Abstract
This paper attempts to theorize two twentieth-century fictional dystopias, Brave New World (2013) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), using Plato’s political dialogues. It explores not only how these three authors’ utopian/dystopian visions compare as types of narrative, but also how possible, desirable, and useful their imagined societies may be, and for whom. By examining where the Republic, Brave New World, and Nineteen Eighty-Four stand on such issues as social engineering, censorship, cultural and sexual politics, the paper allows them to inform and critique each other, hoping to reveal in the process what may or may not have changed in utopian thinking since Plato wrote his seminal work. It appears that the social import of speculative fiction is ambivalent, for not only may it lend itself to totalitarian appropriation and application—as seems to have been the case with The Republic—but it may also constitute a means of critiquing the existing status quo by conceptualizing different ways of thinking and being, thereby allowing for the possibility of change.
Highlights
We usually imagine utopias as communitarian societies, such as the one proposed in Sir Thomas More’s, Utopia (2003), yet it is easy to forget that Capitalism began as a utopian project in early modernity promising unlimited individual and social progress through a combination of unfettered private enterprise and “trickle-down” economics
By examining where the Republic, Brave New World, and Nineteen Eighty-Four stand on such issues as social engineering, censorship, cultural and sexual politics, the paper allows them to inform and critique each other, hoping to reveal in the process what may or may not have changed in utopian thinking since Plato wrote his seminal work
Besides its relevance to the post-Cold War era of globalized capital where we are told that history has ended with the triumph of Western liberal democracy,1 Burnham’s predictive sociology may be useful in theorizing such technocratic dystopias as Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which ideological conflicts have either been eradicated or are used as an alibi by the ruling elite to enforce a scientific dictatorship on a global scale
Summary
We usually imagine utopias as communitarian societies, such as the one proposed in Sir Thomas More’s, Utopia (2003), yet it is easy to forget that Capitalism began as a utopian project in early modernity promising unlimited individual and social progress through a combination of unfettered private enterprise and “trickle-down” economics. Besides its relevance to the post-Cold War era of globalized capital where we are told that history has ended with the triumph of Western liberal democracy, Burnham’s predictive sociology may be useful in theorizing such technocratic dystopias as Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which ideological conflicts have either been eradicated or are used as an alibi by the ruling elite to enforce a scientific dictatorship on a global scale. More useful in unraveling the complexities of Huxley’s and Orwell’s utopian/dystopian visions may be Plato’s Republic, the first social engineering project in Western culture which set the stage for subsequent discussions of ideal societies in scientific, philosophical, and fictional terms. More important arguably than the way speculative fiction imagines alternative societies is its position on creative writing or poiesis itself, for to restrict or abolish that would be to deny the very conditions of its existence
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