not suffer from the limits of the historical or polemical circumstances of its
making.

The early French socialists-those who were active chiefly in the period
1830-1849-are among those collectively described, and implicitly dismissed, as
‘utopian socialists’.* In his widely circulated account from the 1830s Louis
Reybaud presented the Comte de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier and Robert
Owen as ‘contemporary reformers or modern socialists’, and their projects as
‘social utopias’.3 He believed that the distinctive character of these systems was
that they ‘pretend to a universal science, and accept not one received idea’.4
L’Echo de l’lndustrie complained in 1846 that the journals of the ‘opinions and
interests of the bourgeoisie’ treated all projects and theories which proposed to
modify the social order as utopia and reverie. 5 But if conservatives minted the
criticism, its currency may have been due largely to the socialists themselves. In
the 1848 Communist Manifesto, to cite only the best-known example, Marx made
a number of distinctions between his socialist predecessors and competitors, the
chief ones being ‘reactionary’, ‘conservative’, and ‘critical-utopia’.6 The
‘utopian’ socialists-primarily Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen-longed for
‘castles in the air’.’
In terms of depicting ideal communities, Fourier and Etienne Cabet are the
archetypal utopians among the early socialists.* ThephalanstPre would, Fourier
believed, solve the industrial and emotional problems of humanity, if only
someone would invest in it. Bouglir described him as a ‘hotelier-philanthropist’.9
Cabet, influenced by Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, published a popular utopian
novel entitled Voyage en Icarie (though he did not at first intend it as a blueprint
for a functioning ideal society*O). It is thus true that among the early socialists
were those who wrote about, planned for and sometimes even constructed model
communities. But this by no means exhausts the variety of their views about the
implementation of socialism. Furthermore, all socialists denied that what they
proposed was ‘utopian’, which term they chose to treat largely as a critique of
their methods. They responded to the charge accordingly: abhorring
revolutionary means, most of them advocated instead persuasion or a trial
community; many protested that all novelty was at first derided as utopian; and
many countered by claiming, pace Engels, that their approach was scientific.
The experience of the French Revolution vividly coloured the views of the
fathers of socialism against revolutionary upheaval. The early French socialists
attacked the social renovators who asked society to take them on trust that, on
the morrow of the revolution, all would be well. They contrasted their so-called
‘utopia’ with the leap of faith required by the revolutionaries. The fourierists
argued that they were much too radical to be revolutionaries.” Revolutions
simply altered the surface of things; they had never improved the conditions of
the disadvantaged; and a small coterie was always the beneficiary, whatever the
initial mass enthusiasm or attendant universal promises.12 Cabet declared that
not one revolution had remedied the misery of the workers.i3 Persuasion, not
Socialism and Utopianism 187

compulsion, would supply willing members for the new society.i4 If, as many
expected, the model community demonstrated that it could provide abundance,
concord, union, fraternity and happiness, ‘then all the world will want to enter
into Community’.ls
Distrust of revolutionary means reinforced the early socialists’ cautious
approach to the working classes: desperate people will do desperate things, and
people with no hope will blindly obey those who offer them even its glimmer.
Revolutions and other violent social crises, of course, had a particular meaning:
they were ‘the protest of human nature against a social order which does not
guarantee man the entire satisfaction of all his needs and the complete
development of all his faculties’. l6 But revolution was no remedy. One needed a
social science, an ‘exact knowledge of the human organism’.” One needed also a
system, a doctrine of reform, a plan for a new organisation, whereas
revolutionaries ‘want first of all to overthrow the government, to change the
political constitution’ to give them ‘the power to realise their pretended reforms,
their unknown, elusive, imaginary, absolutely imaginary reforms!‘18 The early
socialists may not have known the expression ‘unintended consequences’, but
they grasped its reality.
For many, the alternative was the trial method. (‘Trial-and-error’ fails to
communicate their confidence.) The fourierist Pcole societaire declared that the
principles of Fourier would, without revolutions, advantage the interests of all
classes and peoples, and realise ‘Order, Justice andLiberty in society’.i9 But, they
asked rhetorically, isn’t this solution a utopia? No! The fourierists insisted that a
trial of theirphalanstkre would ensure its universal adoption.20 Fourier declared
that if a theory is good and exact, it needs only one working model: one success
would confound his detractors. 21The faithful Just Muiron supported his master,
declaring that ‘universal social reform will be even easier than the foundation of
the first Phalange’.22 The fourierists believed that here lay their decisive
advantage over other socialists. 23 ‘L’EPREUVE LOCALE!’ would provide
infallible proof of Fourier’s ‘discoveries’. In this sceptical age, practical proof
was needed: ‘The foundation of aphalanske is thus not a detail, it is ALL’.24 The
major obstacle to the fourierist project was always the same, according to Gatti
de Gamond: to obtain the co-operation of the wealthy,25 who remained aloof and
sceptical.
The success of pilot utopias, it should be said, is as doubtful as their exemplary
status. Among the brave, the dedicated and the farsighted who are attracted to
such experiments will be society’s escapees.26 For the latter, the ‘utopian
propensity’ may accommodate a siege mentality. Furthermore, such places tend
to ‘exclude the damaged, the disabled and the demanding and those who are
potentially so’, as Abrams and McCulloch have explained.27 Begun by highly
motivated people, convinced of their rightness and ultimate success, such
voluntary associations are prone to dissent and factionalism. Ambition mingled
with disaffection and a sense of destiny often produce a positive duty to secede.28
Measured against their proclaimed objectives, the records of such communities
are unimpressive;29 some may nevertheless be redeemed by applying gentler
standards.
In May 1833, Victor Considerant rounded on all critics of utopia in an article
188 David Love11

