The critics of utopian thinking are legion. Attempts to imagine a radically better world are often dismissed as irrelevant or as dangerous. The argument that utopianism is perilous was especially prevalent during the Cold War. Thinkers such as Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper maintained that a traceable line ran from utopian dreaming to the concentration camp and the Gulag. Nazism and Soviet communism were regarded as expressions of a totalitarian logic inherent to utopian desire: the creation of new societies required violence and repression. Utopianism, the critics charged, had to be excised from the political imagination.
But this caricature failed to capture the richness and variety of the utopian tradition, a complexity which is the subject of Douglas Mao’s Inventions of Nemesis (2020). Attentive to both the promises and the pitfalls of utopian thinking, his argument is that utopian thought has always focused on achieving justice, defined broadly as “a condition of right arrangement” or “a condition in which each receives what’s due to them”. It is motivated by fierce indignation (or nemesis) at the wrongful ordering of things, at manifest injustice. From Plato to the present, the insistent search for the just society, rather than for human perfection or happiness, has shaped utopian ambition.
Content from our partners
