Bauman - Socialism The_active_utopia

8/2/2019 Bauman - Socialism The_active_utopia

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in the same seriesSocial Theory and Polit ical Practice

by Brian FayUnderstanding Social Life

by R. W. Outhwaite

SocialismThe Active Utopiab y

ZYGMUNT BAUMANProfessor oj Sociology, University oj Leeds

LondonGeorge Allen & Unwin LtdRuskin House Museum Street


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First publi shed in 1976 To Irena andLydia-my twin utopiasThis book is copyright unde r the Berne Convention. Allr ights are reserved . Apart from any fair dealing for thepurpose of private s tudy , research, criticism or review, aspermitted under the Copyright Act, 1956, no part of thispublication may be reproduced,stored in a retrievalsystem, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,electronic, electrical, chemical, mechanical, optical , photo-copying , recording or otherwise, without tbe prior permis-sion of the copyright owner. Enquiries should beaddressed to the publishers.

George Allen &Unwin Ltd . 1976_ -ISBN 0 04 300059 2 hardbacko 04 300060 5 paperback

Prin ted in Great Brita inin 10 point Times Roman typeby Clarke, Doble &Brenden LtdPlymouth


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'No man can put forth any special claim in the faceof Nature; but insociety want at once becomesan injustice either to this class or to that:Contents

HEGEL

1 Utopia and Reality2 Utopia and the Modem Mind3 The Historical Location of Socialism4 The Structure of the Socialist Utopia5 Utopia and Commonsense6 A Socialist Experiment7 Socialism as Culture8 Continuity and Change9 Roads from UtopiaNotesIndex.

9183849657710111 4133143149


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1Utopia and Reality

Socialism descended upon nineteenth-oentury Europe as utopia.this statement is bound to provoke one of two responses: either

of angry protests from those who feel safer on a sturdy jeep ofhistorical necessity than on a flying carpet of human will; or offriendly smiles from those who feel that the world we live inwouldbe a much happier place were it never haunted by the abortiveventure into equality. Both protests and smiles are - I admit - morethan partly justified by the sense in which the concept of 'utopia'has sedimented in the public mind. But it is not the sense inwhichIropose to use it.The context in which the word 'utopia' appears most often in

everyday discourse is the phrase condemning an idea. a project.an expectation as a 'mere utopia'. The phi'ase marks the end, notthe ~ of an argument ; one can still quarrel. to be sure,whe ertheverdict applies to a particular case. but provided itdoes, further consideration of the possible merits of the idea inquestion will make little sense. The indictment amounts to a flipand irrevocable dismissal of the idea as a f igment of unrestrainedfantasy, unscientifi c. at odds with reali ty- i.e. loaded with all thosefeatures which mark off an idea as something to be kept at a safedistance from scholarly discourse.The operation has been performed often enough to tum it into

a purely perfunctory procedure. which no longer requires referenceto the original justi fication. One can only suppose that the disreputeinto which utopian thinking has fallen is that shared by magic,religion. and alchemy - all those slushy paths of the errant humanmind which modern science set about eliminating once and for allfrom the map of human action. Having been defined from the out-set as an idle. unrealistic blueprint without much basis in reality,,. .


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10 Socialism: The Active Utopia Utopia and Reality 11utopia was irretrievably cast among the false ideas which in facthinder human progress by diverting human effort from the waysof reason and rationality. Stripping Thomas More's term of itsintended ambiguity and reducing it to only one of the two originallyintertwined meanings - to 'a place which does not exist ' (no longerassociated with 'a place to be desired', eutopia)- the dominant usagerendered the historical irrelevance of utopia self-verifying, With thebenefit of hindsight the blueprints which had materialised wereclassified as predictions. while the name 'utopia ' was kept only forthose which failed to do so.The insufficiency of treating utopias as predictions which turnedout to be false. or plans which failed to prove their realism. willbecome evident if we only agree that each moment of humanhistory is, to a greater or a lesser degree. an open-ended situation;a SItuation which is not entirely determined by the structureontsown past. and from which more than one string of even~ _!O~yfollow (not only in a subjective sense, C?nsidering the state of ou rkDowIedge, but in the objective sense ~~well, conSidering a com-Elete knowledge of the present and the past which could have beencollected and processed orily if the perfect research and data-processing technology had been avililaWe). People, said C . WrightMills, 'may become aware of predictions made about their activities,and accordingly they can and often do re-direct themselves; theymay falsify or fulfil the predictions. Which they will do is not, asyet, subject to very good prediction. In so far as men have somedegree of freedom, what they may do will not be readily pre-dictable." The point which Mills made (a very radical point in aperiod dominated by th e reified, ' reacting' image of man and thebehaviouristic paradigm) was that far from being just predictions,passively waiting on bookshelves to be compared with the actualcourse of events they avowedly tried to foresee. our statementsabout the future become, from the start, active factors in. shapingthis future. Whi:ch way they will deflect the course of history doesnot depend on their content alone; it ultimately hinges. one wouldsay. on the intrinsically unpredictable, intractable human praxis.If that is so, then the right uestion to ask about redictions or,more generally. visions 0~~~l!.~!e. is not w et!!~~_.th~YM.Yeeenverified or falsified by sUDsequentevents, but in which war. and ! o -what de e these events nave-oeeliliifluenced -aildneiier~bthe presence of the. orementJon vlslons- in the public mind.Thomas Carlyle called history 'an unprisoned prophecy'; Oscar

Wilde declared that 'a map of th e world which does not includeUtopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the onecountry at which Humanity is always landing' ; Anatole Francereminded his science-intoxicated contemporaries that 'without theutopians of other times. men would still live in caves, miserableand naked'. And Gabriel Tarde posed the question almost naive inits pertinence: 2 < it seems to me neither more nor less conceivablethat the future which is not yet. should influence the present thanthat the past, which is no more, should do so'. One can see that allthese thinkers were trying to grapple not just with the issue ofutopia and its active historical role, but with the much widerquestion of the nature of human history as such.The radical opposition to the conservative vie~ of culture, asreduced to iearrung, to the detriment of creativity .starts with anassumption that the peculiarly human mode of existence is.foundedon a uruque phenomenon of the future, as a mode, of time quali-tatively distinct from the past in the sense of being not-entirely-determmed and at the same tune sufficIenti owerful to destroy.time an agam. even e t IC est ayer of habitu patterns. 2most dramatican distinctive feature of culture is the notoriou$ough ho y denied b many a scientist in the . ia.meof ihe ultimatesuccess 0 e SClen C venture uman a iIi to decline to learn.resiSt ~ e cOnltioning pressure. to meres onses' to 'stiiOu "w c are not present 10 any unagina e material sense. Inventive-ness, originality v!Tlpng on wa~ardnessl characteri~ b~umanbein~at least as much as -their abilit to learn and theu ca aClt forDemg con itioned. Some tiers would go so far in _err protestagainst the 'learning' image of man that they would take, withTeilhard de Chardin, a stance opposite to the one portrayed above:'It is finally the Utopians. not the "realists", who make scientificsense. They at least. though their flights of fancy may cause us tosmile, have a feeling for the true dimensions of the phenomenon of


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12 Socialism: The Active Utopia 1 3topia and Realitytheir fitness for men'. ~ and in fact accepts the ideal of technical,'Zweck' perfection as the only ideal admissible in a world bent oninstrumentalising ends rather than setting them. invention is anentirely legitimate and. indeed. praiseworthy and prestige-bestowingendeavour; but not utopia, though it involves the same psycbologicalstructure and tbe same propensity for noncompliance and defianceof existing patterns. To quote Ruyer a in, a uta ian thinker wouldbe just an ordinary SOCIO Ogist. exce t for his eclslon to a onat some pomt t e ve lC e 0 mental ex erience'6 in his determinedat emp to orest any evtation from the direction be Wishes to~~~ This 'abandomng of the vehicle of experience' is a unifying. 1 l . . r e a t U r e of tbe inventor and the utopianist; the first, however,""pursues technical perfection within the framework delineated bythe dominant value-standards. while the utopianist defies thestandards themselves. and this makes all the difference in a worldbent on Zweckrationalitdt, Virgilio Melcbiore places the utopianimagination in the Kantian 'field of mediation' which stretchesbetween the 'consciousness of the absolute' and the 'awareness ofthe historical situation'.' The absolute ' is one thing for which ourcivilisation has little use; those who cannot help but suffer fromNietzsche's Fernstenliebe are invited to let off steam by divinginto the wonderworld of science fiction, famous for its remarkableblend of unbridled technical fantasy and disheartening paucity ofimagination in anything concerning human relations. One wondershow far the freedom that people actually enjoy can be measuredby the extent to which they are able to envisage worlds differentfrom their own..These are the reasons why we em haticall re'eet the scornfulview at is manifest int e 'mere uto ia' catch hrase, It seemsat t s prase re ec s more the nature of the social system inwhich it has become common currency than the value of utopiawhich it pretends to assess. I think social life cannot in fact h $ lunderstood unless due attention is paid to the. immense roleplayed b y utopia. Utopias share With the _totali!!._of c!:ll~quality - to paraphrase Santayana - of a k~~ wit.~~!_1:lt:.~g.~_pres~against the future. They constantly cause the reaction of the futurewith the present, and thereby produce the compound known ashuman history.I shall now outline the functions which have been Elayed byutopias in general, and by modem socialism in particular. which to

