Manuel, Frank E. 1965. Toward a Psychological History of Utopias. Daedalus 94(2): 293-322. [JSTOR]
Uncounted utopian worlds of this character are being conjured up every day, though few of them are ever set in print. But if one avoids solipsistic manifestations and restricts oneself primarily to those utopias which have won a measure of public acceptance (and become at least folie à deux), the maincurrents of utopian feeling, the dreams shared widely enough to be social utopias with a general history, can be identified. Some dreams express so forcefully a poignant longing of masses of men that their words reverberate for centuries. (Manuel 1965: 293)
Not all utopias are created equal. Some are more equal than others.
Thomas More's book is ex definitione a utopia, but what else to include under this rubric may be subject to debate. My attitude is latitudinarian and ecumenical. The conception encompasses "extraordinary voyages," moon-travelers' reports, fanciful descriptions of lost islands, ideal constitutions, advice to princes on the most perfect government, novels built around life in a utopian society; the works of men like Owen, Saint-Simon, and Fourier, who surely would have spurned the epithet utopian which Karl Marx, in the wake of Louis Reybaud, thrust upon them, and also of Marx himself, who tried so hard to differentiate his vision from theirs; and finally a group of modern philosophical psychologists and biologists who would be ambivalent about the term, as well as a number of contemporary [|] philosophers of history who have ventured to speculate about the future nature of man. (Manuel 1965: 293-294)
Olaf Stapledon is clearly within this latter camp of "philosophical psychologists" speculating on "the future nature of man".
Bacon and Campanella, Andreae and Morelly, Fénelon and Condorcet, Restif de la Bretonne and Edward Bellamy, Wells and Hertzka, Wilhelm Reich and Norman Brown, Fromm and Marcuse, Maslow and Julian Huxley, J. B. S. Haldane and Teilhard de Chardin all find a place on the roster of utopia - some, to be sure, against their will. (Manuel 1965: 294)
Johann Valentin Andreae, Étienne-Gabriel Morelly, François Fénelon, Marquis de Condorcet, Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne, Edward Bellamy, Theodor Hertzka, Wilhelm Reich, Norman Oliver Brown, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, J. B. S. Haldane, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
While the responses of hundreds of utopias written in a Christian Western world since the sixteenth century have something in common, they may also be regarded as psychological documents that significantly reveal the sensibility of the particular historical societies in which they appeared. (Manuel 1965: 294)
A grounded approach.
The anti-utopia 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; and even in the body of many a dead-pan utopia, a mischievous little imp occasionally raises its head to debunk. But such intrusions from the real world, the satirical utopia or what has been variously called the dystopia, anti-utopia, or contra-utopia, and excluded from our inquiry. The same applies to the weird, biologically transformed supermen invented for Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race (1871), and Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men (1930), another subject passed over in order to preserve Thomas More's humanist frame. (Manuel 1965: 295)
"When your writers romance of the future, they too easily imagine a progress toward some kind of Utopia, in which beings like themselves live in unmitigated bliss among circumstances perfectly suited to a fixed human nature. I shall not describe any such paradise." (Stapledon 1937: 11)
The first group might be called utopias of calm felicity, running roughly from More to the age of the French Revolution; the second comprises the dynamic socialist and other historically determinist utopias, which span the greater part of the nineteenth century; and the last are the psychological and philosophical utopias of the twentieth century, for which I borrow from Professor Abraham H. Maslow the term "eupsychia." Throughout this essay the new themes in the utopian dreaming of each period - the most recent fashions in utopia - will be pushed to the fore and highlighted, in full awareness that hackneyed motifs from earlier times are constantly being reiterated in the background. (Manuel 1965: 295)
Campanella's is definitely one of "calm felicity". Socialist and historically determinist utopias I'm not that aware of. The latter comment can be marked down under "style growth" - the new does not destroy the old - or, why not be obtuse about it, permanent dynamic synchrony.
If a broad definition of utopia is accepted, a headcount would show a vast increase in the number of utopias produced in the last fifty years, but most of them are mere mastication. (Manuel 1965: 296)
Brutal.
Through the end of the eighteenth century this stereotype predominated in hundreds of derivative works, for the most part ephemeral, in which typical literary elements were the isolated island, the shipwrecked or adventurous sailor, and the systematic description upon his return home of a government-controlled economy, benign social customs and manners, and a peaceful, tolerant religion. (Manuel 1965: 296)
Socialism, I tells ya.