entitled ‘Innovation and utopia’, the burden of which was that new systems of
ideas about society are often at first dismissed as utopia. ‘Utopia! utopia! the
most foolish imbecile, when he utters this exclamation, believes he is the premier
logician of the world’.30 By using this device, opponents confused the real issues.
The solution to these charges had been suggested by Fourier himself in 1822:
adjudication by scientists.31 The Saint-Simonians also challenged the charge of
utopianism directly when, in May 183 1, they subtitled an article ‘The New Order
is not aUtopia’ because, as they explained, it already existed among themselves.32
It may be true that novel proposals are often the butt of jokes or are deemed
impossible.33 Yet, as we now have good reason to expect, much of the science-
fiction technology of today will drive the home appliances of tomorrow.Mutatis
mutandis, such ‘mechanical’ examples were typically offered by the early
socialists who believed them to be directly transferable to the social world. For
Considerant, a ‘social theory, like a theory of physics or mathematics, is true or
false’.34
Many of the early socialists associated their projects with the model-but
primarily the prestige-of the natural sciences. In 1843 the young Engels, for
example, contrasted Saint-Simonianism with Fourier’s work by claiming that in
the latter was to be found ‘scientific research, cool, unbiassed, systematic
thought’.35 An older Engels became the cofounder and systematiser of ‘scientific
socialism’, however self-effacing he was about his role vis-h-vis Marx’s. There
was nothing new about the claim; only its widespread acceptance was
unprecedented. Fourier did not doubt that he had found in the social world what
Newton had discovered in the natural (with gravity): attraction. His disciples
contrasted their ‘scientific’ approach with that of the ‘utopists’;36 they styled
themselves the ‘School of Social Science’, although Pierre Leroux ridiculed their
‘exorbitant pretensions’ to having a social science.37 Saint-Simon, too, was much
impressed by the natural sciences and could see no impediment to extending their
methods to the social world. He valued scholars and scientists, particularly for
their contributions to ‘industrial society’, and in his early plans for the ruling
body of society, the ‘Council of Newton’, scientists occupied a prominent place.
(Some of the early French socialists underlined-and undermined-their
commitment to science by endorsing phrenology.38)
The early socialists were also encouraged by the scientific claims of political
economy, and believed that they could apply it to society so as to maximise
wealth for a11.3qUnlike socialists, the political economists had failed to realise
that ‘the true wealth is man’.40 The study of history, too, was considered
potentially scientific. Philippe-Joseph Buchez looked, in 1833, to the study of
historical facts to find ‘the law of generation of social phenomena’.4’ Such a
context helps to explain Marx’s position as the foremost socialist thinker: the
apparent rigour of his economic and historical analyses was more persuasively
‘scientific’ than that of earlier socialists’.42

II

Robert Nozick has noted that ‘Many criticisms focus upon utopians’ lack of
Socialism and Utopianism 189

discussion of means for achieving their vision or their concentration upon means
that will not achieve their ends’.43 This is partly true of expositions as well as
critiques of the ‘utopian socialists’; even though, like all socialists, they were
preoccupied by the question of means. It is rather the inadequacy of their answers
that distinguishes them. We may account the acceptance of this judgment as a
legacy of Marx, though there was nothing particularly new in Marx’s critique,
nor in its presentation.44 The ‘proletariat’ gave Marx the edge on them in terms of
means and perspective, even if the working class has proved unworthy of the
mission he entrusted to it. The ‘proletariat’ helped to deflect the charge of
utopianism from Marx’s own project. 45 More than twenty years after the
Manifesto, Marx declared:

From the moment the working men’s class movement became real, the fantastic
utopias evanesced, not because the working class had given up the end aimed at by
these utopians [emphasis addedj, but because they had found the real means to
realise them.46

Karl Kautsky, the so-called Pope of Social Democracy, concurred in arguing that
‘Utopian Socialism’ was rightly named after More’s Utopia: it ‘is utopian less on
account of the impracticability of its aims than on account of the inadequacy of
the means at its disposal for their achievement’.47 For him, the modern Utopus
was the proletariat. ‘Utopian socialism’ was the product of a different era.
On the whole, the early French socialists construed the charge of utopianism as
relating to the means for implementing their proposals-even if the conservative
critique was intended to describe their goals- and countered that their means
were superior to their (socialist) critics’. In fact, Fourier himself spelt out the
ground rules for much of the succeeding discussion of utopianism in the process
of denying that his project was utopian. As early as 1832, he devoted a series of
articles to a ‘Revue des Utopies du XIXe Sitcle’, in which he attacked Saint-
Simon and his followers and Owen, among others. ‘All parties are utopist when
they argue for an improvement without possessing, or seeking, the means of
putting it into effect’.48 The fourierists went on to charge that ‘The Utopians are
those.. . who believe they can remedy all evils with beautiful words of union and
a quantity of exclamation marks’.4g Their credibility suffered from their support
of a cosmology whose more bizarre elements were legendary among socialists.
Fourier himself admitted that ‘on m’a surnomm~ I’ARIOSTE des utopistes’. 5o
Veneration for their founder (‘the Prometheus of modern times’; ‘the
culminating genius of humanity’)51 only reinforced the problem.
The continuing discussion of utopianism was shaped largely by an intra-
socialist dispute. Why should socialists have adopted such a charge? Rivalry
between them was intense. The charge of ‘plagiarism’, for example, was not
uncommons2-where today we might speak of Zeitgeist. Socialists differed
profoundly over how the social problem would be resolved. Schools of thought
coalesced around different strategies, each arguing the merits of its differentia
with vehemence. In 1850 ConsidC?rant explained:

