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Plato imagined a city with laws and a psychology to replace the heroic ethos, and later Greek authors developed a satiric critique of the heroic character which fed modern literature from More to Voltaire and beyond. The dystopias, real and imagined, of the twentieth century showed how utopia, having summoned the heroes it once banished, could become a fatal instrument in their hands. The utopian wish to escape from politics is another element of this modern problem of agency. The apparently irrepressible character of competitive psychology for many of the writers discussed in these pages may be discouraging, but the moral force of the utopian critique is just as resilient. It may be sobering to consider how serious are the rivals to collective happiness as the aim of social existence; it may be even more sobering to consider how firmly the imagination takes sides.

Utopian thinking has a typical opponent, the heroic-aristocratic culture which has its fullest expression in epic poetry. There is a perennial clash of values between the dignity of rank and personal achievement and rational utopian planning. Most of the major authors who have dealt with utopian themes find themselves caught in a dilemma between the inhumanity of heroic values and difficulty of imagining life without them.

Huxley’s vision of juvenile happiness kept in place by genetic engineering, compulsory promiscuity, psychological conditioning, drugs, and propaganda has been traditionally read as a warning against the dangers to modern freedom. Huxley would seem, then, to be a strong defender of the heroic protest against utopia. In fact, Huxley believed that most of the measures taken by the World State, including eugenics, would be necessary in some form, and his narrative strongly ironizes the resisters to utopian happiness. Unable to grasp either horn of the utopian dilemma, he produced a lucid and memorable version of it.

Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground offers the most profound and conflicted treatment of the utopian dilemma. Utopian planning, symbolized by the Crystal Palace in London built for the Great Exhibition of 1851, threatens the narrator’s vanity and sense of freedom, yet he cannot conceal from himself the irrational and shameful basis of his resistance to the happiness it represents.

Marx was a bitter opponent of feudal-aristocratic distinction and his vision of communism as the end-state of history is classically utopian, but he views the current world as a field in which progressive forces can advance only by class conflict. Thus Marx crystallizes the new, post-French Revolution phase in which utopian thinkers seek to transcend the utopian dilemma as a philosophical stance in order to regain practical access to heroic resources, including violence.

Utopia, Dystopia, Dostoevsky, Huxley, Orwell

In this volume, John Farrell shows that political utopias—societies with laws and customs designed to short-circuit the foibles of human nature for the benefit of our collective existence—have a perennial opponent, the honor-based culture of aristocracy that dominated most of the world from ancient times into early modernity and whose status-based competitive psychology persists to the present day. While utopias aim at equality, the heroic imperative defends the need for personal and collective dignity. It asks the utopian, Do we really want to live in a world without struggle, without heroes, and without the stories they create? Because the utopian dilemma pits essential values against each other—equity versus freedom, dignity versus justice—few who confront it can simply take sides. Rather, the dilemma itself has been a generative stimulus for classic authors from Plato and Thomas More to George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. Farrell follows their struggles with the utopian dilemma and with each other, providing a deepened understanding of the moral and emotional dynamics of the western political imagination.