my mind substantiate the claim that they have a crucial and con-structive role inthe historical process.1 . Utopias relativise the present. One cannot be critical aboutsomething that is believed to be an absolute. By exposing thepartiality of current reality, by scanning the field of the possible in

which the real occupies merely a tiny plot, utopias pave the way fora critical attitude and a critical activity which alone can transformthe present predicament of man. The presence of a utopia. theability to think of alternative solutions to the festering problems ofthe present. may be seen therefore as a necessary condition ofhistorical change.Utopias, to be sure, d!ffer from electoraJ_--EJatformsand evenfrom long-term political programmes in that they seem to be litt leconcerned with pragmatically conceived realism, They offer theluxury of unJeashing human imagination and leading it to thedistant expanses which would never be reached if it were helddown by the exactions of the political game. Since the meaning oflogic and rationality is defined by the latter rather than the former.'utopias do not seem logical and immediate steps from what isinexistence at present. . .. The utopian vision. in this sense, breakswith historical continuity'. e It does not follow. however. that theyare useless for the practically-minded reformers of the society. Nordoes it follow that nothing but ridicule toward utopias becomes asober mind bent on 'realistic ', i.e, piecemeal. improvement of hi ssociety. The situation in which major political blocs of a nationknow no better than to argue about the balance of payments and thedesirable level of the bank rate signals. in fact, a dangerous dryingup of the reservoir of utopian ideas and spells trouble. It is ratherthe boldness of the utopian insight into the unexplored future. itsability to cut loose and be impractical, which sets the stage for agenuinely realistic politics, one which takes stock of all opportuni-ties contained in the present. The presence of such utopian ideasand their vitality may be seen as a symptom of a society set on aperhaps turbulent, but vigorous development. In Lewis Mumford'swords, 'an ideal pattern is the ideological equivalent of a physicalcontainer: it keeps extraneous change within the bounds of humanpurpose. With the aid of ideals. a community may select, among amultitude of possibili ties. those which are consonant with its ownnature or tbat promise to further human development. This cor-


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14 Socialism: The Active Utopiaresponds to the role of entelechy inAristotle's biology' ." The thinline which divides a genuine realism from downright conservatismdisguised as soberness runs between willingness and refusal toconsider the full range of human alternatives, however fantasticthey may seem from the perspective of a complacent or disenchantedcommonsense.

Utopia an d Reality 1 5mysteries of reason. but analysed in depth by Ernst Bloch. Hopesupplies the missing link between practical and theoretical interestsbecause it is intrinsically critical of the reality in which it is rooted.Again, it extends the meaning of realism to encompass the fullrange of possible options.

2. Utopias are those as ects of culture in itself a TO ammerather a escn non ate uman condition) in which theSSI e extra ations of the resent are ex ored. ey s amraise t elf eyes very high above t e eve of current reality; theyare, indeed. surprisingly realistic in their drawing from the experi-ence and the cravings of their contemporaries, and in their penchantfor singling out this or the other established institution as a vehicleof desired change. No epoch, said Marx, poses problems which itis unable to solve; George Sorel, adding a psychological specificationto this historiosophical generalisation, remarked that when a mindputs forth au idea, it is because the idea is in the air. It can hardlybe otherwise, since the utopian ideals of any generation - if thegeneration is lucky and free enough to possess any - are shaped.like culture in general, under the double pressure of the galvanisingfeeling of deprivation and the chastening squeeze of omnipresent andstubborn realities. On the one hand, Frank E. Mannel says, 'utopiaprovides what men most keenly miss';" on the other, says FredCharles Ikle, 'we can only follow the light at the prow of ourship' .11 Both are right, since they focus on two mutually comple-mentary traits of utopian epistemology.Uto ias, so to seak. transcend the level of both theory an:dpractice 10 etr voluntar y rna est, imrn tate sense. They provideanswers to issues people experience as poignant; but the questionthey try to respond to is neither 'what can I know?', which is the

concern of philosophers, not 'what ought I do?', which is thedomain of ideologues and politicians. It is 'what may I hope?'. anawkward question. which Kant would perhaps declare illegitimate.since it invokes simultaneously his 'practical' and ' theoretical'reason, subordinating the second to the first. while remaining stub-bornly oblivious to the incompatibility of their structures andpotentials. The driving f~e 8ehind the sear2~ I~9E_i~ is !leitherthe theoretical nor tlie pra~ncal reaso!!. neitjler...th~~.S_!lltiv!Ulortlie moral interest, but the finei Ie of ho e; the idea very muchpresent. somewhat hidden, in Kant's quarrying of the

3. Utopias split the shared reality into a series of competin~erojects-assessments. The reality in which utopia is rooted is notneutral toward conflicting cognitive perspectives generated by socialconflicts. In so far as the society consists of groups differentiatedby an unequal share of available goods as well as by unequal accessto the means of social action - including the ability to act critically -all criticism of the present is inevitably committed. It may beattributed by the analyst to specific classes or strata whose grievancesand cravings it represents, even though the link may be obscuredby the largely haphazard social location of the author and his ownsupra-partisan illusions.Instead of constituting a class among varieties of human thinking,utopia is an integral element of the critical atti tude, which alwaysmaterialises in a group-specific form. representing a group experi-ence and invariably partisan yearnings. A vision eutopian to onegroup may well be dystopian to another, not too novel a pheno-menon for any student of social and political thought. Utopias.therefore, help to lay bare and make conspicuous the majordivisions of interest within a society. They contribute to thecrystallisation of major socio-political forces. thereby convertingdifferences of status into differences of action. They scan theoptions open to society at the current stage of its history; but byexposing their link to the predicament of various groups, utopiasreveal also their class-committed nature. In other words, utopiasrelativise the future into a bundle of class-committed solutions,and dispel the conservative illusion that one and onl one threadea s on rom te present the reality-protecting ideology attemptsto disguise history as nature, utopias. on the contrary, unmask thehistorical status of alleged nature. They portray the future ~tof com eting ro 'ects, and thereb reveal the role of humanvolition an concert e ort 10 sha in and brio .n it outTheconservative ers ective man' ests Itself ill discussing the futurefnterms 0 e ro ae" e uto ian ers ectIve fe' ers to speak interms of 'the osslble', even if, or e sake 0 ex Ienc. Ite DOseS to hi e d the mask 0 t e inevitable', The conservative


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16 Socialism: The Active Utopiaperspective is backed by the ubiquitous power of habit and routine;in order to unleash the self-emancipating effort of those who canexpect nothing but a rough deal from an extrapolation of thepresent, utopias are bound to embark on the hazardous venture ofdepicting the group-committed ideals, as embodied in the viableand complete social system, with a degree of verisimilitude whichcan easily be held against tbem by a scientific purist. But thisallegedly unwarranted fantasy is the only tool with which to makeup for the handicapped position of .an idea which dares to challengethe twin powers of routine behaviour and commonsensical know-ledge. The dominant definitions of realism tend to be cut to themeasure of dominant interests; they are meant to defend theirdominance by defending the habitual and the 'normal' . Utopiasweaken the defensive wallS of hi6it, thus re arm their destructionby a ramatic thrust 0 con ensed dissent, or their gradual erosionby the vitriolic solution of utopian ideas.4. Uto ias do exert enormous influence on the actual courseof histOrIcal events. ometimes tbey are so prompt y mcorporatedinto political practice (as was the case with Harrington's Oceaniaand tbe American Constitution laid down by his admirers) that thereis hardly time for the glue to dry under their utopian label; some-times they are decreed to have been brought into reality and thenthey imperceptibly merge into conservative ideologies. But in mostcases they just linger in the public mind as guides for social action,as criteria marking off the good from the evil, and as obstinatereminders of tbe never-plugged gap between the promise and thereality, too slow to catch up with its own constitutive ideals. In thistriple role utopias enter reality not as the aberrations of derangedintellects, but as powerful factors acting from within what is theonly substance of reality. motivated human action. Daniel Bell has

traced the logic of mucb of American history to 'the realisation ofthe promise of equality which underlies the founding of thiscountry. and the manifestation of the Tocqueville's summation ofAmerican democracy: what the few have today, the many willdemand tomorrow';" Francois Bloch-Laine, invoking semantic dis-tinctions proposed by Gaston Berger, suggests the term 'prospectiveacting' for the collective action induced by a vision of the goal-system: 'Its starting point is the idea that we can determine avoluntary future, a future that is "never inevitable", provided thatwe place ourselves resolutely in a future-orienteci framework to

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To sum up, one can define utopia - in the sense inwhich it willbe used in this study - as an image:;( a}uture and better worIa,which is:(1) felt as still unfulfilled and requiring an additional effort tobe brought about;(2) perceived as desirable, as a world not SO much bound tocome as one which should come;(3) critical of the existin societ; in fact a system of ideasremains utopian an thus able to boost human activity only in sofar as it is perceived as representing a system essentially differentfrom, if not antithetical to, the existing one;(4) involving a measure of hazard; for an image of the futureto possess the qualities of utopia, it must b e ascertained that 1twill not come to ass unless fostered b a deliberate collectiveaction. ramsci s we - nown view of organised action as the onlyavailable way of 'verifying' social predictions fits this attribute ofutopia very well.


