A Tolerable Anarchy by Jedediah Purdy

Author:Jedediah Purdy [Purdy, Jedediah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-27143-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

UTOPIAN needs to be more than an insult. Taking the word in a neutral sense, the first lines of the Declaration of Independence are utopian, envisioning a world of unprecedented political freedom and equality Frederick Douglass's insistence on equal dignity and Emerson's on the sovereignty of conscience are utopian also. In this neutral sense, utopianism has two aspects: a judgment that what now exists in the world, however familiar and lawful, is intolerable; and a choice to assert the demands of feeling and conscience, however unlikely their success. What is intolerable in the world and what is irresistible in our innermost and most persistent demands (Emerson called it the “soul['s] … enormous claim”) are two sides of the same experience: the discovery of a need that has no answer in the present world. The discovery may come in some moment of ordinary experience: a joy in being alive that one cannot explain, a fleeting intimacy with another person whom one is otherwise forbidden to know or touch (think of interracial love in the age of miscegenation bans), a taste of what it would be like to work from delight. Or the wish may begin in the language and images of the common culture, in a biblical prophecy of justice and plenty, or in haunting words: “that all men are created equal.” The utopian impulse makes that wish a demand, a project to reshape the world by answering a human need that will otherwise have to be put away and forgotten—until it appears again.

Ironically, we successors to American utopianism now inhabit only a personal version of that spirit, which makes us revolutionary in our private lives and mores but complacent about our institutions. This is foremost a utopianism of the individual life. It does not pay less honor to the impulses at the core of utopianism, but it does them less good, and makes them less credible, than would a version looking to both the heart and the world in which it must live.

To appreciate this peculiar development, consider an unrecognized forerunner of American ideas: Charles Fourier, the embittered French salesman and clerk who spent his evenings at the start of the nineteenth century filling notebooks with vivid rants against commercial civilization and plans for idyllic communities of spontaneous work and free love. Inhabitants of Fourier's “phalanxes” would be assigned tasks and lovers based on their place in Fourier's map of the 810 personality types. “Courts of Love,” meeting at night, would assign amorous duties to ensure that every member of the community received a “sexual minimum” of erotic satisfaction. Fourier once predicted that, when his principles governed the world, life would be so sweet that the seas would turn to lemonade.

Fourier's comical excess captures how Americans tend to think of political utopianism, if we do at all: as a cocktail of hyperbureaucratic imagination, unrealistic ideas about human nature, and, at root, the alienation and grudges of people who probably can't put their pants on straight, let alone find a sexual partner in the usual way.

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