Unity is made around the word Socialism.. . We are still, I will avow, sufficiently in
accord on the general results which must produce that new order: liberty, equality,
He warned that if government fell under the monopoly of any one fraction there
would be &vi! war between socialists,5*
ft is perhaps not surprising that in the attempt to give ‘utopianism” a definite
content critics have tamed to the issue ofthe ap~r~pr~ateuess ofmeans, since tke
ends themselves, or rather the forms they take, have been so varied. Jeremy
Bentham, for example, believed that in a utopia “desirable effects” could nat be
traced to adequate causes. 55For Graeme Duncan, one of the distinctive, but not
de~~~t~~~~features of utopi~~~srn is ‘The f&m-e to spell out the means hy which
utupias are to be realised’.56 fJtopians of&I flavmzrs often believe that the virtue
of their projects is the discovery ofthe correct means. Bentham’s solution was the
Panopticon?’ The early French socialists in fact addressed the question of
attainment in some detail. But where they spoke to reason, to all classes, and to
~~per~rnentatio~~ Marx spoke to interest, to the proletariat, and to revolution.
The e$Ecacy of the latter can no longer be assumed.
Alongside ‘utopianism’ as ins~~i~j~~~ atiention to means has grown the
charge that because utopians want n~lattainable ends the means they choose must
be dictatorial. Whether authori~rianism is a necessa~ or only potential part of
any attempt to implement an ideal society has been the source of much
ar~nment.~% The foregoing evidence from the early socialists, however, suggests
that George Kateb is mistaken to claim that when utopians have considered
means their answers ‘have involved, of cuzlrse, force and violence, and
dictatorship”.5g Utopians are not necessarily authoritarians. Some of them, of
course, may be prepared to use any means at their disposal; but even reformers
who have mare limited objectives than transforming society can be quite ruthless
in pursuing them. Lack of concern for, ox delusions about, the effectiveness of
means to attain desired ends cannot be a decisive criterion for the char@ of
utopianism. They may characterise some utopians, but need not charactedse
them all. Fu~hermore, all sorts of political programmes, even feasible ones, may
rely upon inappro,~riate means. Thus to limit ~~topianism’ to the realm of means
is hardly germane,
This ~~s~nssjo~ raises another issue which tends to be confused with
~~topia~~s~~. It concerns the relations between t~eo~and practice. ~fs~ia~ism
it is sometimes said: ‘it is all very well in theory, but it doesn’t work in practice”,
Socialism, that is, requires a level of selfless behaviour which is inconceivable to
the critic, or violates his conception of ‘human nature’. Whether socialism has
mistaken human nature or not-and whether any political theory establishes
impossible goals or not-its ~~~~5~~~~~~~ pistenfid lies in its partisans’ attitude
to practice. ~~~~xib~l~tyin pursuing a theory, and refusing to change it in the light
of experience are far more dangerous than the pretensions of theories themselves,
Politics, as opposed to ‘praxis’,60 is an arena for working out this dialectic
between ideals and experienc&- though the i~f~ex~bIe will always equate
Socialism and Utopianism 191

compromise with renunciation. Politics should not prohibit the pursuit of ideals
because of contingent associations between idealism and authoritarianism.62 To
evaluate the genuine critical purchase of ‘utopianism’ we must turn to that
optimism itself.

III

The charge of utopianism is more properly directed toparticular sorts of ends.

What precisely characterises those ends is a matter of dispute, since there is to
begin with no firm agreement about what constitutes a ‘utopia’. We might
accept, for example, that utopia generally denotes a fictional ‘nowhere’, as
exemplified by More’s eponymous essay. Yet utopia as an ideal society does not
always indicate that utopia is a perfect society.63 J.H. Hexter confirms that
‘although More envisaged a great amelioration of evils in his ideal state, he did
not envisage their disappearance’.64 Perhaps More’s devout Christianity
determined the limits he placed on the earthly perfectibility of man: although
Utopia respected reason, it did not know Christianity. J.C. Davis has cogently
argued that ‘utopias’ form only one of a range of ideal societies.65 From the
Hebraic tradition we have stories of Eden; from the Greek, the Golden Age of the
past and Plato’sRepublic. More’s essay has given the whole tradition of thought a
particular focus and a congenial name, though at some expense to clarity and
concision. The Manuels, in their encyclopaedic work on ideal societies, have even
claimed that man has a ‘utopian propensity’,66 though it has been largely
confined to the Western world.
As a descriptive term, the generic ‘utopia’ is amenable to a variety of
classifications. They are testimony to the fact that the representation of ideal
societies takes a number of different forms. Having so far assumed that ‘no place’
is a good place (technically eutopia), then the distinction between utopias and
dystopias (bad places) is meaningful. Dystopian accounts seem to flourish now
because contemporary history forcefully reminds us of human stupidity,
irrationality, suffering and death. There are also classifications of utopias based
on the arrangements for private property, and on the distribution of goods
(whether material satisfaction-which seems common to many-is a matter of
abundant production or diminished demand); on their view of technology; on
their underlying principles (some religious or moral injunction, for example, or
Reason); and on whether the utopia takes men as they are, or requires them to be
quite different. Robert Elliott suggests another classification into personal and
social utopias.67 The personal utopia is used as an escape from the frustrations of
everyday life-the Walter Mitty approach, exemplified by Johann Valentin
Andreae in his Christianopolis of 1619: ‘Inasmuch as I myself do not like to be
corrected, I have built this city for myself where I may exercise the dictatorship’.68
The social utopia reserves no special role for its author.
To depict an ideal society is to present an alternative reality, yet it is not
alternative in every respect, otherwise we could not recognise or relate to it. Often
those aspects of contemporaneous societies it took for granted later mark it as
historically limited. Utopias can, in major respects, be quite conventional. It
192 David tovefl

should be noted that before the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries utopias

