Utopia and Its Discontents

Plato to Atwood

Sebastian Mitchell

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781441172181
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Teoría de la crítica literaria

Utopia and Its Discontents traces literary representations of ideal communities from Plato to the 21st century. Each chapter offers close readings of key utopian and anti-utopian texts to demonstrate how they construct, challenge and explore the ideas and forms of earlier utopian writings and the social and political ideals of their own periods. In this original and insightful study, Sebastian Mitchell demonstrates how literary utopias are often as much about the past as they are about the present and the future. Utopia and Its Discontents concludes by arguing against the idea that the utopian has been eclipsed by the dystopian in contemporary culture. Topics covered include: - Early political and philosophical authors, such as Plato and Thomas More
- Literary works, from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four
- Speculative-fiction writers such as H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley and Margaret Atwood
- Ecological and feminist texts by Ernest Callenbach, Ursula Le Guin and Marge Piercy
- Twenty-first century utopianism This is an essential study for scholars and students of utopian literature.

1

Plato versus Plato: Art and Idealism

In their landmark study, Utopian Thought in the Western World (1979), Frank and Fritzie Manuel made it clear that they did not think Plato’s dialogues were utopian. Those kinds of writings did not emerge until the sixteenth century. Any works demonstrating idealistic impulses before the Renaissance should be regarded as a foreshadowing of utopia without actually embodying the genre’s essential characteristics. And even then, there was a delicate balance to be struck. One could easily identify a point of origin in Thomas More’s Concerning the Best State of a Commonwealth and the New Island of Utopia (1516); but one still had to keep in mind the ‘shadowy’ nature of the whole utopian enterprise, the extensive range of books and ideas drawn into its orbit, and the rapid multiplication of the various forms in which the utopian was manifest.¹ There was Jewish and Christian apocalyptic thought, sabbatical millenarianism and monasticism, all synthesised with the regulatory frameworks to be found in Plato, Aristotle and Cicero. The Manuels believed the resultant genre had multiple aspects: ‘geographical, historical, psychological, sociological, as a form of belles-lettres; as philosophico-moral treatises; as a new mythology’.² Despite the proliferation of forms and approaches, it was still just about possible to detect an animating utopian spirit, a ‘propensity’, until the twentieth century that is.³ By the 1930s, utopianism ‘was a corpse’, the Manuels claimed, ‘the nails were hammered into the coffin with resounding blows struck by Marxists at one end and Fascist theorists at the other’.⁴ If Plato’s thought could not be seen to provide an origin for utopia, then it could easily be taken as a blueprint for authoritarian regimes which speciously insist on absolute obedience to the state. The best-known example of that argument was Karl Popper’s Open Society and its Enemies (1945), which traced the origin of totalitarianism to Plato’s examination of the principles of effective political society (while also condemning the philosopher for misrepresenting the liberal views of his former teacher, that ‘great individualist’, Socrates).⁵ Writing in the same epoch, but from a very different political perspective, Ernst Bloch came to a similarly sceptical conclusion about the apparent idealistic aims of this schema. With Bloch’s more capacious application of the term, the utopian could readily be applied to Plato, but still not in a complimentary fashion. Bloch describes the Republic ‘as a work well thought out as it is reactionary’, a ‘splendid-utopian ship’, which ‘transposes the land from which the ship is destined and replaces the Golden Age with that of black soup’.⁶

Bloch’s vivid observations are open to the objection that they diminish nuanced Socratic argument for the purposes of aphoristic effect. These interpretations also depend on an almost exclusive focus on the Republic as the central source of Plato’s political ideas; and they provide a selective reading of the dialogue at that. Yet such attacks are also a tacit acknowledgement of the long-standing influence of the Republic as a source of compelling political ideas. And then there are wider considerations, even if one rejects the organisational model Socrates advances in the course of the dialogue. Popper conceded the point, at least in part. As aberrant as he found the Republic’s political vision, Popper still believed Plato was a fine sociologist, who constructed ‘an astonishingly realistic theory of society’.⁷ Plato’s dialogues raise questions of the relationship of private and public virtue, of freedom and authority, of the relationship between a universal claim for political organisation and the appropriate arrangement for a historically specific set of circumstances; and especially pertinent to this study, they raise the question of the relationship of art to the ideal state. Plato’s projection of a perfect constitution is not limited to the Republic. He offers other models in the Statesman and the Laws. And then there are more impressionistic, mythological accounts of ideal societies in Timaeus and the incomplete Critias (a vision of ancient Athens). However, one might also pose in this context the more unusual question as to whether it is possible to detect a different kind of foreshadowing of the ideal state, or at least the general circumstances of the ideal state, in the ostensibly poetic dialogue of the Symposium. And that would be to place an emphasis on the literary and the dramatic in the dialogue as a form of anticipatory consciousness, rather than attempting to trace out or construct the general lines of continuity within a coherent body of philosophical analysis.

