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Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society

2014; Penn State University Press; Volume: 25; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/utopianstudies.25.1.0227

2154-9648

Laurence Davis,

Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism

In 1990, Ruth Levitas published her pathbreaking book The Concept of Utopia, a work that helped to shape the emerging field of utopian studies and inspired a generation of utopian studies scholars. Twenty-three years later, she has published a major new contribution to the field, Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society. Like its predecessor, Utopia as Method is exceptionally well informed, clearly and accessibly written, and deeply politically engaged. The product of years of scholarly study and professional activity in the fields of utopian studies and critical social thought, it is also methodologically sophisticated and a reliable guide to some of the most advanced current research on utopian social thought.The central argument of Utopia as Method is that utopia should be understood as a method and that as such it should be recognized as intimately related to the discipline of sociology. In the course of elaborating this thesis the analysis of the book ranges quite widely, from its opening chapters—which reprise the argument of The Concept of Utopia that utopia is the expression of the desire for a better way of being or living and as such is diffused throughout human culture—to part 2 of the book, which traces the history of the relationship between utopia and sociology from the institutionalization of the discipline to the recent revival of interest in utopia in contemporary sociology. Finally, in part 3 of the book, Levitas develops a line of analysis that will be very familiar to those who have followed her work over the years—namely, mapping the imaginary reconstitution of society as a method that has three aspects: archaeological, ontological, and architectural.Original and engaging throughout, Utopia as Method is particularly innovative and thought-provoking in its sustained analysis of the evolving relationship between sociology and utopia. Very unusually for a work written by a utopian scholar with an abiding interest in William Morris, Marxism, and ecologism, this aspect of the book originates in and is inspired throughout by the ideas of one H. G. Wells. More specifically, Levitas develops Wells's argument that (and this is the opening quotation of the book) “the creation of Utopias—and their exhaustive criticism—is the proper and distinctive method of sociology” (xi).In one sense, Wells's 1906 lecture “The So-Called Science of Sociology,” with its critical discussion of the emergent academic discipline of sociology, seems an apt choice of starting point for the argument developed in Utopia as Method. Like a number of other emergent academic disciplines in the social sciences in the nineteenth century, sociology sought to gain a place in the European academies and universities by demonstrating its respectability and disciplinary self-sufficiency. Importantly, and the point is frequently forgotten today, it did so by simultaneously distancing itself from the early literary forms of the discipline and adopting a scientific orientation that led it to imitate the methods of the natural sciences. As might be expected, this process of transformation was fraught with intellectual conflict, between, on the one hand, a literary intelligentsia composed of authors and, on the other hand, a social-scientific intelligentsia composed of self-professed “scientific” sociologists.In England, Wells's 1906 lecture at the recently established London School of Economics may be understood as a partisan contribution to this ongoing conflict intended primarily to debunk the scientific pretensions of the then fledgling science of sociology. Typical of Wells, the lecture is from start to finish an intellectual provocation, perhaps nowhere more so than in its deliberately controversial claim that sociology must be neither art simply nor science in the narrow meaning of the word but, rather, “knowledge rendered imaginatively, and with an element of personality; that is to say, in the highest sense of the term, literature.”Utopia as Method draws a great deal of intellectual inspiration from Wells's distinctive understanding of sociological method and develops it in fascinating and unexpected directions. In chapters 5 through 7, for example, Levitas traces the historical development of sociology and the disavowal of its utopian dimension that corresponded with its institutionalization as an academic discipline. As she correctly points out, again following the example of Wells, such a disavowal could never be complete, insofar as the very silences of sociology reveal its repressed but ultimately inescapable utopian affinities. Persistently and consistently, Levitas employs the tools of her craft to push sociology in the direction of greater holism, normativity, and concern with the future and what it means and might mean to be human. Notably, she argues passionately against what she describes as the excesses of postmodern social (and literary) theory—in particular, resistance to engaging with the actual institutional structure of the present and the potential institutional structure of the future—and for a form of transformative utopian realism that recognizes that (in Roberto Unger's words) “we must be visionaries to become realists” (140). Like Wells, she offers us a compelling and inspiring vision of sociology as utopia and utopia as sociology.Having said this, and in the spirit of utopian critique and pluralistic debate, which Levitas frequently invokes in the book, I would suggest that there are a number of important silences and omissions in the Wells-inspired utopian vision proffered to us by Utopia as Method. Four points in particular—linked by their concern with the book's pronounced emphasis on social structures, norms, and ideals—are especially worth noting.First, like Wells's 1906 lecture, Utopia as Method sometimes blurs the distinctions among evaluation, normativity, and utopian imagination and in doing so postulates a norm-heavy model of utopia that abstracts from the social practices of our world in order to pass moral judgment on them. The book's claim, for example, that utopia is “concerned with what ought to be and the process of conforming the world to that standard” (66) takes I believe insufficient account of the inextricable connection of ought and is, ends and means—which, after all, are also ends in the making.Second, and related to this point, like Wells's lecture Utopia as Method at times glosses over some of the ambiguities, contradictions, and dogmatic excesses in the utopian tradition. Not all utopias are—to use the language of the book—“provisional and reflexive models of possible futures open to criticism and debate” (153). Anticipating this criticism, Levitas replies that even if not all utopias are intended in such a manner, they should all be read this way. To this I would respond: Why? Wouldn't it be more helpful from both a scholarly and a radical democratic point of view to recognize, acknowledge, and interpretively respect the splendid diversity of the utopian tradition, including its eminently human flaws, inconsistencies, and imperfections?Third, in keeping with Wells's statist perspective—and in stark contrast to the views of Marx and Morris—Utopia as Method assumes that the state will always remain necessary. One wonders, however, if this doesn't also assume a particular and fixed conception of human nature and potential tied inextricably to existing structures of domination, an assumption at odds with the more nuanced line of argument developed in the chapter on utopia as ontology.Fourth and finally, what role remains for individual character and psychology in the emphatically socialized account of utopia as method advocated (in different ways) by both Wells and Levitas? To recall a memorable metaphor employed by Virginia Woolf in an essay in the 1920s in which she distinguished between Georgian and Edwardian fiction writers, whereas the former took a real interest in the old lady sitting in the opposite corner of the train carriage (Woolf calls her Mrs. Brown), the latter (in which group Woolf includes Wells) looked out of the train carriage, describing the factories gliding past, utopias with utopian versions of Mrs. Brown, and even the furnishing and upholstery of the carriage but never Mrs. Brown herself. Fundamentally, according to Woolf, Wells and his fellow Edwardians were not interested in human psychology or the idiosyncrasies of individual human character. Might a similar charge also be leveled at Utopia as Method?Ultimately, however, none of these marginal criticisms detract from the merits of Ruth Levitas's fine new book, which emphatically welcomes such archaeological critique as a means of reinvigorating the utopian tradition. As Levitas maintains on the final page of the book, utopia must be continually reinvented as one crucial tool in the making of the future. Utopia as Method makes a bold, original, and politically engaged contribution to this continuing process of reinvention—one that will generate intellectual excitement and guide research agendas for a whole new generation of utopian studies scholars—and for this we owe its author a debt of gratitude.