In most pre-Revolutionary utopias in the Morean tradition, unbridled acquisition of property is identified as the chief, if not the sole, source of dissension. There is a presumption that with the abolition of monopolies of property and with the establishment of some sort of communism or commonalty the antagonistic spirit, the cause of evil, no longer would find significant expression in society. It would simply vanish. "In this they establish three good qualities of man: equality, the desire for peace, and the contempt for riches, as the world is tortured primarily with the opposites of these," wrote Johann Valentin Andreae in the Christianopolis (1619). (Manuel 1965: 297)
Yearning "to have an unstudied contempt of, and hostility to glory, wealth, and the like" ((Iamblichus 1818: 36).
In More's Utopia a viewing in the nude of prospective mates in the presence of elderly witnesses avoids the subsequent discovery of secret faults and keeps the marriage secure. (Manuel 1965: 297)
It would certainly avoid situations like that one guy in whatever century it was who married a lovely young lady and upon their wedding night discovered that the parts that women have under their undergarments did not fit his expectation of what was supposed to be down there, and, disgusted, never touched her again (while still remaining married and keeping her from finding a proper mate).
In the works written after More there is no consensus on absolute equality, and in late eighteenth-century utopias published in the wake of Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality there is a tendency to distinguish between "natural" inequalities, which are allowed some measure of extra reward, and those alien inequalities introduced by "civilization"; but gross inequality is not countenanced. (Manuel 1965: 298)
Making a note to read Rousseau's discourse after More's Utopia.
In many pre-revolutionary utopias an exception from the rule of equality is made for those with an inclination toward studies. Philosophers and scientists arepreferred as leaders, but their natural superiority is not envied, neither does it always yield them substantially greater material benefit than the work of a farmer or [|] an artisan. Perhaps there is inequality of esteem - occasionally special memorials for scientific benefactors are erected in the marketplace - but in many utopias there is no essential difference of economic condition. (Manuel 1965: 298-299)
Most likely a relic of Plato's philosopher-kings.
Though not regarded as a source of great pain, work is nonetheless kept a ta minimum in order to allow ample social time for the [|] awakening of other salutary human interests such as learning. (Manuel 1965: 299-300)
There's amazing brevity in the expression "social time" - time allocated for socialization.
Perhaps the greatest distinction between the sixteenth- and the eighteenth-century utopias lies in the redreaming of ideal sexual and marital hapiness. As the Christian character of utopia began to wear off, the utopian fantasy allowed itself more and more to envision a wider gamut of sexual relationship-. Particularly after the discovery of the Blessed Isles of the Southern Seas and the publication of travelers' reports - many, of course, written in Paris garrets - a flood of utopias depicting various exotic forms of marriage inundated Europe. (Manuel 1965: 302)
This tendency achieves its pinnacle in Stapledon's multi-sexual group.
About the time of the French Revolution, [...] a new historical consciousness epitomized in a theory of inevitable, endless progressions; a conception of past - and hence at least the probability of future - biological metamorphoses of the species; a new definition (or a revival of an old one) of human nature that cast doubt upon the hithero unchallenged Greco-Christian belief in the superiority of man's rational over his passionate and manual-administrative capacities; [...] (Manuel 1965: 303)
A premonition.
And vulgar expositions of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Marx, and Comte make it appears that their ultimate worldly telos is fixed and codified. Comparison with the earlier examples of utopia, however, immediately points up their unique quality: virtually all the great nineteenth-century utopias have continued metamorphoses built into their very frame; they are open-ended. (Manuel 1965: 304)
Change enters the scene.
August Comte's portrayal of humanity-to-be in the second volume of the Système de Politique Positive - usually forgotten - predicted a complete turning-away from preoccupation with rationalistic science and technology once nourishment for the maintenance of life could be provided without work and inhaled as odors. But this dawn of a world of pure love and play does not inaugurate a static utopia, since Comte foresees a ceaseless extension of the dimensions of human emotiveness and its expression. (Manuel 1965: 305)
There are frail traces of this in Stapledon's imagination of the distant future, especially in the Third Men, for example.
Among the Saint-Simonians, utopia was based on three biological types whose Platonic origins are obvious: the rationalist, the emotive, and the motor. (Manuel 1965: 307)
Another minute variation in a seemingly endless series of such variations.
