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2. Utopia and Its Negative Dystopia and Political Imagination in the Twentieth Century by Matthew Benjamin Cole Department of Political Science Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Michael Gillespie, Co-Supervisor ___________________________ Tom Spragens, Co-Supervisor ___________________________ Ruth Grant ___________________________ Malachi Hacohen Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Political Science in the Graduate School of Duke University 2017 i v ABSTRACT Dystopia and Political Imagination in the Twentieth Century by Matthew Benjamin Cole Department of Political Science Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Michael Gillespie, Co-Supervisor ___________________________ Tom Spragens, Co-Supervisor ___________________________ Ruth Grant ___________________________ Malachi Hacohen An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Political Science in the Graduate School of Duke University 2017 i v Copyright by Matthew Cole 2017 Abstract My dissertation offers an interpretation of twentieth century political thought which emphasizes the influence of dystopian images, themes, and anxieties. Drawing examples from philosophy, literature, and social science, I show how negative visions of future society have played an important critical function in our contemporary understanding of freedom, power, and responsibility. In contrast to those who associate dystopia with cynicism or despair, I aim to provide a more nuanced and sympathetic account of a mode of thinking which gives twentieth century political thought much of its distinctiveness and vitality, and continues to inform ethical and political judgment in our time. Throughout the dissertation, I offer commentaries on the emergence and decline of modern utopianism (Chapter 1); Huxley’s and Orwell’s seminal dystopian novels (Chapter 2); the role of paradigmatic dystopian images related to totalitarianism, mass society, and technocracy in post-war political discourse (Chapter 3) and the innovative contributions to these discourses made by Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, and Michel Foucault (Chapter 4). iv Dedication For all of my teachers, with gratitude v Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 1 1. The Modern Space of Possibilities ........................................................................................ 13 2. Utopia and its Negative ......................................................................................................... 69 3. Paradigms of Dystopian Thinking ..................................................................................... 133 4. Theorizing Freedom and Domination ............................................................................... 215 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 278 Works Cited .............................................................................................................................. .293 Biography ................................................................................................................................... 305 vi Acknowledgements Many people deserve thanks for their guidance, input, and encouragement over the course of this project. Many people also deserve apologies for the (very) rough drafts and missed deadlines that accumulated as the project came painstakingly to completion. I am fortunate to have completed the dissertation in a collegial department, under patient advisors, and with the support and confidence of my friends and family. Perhaps, if this project ever sees publication, I will thank them all by name. For now, it is probably safe to assume that anyone reading this deserves to be acknowledged for their help. If you are reading this and you did not help me write it, I would like to acknowledge you for reading anyway. vii Introduction We frequently hear the complaint that political thinking in our times suffers from a lack of imagination, leaving us stranded, in Roberto Unger’s words, “between dreams that seem unrealizable and prospects that hardly seem to matter.”1 And yet when it comes to producing images of the future which to frighten and torment ourselves, who could accuse the twenty-first century of lacking ingenuity? Aside from apocalypses of the nuclear and ecological varieties, pressing enough to say the least, we routinely imagine futures in which human life ceases not on account of life being rendered impossible but on account of life losing its human character. Eugenic caste systems and “designer children,” the dissolution of the self under constant surveillance, a paranoid geo-politics in which state and corporate power become indistinguishable – these and far stranger possibilities now pervade political discourse and popular culture. From social criticism and literary fiction to young adult novels and their inevitable cinematic adaptations, it seems that every future fit to depict now has a bit of Brave New World or 1984 about it. Why do such images occur so readily in our times? Dystopia is one of the twentieth century political imagination's most distinctive and unsettling innovations. Its ancient ancestor, the utopia, had thrived in the 1 Roberto Unger, False Necessity: Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy (Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 1987). p.331. 1 philosophy, literature, and even the real social life of the preceding century. But in the wake of the First World War, and with the emergence of the first totalitarian regimes, European writers were inclined to adopt a bleaker view of the human prospect. They began to imagine future societies of an altogether different sort: "negative utopias," ingenious cages for the human spirit. This tendency finds paradigmatic expression in Zamyatin's We (1921), and with Huxley's Brave New World (1931) and Orwell's 1984 (1949), it yields two of the century's most influential novels. However, the dystopian impulse is by no means confined to the field of speculative fiction. Particularly in the post-war era, dire predictions about the likely course of social evolution can be found in the works of philosophers, sociologists, economists, and theologians. Like the novels which are more familiarly described as a dystopian, these works depict future societies in which freedom has been eliminated and warn that the makings of such a world are already underway. This dissertation advances a distinctive interpretation of 20th century political thought, one which emphasizes the pervasiveness of dystopian images, themes, and anxieties in the most searching and original works of the post-war era. Though the dystopian outlook of the 20th century is often contrasted with the utopian horizons of the 19th, and despite the great significance attached to works like Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984 in our cultural and political discourse at large, there has yet to be a systematic treatment of dystopia with respect to political theory, nor have the dystopian 2 overtones in the century’s most influential thinkers been addressed in any detail. Those political theorists who acknowledge dystopia tend to invoke a simplistic contrast between utopian and dystopian reflection while shortchanging the more complex and dynamic interplay between the two modes of thought, or else dismiss dystopia as a product of apolitical pessimism. By contrast, I argue that dystopian thinking represents an innovative mode of political thought in its own right, one which provides a way of surveying modern society’s possible futures and diagnosing those developmental tendencies which would lead to an unfree and inhuman mode of social organization. Far from implying fatalism, dystopian thinking only emerges at the close of the 19th century, as the certitudes of teleology and the inevitabilities of historicism are displaced by an appreciation of historical contingency. Dystopian visions occur only to late moderns who confront meaningful, because underdetermined, choices about the future shape of society. In the following chapters, I reflect on the dystopian turn as the site of emergence for a new paradigm of social thought, one which remains influential throughout the twentieth century, and continues to structure our own sense of historical and political possibility. Dystopia represents a characteristically modern anxiety about the future of society - the nightmare of a dehumanized existence subject to an all-encompassing system of social control. Amid the diverse products of the dystopian imagination lies the fear that in the future the characteristically human capacities to think and act will be 3 tightly constrained, if not entirely suppressed, by technical and organizational means. The traumas of the early twentieth century must be given credit for allowing this perspective to become pervasive. However, the origins of dystopian thinking can be traced back to
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