It has long been a well-rehearsed commonplace that utopianism—and utopian fiction—is virtually extinct in our times, and conventional to say that this is for the best. By contrast, it has been rare for anyone to take the entirely defensible opposite view: that utopianism endures, and that in existing it renders us an important service. Consequently, the title of Loughborough University research fellow Joe P. L. Davidson’s Saving Utopia: Imagining Hopeful Futures in Dystopian Times was by itself quite enough to catch my attention. Here Davidson defines utopian fiction as fiction which “constructs a society that is both radically other and significantly better than the world of the present,” with the caveat that said world is not the product of the supernatural forces or apparent impossibilities seen in so many mythical paradises, while conventionally “foregrounding [the] sociopolitical structures” of the imagined world (p. 14). Davidson also argues for the uses of utopia, and utopian fiction, in articulating both criticisms of the world as it is, and human desires for something better (favorably quoting Oscar Wilde’s remark about the value of any map that does not have “utopia” on it). However, as one may guess from his title’s implication that utopia is in “need” of saving Davidson does not disagree that these have not been good times for utopian thinking, philosophically or politically or in literature, driving him to grapple with the question “Why is it so difficult for writers to articulate visions of new and better worlds?” (p. 2). The book that Davidson produces in that grappling has its undeniable strengths, but also fundamental weaknesses, and both are rooted in the tack he ultimately follows in attempting to answer the question.

Certainly Davidson starts out on solid ground, with the robust definition presented above, and due attention to the history of the modern tradition of fictional utopias, appropriately extending to that of the anti-utopias and dystopias which present the “radically other and significantly worse,” so to speak, round out the tradition. Surveying this he draws on Reinhart Koselleck's theorizing, about which it is essential to say something before one can get much further in any appraisal, Davidson writes of  the emergence of “modern time consciousness” (or synonymously, the “modern time regime”) in the eighteenth century, which consciousness experiences the flow of time not as “sameness” or “repetition” in the manner common to pre-modern peoples, but instead a linear movement often bringing with it a “feeling of difference and novelty” (p. 119).

Along with that linearity, difference, and novelty came the possibility of “progressive development” and ultimately “a strong association between the future, novelty, and betterment" (p. 30), extending to the belief that "a better future is written into the present” (p. 41)—in short the idea of “progress” as we know it. As a result, where writers of utopias—like the first major such work of modern times, Thomas More’s Utopia (1516)—situated their imaginary societies elsewhere in the world, in the eighteenth century writers began to situate them elsewhen. In particular, they began to imagine their own society at a future date being “radically other and significantly better,” in what Koselleck and Davidson both describe as a “temporalization” of the previously “spatial” utopia, producing such works as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888) and William Morris‘ News From Nowhere (1890). Along with the temporalization of utopia also went the temporalization of the counter-tradition of anti-utopia/dystopia that emerged alongside it, as exemplified by George Orwell’s then far future year-set Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

In Davidson's analysis that temporalization of utopia—and dystopia—made utopia and all that went with it vulnerable to anything that would threaten this association of “the future, novelty and betterment” with each other. Dismissing as inadequate the argument that the paucity of utopianism today is a result of “the anti-utopians hav[ing] succeeded” (p. 29) in fighting that association of future, novelty and betterment  (Davidson going so far here as to say that there is less anti-utopianism about than there used to be), he relegates that anti-utopianism to a secondary, reinforcing role next to the real culprit, the way “[t]he catastrophes of the first half of the [twentieth] century” (p. 8), particularly “the industrial slaughter of World War I, the degeneration of the Russian Revolution, the Holocaust, and … the nuclear bomb” (p. 41) precipitated the collapse of the modern time regime, and the hope of progress with it. Davidson also holds that, like utopia, dystopia suffered from that collapse, but—as one might expect in a world where people had little hope of the world getting better but still believed that the world could get worse—utopia suffered much more (as seen in how prolific dystopian fiction has been in the era of The Hunger Games [2008-2025]).

Still, Davidson goes on in his second chapter to suggest that utopian fiction, and the impulses behind it, did not simply abandon the field to utopia’s enemies, but adapted. Thus Davidson writes not only of anti-utopia but also "anti-dystopia," which "sidesteps" the prevailing "visions of horror" (p. 68) as it carries on with utopianism in disregard of the claims for modern time consciousness' collapse, and more lengthily, what he, after Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini, calls the “critical utopia,” presenting in place of the well worked-out “world that works” of older utopias—like those of Bellamy and Morris—a “radically better” society that is still a “work in progress,” “open” and evolving rather than “final” and “closed” (p. 63). Of particular note is that these worlds have their admitted problems, which the “utopia” foregrounds in a manner perhaps most associated with Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed (1974), significantly subtitled An Ambiguous Utopia. However, Davidson points out that even the critical utopia has become less common since the brief efflorescence of the form in the 1970s, such that, while he acknowledges the continued appearance of utopian works (acknowledging, for instance, Kim Stanley Robinson‘s Mars cycle [1992-1999]), he stresses their fewness to the point of implying they have relatively little analytical value for his purposes.

