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The End Of Utopia: Politics And Culture In An Age Of Apathy

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This book should be on your short list of "must-read" material.

Russell Jacoby's willingness to think critically and his trust that his audience is willing to do the same inevitably result in the finest cultural and intellectual criticism available in the United States.

This book is no exception and is an important read for anyone who wonders if there's a better way available to our society. Before we can answer that question, the dead wood of the last century must be cleared away.

Jacoby does so by pointing out how thoroughly enervated left/liberal political and social thought has become. Jacoby's conclusion is frightening in its implications -- leftists and liberals have essentially given up on the complex task of forging a new, better future for all.

In place of that utopian impulse, leftists and liberals have substituted cynicism, academic careerism and outright moral defeat. No longer certain that they can change the world, they seem intent on obscuring their total surrender to the existing sociopolitical milieu.

Jacoby's book is brief, but does a great job of documenting this shift in liberal/leftist thought from ardent desire to improve society to abject acceptance of what exists. Western societies need people who are willing to think on a grand scale about how the lives of people living in those societies can be improved. What the liberal/left now offers is an incoherent insistence that nothing can be improved, that all is simply rhetorical strategies designed to perpetuate systems of dominance and subjugation.

The society that is currently emerging from the turmoil of technological ferment desperately needs moral, political and intellectual leadership informed by a vision of a better future. In its current incarnation, left/liberal thought is incapable of providing that vision.

The frightening thing is that this tradition is probably the only one capable of conceiving and implementing social change that would make the new technology serve us rather than the other way around. Jacoby's book is a tough-minded call to arms for those of us who aren't ready to give up on humanity and don't believe that the market place is a mechanism that necessarily best adjudicates complex social interactions and promotes the values of a humane society -- equality, justice, peace and prosperity.

Politics, as Russell Jacoby observes, has become boring. Hardly anyone talks about political ideas anymore. Where there is little talk, there is even less action. I have long believed that an effective left needs some kind of positive vision for the future. Changing society takes enormous energy and requires something more than a belief that a change "is the right thing to do," or that "it might do some good." This attitude leads to sporadic and half hearted efforts while those convinced they are creating a new world are capable of sustaining their passion over a lifetime while inspiring others along the way.

Nevertheless, a recognition of the left's loss of faith in its ability to create a better world has been missing, curiously so since such hopes have nourished it for over two centuries. For years I could find no mention of it anywhere. So my heart was ineffably gladdened when I stumbled onto The End of Utopia, a superlative work that focuses on this issue.

Russell Jacoby is a highly respected intellectual historian who made a splash a decade ago with the excellent and well received The Last Intellectuals. He is a brilliant writer with a biting wit, one of those rare people who can make the discussion of even the dullest writers interesting. His excoriation of current leftist theory is great fun. In a review in Dissent Magazine, George Scialabba commented that Jacoby is "a cultural hygeinist, scouring verbal plaque and conceptual decay with his high-powered electric-sarcastic drill."

Jacoby's thesis is that the left needs to be open to the possibility of utopian thinking. By utopian, Jacoby isn't referring to an attempt to create a perfect world, but that we can hope "that the future could fundamentally surpass the present." His primary focus is the botch that contemporary leftist theory has become without it.

He is perhaps best when reviewing multiculturism. While agreeing with the basic premise that we need to be more inclusive of racial and ethnic groups, he derides multiculturism's pretenses of radicalism. He points out that we are becoming more culturally uniform, not diverse. Everyone buys the same goods, looks at the same TV shows and movies, "pursue the same activities and have the same desires -- more or less -- for success." There is, moreover, no vision inherent in multiculturism. Its efforts are primarily directed toward getting its people more power with everyone wanting "a bigger piece of the same action," suggesting "patronage more than revolution," leading people to specialize "in marginalization to up their market value." The radical pretenses of multiculturism "might be characterized as jargon attached to an air compressor." Ultimately, it assumes that the future will be like the present, only with more options.

Jacoby is also deeply concerned with the left's abandonment of universal values in favor of the local and particular, the tendency to aestheticize reality and the inability to make moral judgments. This avowed relativism often makes it difficult for the left to say anything significant. Denying the objectivity of truth, leftist theorists never get to the fundamental question of "what is and what should be." In short, the left never gets around to describing what sort of future we should be trying to create.

No reviewer questions Jacoby's brilliance as an intellectual historian, or his astuteness in revealing inane writing, excessive theorizing and self-promotion. Still, few are receptive to promoting an openness to utopian theory either. The most common criticism hurled at Jacoby comes from the McCarthy era, when being a good intellectual required fervent anti-communism which often equated communism with whatever was going on in Nazi Germany.

Yet, if there is any lesson to be gained from the great villains of the Twentieth Century, it would have to be that it is not wise to give absolute power to a single ruler, that democratic checks and balances are sound politics. The cold war engendered a herculean effort to equate totalitarianism with utopian ideas. Jacoby walks us through the history of the cold war's blackening of utopian theory, rightly observing that any connection with Nazi Germany is highly tenous and that the Stalinist moment was an aberration when viewed in the entirety of utopian ideas. Certainly, there should be little difficulty for future utopians to heed the dangers of omnipotent dicatators. It's hard to imagine any group, on the left at least, being attracted to that.

