p The romantic Utopia has now become a natural ally of the anarchic capitalist Utopia in its struggle against the bourgeois welfare state and technocratic civilization. 138 However, the romantic Utopia is developing within the mainstream of a well-established American historical tradition, with many of its ideals and principles in opposition to those of the anarchic capitalist Utopia.

p While the American romantic Utopia of the first half of the 19th century was a kind of cultural reaction to capitalist industrialization in expanding free market conditions, today’s romantic Utopia should be considered in close connection with the scientific and technological revolution and its social consequences and with the new stage in the development of state-monopoly capitalism. At this stage, the role and functions of the bourgeois state are growing stronger (with all this entails in the humanitarian sphere), science is gradually turning into a direct productive force, technology is advancing rapidly and its impact is being felt increasingly not only in production but in everyday life too.

p Tradition has played an important part in the emergence of the modern romantic Utopia: the transcendentalist spirit and the ideas of Emerson, Melville and Thoreau experienced a revival and acquired a new popularity among the nonconformist intellectuals in the 1960s. But in the new conditions, the ideas of 19th-century romanticists were often colored by the concepts of Marcuse, Brown, Goodman and some other sociologists and psychologists who advocated what was known as radical Freudianism. This was all the more natural because these sociologists and psychologists, as Richard King notes in his Party of Eros, "worked within an intellectual tradition some 150 years old. In the context of American intellectual history ... one might classify these three thinkers as the theorists of a second transcendentalist revolt.”  [138•1 

p As in the past, the romantic Utopia is a spontaneous reaction, on the one hand, to the complexity and, on the other, to the ordinariness of the real world, to the changing boundaries of individual freedom. No wonder that in the eyes of the romanticist, naturalness remains the central principle of Utopian society and the ideal of the free man, its foremost value. Hence the pronounced naturalism and anthropocentrism of the romantic Utopia. Hence also the 139 obscurity or peripheral nature of justice, democracy, efficiency and other issues which are almost central to other types of utopia.

p The first thing that catches the eye of an observer in a romantic Utopian world is its simplicity (if not primitivism) which contrasts sharply with the complexity and conflict of the real world. But it is the simplicity of an inherently integral world, not the result of a purposeful organizing effort by the state or the market. It is a natural and therefore the most stable and coherent wholeness possible—the wholeness of a free society.

p The romantic Utopia values freedom above all else. Outwardly, it is expressed in the lack of social rigidity, of clearly delineated structures of institutions, organizations and groups and lines separating them; this offers virtually unlimited opportunities for spontaneous self-assertion by the individual. With approval, Norman Brown quoted Henry Miller’s Sunday After the War: "The cultural era is past. The new civilization, which may take centuries or a few thousand years to usher in, will not be another civilizationit will be the open stretch of realization which all the past civilizations have pointed to. The city, which was the birthplace of civilization, such as we know it to be, will exist no more. There will be nuclei, of course, but they will be mobile and fluid. The peoples of the earth will no longer be shut off from one another within states but will flow freely over the surface of the earth and intermingle. There will be no fixed constellations of human aggregates. Governments will give way to management, using the word in a broad sense. The politician will become as superannuated as the dodo bird. The machine will never be dominated, as some imagine; it will be scrapped, eventually, but not before men have understood the nature of the mystery which binds them to their creation. The worship, investigation and subjugation of the machine will give way to the lure of all that is truly occult. This problem is bound up with the larger one of power—and of possession. Man will be forced to realize that power must be kept open, fluid and free. His aim will be not to possess power but to radiate it.”  [139•1 

p “Utopian speculations, such as these of Henry Miller," Norman Brown wrote in 1959, "must come back into fashion. They are a way of affirming faith in the possibility of solving problems that seem at the moment insoluble. Today even the survival of humanity is a Utopian hope."  [140•1  In all probability, Brown never anticipated that this last phrase expressed the essence of the quest many American Utopians would undertake in the two decades that followed.

p The picture drawn by Miller presents not only the outward but also some of the inner features of freedom in the romantic Utopia—a society freed from diktat and oppression on the part of the state, the market, the masses and culture with its codified norms.

p The romantic Utopian can be described as an advocate of the "minimal state" because, like Emerson and Thoreau, he believes that the less the state governs (and generally, the lesser it is), the better. At any rate, he sees today’s "corporate state" as one of the mortal evils of American society. And so the romanticist would be ready to embrace Robert Nozick’s project of a commonwealth of autonomous Utopian communities had it not been for the sales talk about the market “meta-utopia” he abhors; individualistic enterprise is where the romanticist parts ways with the anarchic capitalist.

p An opponent of the "corporate state", the romanticist dreams of a society without a bureaucracy. But to him, debureaucratization does not mean simply restricting the functions of the state (and of the political machine as a whole) severely, narrowing down its field of activity and destroying relations based on rationality and efficiency. It is a transition from the Gesellschaft with its artificial and impersonal human relations to the Gemeinschaft which ensure new interpersonal relations of organic collectivism, transgressing both traditional individualism and artificial collectivism. This is why many romantic Utopians see the ideal form of social organization in a small, relatively autonomous community of free working people sharing a common philosophy—something resembling perhaps a classical Greek polis, or a Utopian commune, or an idealized pioneer settlement.

