I just finished reading Michael Löwy’s Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History,” but not without coming across, in the endnotes, this most interesting comment (p. 136, Verso 2016):
As Miguel Abensour rightly observes, it is not utopia that is generative of totalitarianism, but a society without utopianism that is in danger of becoming a totalitarian society, caught up, as it is, in the dangerous illusion of completion. See M. Abensour, L’Utopie, de Thomas More à Walter Benjamin (Paris: Sens & Tonka, 2000), p. 19. Abensour argues that the hatred of utopia is a ‘repetitive symptom which, from generation to generation, affects the defenders of the existing order, who are prey to the fear of otherness’.
This strikes me as entirely true. I have often heard it stated (but don’t recall it ever being argued in any detail) that revolutions become violent because the revolutionaries degenerate into a rage when they cannot bring about a utopia, and begin instead to destroy as much as they can of what is. Rather, I suspect it is far more often the case that reforms or revolutions become violent when they are steadfastly, even violently resisted in their most moderate and reasonable demands.
Do we not live in a violently anti-utopian age? Has not capitalism discarded its professed idealism of liberty and prosperity for all to reveal what has been there all along for those paying attention: nihilism, cynicism, a truculent worship of power?