Monday 14 May 2012

Berlin and Utopianism

All,

To get things started, I was interested in this statement from Berlin's 'The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West' (from 1978, collected in The Crooked Timber of Humanity (Princeton 1990: 20-48)):

The idea of a perfect society is a very old dream, whether because of the ills of the present, which lead men to conceive of what their world would be like without them - to imagine some ideal state in which there was not misery and no greed, no danger or poverty or fear or brutalising labour or insecurity - or because these Utopias are fictions deliberately constructed as satires, intended to criticise the actual world and to shame those who control existing regimes, or those who suffer them too tamely; or perhaps they are social fantasies - simple exercises of the poetical imagination. (20)

[...]

What is common to all these worlds, whether they are conceived of as an earthly paradise or something beyond the grave, is that they display a static perfection in which human nature is finally fully realised, and all is still and immutable and eternal. (22)

And then I read Michael Walzer's piece on Berlin and his critique of Utopianism. 

I'm hoping to be able to do more reading on Berlin and utopia (any suggestions?) - and I hope to be able to discuss utopianism in the thinkers we've read in our workshop more broadly. Watch this space?

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