embodied little activism or revolutionary optimism, or future-directed hope.
More did not intend to stimulate his readers’ disaffections, and his audience was
deliberately limited: Utopia was published in Latin.69 R.B. Rose relates that in the
eighteenth century ‘The majority of published utopias.. . were not seriously
concerned with reform, much less with revolution’.70 The move to the political
was accompanied in the literary form, according to Anthony Stephens, by ‘a
trend to cast both Utopias and dystopias as temporal projections’,71 rather than
as isolated from the existing world by being based in the remote past, in a remote
place, in the imagination, or in the remote future.
Despite their diverse forms, may we distil an essence from the ends envisaged
in the accounts of ideal societies? Buber argued that utopia was ‘a picture of
society designed as though there were no other factors at work than conscious
human wi1l’.72What, then, has the will willed? If we attend to the literary genre,
utopia presents a distinctive profile. Elliott explains that by attempting to
eliminate social conflict, accident and tragedy, ‘Utopia.. . provides little
opportunity for the progression by opposition we are accustomed to in literature
and in life’.13 Strife, where it occurs, is usually imported, rather than being a
product of the ane-dimensional beings who populate it.74 Ideal societies are
characterised by the reign of harmony, happiness and order. They assume that
social life can take a form in which the traditional problems and conflicts that
bedevil humanity will no longer be found.
As both literature and political programm~, utopia displays some basic
shortcomings. Utopian political ends challenge something fundamental in our
understanding of the human condition. Leszek Kolakowski has argued in this
vein that ‘utopia’ includes all those projects which contain patent logical
inconsistencies or empirical impossibilities.75 He added that ‘the common and
permanent core af utopian thinking’ is ‘the idea of the perfect and everlasting
human fraternity’.76 Utopian ends are those founded on the belief that human
values admit of a final, beneficent hierarchy.
The socialist utopia embodies the assumption that the values of liberty,
equality and fraternity are ultimately reducible to one another, or that there is
one all-encompassing value which will emerge once ignorance, stupidity or
material scarcity are eliminated. On this account, different values are simply
different aspects of the same problem or o~entation in humans: a problem
which, fully understood~ will provide the key to harmonious relations between
once ultimate values. There will, in other words, no longer be a need for trade-
offs between different values. The opposition to this view has been championed
by Sir Isaiah 3erlin, who argued that the claims of each value, were we to know
them fully, cannot all be satisfied. 77Utopias, however, seek or assume a single
formula so that all the diverse ends of men can be simultaneously realised.
Harmony, an aim they share, is the product of the application of this formula,
though the formula itself may differ from utopian to utopian.
Utopian politics pursues a vision of thegood, not of competing goods. It means
that the community itself has one ultimate value orientation, a situation Nicolas
Berdyaev described as Lmonism’.7* Nozick’s ‘utopia’, by deliberately avoiding
detail, and by contemplating diversity among separate utopian communities,
Socialism and Utopianism 193

acknowledges these problems: ‘There is no reason to think that there is one

community which will serve as ideal for all people and much reason to think that
there is not’.79 The very diversity of the ideal societies that have been presented
throughout history encourages us to agree with Nozick that there is no unified
vision of the good life, nor could there be. Popularly expressed, one
man’s dream is another man’s nightmare.80 Whether Nozick’s vision
itself is a utopia thus emerges as a classificatory issue, though not one I shall
explore here.
Though the name derives from literature, the charge ‘utopianism’ need not be
connected with it. A literary image- which may hinder or aid-need not
accompany a utopian political project. Marx believed that because he had not
written ‘receipts. . . for the cook-shops of the future’,*’ he was not a utopian. Not
having a clear vision of the future they proposed even became a virtue for
Marxists when challenged to specify their plans. For Marx, the achievement of
socialism was, at bottom, a technical and material problem. R. Buckminster
Fuller agreed that ‘Not only did all the attempts to establish Utopias occur
prematurely. . . but all the would-be Utopians disdained all the early
manifestations of industrialisation’.82 Many socialists, however, have accepted
that an important element of Marx’s project is utopian in the sense of visionary.83
Indeed, there has in recent years been a tendency to revive the status of
utopianism. Vincent Geoghegan, for example, has argued that Marx anticipated
the future without foreclosing it (the latter being the sin of those with
blueprints). 84 Steven Lukes claimed that Marx and Engels ‘were anti-utopians
and utopians’.85 Their utopianism was a vision of the ideal society, influenced by
Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen; their anti-utopianism was a hostility to
blueprints. The consequences of their anti-utopianism, however, have been
‘disastrous’ Lukes concluded, since ‘Marxism has failed to clarify its ends and to
explore the institutional and political forms that could embody them’, and it has
failed to bring social and political imagination to bear on real-life problems.86
It is true that many political projects can be labelled ‘utopian’. Some
predictions are fantasy, and some dreams become reality, whatever the
intentions of their authors. Some (sympathetic) contemporaries of the early
socialists recognised this. Alphonse Lamartine, for example, declared that
‘Utopias are often only premature truths’.87 The charge of utopianism may tell us
more about the designator than the designated. Herbert Marcuse has suggested
that what is labelled ‘utopian’ is that ‘which is blocked from coming about by the
power of the established societies’.88 Karl Mannheim argued that ‘The
representatives of a given order will label as utopian all conceptions of existence
which from their point of view can in principle never be realised’.89 But while
Mannheim suggests a class, and thus sinister basis for the label ‘utopian’, there is
a broader critique grounded in the historically-limited vision of all men,
regardless of class affiliation. Is the so-charged utopian prescient or myopic?
Fourier’s followers were fond of saying that great men are never properly
recognised by their century: 9obut not everyone who is out of step with his times is
a great man.
Political thinkers have long been interested in the question of what is possible.
Answering is made difficult by the fact that men have changed dramatically in
194 David LoveN

various ways through history, and differ markedly across societies. Such thinkers
have sometimes distinguished between the best world, and the best possible
world: between Plato’s RepubIic and the Laws. Machiavelli prided himself on
confronting ‘the real truth of the matter’ rather than the imaginings of previous
political philosophers. g1 Graeme Duncan has argued that ‘the limits of
possibility are a matter of continuous and legitimate dispute’.g2 But where is the
point at which possibilities run up against the brick wall of impossibilities? One
ought to distinguish between outcomes that are technically impossible-
‘utopian’-and those that are politically impossible. Politics may only achieve
outcomes that are technically possible, but not all possible outcomes are
politically possible at any particular time. The difference between that which is
possible and that which is politically feasible, can perhaps best be summed up as a
distinction between can and may. g3Many things can be done; not all of them may
be done. The doctrine of the irreducibility of values, however, supplies
‘utopianism’ with a cogent, non-contingent foundation, which preserves the
thrust of the charge: impossibility.

