170

p At every stage of its development the inherently contradictory tradition of Utopian thought has encountered more or less active resistance. It has not been merely a clash of different temperaments, a debate between optimists and pessimists. It has also been a clash of different political forces and different social ideals. "The concept Utopia," the American scholar Frank E. Manuel writes, "has from the beginning been used in both a positive and a pejorative sense; it has connoted at the same time an ideal longed-for and a crackpot scheme. The negation of the great dream has always constituted a parallel stream, from the very inception of Utopian thought. The antiutopia was not the invention of Aldous Huxley and Zamiatin: after all, The Parliament of Women by Aristophanes was contemporaneous with Plato’s Republic; More’s Utopia produced a galaxy of mocking parodies.”  [170•1 

p One could agree with this statement but for an element which, at first glance, appears purely semantic but proves to be quite important. Today’s experts use—often indiscriminately-a variety of terms: “antiutopia”, "negative utopia", “dystopia” and “cacotopia”. Meanwhile, the history of Utopia proves that these terms denote two different phenomena, and to confuse them means to distort the picture.

p There are books which, unlike Utopias with their image of a desired world, picture an undesirable world whose emergence must be prevented. It is very important that such works may accept the Utopian quest, Utopian ideals 171 and principles. These works are negative Utopias, or dystopias ("bad place" in Greek). “Cacotopia” is synonymous with “dystopia”.

p But aside from these there are books which not only describe an undesirable world but also link its emergence to the very attempts to construct and implement a utopia. These books dispute and even negate utopia; they are antiutopias. One may debate which term should denote which phenomenon, but it is imperative to distinguish between them.

p A negative utopia criticizes deviations from progress as seen by the Utopians. And if its denunciations do deal a glancing blow to progress, it contains no radical negation of the latter. It is perhaps for this reason that a negative, often satyrical, utopia could exist side by side with a Utopia within one and the same book. Conversely, antiutopia is a more or less pronounced negation of the very notion of progress, of the very striving to improve the world. And so the two phenomena differ quite substantially; to ignore this means to oversimplify the history of utopia, of the struggle of ideas and ideals.

p The "parallel stream" Manuel refers to is made up not by antiutopias but by the negative utopia which was born simultaneously with utopia. And the works he mentions belong to the class of the negative utopia. Naturally, even some classical philosophers were skeptical of the attempts to improve man and society. But this skepticism could crystallize in the form of an antiutopia only given certain conditions which could not arise before it became clear that historical progress had a contradictory nature and that a striving to realize a utopia may entail far from pleasant consequences. This happened in the 20th century.

p Some scholars who admit that antiutopia is a product of our times believe that it is rooted in the advances of science and technology. According to George Kateb, " antiutopianism ... is a crystallization of a number of ideas, attitudes, opinions and sentiments that have existed for centuries. And it is nothing but the development of technology and the natural sciences that is responsible for the crystallization that has taken place".  [171•1  Other authors (Fred Polak) 172 look for the roots of antiutopia in the political history of the modern age.  [172•1 

p Although in both cases authors speak of phenomena which have a bearing on the process under discussion, their approach appears too simplistic and superficial. Certainly, scientific and technological progress and political crises both are bound to influence the emergence of antiutopia. But the main causes were in-depth historical processes, above all the general crisis of capitalism and all its consequences. This crisis signified a gradual decomposition of bourgeois civilization which inevitably produced qualitative changes in bourgeois historical consciousness and led to disillusionment in “reason” and “progress” among certain social groups who felt they were now treading shaky ground. Before the very spirit of social utopianism (and not merely specific Utopian ideas) was called into question, before the striving to attain social perfection encountered a skeptical reaction, before philosophers rejected Utopia, progress and perfection on the grounds that the search for perfection led to destruction, bourgeois civilization had to enter a period of protracted but total and irreversible crisis.

p In 1917 Pavel Novgorodtsev, a prominent Russian jurist and professor at Moscow University, wrote in his book On the Social Ideal: "Utopian hopes to find an ideal form of social organization have foundered. There is no political means which could give people immutable perfection of life once and for all.

p “(1) We must abandon the notion of finding an Open Sesame which would show us the absolute form and point the way to paradise on Earth.

p “(2) We must abandon the hope that in the near or distant future we might reach a blissful and happy epilogue of the earlier drama, the last and concluding period of history....

p “The experience of the 19th century has undermined the faith in the miraculous power of political change, in its ability to usher in a heavenly reign of truth and good.”  [172•2 

p This idea was subsequently echoed in different ways by many authors and philosophers, particularly Nicolas 173 Berdiaeff who expressed it almost aphoristically. "Utopias," this Russian idealist wrote in his essay "Democracy, Socialism and Theocracy", "seem very much more realizable than we had formerly supposed. And now we find ourselves face to face with a question which is painful in quite a new way: How can we avoid their actual realization?

