The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (285 page)

The word has moved gradually from its general sense of ‘usefulness’ to its specific meanings in social science. The first philosopher to use it in the sense of the ability of something to satisfy wishes was
Hume
, and this usage was systematized by the nineteenth-century utilitarians. The cognate meaning in economics, that which leads someone to choose one thing over another, is traced by the
Oxford English Dictionary to
1881, but the concept is far older. In particular, the idea that maximizing one's utility could not be the same thing as maximizing one's income was proved by Daniel Bernoulli in 1738. If they were the same, then anybody offered the opportunity to play the following game would rationally be prepared to pay all the money in the world to play it: A fair coin is tossed repeatedly until it lands for the first time on a head, when the game ends; your prize is two ducats if the coin comes down ‘heads’ on the first throw, four if the first head is on the second throw, eight if on the third throw, and so on. The expected value of this game is infinite, but as Bernoulli observed, nobody would be prepared to pay more than about twenty ducats to play it. This has become known as the ‘St Petersburg paradox’, which Bernoulli resolved by suggesting that the more money we already have, the less we want an extra ducat. This would now be labelled diminishing marginal utility for money.
Therefore when used as a technical term utility has no normative connotations. Utility furniture may be contrasted with beautiful furniture, but maximizing utility is the same as maximizing beauty if beauty is what the subject wants to maximize.

 
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A disposition to embrace the vision of an alternative society from which present social evils have been eradicated and in which there is complete human fulfilment and well- being through the attainment of perfect justice, freedom, equality, and/ or other ideals formulated by the utopia's author. Thomas More gave the name Utopia to the imaginary island in his book of the same name (1516): an island whose social, economic, and political arrangements were marked by a high degree of communism, undoubtedly inspired by More's own religious (Catholic) convictions and his monastic ideals. The imaginary society described by More was both a ‘good place’ (from the Greek
‘eutopia’
) and a no-place (or
‘outopia’
) in the sense that it did not actually exist.
Before More there had been a long tradition of speculation on the form and nature of an ideal human community: a tradition going back to
Greek political thought
(especially in the writings of
Plato
) and further developed in Christian doctrine (see, for example, the account of a good society in Saint
Augustine's
neo-Platonic
City of God
). From Plato to More the literary utopia served essentially as a way of articulating a moral sense of the ideal, and in this way the failings of real human societies and their political arrangements could be put into perspective. Often descriptions of utopia deliberately ‘inverted’ the real (e.g. private ownership of property) by putting forward an opposing principle (e.g. economic communism). In literary terms the effect of such contrasts was often highly satirical, as in More's celebrated description of gold and silver being used for the making of Utopian chamber pots.
The artistic and scientific flowering of the Renaissance gave renewed impetus to utopian thought, and authors such as Campanella (
The City of the Sun
, 1602) and Bacon (
New Atlantis
, 1627) began to inject a new spirit of modernity into political theory by describing societies transformed by the application of knowledge and economic-technological development. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the utopian impulse found its way into movements of social protest, revolutionary sects and parties, and into the new all-embracing political ideologies of the age of the industrial and democratic revolutions. In particular, the new socialist doctrines of the early nineteenth century—articulated by
Saint-Simon
,
Fourier
,
Owen
, Cabet , and others—were widely received as gospels of salvation by the industrial working classes in their struggle for liberation from the dehumanizing and exploitative effects of capitalist industrialism. The utopian socialists pointed to a new, future social order of perfect harmony, peace, and justice, often describing in considerable detail how such a society would be organized, whether on the level of a small-scale community (Fourier, Owen) or at a national and even international level (Saint-Simon and his disciples, and Cabet ).
Marx
and
Engels
sought to draw a strict distinction between utopian socialism and their own scientific socialism. They clearly believed that their utopian predecessors had put too much faith in reason and enlightenment as instruments of change in the direction of socialism, and stressed the importance of understanding the dynamics of class conflict in society and the need for revolutionary struggle as a means of overthrowing the existing social order. However, in terms of their own vision of a future socialist, and eventually communist, society,
Marx
and Engels , and indeed the whole tradition of modern
Marxism
, can be seen to have embraced a strong conviction that the future would see the full realization of ideals of human liberation and equality. In this sense, the extent to which Marxism can be seen to embody utopian aspirations is a highly controversial question.
It is not only socialists and communists who have produced utopias in modern times. Following Karl
Mannheim's
analysis (
in Ideology and Utopia
) it is important to recognize that both liberal and conservative thought have found expression in utopian aspirations and (often) fully-fledged blueprints for the future. And today we must add the strongly utopian thrust of much contemporary environmentalist thought (Green utopianism), feminism (which has produced a rich literature of fictional utopias), and some social-scientific theories of post-industrial society. At the same time the strongly progressivist assumptions behind much utopian thinking in the nineteenth century have encountered widespread opposition in the twentieth century, and utopian blueprints and ideals have been widely rejected by their critics in a spirit of anti-utopian reaction. The literary dystopia—that is, a work deliberately seeking to reveal the awful consequences of trying to implement a rational blueprint for utopia—has exercised great persuasive power in the last half century or so. Aldous Huxley's
Brave New World
(1932) and George
Orwell's
Nineteen Eighty-Four
(1949) are two of the most widely read accounts of possible ‘nightmare’ worlds of the future in which utopian ideas and principles have been put into effect through all-powerful dictatorial states.
The anxiety about utopianism in practice leading to totalitarianism has clearly been strengthened by the twentieth-century experience of Stalinism and fascism, and the inhumanity of the supposedly rational bureaucratic state. However, utopianism does not necessarily lead to an advocacy of the all-powerful state and extreme forms of collectivism. As Robert Nozick demonstrated in his
Anarchy, State and Utopia
(1974), it is possible to justify a minimalist state and extreme libertarian individualism on the basis of utopian arguments.
KT 

 
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Name given by John Rawls in his
Theory of Justice
(1971) to a mental device to enable individuals to formulate a standard of justice whilst remaining ignorant of their place in or value to their society. Rawls's social contract is that which he argues rational individuals would agree to if they were each placed behind a veil of ignorance. The veil permits them to know ‘the general facts of human society’ such as ‘political affairs and the principles of economic theory…whatever general facts affect the choice of the principles of justice’. It prevents them from knowing any particular facts about themselves: ‘no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status…his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence and strength…his conception of the good …, or…his aversion to risk or liability to optimism or pessimism.’ Rawls argues that such people would agree on his principles of justice, including the controversial
difference principle
. Critics of Rawls argue: (1) that people behind the veil of ignorance would not in fact choose the rules Rawls says they would as being just; and (2) that even if they did, that is no independent argument for the rightness of such rules. This latter point echoes a classic attack on social contract theory by
Hume
.

 
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