IV

The terms ‘utopia’ and ‘utopianism’ are not precision tools in social and
political analysis, though they seem ineradicably popular as synonyms for
‘impossible’. It may be useful, therefore, to conclude by summarising some basic
points. It is not utopian to want a better society; nor is it utopian to work towards
a better society. It is not utopian to have ideals, and to try to realise them. There
will always be men who dream of the good life, and I share Kolakowski’s opinion
that they are a necessary and useful part of humanity: they may ultimately shape
the ways we perceive of our lives. Indeed, in the burgeoning literature on utopias,
there is much on the ‘necessity’ and relevance of utopia in this sense for our
political and moral health.g4 It is not utopian to want to change society by
persuasion or by force, although either method may be impolitic, or dangerous,
or counter-productive. Means must be assessed on their efficacy, on their ability
actually to achieve their goals, not on a scale running from ‘utopia’ at one
extreme to ‘science’ at the other. Persuasion, at least, must come to grips with
experience, with the dialectic of theory and practice; compulsion sets its own
standard.
It is utopian, however, to expect a society of perfect harmony and unity, where
there are no social evils, and where history has reached its fulfilment. As Jon
Elster recently put it, ‘The belief that all good things go together and the refusal
to consider trade-offs between values are characteristic of utopian thinking’.9s It
is utopian to expect that change in one facet of man’s life-say, the provision of
material abundance, or the abolition of property-will bring the others to
perfection. Kamenka has argued that the impossibility of utopia ‘is logical:
conflict and division are as much part of human life and social existence as
cooperation and harmony’.g6 Monocausal explanations of social phenomena
cannot hope to comprehend their intricacies or inter-relations. In this respect, the
early French socialists were utopians, as much as was Marx.
Socialism and Utopianism 195

Utopias are interesting and sometimes valuable speculations.97 Utopian

theorising can be inspiring; too much can be crude and stifling. Utopia, or hope,
is essential to political thought. But there is a limit to how much utopian
theorising is able to contribute to political understanding. Politics is the refuge of
a flawed world. And the fundamental problems of politics, whether they concern
who is to rule, or how to prevent bad rulers from doing harm, are ignored by
those who envisage an ultimate value, or value hierarchy. They foresee no
disputes in the new society which would require the old political machinery or its
restraints.
Marx’s charge that the ‘fathers’ of socialism and their disciples were ‘utopians’
(and our acquiescence in it) fails to do justice to the diversity of views among
them. It fails to acknowledge the extent of Marx’s dependence upon their views,
and ignores the extent to which the parameters of the charge were set by the
‘utopian socialists’ themselves. It displaces the discussion of utopianism from
ends to means, upon which ground Marx is by no means the obvious victor, while
obscuring their common utopianism. And it conflates utopianism with the
drafting of blueprints, thereby seeking to shift the charge of utopianism away
from Marx’s own project. Marx may well have understood that the plans of the
‘utopian socialists’ he criticised would one day be historical curiosities, and that
one of the best ways to make a project of reform irrelevant was to tie it too closely
to a particular image of the desired society. Yet his own reluctance to imagine, at
least in print, is now perceived by many socialists as a grave shortcoming.
The relations between socialism and utopianism have been paradoxical, with
the charge of utopianism having a life both within and outside the socialist
movement. While Marx and Engels were not the first, or the only ones, to make
the charge, they have been decisive in circumscribing its limits and defining its
opposite. In this respect, the ‘utopian socialists’ were hoist with their own petard.
Perhaps there was not a little eccentricity among them; not to mention their
pedantry and their more absurd ideas, including Fourier’s ‘oceans of lemonade’.
But the charge underrates their contributions to understanding the potential and
the pathology of modern, industrial societies, and to defining an acceptable
means. Their refusal to rely upon the working classes-the source of much
socialist opprobrium against them-ought now to have a different significance.
Their goals were indeed utopian, but succeeding socialists have largely adopted
them. There are ways of distinguishing between the early French socialists, and
distinguishing early French socialists from other socialists, but ‘utopianism’ is
not particularly helpful in these respects.

David W. Love11
Australian Defence Force Academy, Canberra
196 David Love11

NOTES

I would like to thank the University of New South Wales for a Special Research Grant
which enabled me to work in the Bibliothtque Nationale, Paris, gaining material for this
article.