p “...Utopias are capable of realization. Life moves towards Utopia. And perhaps a new age is beginning in which the intellectuals and the cultured class will dream of methods of avoiding Utopia and of returning to a society that is not Utopian, that is less ‘perfect’ and more free.”  [173•1 

p This was not simply one of the catch phrases for which Berdiaeff had a penchant, but an extremely succinct expression of the social mood certain strata of bourgeois society experienced upon entering a crisis; it was their social and political credo and, most importantly, the very essence of antiutopia. It was no accident that Aldous Huxley, an author of rare sensitivity to social change, used this quotation from Berdiaeff as the epigraph for his Brave New World.

p Antiutopia expresses the crisis of historical hope, and the antiutopian is usually a disenchanted Utopian. He would have loved to support the values extolled by many generations of Utopians, all the more so because he himself harbors a Utopian project which he hides guiltily. But the antiutopian no longer believes-is afraid to believethat it is possible to create a free, happy and prosperous society. He is not only a disillusioned but also a despairing Utopian for he is convinced that any attempt to put Utopia into practice will lead to directly opposite results. And so he is against Utopias and Utopian experiments as such.

p Critics of antiutopia justly blame it for some of the hostility toward Utopia which emerged and became fairly widespread in the West in the 20th century and which contributed to the banishment of Utopia from culture and political practice and to the spread of pessimistic, if not apocalyptic sentiments. I believe, however, that a purely negative attitude to antiutopia is as unjustified as the latter’s purely negative attitude to Utopia. After all, antiutopia is right in its assertion that attempts to translate Utopia into 174 practice very often lead to arbitrary and violent action against the laws of history, against nature and man and that therefore Utopia should be rejected as a practical way of transforming society. Essentially, antiutopia soberly, albeit sometimes in extravagant terms, states the repeatedly proven fact that an arbitrarily constructed (and for this reason “perfect”) model of society can usually be implemented only contrary to the natural course of developments-that is, also arbitrarily. Marx and Engels were well aware of this, and they resolutely opposed the practice of approaching social transformation as the realization of ideal (or perfect) projects constructed a priori. The founders of scientific communism invariably stressed that workers "have no ideals to realize, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant".  [174•1 

p But the distinctly negative attitude of Marx and Engels to attempts at implementing social Utopias in practice did not prevent them from appreciating the role of individual Utopians in the shaping of socialist consciousness and culture and from making use of their legacy in elaborating a scientific approach to history.

p When an antiutopian banishes utopia not only from the sphere of sociopolitical practice but also from the spiritual and intellectual sphere, trying to dismiss it as a phenomenon of culture, of consciousness, he, perhaps unwittingly, turns against the humanitarian principles, although their defense was perhaps the prime reason for the crusade against utopia launched by many other antiutopians. As a result, antiutopianism emerges as a sort of positivist tyranny which is no less dangerous than the tyranny of a Utopian.

p Let us now return to America and trace the genesis of the critical attitude to utopia.

p In the opinion of some American literary critics, historians and sociologists, U.S. authors anticipated Yevgeni Zamiatin, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, the classical threesome of European antiutopians, by more than a quarter century. They hold that the pioneers of this genre were Jack London, the author of The Iron Heel, and Ignatius 175 Donnelly, a public figure almost forgotten today but very popular in the late 19th century, the author of several novels, including Caesar’s Column.

p “Obviously, Caesar’s Column, though possessing definite characteristics of the Utopian romance," W. B. Rideout, an American literary critic, writes, "stands more in the tradition of antiutopia, that tradition which has become characteristic of our own violent century and which has produced such books as Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984. As a novel it is certainly inferior to either of these two; yet all three are alike in being extrapolations into the future of major forces that each author sees operating in sinister fashion at the present time.”  [175•1  M. Fellman, a U.S. historian, is even more outspoken in his claim that Caesar’s Column, the peak of Donnelly’s literary effort, marked the death of utopia and the birth of antiutopia.  [175•2 

p Before taking up Huxley’s and Orwell’s novels, one should examine these assessments of works by American authors. It is not a matter of precedence, for precedence here is nothing to be proud of, but of historical accuracy. There is no doubt that The Iron Heel and especially Caesar’s Column, as well as several books written in imitation of these novels, recorded new tendencies in American social consciousness and a new stage in the development of the Utopian tradition and in the attitude to it. But was Donnelly really the first antiutopian and his novel, the first antiUtopia? Or, to put it differently, did the United States of the late 19th century really develop conditions which gave rise to the antiutopian phenomenon?

p Caesar’s Column is set in the United States of 1988. Gabriel Weltstein, a Swiss colonist from Africa, arrives in New York and witnesses the collapse of civilization, the inevitable result, the author emphasizes, of developments over the past 100 years.

