Totalitarianism and the ‘Repressed’ Utopia of the Present: moving beyond Hayek, Popper and Foucault

This article starts by reviewing the negative account of utopian thinking in dominant liberal western political theory, through the positing of a link between utopianism and totalitarianism, as present in the writings of liberal writers like Hayek, Popper, Berlin and others. As such, this article constitutes a critique of the liberal theories of utopianism and totalitarianism as well as positing alternative conceptions. It uses Michel Foucault's views to advance beyond the liberal mind-set in order to rehabilitate the concept of utopia as both a substantive and methodological conception for both democratic and educational theory, and argues for a revival of utopian thinking as necessary for extending and deepening democracy in the world post 9/11. A utopia, from one point of view, implies a distinction between things as they are and things as they should be. In this sense, a utopia implies an ideal society created by deliberate human endeavour. Such a definition typically includes a vision of an ideal existence for a collectivity. The utopias of the renaissance, for instance, described ideal imaginary societies characterised as if they operated in the present. They were fictional characterisations expressed so as to represent an ideal blueprint of how human groups could or should co-exist. As blueprints they combined both substantive and methodological concerns. That is, they spelt out the substance of how human society should be structured, and they constituted a method to enable comparison with actually existing societies. As often as not, because they were structured systemically, representing the individual in relation to complex institutional and social processes, they would address and resolve complex issues relating to structure and agency, freedom and determinism, morality and law, and social justice as well. The utopias of the Renaissance, for instance, represented a possible future, recapturing the authority and stability of the ancients. Most stressed stability at the expense of TOTALITARIANISM AND ‘REPRESSED’ 527 change, and repressed expressions of difference and diversity. Thomas More [1], writing in the early sixteenth century, for instance, imposed restrictions on travel, public gatherings, and the expression of political ideas, especially as influenced by the rise of the recently invented printing machines. More’s conception of utopia, like those of von Gunzburg [2], Doni [3], Campanella [4], Andreae [5], Burton [6] and Bacon [7], emphasised social justice, the moral life, the relations of the individual to the polis and the absence of exploitation. Miriam Eliav-Feldon (1982, p. 85) characterises renaissance utopias as resting on four motives: social justice, a religiously moral life, the eradication of individualism, and simplicity. It may be this renaissance characterisation of utopia, with its emphasis upon stability, consensus, and holistic construction, that accounts for the bad image of utopian thinking in Western political culture. Such a negative view is expressed by Ralph Dahrendorf (1967, p. 139), for instance: One of the basic assumptions of all utopian constructions is that conditions may be created under which conflicts become superfluous. Indeed, the resulting state of harmony is the theoretical basis of the persistence of the social structure of utopia. But in reality these conditions do not exist. In fact, with the terrible dialectics of the non-rational, it happens that utopia first requires and then glorifies suppression. What Frederich Hayek termed, as Erik Olin Wright (1995. p. x) reminds us, the ‘fatal conceit’ – ‘ the belief that through rational calculation and political will, society can be designed in ways that will significantly improve the human condition’ (Wright, 1995, p. x) – symbolises the negative view of utopian theorising that has characterised liberal analyses. This type of anti-utopian thought, expressed forcefully in Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, was to be taken up by political philosophers like Karl Popper, in The Open Society and Its Enemies, and The Poverty of Historicism, and, in more recent times, such an anti-utopian conception has been echoed by Michel Foucault in an assortment of comments and interviews. In this short essay I want first to spell out the anti-utopian argument as represented by Hayek and Popper representing it as embodying a distinctively liberal viewpoint. I then want to consider Foucault’s viewpoints on utopias in order to gain some insight into how the liberal objections can be overcome. Finally, I will argue that a utopia is best represented as embodying an ideal of social organisation that is not only representable in models of an ideal form of society in the future, but also always necessarily inheres in any present form of social organisation. That is, within actually existing societies, as depicted by liberals, there is I will argue a ‘latent’ or ‘repressed’ utopian ideal. My argument is that Hayek, Popper and other ‘cold-war’ liberals attack a partial representation of what is called utopian thinking which should not and does not exhaust the meaningful and useful senses in which utopian thought is possible and desirable. In this sense, I argue that the idea of utopia has useful purposes and needs rehabilitation in Western political thought. I argue further that much anti-utopian thought from liberal quarters is incoherent on the