Utopia As Method Utopia As Method the Imaginary Reconstitution of Society

Utopia as Method Utopia as Method The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society Ruth Levitas University of Bristol, UK © Ruth Levitas 2013 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-0-230-23196-2 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN 978-0-230-23197-9 ISBN 978-1-137-31425-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137314253 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. For Rob, companion in the quest Contents Preface and Acknowledgements viii Introduction xi Part I 1 From Terror to Grace 3 2 Riff on Blue 20 3 Echoes of Elsewhere 40 Part II 4 Between Sociology and Utopia 65 5 Utopia Denied 85 6 Utopia Revised 103 7 The Return of the Repressed 127 Part III 8 Utopia as Archaeology 153 9 Utopia as Ontology 175 10 Utopia as Architecture 197 Notes 221 Select Bibliography 249 Index 261 vii Preface and Acknowledgements In 2002, Tom Moylan, founding Director of the Ralahine Centre for Utopian Studies at the University of Limerick in the Irish Republic, invited a number of established scholars in utopian studies to reflect on how they had used utopia in their own work. Those papers were eventually published as a collection edited by Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini as Utopia, Method, Vision.1 My own contribution developed the idea of utopia as method in terms of the Imaginary Reconstitution of Society, or IROS. I had written about utopia as method before, in an arti- cle on social policy published the previous year,2 but these discussions led me to reconsider H. G. Wells’s claim that the imagination of utopias is the distinctive and proper method of sociology. I have spent my professional life as a sociologist, and my interest in utopia has always been regarded as at best marginal, and at worst distinctly suspect. This book is the last academic book I shall write before retirement, and it seemed the right time to ask not what sociology can tell us about utopia, but what utopia can, as Wells suggested, tell us about the trajectory and limits of sociology. The book was eventually completed with the support of a University Research Fellowship from the University of Bristol in 2009–10 and a Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust in 2010–12. I am hugely grateful both to the University of Bristol, where I have worked for over thirty-three years, and to the Leverhulme Trust for enabling me to bring this project to some kind of conclusion. Whether that conclusion is a successful one is for the reader(s) to judge; this is the best account I can give at the present time of my attempts to think through the meaning of utopia as concept and as method, its implica- tions for a publicly engaged sociology, and its potential contribution to the making of a better world. The Ralahine Centre has been an important intellectual context for my work on utopia over the past decade, including the conference and associated publication on Exploring the Utopian Impulse,3 the 2008 annual meeting of the Utopian Studies Society Europe (USSE) and an ongoing series of shorter workshops. Colleagues associated with Ralahine have been unfailingly hospitable, welcoming and intellectually generous, and I appreciate their friendship and engagement. USSE itself, inaugurated with drunken enthusiasm in a bar at New Lanark in 1988, is entering its twenty-fifth year. Now chaired by Fátima Vieira, with the support of viii Preface and Acknowledgements ix Lorna Davidson and Jim Arnold from New Lanark, it has been the locus of discussions with too many people to list: the 2012 conference in Tarragona alone brought together over a hundred scholars from twenty- three countries and five continents. I have made occasional trips across the pond to the Society for Utopian Studies, which holds an annual conference in North America. My work has also grown out of partici- pation in the William Morris Society, the Schumacher Institute, and, of course, professional networks of sociology, especially the Sociology Department at Bristol. The need for change is kept in sharp focus by my membership of the large team conducting the ESRC-funded 2012 survey of Poverty and Social Exclusion in the United Kingdom. I have given many lectures and conference papers over the decade of this book’s gestation, and written several articles on related themes. None is reproduced here in full, but parts of some are incorporated into the wider argument. I am grateful to the original publishers for permission to re-use selections from the following pieces: ‘Looking for the Blue: The Necessity of Utopia’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 2007, 12(3): 289–306 (Taylor and Francis); ‘Introduction: The Once and Future Orpheus’, Utopian Studies, 2010, 21(2): 204–14; ‘In Eine Bess’re Welt Entruckt: Reflections on Music and Utopia’, Utopian Studies 2010, 21(2): 215–31 (Penn State University Press); ‘Back to the Future: Wells, Sociology, Utopia and Method’, Sociological Review, 2010, 58(4): 530–47 (Wiley); ‘For Utopia: The Limits of the Utopian Function under Conditions of Late Capitalism’, Contemporary Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 2000, 3(2/3): 25–43 (Taylor and Francis); ‘Pragmatism, Utopia and Anti-Utopia’, Critical Horizons, 2008, 9(1): 42–59 (Equinox Publishing); ‘Being in Utopia’, Hedgehog Review: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture, 2008, 10(1): 19–30 (Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, University of Virginia); ‘Towards a Utopian Ontology: Secularism and Postsecularism in Ernst Bloch and Roberto Unger’, Journal of Contemporary Thought, 2010, 31: 151–69 (Forum on Contemporary Theory). I am also grateful to Jim Boyes for permission to reproduce lyrics from Jerusalem Revisited at the end of Chapter 3. It seems invidious to select from the many organizers, participants, reviewers and editors, as well as students, whose responses have con- tributed to my thinking. But equally, there are some who should be thanked. Those whose conversations and interventions have been important include Phillippa Bennett, Nicky Britten, Nathaniel Coleman, Lynne Copson, Lorna Davidson, Vincent Geoghegan, Diana Levitas, Susan McManus, Gregor McLennan, Stella Maile, Tom Moylan, Jenneth Parker, Lucy Sargisson, Nigel Singer, Jane Speedy, Sarah Street, x Preface and Acknowledgements Maggie Studholme, Gillian Swanson; my thanks to you all. Several others have generously read and responded to parts of the book: my warm thanks to Davina Cooper, Jane Edwards, Richard Hobbs, Sarah Payne, Randall Smith and Daniel Thistlethwaite. Jem Thomas and Tom Moylan resolutely read the whole, and I am deeply grateful to both for their careful criticism and encouragement. Thanks also to Jem and to Anne-Marie Cummins, for stalwart friendship and for crewing Spirit of Utopia. The skipper, Robert Hunter, my partner for over thirty years, has read repeated drafts of the manuscript; he is, in the deepest sense, the co-creator of all that I do, the mirror of my best self, my best critic and my unfailing companion in the quest. And while I have been writing, Graham and Sara have given us three grandchildren, Caleb, Seth and Hannah, constantly reminding me of the point of it all: to make it better, if we can, for those who come after. Introduction In 1906, H. G. Wells argued that ‘the creation of Utopias – and their exhaustive criticism – is the proper and distinctive method of sociology’.1 Wells’s claim may seem counter-intuitive in terms of common under- standings of utopia and of sociology. But although sociology may, as he says, have sought to distance itself from utopia, both conventional sociology and critical social theory have unavoidable utopian character- istics, increasingly recognized in recent discussions. A utopian method relevant to the twenty-first century may be somewhat different from that which Wells envisaged, but is both appropriate and necessary. It provides a critical tool for exposing the limitations of current policy discourses about economic growth and ecological sustainability. It facilitates genu- inely holistic thinking about possible futures, combined with reflexivity, provisionality and democratic engagement with the principles and prac- tices of those futures. And it requires us to think about our conceptions of human needs and human flourishing in those possible futures. The core of utopia is the desire for being otherwise, individually and collectively, subjectively and objectively.

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