1. See, for example, Z. Bauman, Socialism: the Active Utopia (London: Allen 8~ Unwin,
1976), p. 36, and Adam Ulam, ‘Socialism and Utopia’, in Frank E. Manuel (ed.),
Utopias and Utopian Thought (London: Souvenir Press, 1973) p. 116.
2. For a selection of writings from some of the relevant figures see, for example,
Paul Corcoran (ed.), Before Marx: Socialism and Communism in France, 1830-48
(London: Macmillan, 1983). Andre Lichtenberger however, published a book about a
number of little known eighteenth-century thinkers entitled Le Socialisme Utopique:
Etudes sur quelques precurseurs inconnus du Socialisme (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints,
1978 [reprint of 1898 edition]).
3. L. Reybaud, Etudes sur les Reformateurs Contemporains ou Socialistes Modernes,
Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Robert Owen (Paris: Guillaumin, 1840), p. vi.
4. Ibid., p. vii.
5. L’Echo de l’lndustrie (4 July 1846), p. 1.
6. See K. Marx and F. Engels, Mantfesto of the Communist Party, Part III, in K. Marx
and F. Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 6 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976),
pp. 507-517.
7. Ibid., p. 516.
8. George Lichtheim argued that the ‘true utopians’ were Fourier and Cabet; see
The Origins of Socialism (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969) p. 27.
9. G. Bougle, Socialismesfrancais, du ‘Socialisme utopique’ a la ‘Democratic industrielle’
5th edn., Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1951 [lst edn 1932]), pp. 115-16.
10. See C.H. Johnson, ‘Etienne Cabet and the Problem of Class Antagonism’,
International Review of Social History, Vol. XI (1966), pp. 403-443.
11. La Phalange (2 September 1840), p. 12.
12. La Revolution (11 August 1830), ‘all the revolutions of which we have evidence have
been made for the profit of one class alone, a privileged class, constituting a new
aristocracy’. This was a problem which Marx also recognised and which he countered
by claiming that since the proletariat was the lowest class, after its revolution there
would be no one beneath it to oppress. See K. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy,
K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 6, p. 212: ‘The condition for the
emancipation of the working class is the abolition of all classes’.
13. E. Cabet, L’Ouvrier; ses miseres actuelles, leur cause et leur rem&de: sonfutur bonheur
dans la communaute: Moyens de l’ttablir (Paris: Au Bureau du Populaire, 1844),
pp. 26-27. See also J.-J. Pillot, Ni Chateaux ni Chaumieres. ou Etat de la Question
Sociale (Paris: Aux Bureaux de la Tribune du Peuple, 1840), p. 40.
14. Cabet, L’Ouvrier, p. 39.
15. Ibid., p. 40.
16. L’Humanitaire (July 1841), p. 1.
17. L’Humanitaire (August 1841) p. 9.
18. La Phalange (2 September 1840), p. 13.
19. Ibid., p. 11.
21. Fourier, in Le Phalanstere (1 June 1832), p. 11; see also Le Phalansttre (7 September
1832), p. 125.
22. J. Muiron, in Le Phalanstere (7 June 1832) p. 19.
23. J. Lechevalier, Etudes sur la Science Sociale (Paris: Eugene Renduel, 1834) p. 159.
Saint-Simon, he believed, was occupied all his life by generalities.
Socialism and Utopianism 197

24. Ibid., pp. 252-253.

25. Mme Gatti de Gamond, Fourier et son System (2nd edn., Paris: Librairie Sociale,
1839), p. 270.
26. George Orwell wrote in 1937 that ‘One sometimes gets the impression that the mere
words “Socialism” and “Communism” draw towards them with magnetic force every
fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, “Nature Cure”
quack, pacifist, and feminist in England’: Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p. 152. Today’s list would be somewhat different.
27, P. Abrams and A. McCulloch, Communes, Sociology and Society (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 19?6), p. 191.
28. As Cabet reported from the U.S.A. in 1856 to his followers in France, the old
opposition had become a majority and had begun to oppress the minority (in which he
was included): ‘all conciliation between us is henceforth impossible; the common life
among us has become insupportable; voluntary separation is now an indispensable
necessity’; Cabet, Adresse du Fondateur dlcarie aux Icariens (Paris: Chez l’auteur,
1856), p. 4.
29. See, for example, M. Holloway, Heavens on Earth: utopian communities in America
1680-1880 (2nd edn., NY: Dover, 1966).
30. Le Phalanstere (24 May 1833), pp. 244-245.
31. Ibid.
32. Le Globe (19 May 183 1).
33. See Cabet, Douze Iettres dun Communiste a un Reformiste sur la Communaute (Paris:
Chez Prtvot, 1841) p. 141; and C. Pecqueur, Thtorie Nouvelle d’Economie Sociale et
Politique, ou Etudes sur I’Organisation des SocietPs (Paris: Capelle, 1842), p. xiv.
34. Considtrant, Le Phalanstere (24 May 1833), p. 244. Jules Lechevalier, another
Fourierist, expressed a similar opinion when he quoted Kant to the effect that the
most powerful conceptions of the great reformers have always been greeted with
injury, derision and insults: Lechavlier, Etudes sur Ia Science Sociale.
35. F. Engels, ‘Progress of Social Reform on the Continent’ (1843), K. Marx and
F. Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 3 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), p. 394.
36. See, for example, Lechevalier, Etudessur Ia Sciencesociale; and A. Paget, Introduction
a I’Etude de Ia Science Sociale, contenant un abrege de Ia thtorie socidtaire, precede dun
coup d’ozil general sur I’ttat de Ia science sociale. et sur Ies systPmesdeFourier, dOwen
et de PecoIe Saint-Simonienne (Paris: Au Bureau de la Phalange, 1838). Cf. Engels,
Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, p. 126.
37. Revue Sociale (December 1845), p. 35.
38. See the discussion by Barthel in T. Dtzamy (ed.), AImanach de Ia Communaute, 1843
(Paris: Prevot, 1842), pp. 129-130.
39. See Constantin Pecqueur, Theorie NouveIIe, p. i. The hope was shared not just by
socialists. Adolphe Blanqui declared that the many works in the history of political
economy tended to elevate the subject ‘to the rank of the factual sciences, the applied
sciences, like physics, chemistry and mechanics’: A. Blanqui, Prtcis tlementaire
d’Economie Politique (Paris: Aux Bureaux de 1’Encycloptdie Portative, 1826), p. 24.
40. See Pierre Leroux, Revue Sociale, ou Solution Pactfique du Probleme du Proletariat
No. 6 (March 1846), p. 89.
41. P-J. Buchez, Introduction a Ia Science de I’Histoire ou Science du Developpement de
I’HumanitP (Paris: Paulin, 1833), p. 1.
42. Of course, long before socialists, and influencing them, were the claims made for the
Enlightenment conception of the sciences of social life. The intellectual development
of those claims is traced and analysed in Robert Brown, The Nature of Social Laws:
Machiavelli to Mill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Neither the early
socialists nor Marx added anything fundamental to this development.
198 David Loveil

