The Individual and Utopia: A Multidisciplinary Study of Humanity and Perfection

Scholarly books of edited readings are usually, like the curate's egg, “excellent in parts,” and that backhanded compliment applies here. This truly international book, edited by an American and a Canadian, has eighteen chapters, with eleven of the authors from the United States, three from Canada, two from Spain and the United Kingdom, and one from Australia, Argentina, France, and Italy—a mixture of academics, doctoral students, and public intellectuals. The chapters are divided into three sections: “Contextualising the Individual and Utopia”; “Mind, Body, Soul, and the Utopian Individual”; and “Marginalised and Alternative Interpretations of the Individual and Utopia.”The chapter titles range from the clear and concise “Fundamental Opposition: Utopia and the Individual” and “Religion and the Mental Utopia in Literature” to the studiously and perhaps pretentiously obtuse, such as “Between the Utopian and the Primitive Horns of His Dilemma: Aldous Huxley's Selection of Peter Kropotkin over T. H. Huxley for the Savage's ‘Third Alternative’ in a Revised Brave New World” and “Abject Utopianism: On the Silence, Apathy and Drifting of Psychic Life in Samuel R. Delany's Hogg.” Chapter titles should both inform and welcome the reader, not bore him or her to tears.The editors advise us that each essay “deals with individual experiences of utopia and, to some extent, the darker side of utopian dreaming, dystopias.” They assert that “utopia has hitherto been understood as what Lyman Tower Sargent calls ‘social dreaming,’ which is to say a communally driven theory and practice displaced in time and oriented toward the future. The individual is always there … but always in the background, within the field of vision, but always just out of focus.” Because of this, they assert, “we do not know what the Utopians think, feel, love, hate, conspire, resent, foresee, and lament as individuals” (1).To overcome this purported problem, the editors tell us that “our aim with this volume is to begin the process of re-cognizing the individual, to add three-dimensionality to the all too often one-dimensional figures that populate utopian spaces” (2). Does that not sound like setting up a straw man? Utopia, of course, is meant to indicate an ideal, and anyone who tries to realize an ideal, the editors warn us, “risks having those same desires recoiling or backfiring leading the individual into his or her own oblivion” (3).One of the best chapters is “Fundamental Oppositions: Utopia and the Individual,” by Mark Jendrysik, in which he argues that utopia is “fundamentally at odds with the needs, desires, and liberty of the individual … [because] utopia has required that the individual surrender her autonomy for the ‘common good’” (27). He reminds us of Plato's assertion that “individual happiness can be an obstacle to communal happiness” (29). This chapter is well written with clear assertions with which no scholar could find fault, such as “history shows us that small groups can oppress just as effectively as the largest state, sometimes more so” (39). It could, nevertheless, have benefited from reference to the extensive research findings along this line from studies of communal living.Another chapter that impressed me was Nancy Nestor's “The Empathetic Turn: The Relationship of Empathy to the Utopian Impulse.” She carefully teases out this relationship and concludes, “If empathy is a function of the imagination, then it may find its best expression in the utopian impulse…. Utopia is the place for which we are always ‘striving,’ the place for which the hope of betterment keeps us searching,” and when utopia is not realized, “all we might have to offer up is empathy, itself” (130).The text as a whole would have benefited from more rigorous editing. For example, we are advised that one author is an “Independent Scholar, California, USA, is an independent scholar” (xii). We later have this eye- (and mind-)numbing sentence: “The Souths’ world-view deserves respect as a cohesive and comprehensive Pansophic—and thus utopian—vision of the universe, in the best traditions of Jakob Bohme, Paracelsus, Francis Bacon, and others of the Souths’ intellectual forebears—including the original Jewish Kabbalists (as opposed to the later Christianized mutation of Kabbalism), but also partaking of the Rosicrucian tendencies of Dee, Khunrath, and Michael Maier” (109). Where, oh where, was the astute editor with his or her metaphorical red pen when most needed?This book will be of interest to some scholars of utopianism. The essays each explore, sometimes in mind-numbing depth, aspects of utopian thought. All are well referenced, and some are well written. I would never refer this text to an undergraduate student or a lay reader—but I would certainly pass it along to a doctoral candidate. This book should have been better than it is. I looked forward to reviewing it because its title grabbed my attention. And while I benefited, it was hard work.

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