by John Gray
While they had an impact on radical thought, these utopian communities had very little influence on the societies that surrounded them. Opposed to common human inclinations and infected with the eccentricities of their founders, most of them failed in a generation or less. One might think that the disappearance of these communities is enough to establish their utopian character. But what is it that makes a community or a project utopian? There have been many attempts to define utopianism, and no single formula can cover all its varieties. Isaiah Berlin has written:
All the Utopias known to us are based on the discoverability and harmony of objectively true ends, true for all men, at all times and places. This holds of every ideal city, from Plato’s Republic and his Laws, and Zeno’s anarchist world, and the City of the Sun of Iambulus, to the Utopias of Thomas More and Campanella, Bacon and Harrington and Fénelon. The communist societies of Mably and Morelly, the state capitalism of Saint-Simon, the Phalansteres of Fourier, the various combinations of anarchism and collectivism of Owen and Godwin, Cabet, William Morris and Chernyshevsky, Bellamy, Hertzka and others (there is no lack of them in the nineteenth century) rest on three pillars of social optimism in the West … that the central problems of men are, in the end, the same throughout history; that they are in principle soluble; and that the solutions form a harmonious whole … this is common ground to the many varieties of reformist and revolutionary optimism, from Bacon to Condorcet, from the Communist Manifesto to modern technocrats, communists, anarchists and seekers after alternative societies.14
Contrary to Berlin, utopianism does not always involve a claim to objective knowledge of human needs. The history of religion contains many examples of communities aiming to embody an ideal of perfection that has come to them as a divine revelation. Such communities are based on faith rather than any claim to knowledge, but to the extent that their ideal of perfection is at odds with basic human traits they are still utopian. The theocratic-communist city-state set up by John of Leyden was one such religious utopia.
Berlin is right that a core feature of all utopias is a dream of ultimate harmony. Whether human ends are believed to be unchanging, as in Plato, or evolving, as in Marx, whether the nature of these ends is known through the scientific discovery of natural laws or accepted as a matter of faith, the normal conflicts of human life are left behind. Clashes of interest among individuals and social groups, antagonism between and within ideals of the good life, choices among evils –these conflicts, which are endemic in every society, are reduced to insignificance.
The pursuit of a condition of harmony defines utopian thought and discloses its basic unreality. Conflict is a universal feature of human life. It seems to be natural for human beings to want incompatible things – excitement and a quiet life, freedom and security, truth and a picture of the world that flatters their sense of self-importance. A conflict-free existence is impossible for humans, and wherever it is attempted the result is intolerable to them. If human dreams were achieved, the result would be worse than any aborted Utopia. Luckily, visions of an ideal world are never realized. At the same time, the prospect of a life without conflict has a powerful appeal. In effect it is the idea of perfection attributed in some traditions to God. In religion the idea of perfection answers a need for individual salvation. In politics it expresses a similar yearning, but it soon runs up against other human needs. Utopias are dreams of collective deliverance that in waking life are found to be nightmares.
Utopian projects are by their nature unachievable. As Hume put it: ‘All plans of government which suppose great reformation in the manners of mankind are plainly imaginary.’15 Hume’s formula sounds definitive, but it is open to the objection of being too conservative. What counts as a ‘great reformation in the manners of mankind’, and is it true that such reformations are ‘plainly imaginary’? Have not several such changes taken place in human history? Even if a ‘plan of government’ is unachievable, might not the attempt to achieve it make the world a better place? There is a school of thought that insists on the indispensable value of the utopian imagination. In this view, utopian thinking opens up vistas that would otherwise remain closed, expanding the range of human possibility. To remain within the boundaries of what is believed to be practicable is to abdicate hope and adopt an attitude of passive acceptance that amounts to complicity with oppression.
According to many who accept this view, the disastrous consequences of utopian projects – in Soviet Russia and Maoist China, for example – do not flow from the projects themselves. Western utopian theories are guiltless; it is Russian or Chinese traditions that are at fault. In the next chapter I examine in greater detail the idea that actually existing communism was a deformation of Marx’s vision. At this point it need only be pointed out that Lenin’s readiness to use terror to bring about a new world was in no sense new. The use of inhumane methods to achieve impossible ends is the essence of revolutionary utopianism. The Bolshevik Revolution was the culmination of a European revolutionary tradition, beginning with the Jacobins and to which Marx belonged, that accepted systematic terror as a legitimate means of transforming society.
Actually existing communism was not a noble humanist ideal corrupted by contact with backward peoples. Repression flowed from the ideal itself. In The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels declared that communism was ‘the riddle of history solved’, but they were in no doubt that the solution would be reached only after much blood had been shed. Terror has been a feature not only of the Soviet and Maoist regimes but also of more recent communist movements such as the Shining Path in Peru,16 which killed tens of thousands of people in pursuit of a world better than any that has ever existed. This vision animated every twentieth-century communist movement, and sustaining it led inescapably to repression.
