Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age

241 Pages·2005·0.82 MB·English

by  Russell Jacoby

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 
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Also by Russell Jacoby
Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology
from Adler to Laing
Dialectic of Defeat: Contours of Western Marxism
The Repression of Psychoanalysis: Otto Fenichel and
the Political Freudians
The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age
of Academe
The Bell Curve Debate: History, Documents, Opinions
(co-editor)
Dogmatic Wisdom: How the Culture Wars Divert
Education and Distract America
The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in the Age
of Apathy
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 
Utopian Thought
for an Anti-Utopian Age
Russell Jacoby
  
 
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Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 
New York Chichester, West Sussex
Copyright © Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jacoby, Russell.
Picture imperfect : Utopian thought for an anti-utopian age / Russell Jacoby.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN –––(cloth : alk. paper)
. Utopias. . Dystopias. . Utopias—Religious aspects. I. Title.
HX.J 
' .—dc 
Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent
and durable acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States ofAmerica
c 
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For Cristina
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Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xix
. An Anarchic Breeze 
. On Anti-Utopianism: More or Less 
. To Shake the World off Its Hinges 
.A Longing That Cannot Be Uttered 
Epilogue 
Notes 
Index 
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Preface
“        
to build castles in the sky,” wrote Lewis Mumford in his 
Story of Utopias. Four decades later he wondered how, in the
wake of World War I, he could have expressed such upbeat sen-
timents. “I was still living in the hopeful spirit of an earlier age,”
Mumford explained. He had been writing under the “impetus of
the great nineteenth century, with its fund of buoyant idealism
and robust social enterprise.”1
Today only the historically obtuse can believe that to build
castles in the sky is urgent. Buoyant idealism has long disap-
peared. In an age of permanent emergencies, more than ever we
have become narrow utilitarians dedicated to fixing, not rein-
venting, the here and now. Yet the case can be made for writing
against the grain of history, for writing under the impetus not of
this but of a different period. In an era of intellectual triage, I at-
tend the utopian esprit of another day.
Yet no one can jump over his or her historical shadow. Any
study of the utopian spirit must engage its current status. Today
most observers judge utopians or their sympathizers as fool-
hardy dreamers at best and murderous totalitarians at worst.
The latter, not the former, charge concerns me. It relies on a
reading of the historical record—indeed on a reading of the
great “anti-utopian” novels such as —that is profoundly