Utopia and Global Risk Management

Abstract

To approach Sir Thomas Mores Utopia as a thought experiment about global risk management highlights the contemporary resonance of what we might call the governmental imaginary informing Mores work. Practices of risk management and conceptual vocabularies cen tered on risk and security have come to organize how people in most liberal democracies inhabit the world, how we relate to ourselves and others, how we are governed, and what we expect from communities, corporations, employers, regulatory agencies, and financial and legal institutions.1 In a similar vein, focus on security characterizes a diverse array of contemporary critiques of globalization that emphasize how existing technologies, social structures, and/or economic forces ineq uitably distribute vulnerability around the planet.2 Setting out from this recent scholarship, this essay argues that More s text represents an important early modern attempt to think about what it might mean to place security at the center of the task of governance.3 Utopia seeks to understand the differential exposure to worldly contingency as an effect of globalization such that certain forms of economic and political contact with the world render some lives more exposed than others to the vicissitudes of lived being. What follows is concerned to show how Mores work offers a compensatory fantasy in response to the damaging modes of globalization impacting early modern England and Western Europe, an extended effort to define a mode of governance organized around actively managing the polity's contact with the world in order to maximize security This essay addresses both the terms of More s analysis and its status as an experimental mode of inquiry, a counterfactual exercise itself predicated on a transnational intellectual culture. In this regard, Mores work seeks to create the possibility of pleasurable attachment from the global flow of risky knowledge. To begin to justify these claims we may note the sharp critique of contemporary Europe with which Raphael Hythlodaeus concludes his lengthy description of Utopian existence. Crucial to this passage is the experience of what Hythlodaeus refers to as fear for the future?a sense of abiding insecurity afflicting those in Europe who do the most necessary labor.4 With an eye carefully focused on the phenomeno