p “There was a golden age once in America—an age of liberty; of comparatively equal distribution of wealth; of democratic institutions.”  [175•3  The United States used to be a country of "universal justice" which meant "equal 176 opportunities for all men and a repression by law of those gigantic abnormal selfishnesses which ruin millions for the benefit of thousands". However, several shortsighted and selfish generations gradually spoiled it all. "Now we have but the shell and semblance of all that. We are a Republic only in name; free only in forms.... The very assertions, constantly dinned in our ears by the hireling newspapers, that we are the freest people on earth, serve only to make our slavery more bitter and unbearable.”  [176•1  The social classes have become sharply polarized and so have power and wealth, which have come alienated from the people and usurped by a brutal and mercenary plutocracy led by a handful of international bankers, with a few score dictating to the entire nation. "This is the real center of government of the American continent; all the rest is sham and form. The men who meet here [in the home of the Prince of Cabano, the leader of the plutocrats] determine the condition of all the hundreds of millions who dwell on the great land revealed to the world by Columbus. Here political parties, courts, juries, governors, legislatures, congresses, presidents are made and unmade; and from this spot they are controlled and directed in the discharge of their multiform functions. The decrees formulated here are echoed by a hundred thousand newspapers, and many thousands of orators; and they are enforced by an uncountable army of soldiers, servants, tools, spies, and even assassins. He who stands in the way of the men who assemble here perishes. He who would oppose them takes his life in his hands.”  [176•2  The plutocracy wallows in luxury, while at the opposite pole the workers are deprived of all rights and are doomed to poverty. Mistrust, suspicion and hatred are rampant. People "are suspicious, and properly so, of strangers, and even more so of each other".  [176•3 

p Donnelly paints a frightening picture of the degradation of the personality which afflicts this society at all levels. "The women, young and old, were much alike in some particulars ... their jaws ... were firmly developed, square like a soldier’s.... The most peculiar features were their eyes. They had none of that soft, gentle, benevolent look ... 177 their looks were bold, penetrating, immodest....

p “The chief features in the expression of the men were incredulity, unbelief, cunning, observation, heartlessness."  [177•1  Here is the portrait of the leaders of the Brotherhood of Destruction set up by the desperate workers to fight against the system: "It was an extraordinary assemblage that greeted my eyes; a long array of stern faces, dark and toilhardened, with great, broad brows and solemn or sinister eyes....

p “The large heads at one end of the line were matched by the large heads at the other. A great injustice, or series of wrongs, working through many generations, had wrought out results that in some sense duplicated each other. Brutality above had produced brutality below; cunning there was answered by cunning here; cruelty in the aristocrat was mirrored by cruelty in the workman. High and low were alike victims—unconscious victims—of a system.”  [177•2 

p Donnelly goes to great lengths to convince the reader that the situation in the America of 1988 is irreversible and can no longer be corrected by reform—it’s too late! The only way out is an uprising of those below who would be glad to rebuild the world and to restore its former virtues but who are unable to perform anything constructive. The only thing they can do is to bring about destruction, chaos, anarchy and death. "The rude and begrimed insurgents ... do not mean to destroy the world; they will reform it—redeem it. They will not make it a world where there shall be neither toil nor oppression. But, poor fellows! Their arms are more potent for evil than their brains for good. They are omnipotent to destroy; they are powerless to create.”  [177•3 

p That is precisely what finally happens in 1988. The people rise. "Like a huge flood, long dammed up, turbulent, turbid, muddy, loaded with wrecks and debris, the gigantic mass broke loose, full of foam and terror, and flowed in every direction. A foul and brutal and ravenous multitude it was....

p “A sullen roar filled the air as this human cyclone moved onward, leaving only wrecks behind it....

178

p “That which it took the world ten thousand years to create has gone in an hour.”  [178•1 

p Having exterminated the plutocrats (together with a multitude of innocent people) the insurgents finally turn against one another. Caesar Lomellini, the president of the Brotherhood of Destruction, who distinguished himself only by erecting a column of 250,000 corpses over which cement was poured, is assassinated. The vice-president, having stolen 100 million dollars, flees by airship to Palestine where he "proposes to make himself king in Jerusalem, and, with his vast wealth, re-establish the glories of Solomon, and revive the ancient splendors of the Jewish race, in the midst of the ruins of the world". The dream of the insurgents was "to create order out of chaos and reconstruct society. But that dream is past".  [178•2 

p Donnelly’s novel is valuable to the sociologist and the historian above all because it is a concentrated expression of the author’s fears, of the trends, in the development of American society at the end of the 19th century which, in his view, should be stopped so as to prevent the destruction of America and of civilization as a whole. Donnelly maintains that all evil is rooted not in private property (Bellamy’s view) but first and foremost in inequality and concentration of wealth; not in the fact that a bourgeoisie exists but in the concentration of power and the weakening of America’s democratic institutions, in the excessive gap between the classes and in the fact that entrepreneurs and bankers rob ordinary people, producers. Caesar’s Column expresses the disillusionment and alarm of the Utopian advocate of a “farmers’ America", his warning to the ruling class to the effect that if it does not move fast to counteract the nascent antiegalitarianist trends and if it does not heed his advice, revolution will be inevitable and will destroy all.