43. Robert Nozick, Anatrhy, State and Utopia (Oxford: BlackwelI, 1974), p. 326.
44. The Communist ~anf~s/a was only one of a number of such declarations ofprinciple,
many of which reviewed and rejected the methods of their socialist competitors. See,
for example, Victor Considerant, Le Sociaiisme devant fe vieux monde, au le vivant
devant les murts (Paris: Librairie Phalansterienne, 1848), which contains the section
“Inventaire du Socialisme’ (pp. 31-119). The Manifesto had at least the virtue of
succinctness.
45, K. Rumar declared that ‘Marx and Engels distinguished themselves from the
utopians principally in their understanding of how socialism would come about’:
LItopia a@d ~~t~-~tapia in Modern Times (Oxford: Blackwelt, 19871, p. 53.
46. K. Marx, First Draft of ‘The Civil War imFrance’, in K. Marx, The First ~~r~r~~~~~~u~
and After, ed. D. Fernbach (~armondswo~h: Penguin, 1974), p. 262. See also the
view of E.J. Hobsbawm, ‘Marx, Engels and Pre-Marxian Socialism’, in ~obsbawm
(ed.), The History af~arxism, Vol. 1 (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), p. 9.
47. Karl Kautsky, ‘Utopian Socialism”, in W. Nelson (ed.), Twentieth-Ce~f~ry
Znterpreratians of Utopia. A C&e&on of Critical Essays (NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968),
p 15.
48. Le PhalansGre (5 July i832), p. 50.
49. ‘Les Utopistes’, La Phalange (30 October 1840), p. 452.
50. Le PhalanstPre (5 July 1832), p. 51.
5 1. La ZXmocratie Pacifique (I August 1843).
52. See, for example, ‘Le plagiat de Fourier’, Revue Sociate. uu la ~ol~t~a~Pac&que du
Prab~~rne du ~ro~~tar~at (publiCe par Pierre Leroux, Paris: Boussac), No. 12
(September 1846).
53. V. Cons~d~rant, La ~5~u~~5~, ou fe ~;aaver~erne~t direct du People (Paris: A la
Librairie Phlanst~r~enne, 18501, p. 28.
54. Ibid., pp. 28-29.
55. Bentham, cited J.R. Poynter, ‘Benthamite Utopias’ in E. Kamenka fed.), iJtopiaT
(Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 49. Lukacs similarly declared that
‘Every Utopian scheme, however penetrating a critique of the given social situation
it may have offered, however desirable it may have appeared as an ideal to be attained,
has failed to determine the mode and the means necessary for its realization and has
therefore come to nothing’; G. Lukacs, ‘ “Intellectual Workers” and the Problem of
Intellectual Leadership’ in Lukacs, T~rticsandEthics: Political Writings” 3919-1929,
trans. M. McColgan, ed. R. Livingstone (London: NLB, 19721, p, 15.
56. G.C. Duncan, “In Defence of Political Utopianism’, Paper delivered to the 1963
Australasian Political Studies Association Conference, p_ 2. This is a familiar
criticism: see, for example, Alexander Gray, The Sa~~aZistTrad~t~a~:Mases to Lenin
(NY: Harper and Row, 196X), p. 62.
57. In 1791 he boasted: ‘Morals Reformed-health preserved-industry invigorated-
instruction diffused-public burthens lightened-Economy seated, as it were upon a
rock-the gordian knot of the Poor-Laws not cut, but untied-al1 by a simple idea in
Architecture!‘. Bentham (1791), Preface to Panopticon or the Inspection House, cited
J.R. Poynter, p. 53.
58. Karl Popper is probably the best known exponent of the view that the link is logical
and necessary; see his ‘Utopia and Violence’, in Conjectures and Refutations: The
Growth of Scientzfic Knowfedge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974),
pp. 358-359.
59. George Kateb, &+a and fts Eizemies (Glencoe: Free Press, 19631, p. 23,
60. The concept of ‘praxis’ has been used in the Marxist tradition to denote the unity of
theory and practice. In Marx’s work, its high point came in the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’
and The ~errna~ Zdeu~agy; see K. Marx and F. Engels, &o~ie~ted Works, Vol. 5
Socialism and Utopianism 199