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2Utopia an d the M od ern M in d

The four traits alx>ve are defining features of uta ias as a family of~~nte ectual constructs aroon which SOCIalismhasen, at east or~ century an a half. y far the most romment mem r. DenOedillsue a way, utopia oes not immediately revea its bond with aspecific stage of human history. Our definition has invoked so faronly such attributes of human beings and their intellectual productsas do not betray their time-limitations and may well be seen asaccompanying human life at all times and in equal measure. Yet,utopia is a thoroughly modern phenomenon. Chad Walsh, to besure, suggests that the entire history of utopias may be portrayed asa collection of footnotes to Plato's Republic: 1 this may well be so,but only in the same sense as the view that the whole of Westerncivilisation bas done little more than elaborate and improve onseminal ideas of Plato's contemporaries and disciples. Its indebted-ness to a history-long motif of human thought does not necessarilymake a phenomenon ancient or timeless. And a strong case can bemade for the assertion that whatever their sources of inspiration,utopias entered the historical stage as important members of thecast only after the stage had been set by a series of social andintellectual developments usually identified with the advent ofmodernity. I shall attempt below to single out the most significantof these phenomena, without which the advent of utopias answeringthe above fourfold definition would hardly be plausible.1. The considerable speeding up of the pace of social changerightly comes first on any imaginable list of such phenomena. Thedecisive threshold had been passed when change began to beascertainable and measurable by the scale of an individual life-span;when in the course of a single individual life the change was evident

-Utopia and the Modern Mind 19

enough to demand a drastic adjustment of cognitive and moralstandards. Then it was duly reflected in the new and novel sense ofhistory as an endless chain of irreversible changes, with which theconcept of progress - a development which brings change for thebetter - was not slow to join forces. It happened. to be sure, notbefore modern technology and craftsmanship took off in so spectacu-lar a way, that it became hardly possible to defy the blatantlyconspicuous evidence and insist that contemporaries knew less andpossessed less skill than the ancient prodigies they wished so avidlyto emulate. Only when he was sure of the 'present degree of per-fection' did Francis Bacon feel prepared to 'pity the condition ofmankind', observing that 'in the course of so many ages there hasbeen so great a dearth and barrenness of arts and inventions'. Itsuddenly looked as if mankind had missed a chance; like HoratioAlger's poor man who has chosen to remain in his miserable con-dition rather than make the tiny effort of picking up the wealthwaiting quietly on the pavement. Bacon's mankind had chosen towallow in its humility by not daring to trust its own faculties:'By far the greatest obstacle to the progress of science and to thenew undertakings of new tasks . . . is found in this - that men ...think things impossible."What lurks behind Bacon's words is a polemic with the dominantidea of development as an effort to attain a stable and immutablestate of perfection pre-ordained once and for all for each type.Bacon in fact proposed to replace the idea of perfection, whichinvolves condemnation of all attempts to transgress the boundariesbetween 'ideal forms' assigned to different types, with the conceptof perfectibility, which stresses movement rather than an end-point,and sets no limits to development, refusing even to discuss itssupposedly final frontiers. (This distinction has been convincinglyelucidated by John Passmore.)It was only this idea of perfectibility which paved the way forutopia. Indeed, to embark on sketching the outlines of a better.though never existing social order, one ha s to believe that noborders are in principle unencroachable and that the ease withwhich even the steepest ramparts can be scaled depends in largemeasure, if not solely, on the boldness of human imagination. Thisnew and emancipating belief flourished in all its numerous aspectsthroughout the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries until ittook solid root in the European mind to the point of becoming apart of common knowledge. the constant backcloth against which


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20 Socialism: The Active Utopiato paint innumerable utopias, ideologies. political programmes. Inbringing the message home, Bacon was helped by many writersresponsible for the intellectual climate of modernity. Herder wasapt to express his utter amazement at the fact that of all the in-habitants of the earth men seem to be the most remote from any-thing which can pass for a final destination; Fontenelle emphaticallyrejected the view that degeneration may ever befa1lthe human race.and manifested his unshakable conviction that no end can beenvisaged to the growth of human- wisdom. Condorcet joined thechorus as probably its most loquacious member and never tired. ofrepeating that there is nothing in Nature which can possiblywarrant human diffidence or the anticipation of an end to humanhopes. Too sure of the ever better times that would come to stopat generalities, Condorcet attempted. with lavish splashes and luridcolours, to paint the picture of the future. giving possibly one of thefirst examples of 'prospective' thinking, this mixture of a forecastand a utopian call to arms: 'Our hopes regarding the future state ofhumanity can be reduced to these three important points: thedestruction of inequality between nations; the progress of equalitywithin one and the same nation; and. finally, the real perfecting ofmankind." Granted the notorious elasticity of the last postulate,one can take this statement as containing a more or less completelist of motifs which were to be played again and again in the nextcentury, in fact to this very day. to animate and redirect socialdevelopment.

Utopia and the Modern Mind 21

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2. The breath-taking feats of natural science reduced once -terrifyingly sovereign Nature to the status of a pliable, malleablestuff with which one could and should knead aU kinds of usefuland practicable things; and they inspired the public mind to under-take a search for similar accomplishment in the social sphere. Thehuman environment, in its 'natural' and 'social' aspects alike, seemedpassively to await the human modelling activity. It would gladlyreveal its secrets to an inquiring mind. and then it would obedientlylend itself to an operation aimed at bringing it closer to humanneed. Hence the attitude of techne, of manipulation, inducingdeliberate and planned change, first forged in the course of wrestlingwith Nature, could be, without much further reflection, stretchedto embrace human relations. The idea of social engineering wasthe natural product of this extrapolation, and the 'Jacobin' type.so admirably portrayed by Chad Walsh as an antonym of the

'Bourbon', became its most radical and devout preacher. TheJacobin, in Walsh's words, is 'the great theoriser, the planner. theapostle of the tabula rasa. He wonders why one should tinker intrivial ways with society. Why not sit down. take a long look atthe social scene, mediate 00 first principles and draw up newblueprints?", ' Whatever sinister results the Jacobin blend of self-assurance and impatience may eventually bring. this view of theworld has an emancipating quality since it amounts to a manifestoof the human right to shape man's own destiny and to an emphaticrejection of the authority of 'the real' and 'the realistic'. The Jacobinis the one to declare that men have history. but a history which canbe consciously directed to the greater benefit of its subjects; andthat man is not only perfectible, but perfectible enough to rise tothe level at which he will be able to set the pattern for his ownperfection.The word 'man' used above should not imply that the Jacobinattitude (or. more broadly. a 'cultural engineering' attitude. sincethe Jacobin type is a blend of belief in cultural engineering plusimpatience and an 'I know better' assumption) is about theindividual. qua individual, fixing his own ends and ideal patternsentirely by himself. The Jacobin in fact shares with the Bourbonan unflattering view of the individual as an essentially waywardcreature with a flair for misinterpreting his own best interests and,consequently. for being lost in the maze of historical choices. Theidea which was used years later by Durkheim to build an entiretheoretical system of sociology has been present infact inEuropeanthought at least since Blaise Pascal: the idea of a crippled, wanindividual overwhelmed with dangerous instincts. from which hecan be rescued only by a superior, supra-individual reason. Theconcept of 'forcing into happiness' was in fact well entrenched inthe European philosophical tradition, with God, History and Societyalternating in the role of the providential force. By no means canit be associated solely with the Jacobin attitude, let alone withsocialism. as the most radical of social engineering ventures. Onecan find. for example, a full exposition of the concept in the writingsof Auguste Comte, rightly classified on the conservative side of thenineteenth-century ideological divisions: 'The end is to subordinatethe satisfaction of the personal instincts to the habitual exercise ofthe social faculties, subjecting, at the same time, all our passionsto rules imposed by an over-strengthening intelligence, with theview of identifying the individual more and more with the species."

