p This concludes my brief review of the American Utopian tradition. I hope I have cited specific examples to prove that Utopia played a substantial part in the emergence of American society, of its social and political values and institutions, of its consciousness and culture.

p Utopia was not only a form of social criticism in America, but also a means of realizing the “promises” set forth in the Declaration of Independence and other basic documents of the American Revolution. In other words, to an American it was not only a challenge but also a legitimate form of the search for new social structures and new values, a form in complete accord with legitimate political practice. And so, while most Utopian projects failed to materialize in actual fact, they did stimulate sociopolitical reform by discharging the function of a pressure mechanism.

p Which way this or that Utopia was trying to push society depended on its specific content, class nature and sociohistorical context. Generally speaking, any Utopia is ambivalent and its social role, contradictory. Comparing the liberal and the Narodnik Utopias which existed in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Lenin noted that although the Utopia of the Russian Narodniks was no more than a romantic dream "about abolishing wage slavery without a class struggle",  [229•1  its actual functions in the then Russia were determined by the alignment of class forces and the priorities of the historical tasks facing the country. "When the issue of economic emancipation becomes as close, immediate and burning for Russia as the issue of political emancipation is today, the utopia of the Narodniks will prove no less harmful than that of the liberals.

p “But Russia is still in the period of her bourgeois and not proletarian transformation; it is not the question of the economic emancipation of the proletariat that has most completely matured, but the question of political liberty, i.e. (in effect), of complete bourgeois liberty.”  [229•2 

p From the viewpoint of the tasks most topical for Russia 230 at that time, the liberal and the Narodnik Utopias discharged, objectively, different social functions, played different historical roles and, consequently, deserved to be evaluated and treated differently on the part of the contemporary political parties and social classes. "...The Narodnik Utopia plays a peculiar historical role. Being a Utopia in regard to the economic consequences that a new division of the land should (and would) have, it is an accompaniment and symptom of the great, mass democratic upsurge of the peasant masses.... The liberal Utopia corrupts the democratic consciousness of the masses. The Narodnik Utopia, which corrupts their socialist consciousness, is an accompaniment, a symptom, and in part even an expression of their democratic upsurge.”  [230•1 

p Obviously, the historical situation obtaining in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries does not resemble the one that existed in America at that time, let alone in subsequent decades. Still, Lenin’s approach to the assessment of Russian Utopias can serve as a methodological key to _r.the understanding of the essence and social role of American Utopias which arose in a different context, a key to the evaluation of Utopian constructs appearing today and about to appear tomorrow.

p In recent years, representatives of different political trends have been increasingly relying on Utopia as a means of social activity in an effort to reawaken mass Utopian consciousness and mold it into a constructive force. Suffice it to recall the famous "Letter to the New Left" C. Wright Mills published as early as 1960: "We are frequently accused of being ‘utopian’—in our criticism and in our proposals.... There is truth in these charges. But must we not ask: what now is really meant by Utopian? And: is not our utopianism a major source of our strength? ‘Utopian’ nowadays I think refers to any criticism or proposal that transcends the up-close milieux of a scatter of individuals: the milieux which men and women can understand directly and which they can reasonably hope directly to change. In this exact sense, our theoretical work is indeed utopian.... If there is to be a politics of a New Left, what needs to be analyzed is the structure of institutions, the foundation of policies. In this sense, both in its criticisms and in its 231 proposals, our work is necessarily structural—and so, for us, just now—utopian.”  [231•1 

p Herbert Marcuse, who tried to supply a theoretical justification of this thesis, wrote: "Today any form of the concrete world, of human life, any transformation of the technical and natural environment is a possibility, and the locus of this possibility is historical. Today we have the capacity to turn the world into hell, and we are well on the way to doing so. We also have the capacity to turn it into the opposite of hell. This would mean the end of Utopia, that is, the refutation of those ideas and theories, that use the concept of utopia to denounce certain socio-historical possibilities.”  [231•2 

p The appeal by C. Wright Mills evoked an unexpectedly wide response in American society-first and foremost, on the part of the left radicals with their extremist claim about the "end of utopia". But liberals, too, responded to it; they saw utopia as a means of solving the social and political contradictions of the modern world. As Daniel Bell wrote in 1962 in his foreword to the new edition of The End of Ideology, "There is now, more than ever, some need for Utopia, in the sense that men need—as they have always needed—some vision of their potential, some manner of fusing passion with intelligence.”  [231•3 

p The 1970s gave a new impetus to utopian quests and experiments. Predictions of a cul-de-sac which mankind was to face in the near future (these forecasts were made by certain Western sociologists and futurologists, especially those involved in the drafting of alarmist reports to the Club of Rome) demanded that a search be undertaken for positive alternatives. The role of social Utopias could appear all the more important because, as some of the alarmists stressed, the difficulties and problems American society encountered in the latter half of the 20th century were to a large measure connected with the absence of "bold projects". "...What the future is like depends on us now, that we are building 232 the future now," wrote Margaret Mead contradicting Herman Kahn and William Irwin Thompson. "And we have to realize that everything we say about the future is going to influence the future. And the picture we draw of the future is, therefore, tremendously important.”  [232•1 

p That was when Alvin Toffler advanced his idea of organizing a "factory of Utopias". This referred to integrated groups in which representatives of different fields of knowledge and culture would, in the course of their communal life, work out systems of alternative values to open new vistas for different social strata. Traditional Utopias, Toffler maintained, pictured simple, static societies sometimes even oriented on the past. But America needed Utopias oriented on the future, on “superindustrialism” or the "third wave" society, as he later called the future.

p But the 1970s were notable not only for the open appeal of left radicals and liberals for Utopian quests and experiments. The dynamics of U.S. politics prove that while crisis developments within American society prompt part of this society to search for Utopian solutions, they also stimulate a policy of protection and restoration which displays a critical attitude to Utopia. This is especially so if champions of this policy gain control of the government, the way it happened in the United States in the early 1980s.

p But even if the antiutopian trend should increase and persist in the coming years, history proves that this will not be "the end of Utopia". First, because the so-called shift to the right, recently discussed so much in the West, is not comprehensive. Besides, the conservatives’ failures to solve America’s pressing problems may, after a while, give rise to a new wave of radicalism and stimulate a new Utopian search. Second, no matter what the conservatives believe about themselves and assert publicly, conservative thinking itself is bound to reproduce Utopian orientations and to generate social ideals and projects that meet all standards of Utopia.

It appears that the contradictions of American society will continue to stimulate both Utopian and antiutopian consciousness simultaneously, urging the rival forces to use all their intellectual resources either for perpetuating bourgeois civilization or for destroying it and building a new society on American soil.