It was not Marx’s economic theory that led to this result. As an analyst of capitalism Marx has few rivals. It was Marx who understood before anyone else the advance of globalization that would render the national economies of the nineteenth century obsolete and destroy bourgeois life as known in the past. Perhaps only the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, writing in the middle of the twentieth century, grasped the revolutionary character of capitalism quite as firmly. Marx perceived that capitalism is an economic system that unsettles every aspect of human life. Not only politics and government but also culture and society are continuously transformed under the impact of the anarchic energies of the market. Movements aiming to free up the market while reinstating ‘traditional values’ dominated much of late twentieth-century politics. While effectively reshaping society to serve the imperatives of the market, politicians such as Thatcher and Blair wanted at the same time to revive the virtues of bourgeois life. Yet, as Marx perceived, the actual effect of the unfettered market is to overturn established social relationships and forms of ethical life – including those of bourgeois societies.
Marx showed how unreal are all visions of marrying the free market to bourgeois values. Far from being utopian, his account of capitalism is a vital corrective to the utopian visions that have distorted politics over the past generation. It is Marx’s vision of the alternative to capitalism that is utopian. Though he understood capitalism better than most economists in his day or ours, Marx’s conception of communism was dangerously impractical. Central planning was bound to fail: no one can know enough to plan a modern economy and no one is good enough to be entrusted with the power to govern it. Worse, Marx believed that with the arrival of communism the conflicts of values that had existed throughout history would cease, and society could be organized around a single conception of the good life. It was a belief that was to have disastrous consequences, as will be seen when the Soviet experiment is examined in Chapter 2.
Today as in the twentieth century the dangers of utopianism are denied. Now as then it is believed that there is nothing to stop humans remaking themselves, and the world in which they live, as they please. This fantasy lies behind many aspects of contemporary culture, and
in these circumstances it is dystopian thinking we most need. If we seek to understand our present condition we should turn to Huxley’s Brave New World or Orwell’s 1984, Wells’s Island of Dr Moreau or Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dreamof Electric Sheep?, Zamiatin’s We or Nabokov’s Bend Sinister, Burroughs’ Naked Lunch or Ballard’s Super-Cannes – prescient glimpses of the ugly reality that results from pursuing unrealizable dreams.
The question remains how a utopia is to be recognized. How do we know when a project is unrealizable? Some of the greatest human advances were once believed to be impossible. The campaign to abolish slavery that began in the early nineteenth century was opposed on the ground that slavery will always be with us. Yet it was fortunately successful – the Slavery Abolition Act was passed in Britain in 1833 making slavery illegal throughout the British Empire, serfdom was abolished in Tsarist Russia in 1861 and in 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment was passed in the US making slavery illegal. These acts removed a barbarous practice and expanded human freedom. Does this not show the value of the utopian imagination? I think not. To seek to end slavery was not to pursue an unrealizable goal. Many societies have lacked slavery, and to abolish the institution was only to achieve a state of affairs others have taken for granted. At the same time, the condition of servitude was not abolished. During the twentieth century slave labour was used on a vast scale in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and Maoist China. Humans were not the tradable commodities they had been in chattel slavery; but they were resources that could be used at will, and exploited until they died. Slavery was reinvented in new forms, as horrible as any in the past. At the start of the twenty-first century, a form of chattel slavery has re-emerged in the form of human trafficking.
A project is utopian if there are no circumstances under which it can be realized. All the dreams of a society from which coercion and power have been for ever removed – Marxist or anarchist, liberal or technocratic – are utopian in the strong sense that they can never be achieved because they break down on the enduring contradictions of human needs. A project can also be utopian without being unrealizable under any circumstances – it is enough if it can be known to be impossible under any circumstances that can be brought about or foreseen. The project of engineering a western-style market economy in post-communist Russia fell into this category, and so did that of establishing liberal democracy in post-Saddam Iraq. In each case it was clear from the start that the necessary conditions of success were lacking and could not be created by any programme of action. A little insight into human nature and history was all that was needed to be able to know in advance that these experiments would end in a familiar mix of crime and farce.
Disasters of this magnitude do not come about as a result of ignorance, error or disinformation – though doubtless all three were at work. They are consequences of a type of thinking that has lost any sense of reality. Defining a sense of reality is a tricky business, but it is not difficult to know when it is lacking. For the utopian mind the defects of every known society are not signs of flaws in human nature. They are marks of universal repression – which, however, will soon be ended. History is a nightmare from which we must awake, and when we do we will find that human possibilities are limitless. To assess utopian projects as merely flawed exercises in rational policy-making is to miss the point. Such adventures are products of a view of the world, once found only in religious cults and revolutionary sects but for a time firmly established in western governments, that believes political action can bring about an alteration in the human condition.
