How the utopian tradition offers answers to today’s environmental crises<br /><br />In the face of Earth’s environmental breakdown, it is clear that technological innovation alone won’t save our planet. A more radical approach is required, one that involves profound changes in individual and collective behavior. Utopianism for a Dying Planet examines the ways the expansive history of utopian thought, from its origins in ancient Sparta and ideas of the Golden Age through to today's thinkers, can offer moral and imaginative guidance in the face of catastrophe. The utopian tradition, which has been critical of conspicuous consumption and luxurious indulgence, might light a path to a society that emphasizes equality, sociability, and sustainability.<br /><br />Gregory Claeys unfolds his argument through a wide-ranging consideration of utopian literature, social theory, and intentional communities. He defends a realist definition of utopia, focusing on ideas of sociability and belonging as central to utopian narratives. He surveys the development of these themes during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries before examining twentieth- and twenty-first-century debates about alternatives to consumerism. Claeys contends that the current global warming limit of 1.5C (2.7F) will result in cataclysm if there is no further reduction in the cap. In response, he offers a radical Green New Deal program, which combines ideas from the theory of sociability with proposals to withdraw from fossil fuels and cease reliance on unsustainable commodities.<br /><br />An urgent and comprehensive search for antidotes to our planet’s destruction, Utopianism for a Dying Planet asks for a revival of utopian ideas, not as an escape from reality, but as a powerful means of changing it.
Author(s): Gregory Claeys
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 607
City: Princeton
Cover
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Part I: Towards a Theory of Utopian Sociability
1. Redefining Utopianism for a Post-consumer society
The History of Utopianism
The Historiography of Utopianism
Defining Utopianism: Some Components
Utopia as Literary Text
Utopia as Religion
Utopia as Mental State
Utopia as Progress
Utopia as Pleasure
Two Further Problems
Luxury, Consumerism, and Sustainability
Enhanced Sociability and Belongingness
Degrees of Association
Family
Friendship
Groups
The Sociology of Community
Utopia, the City, and Belongingness
Utopianism Restated
2. The Mythical Background: Remembering Original Equality
The Golden Age
Sparta
The Christian Paradise
Utopia and Millenarianism
The Origins of Secular Millenarianism: Thomas Müntzer, Revolution, and Republicanism
3. Theories of Realised Utopianism
Michel Foucault and Heterotopia
Arnold van Gennep, Victor Turner, and Liminality
Ernst Bloch and the Concrete Utopia
Part II: Utopian Sociability in Fiction and Practice
4. The Varieties of Utopian Practice
Festivals as Utopian Spaces
Pilgrimage as a Utopian Activity
Intentional Communities
Christian Intentional Communities
Secular Intentional Communities
Twentieth-Century
Communitarianism
On the Possibility of Everyday Utopia
5. Luxury, Sociability, and Progress in Literary Projections of Utopia: From Thomas More to the Eighteenth Century
Thomas More
Utopian Fiction after More
The Eighteenth Century
Luxury, Simplicity, and Utopian Satire
The Transformation Problem
6. The Triumph of Unsocial Sociability? Luxury in the Eighteenth Century
Regulating Luxury: Sumptuary Laws
Mandeville’s
Paradox
Rousseau and Utopia
After
Rousseau
A Consuming Passion: Novelty and the Desire for Things
The Progress of Novelty
The Fate of Imitation
Part III: Luxury and Sociability in Later Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century Utopianism
7. The Later Eighteenth Century and the French Revolution
Spartans, Neo-Harringtonians, and Utopian Republicans
The Utopian Turn towards the Future
The French Revolution
8. Simplicity and Sociability in Nineteenth-Century Utopianism
Early Nineteenth-Century Literary Utopianism
Utopian Social Theory
Karl Marx
John Stuart Mill and the Stationary State
Anarchism and Luxury
Luxury and Simplicity in Later Nineteenth-Century Literary Utopianism, 1880–1917
Edward Bellamy and the Shift to Public Luxury
William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890): Beauty and Creativity
H. G. Wells
Summary of the Historical Argument concerning Utopia and Luxury to the 1930s
Part IV: Modern Consumerism and its Opponents
9. Twentieth-Century Consumerism and the Utopian Response
Explaining Waste: Veblen and Conspicuous Consumption
Modern Consumerism Defined
Branding
The Ideology of Choice
Things Take Over
Narcissism as the Consumerist Personality Type
Consumerism and Identity: Summarising the Pros and Cons
Counter-ideals: The Soviet Response to Consumerism
Eastern Europe
A Note on China
Twentieth-Century Literary Utopianism: Green Shoots
Aldous Huxley
Ernest Callenbach
10. Counterculture and Consumerism: The 1960s
Prelude
The Counterculture: A New Model of Sociability
Origins
The 1960s
Legacies and Relevance
11. Life after Consumerism: Utopianism in the Age of Sufficiency
The Spectre of Extinction
Compensatory Sociability in the Twenty-First Century: Some Hindrances
Neither Sybaris nor Sparta: Envisioning a Post-consumerist Society
No More Billionaires: The Rationale for Equality
I Am Not Your Servant
The Great Change: The Sustainability Paradigm
Voluntary Simplicity
Political
Implications
The Green New Deal
A Radical Green New Deal
1. Energy
2. Reforestation, Water Management, and Species Protection
3. Food
4. Avoiding Waste and Restraining Demand and Consumption
5. Population Restraint
6. Work
7. Public Service
8. Wealth and Inequality
9. Urban Renewal
The Neighbourhood Model
Urban Sociability: Towards Neo-Fourierism
What You Can Do
Pitfalls and Paradoxes
Conclusion: The Great
Change: Creating Enhanced Simplicity
Afterword: Covid-19 and Sociability
Bibliography
Index
