Utopianism for a Dying Planet: Life after Consumerism by Gregory Claeys (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Utopianism for a Dying Planet: Life after Consumerism by Gregory Claeys Jason Pearl Gregory Claeys, Utopianism for a Dying Planet: Life after Consumerism ( Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2022). Pp. 608. $39.95 cloth. The latest book by Gregory Claeys gives an impression of summation and culmination. At over 600 pages, it returns to and reexamines many of the texts and topics that Claeys, a historian of radical and socialist thought, has spent a lifetime researching. His work across five decades as author and editor has helped us to see the significance of social idealism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Dystopia: A Natural History (2016), itself over 500 pages, examines the history of the concept in both creative literature and actual political regimes—that is, governments that have made real the sorts of scenarios that writers have only imagined. The book discussed here, Utopianism for a Dying Planet, is likewise bleak in tone, despite its concern with speculations we might think of as positive or optimistic. Indeed, for Claeys, it will take the boldest aspirations—the kind that are sometimes dismissed as unrealistic—to address what are in fact our realest problems. The bulk of the book is a survey of utopian ideas and practices, with a chapter at the end that distills useful lessons and applies them to the climate crisis. Historically, Claeys starts in ancient Sparta and ends with the counterculture of the 1960s, giving ample attention to debates over luxury in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and the United States. Thematically, he moves from literature and political philosophy to cultural movements and governmental institutions, finding worthwhile, though admittedly dated, proposals for equity and sustainability in an array of sources that go far beyond the parameters of Thomas More's Utopia (1516). This range is the strength of the book: in my view, no one but Claeys could have covered the subject so knowledgeably, so expansively. In some ways, despite the focus on consumption and the environment, Utopianism for a Dying Planet is a good introduction to the subject of utopia in general. Part 1, "Towards a Theory of Utopian Sociability," is composed of a meditation on the meaning of utopia; an excavation of its mythical background; and a [End Page 117] commentary on various theoretical models. In chapter 1, Claeys gives a broad and compound but nonetheless minimally complicated definition, so that "utopia consists in any ideal or imaginary society portrayed in any manner" (19). It has taken a number of forms: a text, a religion, a mental state, the very notion of progress, the experience of pleasure. At the same time, it is more than an empty placeholder or mere suggestion that things could be otherwise. Claeys insists, against theorists such as Fredric Jameson, on the details of plans and projects, however farfetched, and argues for the practical utility of even fantastical literature. Chapter 2 looks at the origins of utopia in such traditions as the myth of the Golden Age and the belief system of Christian millenarianism. The third chapter turns to Michel Foucault's theory of heterotopia, Victor Turner's concept of liminality, and Ernst Bloch's oft-cited idea of the concrete utopia, which Claeys describes as a kind of secular millenarianism. Part 2, "Utopian Sociability in Fiction and Practice," moves from medieval times to the eighteenth century and looks in particular at the question of consumption and the potential of more robust sociability to compensate for greater abstention. Chapter 4 gives an account of utopias in practice, for instance in festivals, pilgrimages, and intentional communities. To readers of this journal, the fifth and sixth chapters are likely to be of most interest. Here, Claeys discusses the legacy of More, reflecting at length on the argument for luxury by Bernard Mandeville and the critique of private property and commercial consumption by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. As Claeys explains, there were four primary examples of virtuous self-restraint: the arcadian state of nature; the primitive Christian community; the classical republic; and the Tory or Country Party ideal. Of course, this is a well-trod terrain. For me, one of the highlights of the book is its commentary on lesser-known texts, many of...