Utopian Imagination, Thought & Praxis: A Basic Bibliography

Utopian Imagination, Thought and Praxis: A Basic Bibliography Patrick S. O’Donnell (2021) “Utopian thought attempts to specify and justify the principles of a comprehensively good political order. Typically, the goodness of that order rests on the desirability of the way of life enjoyed by the individuals within it; less frequently, its merits rely on organic features that cannot be reduced to individuals. Whatever their basis, the principles of the political good share certain general features:  First, utopian principles are in their intention universally valid, temporally and geographically.  Second, the idea of the good order arises out of our experience but does not mirror it in any simple way and is not circumscribed by it. Imagination may combine elements of experience into a new totality that has never existed; reason, seeking to reconcile the contradictions of experience, may transmute its elements.  Third, utopias exist in speech; they are ‘cities of words.’ This does not mean that they cannot exist but only that they need not ever. This ‘counterfactuality’ of utopia in no way impedes its evaluative function.  Fourth, utopian principles may come to be realized in history, and it may be possible to point to real forces pushing in that direction. But our approval of  a utopia is not logically linked to the claim that history is bringing us closer to it or that we can identify an existing basis for the transformative actions that would bring it into being. Conversely, history cannot by itself validate principles. The movement of history (if it is a meaningful totality in any sense at all) may be from the most desirable to the less; the proverbial dustbin may contain much of enduring worth.  Fifth, although not confined to actual existence, the practical intention of utopia requires that it be constrained by possibility. Utopia is realistic in that it assumes human and material preconditions that are neither logically nor empirically impossible, even though their simultaneous co-presence may be both unlikely and largely beyond human control to effect.  Sixth, although utopia is a guide for action, it is not in any simple sense a program of action. In nearly all cases, important human or material preconditions for good politics will be lacking. Political practice consists in striving for the best results achievable in particular circumstances. The relation between the ideal and the best achievable is not deductive.” — William A. Galston “By perfectible, it is not meant that he [i.e., man] is capable of being brought to perfection. But the word seems sufficiently adapted to express the faculty of being continually made better and receiving perpetual improvement; and in this sense it is here to be understood. The term perfectible, thus explained, not only does not imply the capacity of being brought to perfection, but stands in expression to it. If we could arrive at perfection, there would be an end to our improvement. There is however one thing of great importance that it does imply: every perfection or excellence that human beings are competent to conceive, human beings, unless in cases that are palpably and unequivocally excluded by the structure of their frame, are competent to attain.” — Wlliam Godwin “For [Ernst] Bloch, the enemies of hope are confusion, anxiety, fear, renunciation, passivity, failure and nothingness. Fascism was their apotheosis. But since all individuals daydream, they also hope. It is necessary to strip this dreaming of self- delusion and escapism, to enrich and expand it and to base it in the actual movement of society. Hope, in other words, must be both educated and objectively grounded; an insight drawn from Marx’s great discovery: ‘the subjective and objective hope-contents of the world.’ The Principle of Hope is an encyclopaedic account of dreams of a better existence; from the most simple to the most complex; from idle daydreams to sophisticated images of perfection. It develops a positive sense of the category ‘utopian,’ 2 denuded of unworldliness and abstraction, as forward dreaming and anticipation. [….] This then is Bloch’s great masterpiece. His achievement was to see that utopianism is not confined to intellectuals and their various blueprints of a better life. He saw that, in countless ways, individuals are expressing unfulfilled dreams and aspirations—that in song, dance, plants and plaster, church and theater, utopia waits.” — Vincent Geoghegan Allott, Philip. Eunomia: New Order for a New World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Allott, Philip. The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Anderson, Harriet. Utopian Feminism: Women’s Movements in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. Baczko, Bronislaw. Utopian Lights: The Evolution of the Idea of Social Progress. New York: Paragon House, 1989. Bahro, Rudolf (David Fernbach, trans.) The Alternative in Eastern Europe. London: NLB (New Left Books), 1978. Bahro, Rudolf. Building the Green Movement. Philadelphia, PA: New Society Publ., 1986. Bartkowski, Frances. Feminist Utopias. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. Beauchesne, Kim and Alessandra Santos, eds. The Utopian Impulse in Latin America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Bellamy, Edward (Matthew Beaumont, ed.) Looking Backward: 2000-1887. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Berryman, Phillip. Liberation Theology. New York: Pantheon Books, 1987. Bloch, Ernst (Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight, trans.) The Principle of Hope, 3 Vols. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1986. Bloch, Ernst (Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg, trans.) The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988. Breines, Wini. Community and Organization in the New Left, 1962-1968: The Great Refusal. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989 ed. Buber, Martin. Paths in Utopia. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1958. Callenbach, Ernest. Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston. Berkeley, CA: Banyan Books, 1975. Claeys, Gregory. Searching for Utopia: The History of an Idea. London: Thames & Hudson, 2011. 3 Claeys, Gregory, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Cooper, Davina. Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. Davis, J.C. Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing, 1516-1700. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981. David, Laurence and Peter Stillman, eds. The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005. Dolgoff, Sam, ed. The Anarchist Collectives: Workers’ Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution, 1936–1939. New York: Free Life Editions, 1974. Eliav-Feldon, Miriam. Realistic Utopias: The Ideal Imaginary Societies of the Renaissance, 1516-1630. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1982. Erasmus, Charles J. In Search of the Common Good: Utopian Experiments Past and Future. New York: Free Press, 1985. Estlund, David. Utopophobia: On the Limits (if any) of Political Philosophy. Princeton, NL: Princeton University Press, 2020. Galston, William A. Justice and the Human Good. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Geoghegan, Vincent. Utopianism and Marxism. London: Methuen, 1987. Godwin, William. Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Middlesex, England: Penguin Classics, 1985 (1793). Goodwin, Barbara and Keith Taylor. The Politics of Utopia: A Study in Theory and Practice. Oxford, UK: Peter Lang, 2009 (1982). Guarneri, Carl J. The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. Harrington, Michael. Socialism: Past and Future. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1989. Hicks, George L. Experimental Americans: Celo and Utopian Community in the Twentieth Century. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Hine, Robert V. California’s Utopian Colonies. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983 (1953). Iyer, Raghavan. Parapolitics: Toward the City of Man. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Iyer, Raghavan. The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi. Santa Barbara, CA: Concord Grove Press, 2nd ed., 1983 (1st ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). Jacoby, Russell. The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy. New York: Basic Books, 2005. 4 Jacoby, Russell. Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007 ed. Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso, 2007. Jendrysik, Mark Stephen. Utopia. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2020. Joll, James. The Anarchists. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2nd ed., 1979. Kanter, Rosabeth Moss. Commitment and Community: Communes and Utopia in Sociological Perspective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972. Katsiaficas, George. The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1987. Kohn, Livia. Cosmos and Community: The Ethical Dimension of Daoism. Cambridge, MA: Three Pines Press, 2004. Kopp, James J. Eden Within Eden: Oregon’s Utopian Heritage. Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 2009. Kumar, Krishan. Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1987. Kumar, Krishan and Stephen Bann, eds. Utopias and the Millennium. London: Reaktion Books, 1993. Levitas, Ruth. The Concept of Utopia. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990. Levitas, Ruth. Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Luntley, Michael. The Meaning of Socialism. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1990. Mannheim, Karl. Ideology and Utopia. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960 (1936). Manuel, Frank E. and Fritzie P. Manuel. Utopian Thought in the Western World. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979. Marsden, John Joseph. Marxian and Christian Utopianism: Toward a Socialist Political Theology. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1991. Martineau, Alain. Herbert Marcuse’s Utopia. Montreal: Harvest House, 1986. Melville, Keith. Communes in the Counter Culture: Origins, Theories, Styles of Life. New York: Morrow Quill, 1972. More, Thomas (Paul Turner, trans.) Utopia. Harmondsworth: Penguin, revised ed., 2003. Morrison, Roy. We Build the Road as We Travel. Philadelphia, PA: New Society Publishers, 1991. Moylan, Tom. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. London: Methuen, 1986. Mumford, Lewis. The Story of Utopias. New York: Viking Press, 1962 ed. (1922). Ní Chuanacháin, Deirdre. Utopianism in Eighteenth-Century Ireland. Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 2016. 5 Nordhoff, Charles. The Communistic Societies of the United States. New York: Schocken Books, 1965 [1875]. Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books, 1974. Pitzer, Donald E., ed. America’s Communal Utopias. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Rexroth, Kenneth. Communalism: From Its Origins to the Twentieth Century. New York: Seabury Press, 1974. Rose, Julie L. Free Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016. Sargent, Lyman Tower. Utopiansim: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Sargisson, Lucy. Contemporary Feminist Utopianism. New York: Routledge, 1996. Schaer, Roland, Gregory Claeys and Lyman Tower Sargent, eds. Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World. (The New York Public Library) New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Smith, Christian. The Emergence of Liberation Theology: Radical Religion and Social Movement Theory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Sonn, Richard D. Anarchism. New York: Twayne Publ., 1992. Stites, Richard. Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Taylor, Michael. Anarchy and Cooperation. London: Wiley, 1976. Taylor, Michael. Community, Anarchy and Liberty. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Van Parijs, Philippe and Yannick Vanderborght. Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. Vieira, Patricia and Michael Marder, eds. Existential Utopia: New Perspectives on Utopian Thought. New York: Continuum, 2012. Weisbrud, Carol. The Boundaries of Utopia. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. Whisenhunt, Donald W. Utopian Movements and Ideas of the Great Depression: Dreamers, Believers, and Madmen. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013. Wright, Erik Olin. Envisioning Real Utopias. London: Verso, 2010. Related Bibliographies (embedded links)  Anarchism: Philosophy and Praxis  Beyond Capitalist-Attenuated Time: Freedom, Leisure, and Self-Realization  Beyond Inequality: Toward Welfare, Well-Being and Human Flourishing  Capitalist and Other Distortions of Democratic Education  Democratic Theory 6  Global Distributive Justice  Toward Green Democratic Socialism (ecosocialism)  Human Rights  The History, Theory and Praxis of the Left in the 1960s  Marxism  Marxism, Art and Aesthetics  Otto Neurath and Red Vienna 7