Oscar Wilde said that any map that doesn’t have utopia on it is not worth looking at.1 There are few quotes I’ve cited as often or with as much pleasure as this one. Yet, there is something in the sweeping nature of the claim that has always left me unsatisfied. In examining utopian thinking, I will also try to distinguish what is valid and useful in Wilde’s claim from what is not.
Before starting on our meta-journey to utopia, however, there are a few ambiguities in the meaning of “utopia” that need to be clarified. The term comes from Thomas More’s famous work, Utopia, where it is used to mean both an ideal society and also one that doesn’t exist anywhere. Later, utopia also came to be used to refer to a society that did not exist because it could not exist; it depicted an impossible dream. An ideal as yet unrealizable, or unrealizable because impossible? This ambiguity in the term’s meaning has teased but no doubt also stimulated writers on the subject from More’s day (early sixteenth century) to our own, and also accounts for the delight or dismay with which different people have reacted to the charge of being a utopian.
In most discussions of this subject,
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Furthermore, wishing for a better future, speculating what this might consist of, is not always and everywhere progressive or even political. Capitalism, after all, has proven very effective in co-opting free-floating utopian impulses. Fashion, for example, is but one example of how our desires for happiness, beauty, and community are cynically manipulated and turned into a means for enriching the few. Lotteries, rock concerts, and mass spectator sports are others. Given forms that are sufficiently distant from the main battlegrounds of the class struggle, even the most radical impulses can be rendered safe for the status