William Paris writes:

All politics seems to operate under the demand to be realistic. There is no quicker end to a political conversation than to describe someone’s ideas as ‘utopian’. The power of this pejorative draws upon seemingly obvious facts concerning human nature, empirical realities and social constraints. Whether we are considering demands to restructure our economic systems, how nations police citizenship claims and their borders, or our relationship to the environment, when these positions are called ‘utopian’, the assumption is not only that there are constraints but that these constraints are inalterable. However, to determine which constraints are fixed rather than alterable is easier said than done.

Perhaps ‘utopia’ should be the start of political discussion rather than the end. When we engage in political debate, we attempt to argue for what we believe should be our priorities and establish the constraints of reality. It would seem that utopia violates this agreement by trying to argue for priorities that can obtain only outside the constraints of our world. To some, it would be nonsensical to claim as a political position that ‘we should abolish the police even though that is not possible’. The non-utopian could respond: ‘That may very well be true for some hypothetical world. But here and now we have crime. You must be realistic.’ The issue is that utopia challenges what we take to be realistic. And so the breakdown between utopians and non-utopians is not over the question of whether we are fated to obey the constraints of reality; the political debate concerns what is inalterable and what is changeable in our social life.

Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) exemplifies this disagreement. The work is structured as a dialogue between a fictionalised Thomas More and a man named Raphael Hythloday (or Hythlodaeus, meaning ‘talker of nonsense’ in Greek) who claims to have travelled to an island where money has been abolished, property is held in common and civic virtue flourishes. Utopia functions less as an argument for a perfect end state and more as a form of political speech against the ruination and pauperisation of peasant life due to England’s practice of enclosure of common land. The question guiding Utopia is whether it was reasonable to expect peasants who have been dispossessed to resist committing the crime of stealing in order to survive. For More, it was the non-utopians who had misjudged reality, and so it was not only their priorities that had to be challenged, but their overall conception of reality. [Continue reading…]