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22 Socialism: The Active UtopiaOn the strength of this quotation alone (and if nothing else wereknown about its author) one would not hesitate to admit Comte tothe family of Jacobins. The point is that what differentiates autopian attitude from the commonsensical mood of Europeanthought is not the belief in techne and its supra-individual founda-tions, but the rather subtle distinction between activism andquietism, eagerness to help reason or society in hammering homethe message of the ideal pattern, as opposed to the passive expecta-tion of the millennium of reason descending upon the earth anyway,though in a piecemeal fashion and through its own slow-working,but unerring mechanisms. In the words of Richard Gerber,

The utopian imagination cannot remain content with far-offbliss and perfection. It is characterised by an insatiable desireto pull heaven down to earth by a violent effort. It not onlywants to effect a radical change here, it also wants it now. ifpossible. Therefore a utopia generally presents a picture of animaginary society whose standard, in the author's opinion, oughtto or might be reached by the young readers' generation withintheir own lifetime, or at least within a period not exceeding thetime span of recorded history . . . [Therefore] the writer ofsocial utopias of the near future has to compromise with realityin a way unknown to the creator of evolutionary myths. aOf all human beings, the Utopian is perhaps the one who mostfaithfully approximates the Heideggerian vision of man as a creatureto whom the future is primary because it is the region toward whichman projects and in which he defines his own being. Slightly para-phrasing William Barrett, one can say that the Utopian 'looks everforward. toward the open region of the future, and in so lookinghe takes upon himself the burden of the past (or what out of thepast he selects as his inheritance) and thereby orients himself in a

certain way to his present and actual situation in life'." By orientinghimself to the future, as the only 'pure' state cleansed thoroughlyof the filth of unreason and immorality, the Utopian mind draws itsmoral stamina and capacity for forceful action from its knowledgeof the 'true' or 'right' shape of things. and thereby disregards orchallenges the possible counter-evidence furnished by the reality'here and now'. Hence the notoriously haughty and contemptuousstance toward the resistance of the multitude, so deeply soaked inthe present that they are unable or unwilling to look to the future.The fact that people do not show enough enthusiasm for their own

Utopia and the Modern Mind 23happiness testifies to their ignorance rather than to the deficiencyof the ideal., ,3. . '


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24 Socialism: The Active Utopiabenevolent despot; the Legislator; the Philosopher; the Scientist_all of them belonged to the family of Supermen who by dint ofmiraculous power. omnipotent technology or abili~y to wrell:chitssecrets from History. were able to unravel and bring to their lessendowed fellows the ideas which, in a sense, were 'not from thisworld'. This answer is still very much with us, deep down in thecommonsense of the twentieth century, manifesting its presence inwhatever has been left of our almost uncritical faith in the abilityof science and the scientists to pave the way to a better and morecongenial future: though, to be sure, it posed in this latter v~rsiona new, but equally vexing and antinomial question of how.sclence,this completely technical-instrumental venture, can possibly tellgood from evil.The second category of answers rests on the emphatic rejectionof the image of man as a passive object of education. Taking eitherthe individual, or the society as a whole. or Reason as a supra-individual entity, as its medium, this category of answers endowsexistence with the capacity to transcend itself without having beenset in motion by an external force; in the womb of a seeminglyossified setting new conditions mature which in fact herald itsradical reconstruction. Thus capitalism breeds its own gravediggers;oppression itself stimulates forces which will eventually bring itdown. Still , i t can hardly do it entirely alone. The birth analogy. tobe complete, requires a midwife; and she duly arrives in the attireof a social scientist, who from the radical standpoint of the op-pressed penetrates the shroud of lies behind which the emancipatingoptions are hidden. or of the New Prince. the community ofdedicated guides who make up for the incurable weaknesses of theindividual by the collective wisdom of revolutionary praxis. In thelast resort, therefore, the same idea, constitutive of the utopianattitude, is still present, whatever the answer: people must be ledinto a better life, either by force, or by being shown the patternthey otherwise would not construct themselves. In either case theyare not trusted with the ability to repeat the Munchhausen solution,the latter being an exclusive property of the intellectual elite.4. The unavoidable weakness of educational efforts is that theymay fail; and the notorious feature of all educators is that they tendto attribute the failure to the obstreperousness or idleness of theirpupils rather than to their own frailities. Inthe case of the utopianthrust into the future the risk of failure is considerable. since the

Utopia and the Modern Mind 25twin powers of commonsense and habit are met only with theshining, but brittle, weapon of ideas. We know already that im -patience is an integral constituent of the utopian attitude; we cantherefore expect that the most likely reaction to the popular Jack ofenthusiasm for utopianists' solicitations will be a vigorous con-demnation of the dumbness and stupor of the multitude. The samepeople whom the utopian programme was bound to make happywill soon be declared responsible for the programme's failure tomaterialise promptly enough.Once again. the image of the multitude as a sluggish. inert mass,wallowing in misery, but refusing to be stood on its own feet. isthe verso of the eIitarian coin and therefore inextricably linked withthe modem cult of reason, At worst the masses were denounced asthe strongholds of the retrograde and obscurantist forces whichheld society back; at best they were pitied as lame creatures, unableto move. unless helped by crutches supplied by the sages. Accordingto de Tocqueville 's testimony. the people-loving philosophers ofthe French Enlightenment 'despised the public almost as heartily asthey despised the Deity'." John Passmore recently amplified thistestimony by collecting an impressive array of statements whichexpose the philosophers' zeal in attributing the sluggishness ofhuman progress to people's inactivity and cowardice. Thus. accord-ing to Diderot, 'the people are the most foolish and the mostwicked of all men'. For d'Alembert, the multitude was 'ignorantand stupefied' and 'incapable of strong and generous actions' .Nothing was left for Condillac but to compare 'the people' to 'aferocious animal '," As to the next period of European intellectualhistory, one is bound to accept Crane Brinton's estimate: 'Eversince the failure of the French Revolution to Jive up to the hopesthey had put in it. many writers, artists, and musicians of greatdistinction and influence bave found the main obstacle to the goodsociety in the bourgeois, the Philistine. the homme moyen sensuel,the Babbitts, the masses' ." The vocabulary has been changed toadjust it to a more populist mood of the late nineteenth century,but the object of contempt and angry accusations remains the sameas before; the culturally retarded masses who refuse to be enlight-ened. The likelihood of a 'bewildered disappointment' with themasses became particularly great when, in Stuart Hughes's words,'the intellectual leaders began to identify themselves with democracyor socialism and sought virtue in the cultural pursuits of the com-mon man'.'! In Marx's mind, to be sure. and to an even greater


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26 Socialism: The Active Utopiaextent in Lenin's, the image of the working class as the fearless andnever erring giant about to pull down the rotte~ str~cture ofbourgeois socie ty coexisted with a hardly flattering pIcture. ofspecific workers and actual labour organisauons as ped~tnan.opportunist. and eager to play the bourgeois game according tobourgeois rules. The second picture was invoked whenever the firstfailed to materialise.The castigation of kosnoie bolshinstvo (Lenin) is a devi~~whl~hmay heal the psychic wound inflicted by an acute cogmuve dIS-sonance; but it will hardly push much further the cause of thedesired social reconstruction. The more practical remedy would beif the advocates of social reconstruction tried to by-pass the obstacle(the expedient which in fact they soon began t~ try) ~y attempti~gto 'short-circuit"! the road to the perfect SOCIety.Since, as EncHobsbawm once described this att itude. the masses will certainlyappreciate l iberation but would hardly lif t a finger to help in bring-ing it about, somebody is bound to do the job for them. Hence theidea of a minority revolution, l imited in its initial and decisive actto a purely polit ical task of capturing the centres of power, and thenemploying the captured assets to redirect the whole process of educa-tion so as to breed a new race of people fit to live in and to sustainthe perfect society.It has escaped my memory who made the observation that thephrase 'minority revolution' contains one.word v.:hichis re~undant,since a majority may do without a revolution. This observation maybe profound and witty. but the ever-widening current in utopianthought from Babeuf through Blanqui to Tkachev, Lavrov andLenin (the close intellectual link between the last three bas recentlybeen convincingly brought to our attention") insisted on the con-cept of a revolution which may be brought about, fought and wonspecifically by a minority. as an alternative to a protracted andprobably futile wait for the conversion of the majority.The word 'minority ', therefore, whether redundant or not, borean important additional significance, conveying a specificphilosophyof social change and a specific way out of the irritating cognitivedissonance with which the educational antinomy left the championsof the better society. It was Blaise Pascal who singled out habit anddivers ion as the two expedients men universally employ to shirklooking their frightening predicament in the face; and it was onlyreasonable to expect that these would be the most l ikely responsesof the common man to the conditions from which the utopians