Nevertheless, we should begin with the Republic, the longest and most sustained example of Plato’s constitutional thought. There has been some debate as to whether it is possible to assign a date for the events described in the dialogue (the matter of composition now being beyond exact determination), but the modern consensus is that it takes place sometime during the Peace of Nicias (421–414 BCE). The discussants have attended a festival and procession in honour of the Thracian goddess Bendis in Piraeus, the port area of Athens. After the celebrations, the group retires to Polemarchus’ nearby house. With his brother, Polemarchus ran a successful armament workshop; and he was aligned politically with the city’s democratic faction (the harbour district was a hotbed of radical opinion). Socrates converses in the dialogue with a variety of fictionalised versions of Athenian citizens, including Plato’s older brothers, Glaucon and Adeimantus, Polemarchus’ father, Cephalus, and a Sophist, Thrasymachus. The dialogue’s circumstances and exchanges are informed by its dramatic irony. Contemporary readers would almost certainly have been aware of Athens’ traumatic history between the periods of the dialogue’s setting and its composition, probably about 375 BCE.⁸

Prior to the signing of the peace treaty in 421 BCE, Athens’ attempt to dominate Greece had resulted in notable victories and territorial gains in the first stage of the Peloponnesian War. However, following the collapse of the peace, the state suffered a series of military reversals. Despicable acts were also committed in the name of the state, such as the massacre of all adult men and the selling into slavery of women and children after the capture of the Aegean island of Melos in 416 BCE. The following year, Athens embarked on a disastrous colonial campaign against Syracuse in Sicily. The intention was to subjugate the island for the purposes of securing a lucrative source of funding for the war with Sparta. The final Sicilian campaign resulted in the loss of 40,000 troops and the destruction of the Athenian fleet. There were further foreign policy debacles. In 410 BCE, the Athenians unnecessarily antagonised their long-standing Persian foes, and had to open up another front to the east. By 405 BCE (when Plato was twenty-two), Athens’ imperial ambitions had collapsed, and the city was besieged by the rival Greek powers. Athens surrendered, and Sparta had to resist calls from its allies that the city should be rased to the ground. The terms of the Athenian surrender treaty of 404 BCE included the imposition of a ruling regime sympathetic to Sparta’s interests. Athens was forced to surrender nearly all her ships to the victors, and the Piraeus as well as the city’s defensive wall were demolished.⁹

The Republic, then, is set in the Athenian district which would be destroyed in the final act of the Peloponnesian War; and the account of the ideal state takes place in what could be retrospectively judged as a brief hiatus in an era of catastrophic military adventurism. Contemporary Athenian readers of the Republic would almost certainly have been aware of the individual fates of Socrates’ interlocutors. Polemarchus, Socrates’ host for the discussion, for instance, perished in the initial purge when the oligarchy backed by the Spartans came to power after the city’s defeat (with Plato’s uncle appointed as an oligarch). If the Republic was intended as a universal projection of the ideal state constructed on immutable principles of justice (the title in Greek, possibly Plato’s own, suggests ‘The State, or on Justice’), then it also seems to be a work which was intended to throw into sharp relief the chronic structural difficulties of contemporary Athenian politics – the inter-connectedness of disastrous military adventurism abroad and defective decision-making at home.¹⁰ Athenian political culture was factional; it promoted personal and familial interest above those of the state; it depended, in Plato’s view, on a partisan leadership which lacked the necessary expertise to be able to undertake a sufficiently thorough diagnosis on any given political and social problem. There was an absurd over-reliance on eloquent public speaking, where the effectiveness of many public addresses bore scant relation to the truth, to the underlying facts of any case under review.

Then there was the difficulties of the extensive role of the citizenry in both legal judgements and governance, whereby both verdicts in trials and major political policy were to be determined by the votes of the demos, those ordinary Athenians, who were ill-equipped, according to Plato, to assess the merits of the affairs brought before them. Democracy, the prevalent political system in fourth-century and fifth-century Athens, was particularly susceptible to the winds of self-destructive populism. Plato’s Letters may or may not be authentic, but the autobiographical claim in the seventh epistle is certainly plausible.¹¹ Plato claims in the epistle that it was Socrates’ prosecution and subsequent execution which confirmed the younger philosopher’s opinions on the state’s structural defects. If democratic politics had been calamitous for Athens by the end of the Peloponnesian campaign, then it was the trial, sentencing and execution of Socrates for impiety and corrupting the young in 399 BCE (as recounted in Euthyphro, Apology, and Phaedo) which revealed in a stark fashion the malaise of Athenian public life – a system of back-to-front principles and personal manoeuvrings which condemned to death the city’s most upright citizen, ‘the justest man of that time’, on trumped-up charges.¹²

The practical difficulty was that manifest defects of the Athenian state could not be appreciably improved upon by adopting any of the other extant political systems in the Hellenic world. As the Plato of the Letters reflects, ‘I came to the conclusion that all existing states are badly governed and the condition of their laws practically incurable, without some miraculous remedy and the assistance of fortune; and I was forced to say, in praise of true philosophy, that from her height alone was it possible to discern what the nature of justice is, either in the state or the individual’.¹³ And it would be the central intention of the Republic to demonstrate, as a contemporary diagnostic, the notion of right in the individual and the state,...