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Mephistopheles
Filthy Animal
Post #33510
Joined: 09 Aug 2005
Posts: 1
Total Words: 455
Average words per post: 455
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Posted: Sun 2006-10-01 01:03
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| Politics: Technocratic Syndicalist |
Country: United States |
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| Utopia |
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The impulse towards utopia is always rooted in dissatisfaction with the perceived status quo, but it has given rise to very different concrete proposals. All utopianists have tended to criticize existing forms of society indirectly by inviting readers to contemplate a hypothetically superior society founded, artificially, by a supremely wise legislator on universalist lines. But their inventors’ perceptions of their societies’ present evils have differed sharply, as have their historical understandings and their moral, political, and social ideals. The solutions offered to the basic problems of construction utopia have therefore varied widely. For instance, although Karl Mannheim’s distinction between “ideology”, the worldview of a dominant class that emphasizes the enduring stability of social arrangements, and “utopia”, which represents the beliefs of a subordinated class or classes, may adequately accommodate some 20th-century utopianists, it cannot do justice to ancient Greek utopianism.
Three common features, however, have typically united all utopiansts across the ages. The first is a unity of form. Utopia constructors tend to opt for the more dramatic, fictional, even fantastic approach to social restructuring exemplified in, say, Plato’s Republic or Laws. Non-utopian social and political reformers, such as Aristotle, do not avoid the notion of the ideal state, but prefer to evaluate the status quo by the standards of general principles of moral and political philosophy and then to devise means of bringing defective practice and ameliorative theory into closer alignment. Second, utopiansts tend to be at one in the totality of their vision, omitting piecemeal criticisms and disdaining partial programs of reform. Third, in their projected ideal societies they have usually judged order to be more important than freedom.
What non-utopian political thinkers of the 4th century yearned for no less than their utopian contemporaries were, above all, stability and harmony: a stability of political institutions and a harmony of political outlook and aspiration. Of actually existing states, Sparta, again, seemed to offer the closest thing to their practical realization in combination. Yet commentators were notoriously unable to agree on how to classify the Spartan politeia, since it could not be fitted neatly into any of the three recognized genera of rule (by one, some, or all). They therefore opted for one of these three, and attempted to explain away the remaining anomalies, or cut the Gordian knot by classifying Sparta as a mixture of all three. Historically, the former were surely correct. But ideologically, the mixed-constitution theorists were the most interesting, since they were seeking a novel solution to the polarization of rich and poor citizens that in the real world, from the late 5th century and on, regularly generated stasis and an unstable alternation between oligarchy and democracy.
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