Utopia Revised

Abstract

The trajectories of utopia and sociology in the twentieth century were largely separate. From the 1970s utopian studies emerged as a distinct interdisciplinary academic field, but it has until recently been dominated by historical and literary orientations and a tendency to define utopia itself in terms of form, as a literary genre. Historical accounts of utopian thought and utopian literature both predate and follow Mumford’s The Story of Utopias, beginning at least as early as 1879 with Moritz Kaufmann’s Utopias and continuing to the present through such works as Frank and Fritzie Manuels’s 1979 Utopian Thought in the Western World, Krishan Kumar’s 1987 Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times, and Gregory Claeys’s 2011 Searching for Utopia: The History of an Idea. All of these approach their subject matter as a relatively straightforward history of ideas. By the 1970s, however, change was overtaking both utopian literature and utopian commentary. These were affected by same intellectual and political challenges as social theory, with similar results. An upsurge of political activism in the 1970s stimulated utopian thought, and the very nature of those politics altered both its content and its form. This brought contingency, provisionality and reflexivity centre-stage. But this political impetus overlapped with and gave way to the postmodern turn, in which sociological and systemic analyses were downplayed in favour of questions of representation and literary form.