by Philipp Kneis
Our desire for utopian solutions in times of crisis will prove incompatible with democracy, as history and political theory have shown.
Dr. Philipp Kneis grew up in Communist East Germany and now teaches cultural and political theory at Oregon State University and the University of Tübingen. He blogs at erraticattempts.com.
In times of crisis we seem to long for utopia, or at least for utopian solutions. This should not be surprising today, especially in the face of pandemics, wars and climate change: The desire for something perfect, for something that will solve our problems, that can give us hope and make us dream for a better future, seems attractive even if it is unreachable. But why must it be unreachable? Can we not maybe will it into being?
Can we not maybe design a world that is better, that is more just, that is more fulfilling? Can’t we turn a maybe into a certainty?
And yet, this lure of certainty is deeply wrought with problems. When are we ever not experiencing crisis somewhere? We tend to eulogize the past, waxing nostalgic over periods of time that seem idyllic especially when attention to detail is lacking. Granted, some periods of history have undoubtedly been darker than others. But crises can typically be found if we are only willing to look, and they can be used — and abused — to dismantle existing systems permanently.
The utilization of a crisis for political purposes has inspired both serious and authoritarian reflections about sovereignty and the state of exception. That term was coined by Carl Schmitt, who would later be known as one of the leading Nazi jurists. The Reichstag fire then became the perfect example of exercising sovereignty and ending the last vestiges of Germany’s first democracy, the Weimar Republic. But the principle is older. The Roman Republic occasionally laid power into the hands of a dictator for a short period in order to confront a serious political crisis. This went well for a while, but eventually attracted the attentions of more authoritarian personalities, until Caesar declared himself perpetual dictator, and a thankful Octavian, turned Augustus, buried the Roman Republic. Napoleon, who revived the Roman Republic under the dominance of the French Republic, eventually seized upon the crisis of the French Revolution with comparable imperial intentions.
Any crisis or emergency can be useful for the curtailing of democratic rights, and for the end of the separation of powers and checks and balances. We saw a revival of Schmitt after the terror attacks of 9/11. But we are also hearing calls for a radical transformation of our existing systems in the face of contemporary crises. Can climate change be fought successfully by democratic capitalist systems, or does the climate emergency, intertwined with an increase of immigration, need stronger government to push through policies unwelcome to many citizens? We have seen a backlash against green measures both in the United States and Europe. There has also been the proliferation of ideas of “illiberal democracy,” and strange alliances between nominally democratic parties and autocratic governments such as Russia. Some of these anti-democratic ideas have a long history, and they are as old as both the struggle for the ideal political system and the critique of democracy itself, going back to Ancient Greece.
Plato famously struggled with the question of the ideal state. We have to credit Thomas More with coining the term utopia itself (with the deepest irony and double meaning), but it is Plato who defined the genre of utopian literature both mythologically and theoretically.
He describes a version of an ideal state in his The Republic (Politeia) on a philosophical level. But then, in the Timaios and Critias dialogues, he also gave us the story of an idealized ancient Athens fighting an external enemy, the corrupt sea empire of Atlantis. Frustratingly, Plato does not finish his story, which has not stopped it from influencing countless speculations thereafter. Is the ideal Athens described in his Critias the same as in his The Republic? If so, then the name of his dialogue may point to a group of 30 Tyrants including Socrates’ eponymous student, a relative of Plato’s, that tried to reshape democratic Athens in the time of crisis after the Peloponnesian War. The Thirty wanted to rebuild Athens from the ground up. The plan included expulsions, population limits, and the setting up of a rule of the “best”, the aristoi. It stands to reason that The Republic provides the theoretical backbone of that historical moment. All three dialogues talk about versions of eugenics, Golden Age mythology, ideal rulers, divinity, souls, and how to create the perfect society to stand the test of time. Plato himself later (in his Laws) seems to have mellowed on the idea of what we today would call — and what Karl Popper has described as — the key example of a totalitarian state.
The totalizing promise of perfection underlies the promise of utopia.
Should we ever be able to design the perfect society, would it not be our moral imperative to keep it as it is?
How would we have to deal with criticism of — by definition — such a perfect and ideal state? Logic would dictate to us the well-known menu of all the untasteful actions performed by governments that are certain of their own perfection. Thus, the key truth of utopia is that it is identical to dystopia, as Thomas More had already recognized in his setting: Someone’s utopia will be someone else’s dystopia, but raising the subject is useful for political criticism. Plato’s The Republic does not allow for critique, dissent, or even poetry. Its rulers tell the lower castes that their suffering is just, because the leaders — the philosopher kings — rule due to a combination of eugenics and meritocracy, in a foreshadowing of Nazi politics. Plato also foreshadows Marx in his critique of property, and Marx famously called for a dictatorship of the proletariat (arguably in reference to the Roman dictator) to bring forth eventually a democratic utopia, which however failed to materialize in history, as we all know. Any perfect “ideal society” clearly seems incompatible with democracy.
Even in fiction, there are only few if any signs of democracy in most if not all utopian visions. Star Wars Episodes I-III retell a familiar story of the destruction of democracy. The rise of Palpatine from Senator of idyllic Naboo to Galactic Emperor seems to draw from Caesar/Augustus, Napoleon, Hitler, and even appears to foreshadow Putin. In a crisis, the state of exception is invoked, and the alleged messiness of the democracy of the Galactic Republic is wiped away to make space for the one ruler who can rule them all, and who claims they can solve all problems and knows how to create an ideal state with a vertical consolidation of power. Star Trek comes closer to showing a democracy, but there is nothing concrete there, and the assumed utopian nature of Federation society is merely that of a post-scarcity society. Nothing is politicized with the exception of scandals and corruption at the highest levels of Federation and Starfleet leadership. Tolkien’s works, which carry some utopian Golden Age elements, famously elevate monarchy.
It seems that utopia and democracy are strange bedfellows.
Many a science fiction author has wisely cautioned against dreaming of workable utopian societies, and democracy almost seems too boring, too mundane to inspire much hope.
Is democracy really able to solve big problems? Are democratic republics really the best forms of government? Francis Fukuyama has claimed such when reflecting on the Hegelian understanding of History, as the history of the discovery of the ideal political system. Such a discovery arguably found its conceptual proof – its end, its telos, its fulfillment – in the victory of the Napoleonic French Republic against the Holy Roman Empire and the Prussian state in 1806. Fukuyama saw a similar moment in 1989/1990 with the defeat of Soviet Socialism / Communism and the vindication of democracy, if not in reality everywhere, then at least conceptually: Even the worst autocratic system by now insists on calling itself somehow democratic or a republic.
But democracy is not a utopia; it is a story of politics which, according to Bismarck, is “the art of the possible”, or for Max Weber is akin to the “slow boring of hard boards.” This sounds a bit less exciting than the complete reimagining of society, but it aims to incorporate citizens into sustainable and workable public policy within a political framework that relies on the participation of all citizens and a clear separation of powers as well as checks and balances preventing authoritarian overreach.
Utopia can merely inspire; only democracy delivers.
This op-ed is part of the Utopia and Democracy series. Op-eds in this series draw on presentations delivered at the conference held under the same title on July 3 to 5, 2024, which was organized by the Utopian Studies Society/Europe and hosted by Zsolt Czigányik, Iva Dimovska, and Daryna Koryagina – members of the Democracy in East Central European Utopianism research group, CEU Democracy Institute – at Central European University’s Budapest campus.
