From Dangerous Utopia to Endangered Utopia

The current moment is not a golden age of utopian fiction.Few writers are publishing literary utopias that imagine new and better worlds, and the cultural landscape is filled with dystopian imaginaries of horrific futures.This chapter is concerned with the challenges of articulating utopias in the con temporary moment.What are the forces that prevent the construction of sustained visions of liberated socie ties?Why is it so hard to write utopias and so easy to write dystopias?To address these questions, this chapter proposes two alternative explanations.The first explanation is that anti-utopianism has won the argument against utopianism.A range of thinkers and writers, from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the nineteenth century to Cold War liberals and dystopian writers in the twentieth century, have declared that utopia is a dangerous phenomenon.They have sought to undermine the utopian impulse by arguing that any attempt to imagine a new and better world produces adverse consequences.Simply put, while utopians may desire a better world, they ultimately encourage the formation of a worse one.In the con temporary moment, it appears that the anti-utopians have succeeded; they have persuaded writers that the literary utopia is a hopeless endeavor.However, as I argue in this chapter, it is far from clear whether anti-utopianism provides an adequate explanation for the paucity of utopias, not least because anti-utopianism itself has declined in recent years.