Utopia and the Modern Mind 27wanted to liberate him. Elaborate sociological theories were de-veloped to show how a social system sustains itself by stretchingover its essentia l patterns a protective net of habit and diversion.surrounding the common man with a multitude of petty barriersand warning signs, as well as by hosts of paltry rewards completewith a morality which hails the virtues of these rewards. In this waysociety is seen as generating a situation in which obedience becomesnormal and in a sense self-fulfilling. while dissent becomes bothaberrant and heroic. Whoever is bent on a drastic reform of thesocietal pattern would therefore be advised not to expect muchfrom spontaneous processes developing within this pattern; if any-thing. they will tend to reproduce the same pattern again and again.Once more the partisans of utopia face the Miinchhausen dilemma;and they single out coercion as the required leverage which mayliftmen from the quagmire of habitual abasement.To be sure, the word coercion stands here, at least in its firstappearance in the argument, for an out-of-the-ordinary agent ableto stall the monotonous self-regeneration of the current societalpattern; in this sense it belongs in one family with Weberian'charisma' or the 'cultural diffusion' of anthropologists. Theirshared feature is their relative 'externali ty' to the exist ing system.and, therefore, their essential inexplicability and unpredictabilityfrom within the cognitive perspective determined by the systemitself. Coercion. before it is defined in phenomenal terms, standsfor a factor potent enough to counterbalance and topple the bul-warks of reality, to break its 'regularity'. As such it may be , andmust be, operated by the few, who act as heralds and vanguard ofthe future. The revolution, as a technical device, is logically deriva-tive; it designates the means of bringing forth a situation in whichthis exertion of power in the name of the reshaping of society willbe possible.But coercion occupies an exceptional place in the aforementionedfamily. in so far as it is seen as a factor constantly present in any'normal' society and continually employed to strengthen and diffusewhatever patterns are regarded as essential for the survival of thecurrent system. At the same time coercion is a factor which. in asense, is 'in'. but not necessarily 'of' the system; it is, so to speak,a detachable part. Or. one might say. it is a tool which can beused as much for the benefit of the system as to its detriment,depending on the intention of those who wield it. This extraordinaryrole allotted to coercion in the modern philosophy of societal change


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28 Socialism: The Active Utopiabas recently been admirably expressed by Barrington Moore Jr. Inhis words. both cultural and social continuityhave to be recreated anew in each generation. To maintain andtransmit a value system. human beings are punched. bulli ed. sentto jail. thrown into concentration camps. cajoled. bribed. madeinto heroes. encouraged to read newspapers, stood up against awall and shot. and sometimes even taught sociology. . . . Thecosts of moderation have been at least as atrocious as those ofrevolution. perhaps a great deal more .... The use of force by theoppressed against their former master has been the object ofnearly universal condemnation. Meanwhile the day-to-day repres-sion of 'nonnaI' society hovers dimly in the background of mosthistory books. HThe point is that when confronted with coercive power human

beings assent to being cajoled and bribed and taught sociology ratherthan being stood up against the wall and shot. It does matter.therefore. who holds the power and for what purpose. Therevolutionary transfer of power may set the society on a new roadand secure the dissemination and sustenance of a new value system.Being an intense dramatisation of the power game. the revolutionmeans a spectacular condensation of its usual costs. This opticalillusion, however. which is the sole basis for the moral objectionslevelled against revolutionaries, will vanish (or so it is said) if onlyone counts the human costs of coercion necessary to keep therevolution off.5. It is only recently that we have begun to realise the extent

to which modern thought is prompted by the cravings for order.To be sure. it has frequently been observed that the literary utopiaswere obsessed wi th painting thei r ideal worlds tidy. neat and regularin the extreme. Their authors. it has been pointed out. were par-t icularly keen on using symbols which. in the public mind, approachmost closely the image of a perfect orderliness. Lewis Mumfordhas noted that in most literary utopias islands are circular. bui ldingsrectangular, streets straight. etc.;" Chad Walsh observed that 'tbefavourite utopian art is architecture. Characterist ically it is massive,functional, gli stening and clean. Cities look as though they were laidout with straight-edge and T-square .... Inthe utopias there isoften a tidying-up of both the natural and human scene, with muchemphasis on spick-and-span .. .. 16 But precisely this obsession of

Utopia and the Modern Mind 29the draftsmen of utopias was more often than not singled out as theparamount evidence of the intrinsic marginali ty of utopian thinking;tbey seemed, indeed. wide of the mark in a world perceived asrelishing the flux of constant change and adventure .But circles and rectangles, particularly in architecture, can be

read as symbols for another motive as well. The concept of archi-tecture can well be conceived as the foremost symbol of the humanmulti-faceted effort to impose man-measured regularity and con-sis tency on inhospitable nature; man's success in this matter , more-over, is proportionate to his success in sneaking nature's secretsand turning tbem to his own advantage. Architecture. therefore. iscoterminous wi th the thoroughly modern. scienti fic att itude; afterall, the unlimited increase of human skill in subduing nature andharnessing it to human needs is what science is all about. The veryproject of science, as it has been gradually advanced in the modernage. starts from an attitude which in the last analysis amounts todefining the human life-world as natural. i .e. as consisting of objectsof ~uman planful activity. and positing the fruition of this activityas SImply a problem of appropriate technical skill. As to the endsof such activity it has been assumed, at least since Francis Bacon'stime, that they are closely related to the substitution of a human-made and human-desired order for the natural one, which obviouslywas not cut to the measure of human needs. Far from being analien body within modern thought, the utopian quest for ordermerely condenses and intensifies the attitude which is riveted intothe practice of modern science; it lays bare what science itself aimsat but would rather not make explicit lest its keenly cultivatedideal of value-neutrality becomes vulnerable. By locating thedifference between the utopian and the scientific attitude in thedomain of order. the critics in fact misinterpreted the actual dis-crepancy; utopias and science diverge in their view as to who may,and who may not, fix the ends of human technical efforts. Utopianswould harness the science-generated instrumental capacity to thechariot of a specific order they deem the best; scientists would bewary of committing themselves to a specific kind of order (if not.they write utopias. as Skinner did). They insist instead on limitingtheir programme to the design and polishing of tools that are meantto introduce more human order into the chaos of nature. And theymaintain that the efficiency of these tools is largely independent ofthe kind of values which may mark off any concrete order fromall other conceivable specimens of the kind.


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30 Socialism: The Active UtopiaThe advent of modernity destroyed the 'immediate', 'transparent'(hence perceived as natural) order of the pre-industrial, mostly ruralsociety. The kind of order buttressed by habit and repetition. fromwhich pre-industrial man drew his emotional security as well as hisillusion of complete mastery over his own life, was no more. It wastherefore apparent that any order which might eventually come toreplace it must be an artificial creation of planners, much as theformer order seemed to have emerged 'naturally' or to have beenordained by a superhuman power. From being a part and parcel ofthe natural world, the human order moved to the region of techne.Whatever the ideal of order upheld by this or that group afflictedwith uncertainty and insecurity, it has been beyond discussion thatthe order would not come unless 'organised' or 'administered'. Inthis respect, as in so many others, utopian thinking has merely beenfaithful to the popular mood of modern times.Whenever blueprints of a future order are drafted, two attitudesare possible. First, one may see the current disruption of orderlylife as a temporary malaise inflicted by an inept or morally corruptadministration of human affairs. One is ready to embrace all thepowerful factors which keep the present system going. consideringthem as an undetachable part of a welcome progress or 'leap for-ward'; but one would organise them in a different way, hoping thatat the end of the road, or just ahead, a new, never tried. but betterorder is waiting. Second. one may perceive the current disorder asa permanent and unavoidable effect of the original deviation froma simpler, but more humane way of life. One would therefore rejectall the trappings of the new system, together with the very notionof progress. expecting nothing but more evil from letting loose thefactors which operate it; not trusting the yet unexplored solutions.one would feel like returning to what can be portrayed as the'natural' organisation of human affairs, and to do it one would

willingly surrender the problematical benefits offered by the existingsystem.It is easy to trace both attitudes in modern utopian thinking.Numerous future-planners. from Saint-Simon through Marx toBellamy, enthusiastically embraced modern industry and technologyas the surest warranty of the impending millennium. Most of themdetested the misuse to which the newly discovered tremendouspowers of man are put when mismanaged. But they did see thedeparture from pre-industrial life as irreversible and final, and.moreover, welcomed it wholeheartedly. On this point there were

Utopia and the Modern Mind 31relatively minor differences between thinkers politically as far apartas Jeremy Bentham and Karl Marx.; the first saw in the modernfactory (which he artlessly viewed as coterminous with prison) aready-made pattern for a perfect social order; the second definedsocia.lismas a modern factory minus capitalists. The tacit agreementwas indeed so broad and unconditional that Marx felt no reserva-tions about naming Saint-Simon, that troubadour of the ascendingcapitalist class, among his predecessors and sources of inspiration-even among the first socialists. This agreement among a largenumber of utopian thinkers reflected a more or less unified common-sense attitude. which quickly developed an intense dislike and sus-picion of humanitarian and aesthetic, Schongeist-like objections totechnological progress."On .the other hand, nostalgic dreams about the lost pre-industrialparadise never stopped for a moment, even if the life-world genera-ted by the emerging and triumphant capitalist market carried littleto lend them even a semblance of realism, or, as it were. to makethem attractive enough to inflame the public imagination. TheirintelJectual impact was in fact much wider than one would thinkwhen scanning the 'surface' message of utopias alone. Even themost ardent preachers of the new industrial world must have drawntheir definition of order, as a safe and predictable situation foundedon the regularity and recurrence of human conduct, from the livingmemory of the past, since it was never demonstrated by the systemcu~entIy in existence. One may legitimately ask whether any blue-print for the future can ever be produced entirely from scratch,without the author's helping himself generously to the stock ofcollective memories and accessible experiences. Hence the fre-quently noted tenuousness of the line dividing 'prospective' from'retrospective' utopias, enthusiasm for progress from a conservativenostalgia. The real dividing line runs between the preachers of

greater complexity and the admirers of simplicity (in the latter caseit is, by definition, always a 'return' to simplicity).Simplicity in the modern context meant invariably a Gemeinschaft-like dimension of humall life. achievable only through dislodgingor weakening the integration-sustaining institutions of the greatersociety. It is assumed that when all important human relations areface-to-face (which is possible only if the web of human dependenciesg~nerated by wor~. communication and power is cut to a communitySIze) all the strain attached to the structural incertitude will beremoved, thanks to the restored 'immediacy' and 'translucence' of