p With 19th-century romanticists, man gave himself to nature which absorbed him as its integral part. This trend has survived to this day. But today, a different trend has appeared alongside it: although he worships nature, man sees it rather as an equal partner in his life and work than as an object of blind adoration.

p Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (first published in 1975), a clearly romantic novel, describes what can only be termed as idyllic relations between man and nature. The novel is set in 1999, in the independent nation of Ecotopia comprising the former states of California, Washington and Oregon which ceded from the United States in 1980. While the rest of America is sinking deeper in the quagmire of rampant violence and pollution, Ecotopia is thriving thanks to its rational environmental policies. The Ecotopians treat land, animals and plants with affection, they have returned to the natural life, and nature repays their love with interest. They have an abundance of vegetables, grain and meat. Animals grazing peacefully on lush pastures delight the eye. The cowboy is again a respected occupation. The country is covered with forests, a source of health, happiness—and timber, too, which has replaced aluminum and plastics. Harmony in Ecotopia is not confined to man’s relations with nature; it reigns in his relations with everything that surrounds him, with all his environment. The Ecotopians’ emotions are akin to the way the Indians feel, that "the horse and the teepee and the bow and arrow all sprang, like the human being, from the womb of nature, organically". When they build a wooden house, they seem "almost to be collaborating with the wood, rather than forcing it into the shape of a building",  [141•1  and so the barrier separating the tree from the man disappears.

p Ecotopia’s harmony of man, nature and the world of objects is accompanied by a change in the attitude to technology and in technology itself. The automobile has vanished completely, and household appliances are noiseless: man’s life should be filled with natural sounds only, such as the rustle of the wind, footfalls, or the crying of a baby.

p Life in Ecotopia as pictured by Callenbach offers a 142 sufficiently accurate reflection of the way the modern romantic Utopian views the world: in his opinion, fundamental change in relations between man and nature depends on either eliminating or radically changing the functions of the factors that stand between them. This applies above all to science and technology; in his eyes, they are obstacles to the understanding of the hidden meaning of nature and to the process which brings man closer to his fellow man and frees him from various forms of tyranny caused by the worship of technology and scientistic thinking.

p The romantic Utopia of the first half of the 19th century did not revile or reject science and technology because by that time they had not yet displayed their contradictions to a degree at which the critical consciousness of bourgeois society would have regarded them as an obstacle to man’s “natural” development. The modern American romanticist is generally critical of science and technology and their mandarins, the technocrats. Hence his criticism of “reason”, rationality and efficiency; hence his idealization of the direct sensory experience which sometimes appears as an apologia of mysticism. This is the basis underlying all relations in the romantic Utopia where there is neither any technocracy as a system of domination nor any caste of technocrats, and where science (with its methods) is no longer regarded as a cure-all, even if it does retain some rights.

p The romantic Utopia is a tangible embodiment of antitechnocratic culture which blends together nostalgia after the past, whether real or imagined, and the refusal (or inability) to accept the new world which is becoming increasingly complex and increasingly inaccessible (in its entirety) to direct perception. And so, if any Utopia is an attempted escape into a simpler and more comprehensible world, none express this desire more forcefully and clearly than the romantic Utopia.

p The romantic mode of thinking is based on a reappraisal of the nature and meaning of all human activity, first and foremost in the form of labor. In the romantic Utopia, labor is not simply exploitation-free activity but a process akin to play, even when labor is not identified with play directly. This approach to labor is rooted in the European folk utopia. And although, as Marx demonstrates, the idea of turning labor into play has no chance of being realized, 143 different types of utopia, especially the romantic one, have been reproducing it with increasing intensity. It is almost an eternal Utopian idea, connected with the fact that the hired worker inevitably views labor as a curse, and this opinion is confirmed by certain trends in the development of the production and the lifestyle of modern capitalist society. "Smith is right," Marx wrote, "in that in historical forms of labor, such as slavery, corvee and wage work, labor is always seen as something repulsive, it is always labor by external coercion, and, conversely, non-labor is seen as ’freedom and happiness’.”  [143•1 

p The further disappearance of elements of play from everyday life and from production, the "management revolution" and the scientific and technological revolution in developed capitalist nations have changed the personal psychological orientation of most people. They now have to display new qualities, such as subordinating their own activity and interests to collectivist purposes, discipline and conformism, which enhance the view of labor as something external, alien and devoid of any elements of play. Add to that the standardization of everyday life and recreation, the impact of "mass culture" which shapes the thinking of scores of millions of readers, listeners and viewers— and the conclusion becomes inescapable that for the overwhelming majority of Americans not only labor but also recreation becomes largely regimented and imposed from without. In these conditions, “programmed” existence is rejected from the standpoint of play—play not as entertainment but as liberation from rigid limits imposed from without, as a spontaneous expression of man’s essence, with its purpose lying within and not outside man.

