Philosophical innovation from, say, the Enlightenment (i.e. from the mid-18th century) to the Seventies has focused upon a set of concepts which I've been calling, for the sake of brevity, utopia. Sure, calling it "utopia" means that, when I suggest that the historic period cited above was the Age of Utopia, I need to clarify what I mean by utopia if I am to have an audience at all. Utopia, as discussed here, is the intersection of human desire and human world-picture. Standard definitions of utopia as an imagined "perfect" society fit in well with this definition: there are no guarantees with utopia, and the urge to create a perfect society could just as well backfire and create a dystopian Hell instead. At any rate, here I am thinking of this age, from the Enlightenment to the Seventies, as the Age of Utopia.

Utopias are also commonly recognized by their specific forms. There were utopias to be found in works of fiction, the most famous of which is Thomas More's (1516) Utopia, describing an imaginary fictional island somewhere off the coast of (it was imagined) Brazil. There were utopian communities -- one of the best books on these came out last year, Chris Jennings' Paradise Now, about utopian communities in the United States before the Civil War. And there were utopian visions of the whole world, especially as popularized by Edward Bellamy's (1888) volume Looking Backward, a book about an idyllic world of technical wizardry which anticipated the invention of the telephone. (One of my favorites among these is Elizabeth Burgoyne-Corbett's (1889) New Amazonia, a feminist utopian dream in which people travel around on canals, live for hundreds of years, and subscribe to vegetarianism.) All of this is worth investigating, though here I'm interested in it as a series of examples of utopian thought, of visions of a far-better society existing in a far-better world. These visions, I would argue, had an especially strong hold on social thought in the historical time period in questions.

Now, there are other, related concepts, which have been used to describe the particular period I've named, from the Enlightenment to the Seventies -- I suppose we could call it the Age of Reason or the Age of Progress or the Age of Development or (in a less idealizing vein) the Age of Nice Rationalizations for Conquest. Each of those names for the period between the Enlightenment and the Seventies deserves its day in court and its fifteen minutes of fame. But none of those other names would convey the philosophical spirit, nor the incredible risk, which was undertaken during the period. If you are a visual learner and you want an illustration of the risks once attendant upon the Age of Utopia, think for instance of Hitler during World War II with his utopian dream of a Thousand-Year Empire. (Hitler, I might add, gets a short passage in the anthology The Faber Book of Utopias in which some of his writings are included.)

Now, arguably, we are no longer in the Age of Utopia today, although the shadow of the Age of Utopia certainly extends over what we do today. Perhaps we simply live in an era of collective denial about the Age of Utopia. At any rate, in this era thought appears constrained by the Margaret Thatcher notion that "there is no alternative," meaning of course that the shape of society is no longer up for grabs and that the masses can stop dreaming of utopia. For that matter, if "there is no alternative," the masses can stop dreaming of anything at all outside of an unfair exchange for their individual market values, considered separately, which is what you see in today's economy, in which the intellectual might of our society is put to work driving for Uber or serving coffee at the drive-thru at Starbucks. There's a fantastic piece on what happened to utopia in Baffler #19, titled "Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit," which explains a fair portion of why the Age of Utopia is no longer with us. And, as for the "antiglobalization" protesters who had "another world is possible" on their banners, here is my question -- is another means of resistance besides protest possible?

We still haven't reasoned through the end of the Age of Utopia to any significant extent. Politics, for instance, is rendered irrelevant by the collapse of utopian energies. The "Left" without its utopian energies collapses into the neoliberal reliance upon policy fine-tuning as a series of better public relations gestures and the rhetorical flourishes of the likes of Barack Obama. The "Right" becomes an equal gesture of futility based on regressive nationalism but still completely subservient to those who are able to rent government as a commodity. The "Two-Party System" becomes an advertising competition between two firms both of which are selling a similar product in many ways.

The last utopia of note to contest the utopia of money (which is what capitalism was before it became "there is no alternative") was the utopia of a classless society. Within this utopia, within the various ideas of communists and socialists and anarchists and quite a number of other outside-the-box thinkers, was the utopia of Karl Marx. The utopia of Marx was a utopia of freedom -- Marx argued in the Grundrisse that the era after capitalism would be a "realm of freedom," as a product of the natural outcome of history. He head a three-stage version of history lined up in this regard:

Relations of personal dependence (entirely spontaneous at the outset) are the first social forms, in which human productive capacity develops only to a slight extent and at isolated points. Personal independence founded on objective [sachlicher] dependence is the second great form, in which a system of general social metabolism, of universal relations, of all-round needs and universal capacities is formed for the first time. Free individuality, based on the universal development of individuals and on their subordination of their communal, social productivity as their social wealth, is the third stage (p. 95, Volume 28 of the Marx-Engels Collected Works).

Precapitalism, then, was the first stage, capitalism was the second stage, and postcapitalism was the third stage. In this regard Marx's ultimate ideal, an ideal he attributed to the human race as a whole, was "free individuality" and the "universal development of individuals," and he thought capitalism got in the way of this by requiring that everyone enter into commodity culture and develop some sort of "objective dependence" upon the relations of commodity culture, upon bosses and landlords and owners and husbands and so on.

Of course, the people who most successfully discredited the Marx ideal of "free individuality" were some of the same people who claimed to believe in it, the Russians who decided that the way to do it was to take over a country through a coup d'etat and install a Joseph Stalin in power. The effect of this was of course to impose a sort of universal serfdom in Russia; precisely the opposite of the realm of freedom. If it wasn't for Russian nationalism (something the honest anticommunist philosopher and onetime Russian Isaiah Berlin discusses at length), Stalin's successors, either Khrushchev or Brezhnev or those who came afterward, probably would have given up and applied for admittance to NATO a long time ago. Meanwhile the ideological apparatus of the capitalist system has grown so effective that very few people even dream of the classless society anymore.

The Age of Utopia may be almost entirely faded away, but if the current output of our intellectuals is any measure, however, we may be seeing a new age of thought: the Age of Nature. The Age of Nature will be characterized by a singular set of events: the climate catastrophes of abrupt climate change. The Age of Nature will be characterized by continued rethinking of the idea of nature, so as to develop a meaningful strategy for climate change. Right now what we have for a climate change strategy is "here's a cap-and-trade scheme or a carbon tax, and please kindly fuck off so we may continue to pursue profit" -- but this too will change.