Since work without love was a psychological burden, a pain to be eradicated from utopia, Fourier developed the mechanism for making labor "attractive," a free expression of the whole self, never divorced from erotic inclinations. You only work with those you love; and you may have as many different work patterns as are congruent with the intricate network of your love relationships. Appropriate provision is made for the specialized psychic needs and desires of each stage of the life-cycle. Since all desires are natural and all have rights to satisfaction, Fourier's utopia operates without any concept of repression. This pathetic little bourgeois salesman may have preserved the idea of unequal returns on investment in the shares of phalanstery, but the poorest man there led a highly stimulated oral and genital existence. (Manuel 1965: 307)
A highly stimulated genital existence. Damn, what a sequence of words.
Where More insisted on continent adequacy, Fourier dreamed of progressively greater pleasurable excitements. The gentle, restrained converse among persons in the older utopias will not suffice the romantics. Fourier widened the dimensions of utopia beyond anything that had bee ndreamed of before, and in retrospect he emerges as the greatest utopian after More. (Manuel 1965: 308)
I should return to reading more about Fourier. Such a fascinating visioneer.
In general, in Marx's manuscripts of the 1840's the utopian elements had been more fulsomely articulated, and he foresaw a rich and varied sensate life that has distinct Fourierist overtones. He voiced antagonism to the occupational specialization resulting from the division of labor because it entailed a deformation of personality and an impairment of human faculties. In the fifties he explicitly used the term "self-actualization of the individual." Though the concept of alienation is primarily an economic one in Marx, on occasion it does have the psychological sense that some contemporary commentators have made central to his thought. The elimination of alienated labor, whatever its meaning, was part of his utopia. Communism would represent a regaining of personality, the reintegration and the return of man to himself, the transcendence of human self-alienation or self-estrangement. In the ultimate sense, idleness - not work - was the goal of the Marxist utopia, as it was of the Comtean. (Manuel 1965: 309)
This I noticed even in my own limited readings of Marx in a course dedicated to the philosophy of alienation.
The initial impact of Darwinism called forth a spate of imaginative new worlds representing the activities of a creature who once was man in successive future stages of his biological evolution - Stapledon has eighteen of these periods. Such writings - often in novel form - are for the most part negative, or at best ambivalent, utopias. The loathsome species whose cold aspect and newly acquired physical-scientific powers terrify such residual humans as they encounter hardly belong in a humanist utopia. (Manuel 1965: 310)
A rather dim view of Stapledon's oeuvre.
The German romantic idea of a leap into a higher state of consciousness, a rather metaphysical concept, is replaced by an assertion of psychosocial evolution that purports to have roots in the sciences of anthropology, paleontology, and biology, broadly interpreted of course. Teilhard de Chardin has written of a noösphere, a universal belt of psychosocial forces; Julian Huxley, somewhat less Platonic, prefers the term noösystem. Both of them conceive this new world of consciousness to be stage three in the evolution of matter, which has already passed through a historical transformation from the inorganic into the organic. (Manuel 1965: 312)
I should really look into the noösphere - if only to figure out if it had any detectable impact on Juri Lotman's semiosphere. The Phenomenon of Man might be a detour worth the effort.
In the twenties, on the eve of the Nazi seizure of power, Reich broke ranks and summoned the German proletariat to abandon their exclusive fixation upon the Marxist sociological interpretation of man's historical destiny and to incorporate much of Freud's psychological theory of genitality into their worldview - "Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis" appeared in Unter dem Banner des Marxismus in 1929. But Reich drew revolutionary consequneces from the doctrine; instead of a future civilization resting on heightened instinctual repression, he preached an apotheosis of the body in all its parts and a worship of the orgasm. Immediate radical sexual emancipation was for him a prerequisite to the achievement of a victorious social revolution; otherwise the potentially militant masses, enthralled by the repressive psychological forces of the Oedipal family structure, would be inhibited from active political rebellion. The two most important nineteenth-century, pre-Marxist utopian schools, the Saint-Simonian and the Fourierist, had intimately coupled free sexuality with work needs, but this bond had been neglected by the Victorian-Kaiser Wilhelm Marxists. Reich's original Sexualpolitik, which of course did more violence to Freud than to Marx, was an authentic return to the older tradition. (Manuel 1965: 315)
Fascinating stuff. If only it didn't involve psychoanalysis.
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