p Some romanticists, those relying on psychoanalysis, connect the transformation of labor into play with the reestablishment of Eros as the life instinct. Norman Brown is one advocate of this approach. "The life instinct, or sexual instinct," he wrote in the late 1950s, "demands activity of a kind that, in contrast to our current mode of activity, can only be called play.”  [143•2  That is why the romantic Utopian considers the attainment of inner and external 144 freedom, the transformation of labor, if not life itself, into play, and the elimination of psychological oppression as interconnected and interdependent goals.

p In his discussions of a free society, mention of relations of property is only cursory. Usually the romanticist does not reject the institution of private property as such; his criticism is spearheaded largely against the monopolies— to him, the economic basis of all forms of coercion. On the whole, the modern romanticist is as little concerned about economic problems as were his predecessors. The United States, he maintains, has reached a level of material development at which the emphasis may be freely shifted to the nonmaterial values and factors of development, which he regards as more important.

p Hence the anthropocentric nature of the romantic Utopia which accords the highest status to man-“free”, endowed with a "new sensuality", living a "natural life" and generally little resembling, no matter how different the various alternative profiles, the inhabitants of the "industrial wasteland" of the latter half of the 20th century. "The Ecotopians," Callenbach writes in his novel, "are almost Dickensian: often strange enough, but not crazylooking or sordid, as the hippies of the sixties were. Fanciful hats and hair-dos, jackets, vests, leggings, tights.... People seem to be very loose and playful with each other, as if they had endless time on their hands to explore whatever possibilities might come up. There’s none of the implicit threat of open criminal violence that pervades our public places, but there’s an awful lot of strong emotion, willfully expressed.”  [144•1 

p Modern romantic Utopians attach particular importance to the psychological freedom of the personality in the new society and interpret this freedom as a spontaneous expression of primal passions. This interpretation, developed by Marcuse, Brown and Goodman, is based on the postulate that psychic repression is behind all forms of oppression and exploitation which underlie a civilization oriented on productivity and efficiency and not on personality development.

p True, there is no unanimity among the proponents of this view as to which primal passions should be " 145 rehabilitated" and “liberated” and to what degree-whether this should be Eros alone, the life instinct (in the opinion of Marcuse) or both Eros and Thanatos, the death instinct (a point on which Brown insisted), whether they should be liberated completely or partially. But this does nothing to alter the essence of the problem: the passions should be rehabilitated and liberated in such a way as to eliminate the antagonism between body and soul, reason and emotion, work and play, individual and society and, eventually, return man (and, consequently, society, too) to a “natural” state. But this is a natural state different from that embodied in many 19th-century romantic (Rousseauist) Utopias. The Utopian romanticists of the past were searching for a model free man and a happy society mostly in faraway, “wild” lands (somewhere in the Marquesas)—essentially, in an archaic, precapitalist state of society which, associated sometimes with certain "third world" regions, attracts the Utopian romanticist to this day. But now he is far more concerned with finding this model in “archaic” and “ prerepressive” states of the human psyche, both in phylogeny and in ontogeny. In other words, he is looking for his ideal not in the sociohistorical but in the psychological childhood of man and mankind taken both literally and figuratively: childhood is associated with a state of the psyche, of the world view and perception in which the primal passions are not yet suppressed, time is perceived in a leisurely manner, and activity is play.

p The modern American romanticist has no clear idea of how a free society should be built. The only thing he can offer as a general prerequisite is the echo of his predecessors’ appeal urging a break with the existing society, an escape into a Utopian commune or into one’s own Walden. Apparently, the only difference is that today’s romanticist interprets this escape (in the spirit of certain Oriental doctrines, specifically, Zen Buddhism which was popular in the United States in the 1960s) not simply as a physical break with the real world but as an escape into man’s inner world. Man, it is maintained, should strive not to rebuild the real world or to find some enclave in it, but to rebuild his inner world; this would enable him to impart a new meaning to his existence and to feel a free man. This means that the romantic Utopia upholds the distinctly American tradition of an individual quest for happiness. This path 146 rejects both entrepreneurial individualism and corporate collectivism.

p The technocratic, the libertarian and the romantic Utopias all share a common feature: they reject or belittle the role of politics as an independent sphere of the effort to transform life and want to solve the problems facing America by nonpolitical means. Among the contributing factors are certain distinct aspects of the emergence of American society, the strong undercurrent of distrust of the state which has always been present in the United States, and, finally, the skeptical attitude to politics widespread among Americans.

However, the mainstream of the American Utopia has always contained a firmly established tradition which links the solution to the nation’s.problems and the creation of an ideal society with the use of political mechanisms and the implementation of political transformations. Today this tradition is reflected in two types of Utopia—the socialist and what might be termed the democratic.