(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976). The most prominent of its later employers
was Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness: studies in Marxist dialectics
(trans. R. Livingstone, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971). The term is too close to its
polemical use by Marxists, and to the inference that praxis is a technique not a
framework for contending groups, to make it of much use here.
61. See Bernard Crick, In Defence of Politics (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964).
62. Max Weber wrote in 1918 that ‘all historical experience confirms the truth-that man
would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the
impossible’: Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation, in H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills
(eds), From Max Weber, Essays in Sociology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1948), p. 128. A similar point is made by Judith N. Shklar, After Utopia, The Decline
of Political Faith (NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 271.
63. On this point I disagree with Kumar, who says that ‘utopias are perfected social
orders, they are societies, that is, which have more or less satisfactorily solved all
known human problems’ (Kumar, p. 48), and agree with J.C. Davis, who argues that
the utopian mode ‘is one which accepts deficiencies in men and nature and strives to
contain and condition them through organisational controls and sanctions’,
J.C. Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing,
1516-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 370.
64. J.H. Hexter, More’s Utopia: The Biography ofan Idea (NY: Harper and Row, 1965),
p. 69.
65. J.C. Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society, Chap. 1, uses ‘utopia’ as one of five different
species of thinking about the ideal society, one which seeks to confront what he sees
as the fundamental problem of the unlimited wants of man and the limited oppor-
tunities for satisfying them by constructing institutions which seek to minimise the
problems so caused.
66. F.E. and F.P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Oxford: Blackwell,
1979), p. 5.
67. R.C. Elliott, The Shape of Utopia: Studies in a Literary Genre (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1970).
68. Johann Valentin Andreae, Christianopolis, cited Melvin J. Lasky, Utopia and
Revolution. On the Origins of a metaphor, or some illustrations of the problem of
political temperament and intellectual climate and how ideas, Ideals andldeologies have
been historically related (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 12.
69. As Judith Shklar has argued, for the utopians who followed More ‘utopia was a
model, an ideal pattern that invited contemplation and judgement but did not entail
any other activity’: J. Shklar, ‘The Political Theory of Utopia: From Melancholy
to Nostalgia’, in Manuel (ed.), Utopias and Utopian Thought, p. 105.
70. R.B. Rose, ‘Utopias and the Enlightenment’, in E. Kamenka (ed.), Utopias, p. 36.
71. Anthony Stephens, ‘The Sun State and its Shadow: On the Condition of Utopian
Writing’, in E. Kamenka (ed.), Utopias, p. 12.
72. Buber, p. 8. Some of the problems of defining utopia are confronted by Lyman Tower
Sargent, in ‘Utopia-The Problem of Definition’, Extrapolation, Vol. 16 (May 1975),
pp. 137-148, who argues that ‘Utopia’ as a literary genre ‘refers to works which
describe an imaginary society in some detail’ (p. 142), and makes a basic classification
of Utopias into positive, negative and satirical (p. 143).
73. Elliott, The Shape of Utopia, pp. 106-107. Kumar argues that, in utopias generally,
‘The didactic purpose overwhelms any literary aspiration’: Kumar, Utopia and
Anti-Utopia in Modern Times, p. 25.
74. As Adam Ulam argues, ‘One word which characterizes all utopias is harmony’:
Ulam, ‘Socialism and Utopia’, in Manuel (ed.), Utopias and Utopian Thought, p. 128.
Recent debate has focused on whether this harmony shall be freely arising or
 David &well

enforced.
75. Leszek Kolakowski, ‘The Death of Utopia Reconsidered’, The Tunner Lectures on
human Values, IV, 1983, ed. S.M. M~Murrin (Salt Lake City: University of Utah
Press, and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 229.
76. Ibid., p. 237. From this he warns of its dangers as a political programme. See also
Kateb, p. 9. Barbara Goodwin agrees: ‘the supreme and culminating value of these
utopian theories is harmony’; B. Goodwin, Social Science and Utopia: Nineteenth-
Century Models of Social Harmony (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1978), p. 167.
77. I. Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1979), p. 168.
78. Nicolas Berdyaev, Slavery and Freedom, trans. R.M. French (London: Centenary
Press, 1944), p. 206.
79. Nozick, p. 310.
80. See Margaret Mead, ‘Towards More Vivid Utopias’, Science, 126 (1957), pp. 957-961
at p. 958. See also R.C. Elliott, The Shape of Utopia: Studies in a Literary Genre
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970) p. 87: ‘One man’s dream is another
7
man s . . . nightmare’.
81. K. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress
Publishers, 1954), p. 26.
82. R. Buckminster Fuller, Utopia or Oblivion, The Prospects for Humanity (Allen Lane,
London, 1970), p. 332.
83. Bertell Oilman, ‘Marx’s Vision of Communism: a Reconstruction’, Critique, 8
(Summer 1977), pp. 4-41, at p. 7.
84. Vincent Geoghegan, Utopianism and Marxism (London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 134-
135.
85. Steven Lukes, ‘Marxism and Utopianism’, in Peter Alexander and Roger Gill (eds),
Utopias (London: Duckworth, 1984), p. 156.
86. Lukes, p. 166.
87. Cited K. Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia. An ~ntro~ctio~ to the Sociology of
Know/edge, trans. E. Shils (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1936), p. 183.
Adolphe Blanqui similarly declared: ‘Utopianism is often only a more advanced
opinion, proclaimed in the face of a generation which does not yet understand it,
and destined to become a standard of faith in the generation that follows.’ Cited in
Parke Codwin, A Popular View of the Doctrines of Charles Fourier (Philadelphia:
Porcupine Press, 1972), p. 18.
88. Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Allen Lane, London, 1969), pp. 3-4.
Elsewhere, Marcuse has argued that projects for social transformation can
reasonably be considered unfeasible only when they contradict the laws of nature.
See Herbert Marcuse, Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia, trans.
J.J. Shapiro and S.M. Weber (London: Allen Lane, 1970), p. 63.
89. Mannheim, pp. 176-177.
90. See, for example, Gatti de Gamond, Fourier et son System, p. 19.
91. N. Machiavelli, The Prince, Chap. XV, in The Prince and The Discourses (NY:
The Modern Library, 1950), p. 56.
92. G.C. Duncan, ‘In Defence of Political Utopianism’, p. 3.
93. Keith Taylor has written, instead, about three aspects of ‘practicability’: technical
impossibility; political impossibility; possibility, but without the happiness
predicted; Taylor, The Po~it~~a~~deasof the Utopian Socialists (Frank Cass, London,
1982), p. 33.
94. See Krishnan Kumar, Prophecy and Progress: The Sociology of Industrial and Post-
Industrial Society (London: Allen Lane, 1978), pp. 258-271, ‘The Relevance of
Utopianism’; and H.J.N. Horsburgh, ‘The Relevance of the Utopian’, Ethics,
Socialism and Utopianism 201

Vol. 67 (1957), pp. 127-138.

95. Jon Elster, An Introduction to Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1986), p. 54.
96. E. Kamenka, ‘Socialism and Utopia’ in E. Kamenka (ed.), Uropias, pp. 71-72.
97. The value of utopian theorising was expressed by Nozick as follows: ‘I do not
laugh at the content of our wishes that go not only beyond the actual and what we
take to be feasible in the future, but even beyond the possible; nor do I wish to
denigrate fantasy, or minimize the pangs of being limited to the possible’; Nozick,
p. 308.