World Order Reform and Utopian Thought: A Contemporary Watershed?

Abstract

During the 1950's and 1960's, Utopian thought, like ideology generally, was deemed to be at an end. Typically, Judith Shklar pronounced that “the urge to construct grand designs for the political future of mankind is gone,” basing her judgment on the ground that “the last vestiges of Utopian faith required for such an enterprise have vanished.” Even more recently, and correspondingly less perspicaciously, Paul Seabury expressed the view that “a Utopian concern for ‘world order’ as a planned qualitative transformation designed to meet new needs seems to have been washed out. … Prescriptive futurism now seems passé. In the event, such obituaries have turned out to be premature: thought about world order reform has experienced a resurgence during the 1970's, to such an extent that we might be tempted to equate the intellectual mood of the present time with the Utopian impulse of the post-1918 decade.