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32 Socialism: The Active Utopiathe individual life-world. The craftsmen faced with the imminentloss of independence will side with Proudhon and hi s syndicalist off-shoots in their praise of the untarnished virtues of a small-scale.self-governing community of individual.producers. Almost the entiremiddle class of the most affluent country in the world will follow, atleast to the polling booths. a sheep farmer who extols the pastoralbeauty and the moral vigour of the countryside. The offspring ofaffluent families in another thriving superindustrial country willlis ten attentively to the message that 'participatory democracypostulates low energy technology' .18 Other offspring of the samefamilies will abandon anxieties and tensions which their parentswould like them to inherit and will try to taste the primitive charmof tribal life.To be sure. the 'come-back' rationale of the 'great simplification'is an optical illusion. It is certainly not the rural community ofsweating Russian peasants, however idealised, to which the dreamersof simplification would like to 'return'; nor the cruel, inhospitableworld of primitive hunters and gatherers. It is Rabelais's Thelemarather than any other ready-made pattern which provides todaythe source of inspiration. As in the upper-middle-class 'idolum ofthe Country House' ,19 the crux of the matter is now passive enjoy-ment rather than hard work. It is true tbat the simplifiers renouncepossession along with hard work; but they merely substitute ac-cumulation of events for the accumulation of things, while retainingthe hedonistic ideal of gourmandism and sensual thrill as thesupreme canon of judgement. Perhaps the only factor limiting thelove of enjoyment is the hatred of the puritan achievement.One is tempted to associate utopias of simplification with themiddle classes of modern society- those who neither rose so highas to treat the powerful modern state as a convenient tool of self-enhancement, nor were cast so low as to count on publicly ad -ministered justice as their only hope. If they bad risen they wouldprobably not have indulged in utopian dreams; if they had fallenthey would probably have opted for as much complexity as mighthave been necessary to guarantee their survival. Not every law paysheed to the need of the weaker; but the lack of law certainly makesthe strong even stronger. It is the weakest and the wretched of theearth who are most likely to dream of a power strong anddetermined enougb to intervene on their bebalf in a struggle inwhich the 'natural' deal left them with a hopeless hand.We have seen that in its notorious yearning for order. as in its

Utopia and the Modern Mind 33other traits, utopian thinking is not alien to the modem world. Itshares its attitude with science, this law-giver and chief referee ofthe modern intellectual game; though it does not recognise thedivision between 'pure' and 'practical' reason which science wouldso meticulously observe. Here at last we come across one respectin which the utopian attitude obviously takes issue with science.It is , to be sure, a ramified issue, with many dimensions whichcan be and frequently are discussed separately, but all these con-tentious points can be traced back to one central disagreement:utopian thinking defies science's reduction of man, in the process ofcognition. to a purely epistemological and contemplative entity. Itdefies this reduction by legitimising the status of 'the possible' invalid knowledge.The nearest the scientific mentality comes to this category is inits concern with 'the probable'. But these two categories. sometimesunjustly confused in everyday discourse, enjoy very different andhardly reconcilable existential modalities. The judgement whichrefers to the probability of an event conveys no information aboutthe occurrence of the event, but precisely about the probability ofthe occurrence. The statement stands or falls by the verification ofprobability, not by the materialisation or non-materialisation of theevent in question at a specific time or a specific place; if this werenot the case, science would lack means to deal with the phenomenonof probability, since it is able to deal only with facta. not with[uturas? Probability belongs to the realm of facta, to the realm ofevents which have already taken place. which can be relished orregretted, but cannot be changed; events in relation to which menhave neither will nor liberty of action, neither power nor influence.Precisely because of this quality of facta, which puts men in aposition of passive contemplation. they are 'knowable' in thescientific way. And so is probability; it belongs to facta, it 'hasalready been done', it exists in a tangible way, here and now,within the reality open to our scrutiny and subject to verification.Any statement about probability refers to the data we alreadypossess and can be verified or denied with reference to them; itcontains information about the present state of our knowledge.The position is entirely different in the case of possibility, as Ipropose to define it. I am aware that the definition which followsis not the only one which can b e conceived. Indeed, time and againone can find statements to the effect that probability is a measureof possibility; that it belongs to one and the same class of concepts.B


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34 Socialism: The Active UtopiaAccording to this usage we are forced to settle for possibility when-ever we are not able to express it mathematically (to measure it)and thereby portray it as probability. Or science may take theprobability of an event as only a 'possibility' whenever it does notknow of any law. or does not possess any previous knowledge,which may contradict i ts occurrence. In the f irst case. possibility isnothing but a weaker version of probability; in the second, it is apurely negative notion. a notion 'not-yet-rejected'. Because of thisusage of the term. our appropriating it for another concept mayengender some confusion. The only justification for still insistingon it is our conviction that depriving 'possibility' of its separatemodality has been an unfortunate by-product of the positivisticdominance over modern sel f-consciousness. It has been. indeed. oneof the many steps toward the final, yet spurious reconcilation be -tween the individual and the reali ty which controls him; or towardacceptance. as natural , of what is merely historical.Now the category of tbe possible, which could not be absorbedby science (in Emile Meyerson's words, 'reason has only one meansof accounting for what does not come from itself, and that is toreduce it to nothingness'"), stands for an event. not for the prob-abi lity of i ts occurrence. It signifies an event which has not yethappened, and whose future occurrence cannot in principle beestablished on the basis of data about facta; not because theaccessible knowledge is insufficient. but because the very namingof the possibility. as well as the ensuing human activity, are amongthe decisive factors which will eventually determine whether thepossibility ever materialises. As Leszek Kolakowski has put itsuccinctly. the existence of the utopia as utopia is the undeniablecondition for the possibility that the utopia may cease to beutopia. Possibility in this sense is a category which applies solelyto the human world, namely the world of events on which informedhuman volit ion may exercise a determining influence.The important distinction between objects which we approach asnatural. and that part of human existence which resists such anapproach. is the distinction between 'being'. as an attribute ascrib-able to Nature, and 'becoming', as a uniquely human way of being-in-the-world. It belongs to the essence of human existence that it isever unfinished and inconclusive, open toward the future, lived.evaluated and revised under the auspices of events which exist sofar only ideally, as an end of human effort, as a desirable state.as an ideal pattern. as a nostalgia. a plan. a dream, a threat, a hope.

Utopia and the Modern Mind 35or a danger. All these events belong to the class of possibilities.which are not present in daily reality in any other way but ideally.and therefore come into existence the moment they reach the levelof consciousness, are named and made into a subject of ioterhumancommunication. The unique significance of this class consis ts in thefact tbat it, and it alone" creates a chance for new forms to enterhuman reality, and for the human reali ty it sel f to unfold dynamicallyits inner potentialities. The life-world in which human me activitytakes place embraces the class of possibil ities. Without them i t wouldcertainly be incomplete as a human world; in fact, it would not bea human world any more. It is only reasonable to postulate thatthis life-world, complete with the class of possibilities, should betaken as the appropriate frame of reference in which to inscribeanalyt ical ly, to classify and understand human life activity.If, however, we abide by this postulate, a number of important

revisions of notions whose meaning has so far been determinedsolely by their intra-scientific usage will become imperative. Themost obvious revision will be that of the concept of rationality,somewhat inhumanly reduced to what can be measured, exactly andhie et nunc, by reference to facta alone, instead of looking up tothe genuinely human level of historical possibility. Utopia, whichspells out the range of possibilities, draws a horizon for the currenthuman reality, says Bloch. The scientific attitude, which wouldrestrict the field of permitted knowledge to that part of the humanworld which ha s already been traversed and left behind. conveysa distorted, since impoverished, picture of the actual field in whichhuman perception, ratiocination and decision-making take place.Men see their situation in terms of its distance from the horizonwhich exists only as a possibility; and our analysis of the degreeof rationality in their behaviour will not fully recognise the roleplayed by reason unless we refer the concept of rationality to thecontinual effort to diminish the gap which divides the reality athand from another, possible reality, still eluding the grasp ofinstrumentally oriented science. This approach, apparent ly defyingthe most essential canons of science. is more akin to the mode ofhuman existence, which is intr insically criti cal, continuously 'tran-scending without transcendence' (Bloch); and 'by placing i tself on anormative standpoint, distantiates itself from the actual situationand views the existing achievement as relative'." Utopia in par-ticular, and the category of possibility in genera], seem to reflectcorrectly this description of the human modality. As Theodore


