The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy.

• Author: Kaye, Harvey J.

The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy by Russell Jacoby Basic Books. 236 pages. $26.00.

American history is a struggle to shape the nation's inherent revolutionary and utopian impulses. Yet lately the contest has become decidedly one-sided. The Disney corporation and its "imagineers" now seek to represent our utopian vanguard. What has happened to the left's imagination and vision?

Russell Jacoby poses this question in The End of Utopia. He observes that politics have become boring, though not benign, and that our future has been reduced to a choice between "the status quo or something worse." He agonizes that a "utopian spirit--a sense that the future could transcend the present--has vanished." And he holds his comrades on the left accountable: "Radicals have lost their bite, liberals their backbone."

He says that the left has either accepted the priorities of the powers that be or subscribed to causes that, however admirable, represent little more than tinkering with the present system. Too many leftists, he says, have pretended that "every step backward or sideways marks ten steps forward."

He denounces the reduction of progressivism to multiculturalism and the transformation of democratic cultural criticism into pop cultural studies. Writing with broad strokes, he indicts the institutionalization of intellectual life, the abandonment of universalism in favor of particularism, and the neutering of utopianism.

Jacoby asserts that multiculturalism simply reppackages pluralism, though admittedly with an ethnic twist. He reminds us that Cold Warriors in the fifties posed American pluralism against foreign "totalitarianism," and continually used the latter concept, originally crafted to refer to both fascism and communism, to broadly damn the politics of the left.

Still, Jacoby appreciates multiculturalism's humanism and the need for ethnic and gender representation in offices and texts. However, he maintains that "no vision drives multiculturalism" other than, perhaps, "inclusiveness," and that implies conformity. Pluralism and multiculturalism, he charges, are the "opium of disillusioned intellectuals."

Jacoby proceeds to deconstruct academic cultural studies. For all their radical posturing, he says, cultural studies scholars end up merely celebrating the status quo. Not only does their postmodern rhetoric alienate them from the very people they say they are concerned about, but their populist desires lead them to...