Only faith in the possibility of creating a better world can create sufficient energy to compete against the relentless forces of money, power and inertia. When there is a faith in a better world, the world is young again and all things are possible. When it is dormant, as now, we find ourselves mired in a dreadful cynism. Jacoby aptly quotes Bertold Brecht at the end, "Something is missing. A light has gone out. The world stripped of anticipation turns cold and grey."

Ultimately, we are responsible for the world we create and no generation gets a free pass. Currently, we need emotional courage, the willingness to reincoporate a utopian vision into our thinking. Once we realize our desire for it, alternatives will begin to present themselves, and even if none existed, we would eventually will them into being. The End of Utopia is a wonderful start, well written, insightful, frequently humorous and highly recommended

As a former student of Professor Jacoby at UCLA, I felt that this was a wonderful book explaining his philosophy on the fall of Utopian thinking. His knowledge on the subject comes through as clearly as it did in class. This should be a must read for anyone interested in why we no longer dream of a perfect society to exist in the future, and have become content with something that falls dramatically short of it.

Radicalism and utopian thinking have withered away, according to Jacoby, in favor of a broad consensus that the good society incorporates a welfare state, a decentralized power structure, a mixed economy, and political pluralism. The collapse of Communism eviscerated radicalism and enfeebled liberalism, removing its vitality and its backbone. He would like to see a rejuvenated utopianism that would provide models of a radically different and better society, but he is never remotely specific about what he means by that, blithering about vague "possibilities of freedom and pleasure hardly tapped" and similar piffle. Mostly, I think, he wants to see a rejuvenated liberalism. He does not seem to notice that the consensual good society he describes is mostly a product of a successful liberal agenda; really new ideas by definition would have to go in some different direction.

He takes on the multiculturalists and obscurantist intellectuals without mercy, and those chapters are well-written and fun to read. But when, in the final chapter of the book, he tries to sum up his argument for utopianism and why the idea has receded from public discussion and intellectual discourse everything falls apart. He does not find it plausible that the general disenchantment with utopian thinking is the result of humanity's miserable experience with it in practice during the 20th Century. He conveniently defines Nazism as outside the utopian tradition, which is debatable, and I suppose he'd do the same arabesque with respect to the societal vision of the Islamist fundamentalists. That won't work for Communism, of course, a problem he solves by simply not talking about it and the 100 million or so deaths it caused. He insists on comparing the perfection of utopian fantasies with the faults of actually-existing societies: "[Thomas More's] sketch of the future, now almost five centuries old, still stands light-years ahead of advanced industrial civilization." Amazing stuff. His notion of what constitutes a utopian project is ideological and myopic. Why isn't the spread of liberal democracy to oppressed peoples a worthy utopian project? Finally, his version of utopian thinking seems to admit only his own standard-issue liberal methodologies; nowhere is there any acknowledgment of the possibility of free-market approaches to societal improvement or transformation.

An often entertaining read through a badly flawed argument.

Jacoby is at his best in in The End of Utopia, which could be read along with his earlier work The Last Intellectuals. Few authors reach the understanding of contemporary society as does Jacoby!

Liberalism is unable to satisfy the urge for something higher, the search for meaning, because it fails to recognize the necessity of maintaining a faith in possibilities. The recurring problem of liberal politics is that it fails to go far enough, that it is afraid to cast judgment on any subject matter. By deeming everything relative, we sacrifice the ability to hope for more since we are unable to deem any idea as superior to another. The section that is weakest here is that of "Thick aestheticism and thin nativism." But the biting commentary and insight elsewhere make up for this dense chapter. Jacoby implores leftist liberals to seek more, to become capable of action and do more than concede to others' opinions. His attack on multiculturalism as ultimately reducing the variety of culture and replacing this diversity with a monolithic, superficial culture is well taken. This book is well worth reading as it unites both a cynicism with the present politics with the utopian demand for higher expectations. We should not be content with the status quo, we should strive for more. Without dreams of what may be possible, deterioration from our already shallow public discourse seems inevitable.

Russell is adept in his honesty that most the writers of the "left" have bent to the mainstream ideology as they toss token ideas into the mill.

Jacoby makes some great observations about the quackery,muddle-headedness and sheer silliness of much of academic writing and thinking.He scores some good points criticising our current political and cultural malaise.Where he goes fatally wrong is where the never-had-a-proper-job-and-thus-divorced-from-the-real-world hard Leftists and idle dreamers always go wrong:that the idea and hope of Utopia will bring us some vaguely defined golden future.The 20th century horrors of Communism and Fascism-the products of fuzzy-brained,feel-good nonsense,mythmaking and deep denial of anything you might call reality-ought to have burned into our brains the hard truth that society cannot be engineered into a state of perfection simply because nothing that man devises can ever be perfect.To ascribe ourselves the power of Godhood is pure megalomania and stupid to the point of suicidal.The utopian swindle got 100,000,000 plus people killed in the 20th century.Don't be surprised if the next wave of Utopianistic thinking and the blind,ignorant faith inherent to it,repeats the carnage.