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36 Socialism: The Active UtopiaAdorno put it, society can become 'problematic' (i.e. an object ofintellectual and practical criticism), only if people can conceive ofone which is different from it.28If we only agree on this meaning of the possible we shan seethe number of proclaimed utopias and the intensity of popular com-mitment to them not as a sign of growing irrationalism and a

departure from the rule of reason, but as a measure of the vitalityand creative vigour of the epoch. It is the obverse situation, asMartin Plattel recently remarked - the situation of acute shortageof utopias and widespread disenchantment with the utopias trustedthe other day - which paves the way to the ascendency of irrational-ism and obscurantism. The lack of utopia creates a void. an opaque,bottomless abyss, in place of a smooth extension of the present.It is the dread of this intellectually unfathomable void that leadspeople to escape into the mystique of irrationalism. It is in a realitylacking any horizon that the would-be Lenins of the West 'seethemselves reduced to leaders of small cults or, worse yet. trans-formed into parliamentarians or academicians'."This somewhat lengthy digression seemed necessary to explainwhy I regard the analytical framework of utopia as particularlygermane to the sociological analysis of modern socialism. Socialismhas been, and to some extent still is, the utopia of the modemepoch. It has been, to quote Tom Bottornore, the counter-cultureof capitalist society, if by counter-culture one means the fulcrumon which the emancipatory criticism-through-relativisation of thecurrent reality rests. It should be clear by now that to classifysocialism as a utopia does not belittle its immense historical signifi-cance. On the contrary. I hope to show in the following chaptersthat whatever inspiring power socialism can justly boast is drawnfrom its utopian status. Socialism shares with all other utopiasthe unpleasant quality of retaining its fertility only in so far as itresides in the realm of the possible. The moment it is proclaimedas accomplished. as empirical reality. it loses its creative power;far from inflaming human imagination, it puts on the agenda inturn an acute demand for a new horizon. distant enough to tran-scend and relativise its own limitations. By being perceived asrealised, says Richard Gerber. an ideal ceases to be ideal." Thetwo centuries of modern socialism's history extend from its majesticadvent in the attire of utopia to the incapacitation arising from itsalleged realisation.The one remaining. and probably most contentious, question is

Utopia and the Modern Mind 37how, and to what extent, a study which takes the category of utopia,or the 'possible'. for its analytical framework, can be regarded associological. The obvious way of approaching the phenomenon ofutopia sociologically is to treat it as an 'object', as an objectifiedartefact of human thinking. perhaps more aberrant than otherspecimens of the kind. but still rightfully a member of the classwhich sociology knows well how to investigate, by relating it tothe 'social background', statistically assessing its distribution. andformulating a number of hypotheses as to its possible influence onhuman behaviour. This is not, however, the way in which I proposeto approach the problem. I intend to investigate the socialist utopiaas an alternative social realit , which differs from the historicallyaccomp IS one its s ecitic existential modalit : that ofe9SSI 1 ty. am In u I agreement Wit a rt Nisbet when hesays that 'at first sight, utopianism and genuine social science mayseem to be incompatible. But they are not. Utopianism is com-patible with everything but determinism, and it can as easily bethe over-all context of social science as can any other creativevision'."


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3T he H isto ric al L oc atio n o f S oc ia lismModernity is, admittedly, a multi-faceted phenomenon whichvaliantly resists clear-cut definitions. It has been widely acceptedthat the phenomenon is intimately related to the 'technologicalrevolution', to the drastic thickening of the artificial intermediarysphere stretching between Man and Nature, often articulated as adramatic strengthening of the human ascendancy over Nature. Atthe same time, however. it is agreed that the phenomenon is notreducible to the technological explosion. Modernity is also a socialand psychological phenomenon; its advent means momentouschanges in the social system as well as in the set of conditions inwhich human action takes place. One can only surmise that how-ever the advent of modernity affects the dimensions and the contentof yearnings and uto ias, the Impact IS mediated b these latterp enomena more than y anyl ng else. As a background and asource of lOS Iration for human ideals, mooernitymeans, above all,a rna ern networ a uman relations.In what IS perhaps the best recent example of the Weberianideal-type method in action, Reinhard Bendix went a long waytoward elucidating major features of this network. Two processes.Bendix suggests, contributed more than anything else to the alsnape whIch modern societ has assumed: the first was .tl!.~~gpre-eminence 0 1m ersonalism' as the aramount principle~la-l10g e way Inwhich in IVl ua s were inioned into the networka SOCIalyen ro es an ehavioural patterns; the second-wasthe advent of ( leblscitarianism', as- simultaneousl - the authority'swor in rule and the keynote 0 ItSIe itimation.' - .'Impersooalism' comes to re ace the aternalistic relationshipbetween patron and client. To use arsoruan anguage, the lattermay be described as subject to the patterns of universalism and

The Historical Location of Socialism 39specificity. in contradistinction to the particularism and diffusenessof the former. The non-modern patterns of human relations arethoroughly particularised and widely different from one pair ofindividuals to another; they are likewise diffuse. tending to embracethe totality of life-processes in which both individuals are entangled.Both attributes disappear with the advent of modernity, to bereplaced by their opposites. Modernity begins. says Bendix, withthe codification of rights and duties of a 'citizen', an individual quahomo politicus, i.e, as a member of the 'polis', the politicallyorganised society. On the other hand. this 'individual' enters tbesociety, or is of any interest to society, only in respect of thosetraits which have undergone this process of 'codification', have beenstandardised and subjected to a set of uniform rules. The individual,as defined and moulded by the modern network, is thereby chargedwith an irreducible paradox; his 'individuality' has been achievedat the expense of all and any of his idiosyncratic. purely personaland genuinely unique predicates, which constitute him as a separate,irreplaceable and unrepeatable being. This peculiar individuality isanonymous and faceless, pared to the bones of pure universality,swept clean of anything idiomatic and distinctive, of any personalfaculty which may thwart his complete mapping into another'individual' . This is not to say, to be sure, that the human denizensof the modern age are really like this; but it does mean that theyare admitted into modernity in this capacity only. Modern societyhas, admittedly, no use for unstandardised human traits; these,classified as the realm of the subjective, are declared sociallyirrelevant in so far as they do not interfere with the codified domain.At the same time they delimit the sphere of individual freedom; thenon-interference of society is ultimately founded on its program-matic indifference to anything which eludes the supra-individualordering, or has been deliberately exempted from it.The principle of impersonalism not only delimits the socialessence of the individual; it is operative in generating a life-spacecongenial to and consonant with such delimited individuals. Therealm enveloping the social existence of the individual likewise con-sists of averaged. impersonal. faceless and hence quantifiableindividuals. It can be handled effectively, assessed and evaluated.in purely numerical terms; thanks to the prior qualitative reductionof its inhabitants, it is indeed quantifiable and therefore amenable tomanagement ruled by the economics of rationality. Again, this doesnot mean that the human life-process in the modern milieu boils


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40 Socialism: The Active Utopiadown to a series of rational calculations and choices; but it doesmean tbat only tbis series is recognised as socially relevant, andthereby socially protected and attended to. The residue, boweverimmense and subjectively important it may be, is left in what, fromthe social perspective, may as well remain forever the penumbraof 'the private'. Vast areas of human life- indeed, its most intimate.passionately lived and emotion-saturated areas - have been pro-claimed 'off limits' for the sake of tbe regularity, and thereforecertainty and predictability, of tbe societally processed nucleus,A rather important remark is in order here. At least since thefamous distinction made by Sir Henry Maine in tbe nineteenthcentury, tbe dichotomy of impersonalism-particularism tends to beanalysed in 'either-or' terms, Bendix's study being no exception.This approacb is entirely warranted in so far as we are interestedsolely in the texture of the social structure, the web of interhumandependencies. which open, limit, an d condition the individual'saccess to socially valued goods. But the social structure in this sensedoes not pre-empt the totality of the individual life-world. Iwonderwhether it would not be better to speak of a 'topping' of thetraditional life-world, in modern times. with an impersonal structureof the greater society. rather than of the substitution of this structurefor the old. particularised one. A very large part of the life-worldstill remains heavily 'particularised', densely packed with face-to-face, multi-faceted relations and apparently open to meaning-negotiating initiatives; it is still 'free' in the latter sense. its freedomhaving been given a new, deeper dimension and been made par-ticularly conspicuous by contrast witb the new domain of thethoroughly standardised. prefigured relations. The 'freedom' whichprevails in this part of the life-world should be understood only inthese comparative terms. Otherwise it becomes an illusion. sincethe sector of the life-world now under discussion. having beenabandoned by the 'impersonal' control of the greater society. is stillkept under tight control by the community (defined as the groupable to hold its members under a face-to-face. immediate, andpersonal control). The activity of meaning-negotiating never takesoff from a zero-point; in each case the cards have already beendistributed and the hands are not even, while the rules of the gameitself are hardly open to negotiation by the current players. Thelast decade showed wbat the consequences of this distorted perspec-tive may be; the so-called 'youth revolt' tried in fact to shake offtbe constraints imposed on the community level, while being can-

