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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The death of politics and a prescription for its renewal., September 22, 1999
By A Customer
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
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