p Like many 19th-century authors, Donnelly ingenuously explains in his foreword what his novel is all about and who it is addressed to: "I seek to preach into the ears of the able and rich and powerful the great truth that neglect of the sufferings of their fellows, indifference to the great bond of brotherhood which lies at the base of Christianity, 179 and blind, brutal and degrading worship of mere wealth, must-given time and pressure enough-eventuate in the overthrow of society and the destruction of civilization.”  [179•1 

p Donnelly, however, believes that the situation can still be salvaged, that all is not lost. His pessimism and criticism are directed not at Utopians who try to squeeze society into the rigid framework of their constructs but at specific social and political groups and their policies. His position differs greatly from the stand taken by Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and other antiutopians of the 1930s and 1940s.

p Donnelly openly admitted his dislike of Bellamy and the socialist ideas he advocated, a fact directly reflected in Caesar’s Column. Viewed from this angle, his novel was not only a negative Utopia but also a counterutopia (in relation to Looking Backward). Still, it remained alien to the antiutopian tradition for which the necessary conditions did not exist in 19th-century America—the very conditions which arose in Europe after World War I, after the fascists seized power in Italy and Germany—in other words, after developments which led critical consciousness to face problems America had not been ready to contemplate at the time. In the late 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries the United States stopped at the negative Utopia, although the latter was represented not only by clumsy pieces like Joaquin Miller’s Destruction of Gotham but also by serious works like Jack London’s Iron Heel, let alone It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis.

p While Donnelly warns against a plutocracy seizing power and, in the final analysis, against a revolutionary explosion, Jack London, taking a different stand (defending socialist ideas and advocating rule of labor) and writing at a different time (1908), warns against the danger of oligarchy and counterrevolution. Anthony Meredith wrote in his foreword to the novel: "The Iron Heel... we feel descending upon and crushing mankind.”  [179•2  Like Donnelly, London tells the reader directly (but not so naively) that his goal is to warn of a danger that can be prevented. "What else than Feudalism could have followed upon the breakdown of that great 180 centralized governmental machine known as the Roman Empire? Not so, however, with the Iron Heel. In the orderly procedure of social evolution there was no place for it. It was not necessary, and it was not inevitable. It must always remain the great curiosity of history—a whim, a fantasy, an apparition, a thing unexpected and undreamed; and it should serve as a warning to those rash political theorists of today who speak with certitude of social processes."  [180•1  According to the novel, the Iron Heel finally (after 700 years of oligarchy domination) loses power to the labor movement which wins a worldwide victory. But the terrible nightmare of seven hundred years hangs, like the sword of Damocles, over the American people.

p It Can’t Happen Here appeared during the 1936 election campaign, when Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal supporters clashed with their rivals, Huey Long among them, a man many democratically inclined Americans charged could become a dictator of the fascist type. In his novel, Lewis warned of the danger of fascism in America which could lead to a new war, destroy democratic institutions, suppress personal freedoms and do many other things fascism was capable of. Much of this was obvious enough from the German experience.

p Lewis describes what could happen in the United States if the voters believed demagogues like Senator Berzelius (Buzz) Windrip (copied, in the unanimous opinion of the critics, from Huey Long, although he is mentioned in the book by name, as a different person) and helped him to become President of the United States. In his election speeches, Windrip spoke of a "Paradise of democracy in which, with the old political machines destroyed, every humblest worker would be king and ruler".  [180•2 

p After his arrival in the White House, Windrip proclaims a "real New Deal" which essentially means that "he should have complete control of legislation and execution, and the Supreme Court be rendered incapable of blocking anything that it might amuse him to do".  [180•3  A personal dictatorship is established in the United States, all parties except "the 181 American Corporate State and Patriotic Party" are banned, labor unions are outlawed, censorship is introduced, labor concentration camps are set up to "help combat unemployment", and a reign of terror begins.

p Lewis was no pessimist. Like Donnelly who believed that a plutocracy could be barred from power, like London who held that the rule of an oligarchy could be prevented, Sinclair Lewis was convinced that America could turn away from the German path if it voted for Roosevelt. This was obviously the immediate political goal of the author who was concerned over the future of America as a democracy.

And so one can conclude that neither Donnelly nor London nor Lewis nor their imitators approached antiutopia. They warned their country and the rest of the world of the coming danger but, I repeat, believed that democracy, freedom and other values they cherished could be saved. They did not oppose Utopia because they still had faith in the very idea of progress and in its tangible results.