The Historical Location o f Socialism 41vinced that it fought the 'impersonal society'. Its success in sub-duing the power of community control was naturally proportionateto the widening of the sphere of impersonal regulation and inter-ference (through new laws which introduced the 'greater society'into areas where it bad traditionally been indifferent).Plebiscitarianism - the second a Bendix's two arameters ofrna ermty - COnsIstsill the mc usion of the masses m the politicalprocess. 'I'ht; now beCOme'citizens' of the state instead of subjectsof a prince. heir collective will now becomes the seat of sovereigntyand its supreme legitimation. Quantity is substituted for quality,numerical power for wisdom, interests for inalienable rights. ac-complishment for properties. The substitution, to be sure. is per-ceived only too often as an improvement on the inductive definitionsof old and immutable values. rather than as one value taking theplace of another. Thus quantity is considered the best measure ofquality, the number of supporters a true index of the wisdom of adecision, pursuit of interest the least alienable of human rights,From the vantage-point of their sociological content, however. thechange in values is enormous and radical. The paramount noveltyis the sheer notion of the masses as the 'flesh' of the body politic.The passage from the patrimonial ruler to the rule of the masses isnot to be seen merely as a widening of the ruling group. as a substi-tution of the many for tbe few. The masses turned citizens do nottake over the former rulers' faculty of entering the field of politicsas socially identifiable persons. Only when they have undergoneand completed the process of impersonalisation can the subjects ofa patrimonial ruler re-emerge as the masses looming large in themodern idiom of authority. The masses are not a collection ofspecific, qualitatively distinct persons, complete with their multi-faceted qualities, needs, and interests. They are describable andintelligible in quantitative terms only, which is possible only on theassumption of their complete comparability and exchangeability intheir role of citizens. It is thanks to this reduction. accomplishedby the modern notion of citizenship. that public opinion can boildown to the computation of statistical distributions and democracycan be measured by a crudely arithmetical yardstick of numericalmajority. The citizens are equal in so far as they are indistinguish-able; whatever makes them different from each other is simply leftoutside the realm of politics and the interests of th e body politic.So we see that. within the modern idiom. impersonalism andplebiscitarianism are not just parallel processes which happen toB


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42 Socialism: The Active Utopiaoccur simultaneously; they complement, validate and support eachother and can be seen as two sides of the same coin. The impersonalequality of individuals as citizens can gen~rate, or be ~u~re~ w~th.only a plebiscitarian type of body politic; and plebiscitarianismcannot assure, or account for, any but an impersonal type ofequality, i.e. equality contained in the citizen role. . . . .However, this is not the end of the story. PleblSCltanamsm do~not only. disregard the differentiation. of citizens beyo~d the sphereof citizenship proper. It also works on the assumptIo~ . that n~!l'political inequality does not affect the role of tbe Citizen; thatcitizens somehow shake off their non-political bonds at the thresholdof the body politic. Having theoretically separated the sector ~fcitizenship from the totality of the individual's status, the pl~bl-scitarian legitimation conceives its conceptual feat as an operationon social reality; it is. indeed, founded on the belief that an in-dividual can enjoy his equal political rights while remaining unequalin spheres other than the political.It is true that the roots of in uality, in the modern societywhlc S gra ua y emerged from t e Sti!!!LYlctones an.dtemporary setbacks of the French Revolution. we~e not politic~.Tliey were dug deep into the network of econOInlCdependenclCsand the web of communication which constituted the CiVi l ~ciety ofthe era. But it is true as well that with these bases of self-perpetua-ting inequality left intact. the political equality of plebiscitarianismmust have remained a purely fonnallegal category. Itwas preciselyin this form that the ideal of equality had been adopted by thedominant. liberal culture of the capitalist brand of th e modemsociety. And it was recisel in this form tbat the ideal of urelypolitical equality had been challenged an re]ec Y It s SOCialistcounter-culture. The emphatic refusal to accept the notj~~..?fi6;uality as limited to the political sphere. alone, the insiste.n~..ont e im ortance of the numerous links With other s heres, w1!i~hren er political equality void if.other m~ualities_ are lef~_i!1tact,andthe determined desire to extend the i eal of equality beyo~ thedomain of homo oliticus were to remain the only cultural postu-tes shared by all shades of the socialist counter-ell ture. . .III this sense, the socialist counter-culture was a continuation~f the liberal-ca italist culture as well as its r .ec . n, Already in90, Bebel publicly ac nowledged socialism's indebtness: no onehad done more than the liberals to awaken the yearning for equalityamong the people. The Jiberal notion of political democracy W,!l.S

. .

The Historical Location of Socialism 43


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44 Socialism: The Active Utopiaof the liberal interpretation. This boundary was drawn by the ideathat masters are born, as Morelly noted already in 1755, not of theusurpation of power, but of resources which precede all politicsand whose usurpation alone can make men power-hungry. Thelegislators, Morelly was eager to make clear, support the mastersrather than creating them; they do it by allowing for the usurpationof resources and defending the ensuing situation. The major disastertook place at the moment when the resources, which should belongin common to all humanity, had been usurped; the disaster consistedin breaking the primary link of sociability. Thus destruction ofcommunity and inequality became one; and the rebirth of corn-munity and the establishment of more than just political equalitybecome one again.It was left to Gracchus Babeuf to cross the t's and dot the i's,In the history of socialism the role of Babeuf is unique and perhapsdecisive. It was he who finally brought together and blended twotraditions which had previously developed independently of eachother: the tradition of socialism as an abstract moral principle, asa verdict of reason. the heritage of Plato, Morus and Campanella,and the plebeian tradition of revolt against injustice, reaching backinto antiquity to the brothers from whom Babeuf borrowed hisassumed first name. In a sense, the role of Babeuf for socialismmay be compared to the role of Galileo for science; it was Galileowho married the philosophers' rationalist tradition of logical truthwith the plebeian tradition of craftsmen's empiricism and techne.Babeuf articulated, as a separate and consistent system of ideas,the utopia of the sansculottes which strove, in the course of theFrench Revolution, to cut the umbilical cord tying it to bourgeoisindividualist egalitarianism. While the inchoate capitalist culturesought in political equality a bulwark to protect an unqualified andunchecked individualism. the sansculottes looked toward the stateas an active power to be used for curbing and controlling theindividual in the name of the community. Both currents could beaccommodated in one river-bed until the river passed the point ofthe equality of political rights. Beyond this point, however, abifurcation was inevitable.In Babeuf's epoch-making statement in the Manifesto of theEquals (1796)the realisation of this inevitability was for the first timemade explicit. The French Revolution was only a prelude to anotherrevolution. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizenwas a step in the right direction, but by no means the end of the

. The Historical Location o f Socialism 45process; in fact, merely its beginning. The equality which theDeclaration proclaimed 'we must have in our midst, under the roofof our houses'. How to bring it there? By placing on the agenda anew revolutionary goal, on which the Declaration is mute, andwhich, in fact, flies in the face of the interpretation of equalitywhich the Declaration took for granted: the goal of doing awaywith the terrible contrasts between rich and poor, masters andservants. Unless this goal is attained. equality will remain nothingbut a fine and sterile fiction of the law.Babeuf would elaborate further on these ideas a year later,when defending himself during the Vendome trial. It was therethat the concept of 'the welfare of men' was first brought to thefore. as Babeuf himself was apt to stress, as 'a new idea in Europe'.What followed was already a gigantic step beyond even the mostgenerous promises of bourgeois equality: the existence of anunfortunate or a poor roan in tbe state is not to be endured. 'Theunfortunate are the powers of the earth; they have the right tospeak as masters to the governments that neglect them.' Thecrucial point is that a state which, in the name of inalienable ri~hts.refuses to intervene in the distribution of wealth and property, IS bytbe same token a state which neglects the poor. What the poorneed is a state determined to trespass on the ground which theliberal utopia would gladly leave to the discretion of the individual;in other words, a state which is prepared to reach beyond homopoliticus. Babeuf, indeed, epitomised practically the whole contentof the ensuing century of socialist propaganda. 'It is necessary tobind together everyone's lot; to render the lot of each member ofthe association independent of chance, and of happy or unfavourablecircumstance; to assure to every man and to his posterity, nomatter how numerous it may be, as much as they need, but nomore than they need.' The only means that can possibly lead tosuch a situation is a common administration: the political stateruled by the demos. What Babeuf wished to get rid of was preciselythe loneliness of the isolated individual. which the bourgeois utopiaeulogised and sacralised. Instead of guarding their dubious 'right tofight each other on equal terms', the state should take care of thepersonal and communal well-being of all individuals, so as toliberate them once and for all from the agonising uncertainty andfear of the future which competition inevitably brings about. Onlysuch a state 'will put an end to the gnawing worm of perpetualinquietude, whether throughout society as a whole, or privately


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46 Socialism: The Active Utopiawithin each of us, about what tomorrow will bring. or at least whatnext year will bring, for our old age, for our children and for theirchildren'. Babeuf's was the call for a welfare state, made onbehalf of these who i

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