The Alternative to Utopia Is Myopia*

• Author: Boaventura de Sousa Santos
• Published date: 01 December 2020
• Date: 01 December 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0032329220962644
• Subject Matter: Special Issue Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0032329220962644

Politics & Society

2020, Vol. 48(4) 567 –584

© The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0032329220962644

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Special Issue Article

The Alternative to

Utopia Is Myopia*

Boaventura de Sousa Santos

University of Coimbra (Portugal)

Abstract

This essay, written in memory of Erik Olin Wright (1947–2019), considers Wright’s

project of constructing and identifying real utopias. It confronts a tension in Wright’s

oeuvre, the question of the knowledge by means of which reformers can identify the

utopias that ground the really existing real utopias.

Keywords

utopias, Erik Olin Wright, Marx

Corresponding Author:

Boaventura de Sousa Santos, University of Coimbra (Portugal), Colégio S. Jerónimo, Largo D. Dinis,

Apartado 3087, Coimbra, 3000-995, Portugal.

Email: bsantos@ces.uc.pt

*This essay is part of a special issue of Politics & Society celebrating and examining the life and work of

longtime board member Erik Olin Wright (1947–2019).

962644PASXXX10.1177/0032329220962644Politics & SocietySantos

research-article2020

568 Politics & Society 48(4)

Ideologically speaking, the twentieth century was hostile to the idea of utopia, even

though there were several bouts of utopia-oriented political practices, such as the first

years of the Russian Revolution, the Cultural Revolution in China, the first years of the

Cuban Revolution, and the student revolts in the late 1960s, starting with May 1968.

In spite of all this, the idea of dystopia fared much better in mass culture than the idea

of utopia. In the social sciences, both bourgeois and Marxist science, however, ostra-

cized utopia, for different reasons. Marxist hostility to utopia stemmed from Marx

himself and was clearly expressed in 1847 in The Poverty of Philosophy (written in

French),1 whereas the bourgeois social sciences were developed in part against the

French utopian socialism of the late nineteenth century and were later much influ-

enced by the liberal thinkers of the 1950s and 1960s, such as Karl Popper and Isaiah

Berlin.2

In the first part of his intellectual trajectory, Erik Olin Wright was a brilliant repre-

sentative of the antiutopian Marxist tradition. The hostility to utopia was most tellingly

present in the work of the “non-bullshit Marxist group,” inspired by G.A. Cohen and

analytical philosophy, to which Wright belonged together with Jon Elster, John

Roemer, Adam Przeworski, and Robert Brenner.3 In the second part of his intellectual

trajectory, Wright became increasingly interested in the question of the political will in

social transformation. He became convinced that the visions of an ideal society were

the necessary guides of pragmatically possible political practices against oppression.4

Long before him, Max Weber had claimed in Politics as a Vocation that “certainly all

historical experience confirms the truth—that man would not have attained the possi-

ble unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible.”5 In 2010, Wright

wrote the following in the overview of the Real Utopias Project:

The Real Utopia Project embraces this tension between dreams and practice. It is founded

on the belief that what is pragmatically possible is not fixed independently of our

imaginations, but is itself shaped by our visions. . . . Nurturing clear-sighted understandings

of what it would take to create social institutions free of oppression is part of creating a

political will for radical social changes to reduce oppression. . . . What we need, then, are

“real utopias”: utopian ideals that are grounded in the real potentials of humanity, utopian

destinations that have accessible waystations, utopian designs of institutions that can

inform our practical tasks of muddling through in a world of imperfect conditions for

social change.6

This shift caused some tension in the Marxist social science Wright continued to

espouse. In the afterword to Wright’s posthumous book, Michael Burawoy summa-

rizes what he calls “the conundrum of Wright’s oeuvre”: “namely his move from

class analysis without utopias to utopias without class analysis.”7 Thus formulated,

this conundrum raises the question, Who needs utopia? In this essay, I argue that

before answering, it is necessary to confront another tension in Wright’s oeuvre, the

question of the knowledge by means of which we can identify the utopias that ground

the really existing real utopias. In other words, What counts as a radical understanding

of society?