As we understand it today, utopianism began to develop along with the retreat of Christian belief. Yet the utopian faith in a condition of future harmony is a Christian inheritance, and so is the modern idea of progress. Though it may seem at odds with the belief that the world is irredeemably evil and about to come to an end, an idea of progress has been latent in Christianity from early times, and it may be in the last book of the Christian Bible – St John’s Revelation – that it is first advanced. As the American historian Ernest Lee Tuveson noted:
In the Revelation we see a great drama which joins angels, demons, monstrous villains, and the people of God in one great action. It involves the human race, which is inescapably divided into redeemed and condemned … what redeems this frightful prediction is the confidence that good is, act by act, destroying evil. Mankind has suffered and still suffers many woes, but they are being eliminated … Thus, strange as the idea may seem at first glance, the movement of the Revelation is in its way progressive –perhaps the first expression of the idea of history as progress.17
A hint of the idea of progress may be found in the Book of Revelation, and the early Christians believed they embodied something better than anything that existed in the ancient pagan and Jewish worlds. A belief in moral progress has always been part of Christianity, but it remained dormant until the Reformation. Puritans served as a vehicle for the idea – often called post-millennialism – that human effort could hasten the arrival of a perfect new world. In contrast with pre-millennialists who believe Jesus will initiate the Millennium, the Puritans believed that Jesus would come and rule over the world after the arrival of the Millennium – a Millennium generated as much by human effort as by divine will. Each is a version of millenarian belief.
The idea that the world must soon end and the idea that it is moving to a better condition look antithetical – after all, why strive to improve it when it is going to be destroyed in the near future? Yet both express a view of history that hardly exists outside cultures shaped by western monotheism. In the Book of Revelation history could be seen as a progressive movement because it was believed to have an end-point when evil would be overcome, and the same is true in theories such as Marxism. On the other hand theories of progress that claim to reject any belief in a final state of perfection turn out, on closer inspection, to retain the idea that history is a struggle between good and evil forces. Both these views take for granted that human salvation is worked out in history – a Christian myth without which the political religions of modern times could not have come into being.
Millenarian belief was at the heart of the Reformation, when it began to assume shapes that are closer to those found in modern revolutionary movements. Despite the opposition of John Calvin and Martin Luther, who led the rebellion against the authority of the Catholic Church, belief in an impending End-Time was rife among the more radical dissenting sects. Hundreds of thousands of agricultural and urban workers pillaged monasteries and demanded large-scale changes in society. They were supported in their struggle by prophetic divines such as Thomas Müntzer, a Protestant pastor who believed all their demands would be met in the imminent new world. In fact the Peasants’ Revolt, which he led, was crushed, with Müntzer and around a hundred thousand others being killed in the process.
It was in seventeenth-century England that the millenarian currents of late medieval times started their mutation into modern revolutionary movements. All the main protagonists of the English Revolution were steeped in biblical prophecy, with figures as diverse as King James and Sir Walter Raleigh taking seriously the idea that the world would end in the near future.18 If radical sects such as the Ranters carried on the millenarian traditions of the Middle Ages,19 the Fifth Monarchy Men were ‘the first organized millenarian political movement’.20 There is in fact no clear dividing line between the two. The Fifth Monarchists were an anti-Cromwellian movement of anything between 20,000–40,000 armed men, taking their inspiration from the prophet Daniel and the Book of Revelation, who believed the existing order would pass away in 1666. So called in reference to Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of a new divine kingdom coming into being after the four earthly kingdoms of ancient times, the Fifth Monarchy Men aimed to install divine rule in England. At a rank-and-file level the millenarian groups that were active in the English Revolution can be compared to the soldiers’ Soviet that played such a key role in the early stages of the Russian Revolution.21 Continuing a medieval chili
astic tradition, these groups began a modern revolutionary tradition of armed missionaries that was later embodied in the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks.
A common academic view sees such millenarian groups as primitive versions of later revolutionary movements. As the British historian Eric Hobsbawm has put it, millenarianism is ‘an extremely useful phenomenon, which modern social and political movements can profitably utilize to spread their range of influence’.22 In other words, millenarian beliefs are metaphors for the rational hopes that guided figures such as Lenin. The truth, I think, is the opposite. Though they were reactions against the existing social order, the secular hopes that inspired the most extreme modern revolutions were not only, or even mainly, demands for specific improvements in society. They were vehicles for apocalyptic myths. Rather than withering away in modern times, or evolving into more rational forms, movements driven by these myths have reappeared in new guises.
As new political movements began to take over, older types of millenarianism did not die out. The historian of English working-class movements E. P. Thompson noted:
The wilder sectaries of the English Revolution – Ranters and Fifth Monarchy Men – were never totally extinguished, with their literal interpretations of the Book of Revelation and their anticipations of a New Jerusalem descending from above. The Muggletonians (or followers of Ludovic Muggleton) were still preaching in the fields and parks of London at the end of the eighteenth century … Any dramatic event, such as the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, aroused apocalyptic expectations. There was, indeed, a millenarial instability at the heart of Methodism itself.23