Indeed, rather than anti-dystopia or critical utopia Davidson concentrates on the way utopian impulses turn up where one might least expect to see them. So it goes in the three discussions rounding out his argument, of the utopian impulse in explorations of trauma (the past weighing like a nightmare on the brains of the living precisely because they feel its burden while trying to move forward toward the radically other and significantly better), nostalgia (the utopian impulse manifest in looking back to a period when the possibilities for progressive change seemed greater), and catastrophism (a "radical breach with the world as it exists" seeming "the condition for the positive configuration of a new society" (154)) in Chapters 3, 4 and 5, respectively. If occasionally glancing elsewhere as he does so (as at retro-futurism or "acid communism"), Davidson looks primarily at Afrofuturist fiction like Cebo Campbell’s Sky Full of Elephants (2024) when discussing trauma, feminist science fiction like Sandra Newman’s The Men (2022) when he turns to nostalgia, and climate fiction like Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020) when he considers catastrophism.

In making his case, Davidson’s attentiveness to definitions and history serve him well, to go by his nuanced understanding of utopia well-informed by a broad knowledge of the genre and the literature interpreting it. In particular, Davidson’s discussion of the temporalization of utopia, the dialectical interaction between utopia and anti-utopia/dystopia, and the ways in which the utopian impulse endured in unexpected places, all strike me as fundamentally sound and even persuasive, all  as he offers quite a number of worthwhile smaller observations along the way (not least, how "one person’s utopia is another’s dystopia" [p. 4]). Nevertheless, Davidson's book is less satisfying on the matter of the collapse of the modern time regime at the center of his work, his taking which so much for granted seems a result of a significant, and problematic, contradiction in his fundamental intellectual approach. This is that, while Davidson is sympathetic to utopia, his self- and identity-minded, Koselleck-citing book analyzes the prospects of utopia on the basis of an anti-utopian postmodernism.

This postmodernism is problematic from the outset given the importance to Davidson’s argument of the premise that the modern time regime flourished and collapsed in the manner he describes. The postmodernist is prone to treat post-war incredulity toward “grand narratives” (per Jean-Francois Lyotard et. al.) as axiomatic, quite readily accepting the premise of a “belief” in progress flourishing in the naively optimistic nineteenth century and collapsing amid the catastrophes of the twentieth, especially the 1914-1945 period. However, all this is much more often glibly insisted upon than it is robustly argued, and is actually very vulnerable to even a little reflection on the relevant history. After all, for as long as the linear, progress-expecting modern time consciousness has been around, so has the denial of that time consciousness, with its opponents often having the upper hand in the intellectual, cultural, political struggle. The Enlightenment liberalism which saw in the potentials of human reason the possibility of progress faced all the way down the line the Counter-Enlightenment conservatism which preached the failings of human reason and rationality, the constancy of the human condition, the undesirability or impossibility of change, the perversity of those desirous of a better world—and espoused as the foundation of all this a misanthropic pessimism holding that sin and evil hopelessly corrupts “human nature.” Indeed, often seeming to regard them as the only things of which one can be sure in this world they present despair of Earthly things the highest wisdom, and faith in the possibility of transcendence the sole comfort of the wise, with the proponents of this view holding power. After all, the French Revolution ultimately ended with an age of continent-wide counter-revolution which, as Arno Mayer showed, made the nineteenth century so many remember today as a time of liberal optimism really a story of “the persistence of the Old Regime” and its official pessimism as it carried on unremitting war against utopia. Amid it all, even the distinctly modern often had a bleak, anti-progressive cast in the century of the Gilded Age, the Crisis of 1873, the long global depression that followed, and the New Imperialism that followed from that, with the intellectual life of the time certainly reflecting that thinking. Thus did figures like Malthus, Spencer, Gobineau, and Schopenhauer interpret the age for those living through it, imbuing many of them with dark, Social Darwinistic visions of individuals and nations fighting each other for survival on a finite world, and of modernity repeating the Roman Empire’s decline. Indeed, hanging over the whole era is the stench of decadence—and one might add, the Decadents, of whose party the aforementioned Wilde was a member in just one reflection of the preference of the era’s artists for sneering aristocratic poses, or simple self-involvement, in the face of the age’s social struggles.

Moreover, one should not oversimplify the optimism of those who challenged the prevailing conservative-reactionary-counter-revolutionary (i.e. rightist) outlook, who to a very great extent did not simply believe that “a better future is written into the present” as Davidson implies. The idea of progress always had its conditions, hence the arguments over society’s structure and governance. If some nineteenth-century writers believed, or at least hoped, that the distance to the radically other and significantly better would be sure, short and rational, other observers were less sanguine, not least Karl Marx himself. In his view, the workers of the world uniting and replacing capitalism with socialism was a necessity for human civilization—but not an inevitability, class conflict quite possibly ending with the “ruin of the contending classes,” in the way since summed up as “socialism or barbarism” (later, “socialism or extinction”), and echoed or paralleled in the Wellsian thinking that Patrick Parrinder summed up as “the scientific world-view” (with which currents Davidson is acquainted, to go by his references to both H.G. Wells and Parrinder). Even those who were confident that humanity would ultimately choose progress over barbarism saw the road to that outcome as likely to be long, winding and painful in the face of its opponents, as did Wells in so many of his works (like The World Set Free [1914]), and Jack London in The Iron Heel [1908]. One ought also remember how marginal, enervated, and apathetic the left could be in the day of the Second International, down to its leaders’ last great betrayal of their principles, and their followers, in the summer of 1914.

All of this is the more relevant given Davidson’s claim for a collapse in said “belief” after 1914. Admittedly, no reasonable person can deny the horrors of the century’s “Thirty Years’ Crisis” (as many, among them the aforementioned Mayer, have termed the events of the 1914-1945 period). Indeed, one may reasonably regard Davidson as remiss were he to slight their insignificance in such a discussion, given how large they have loomed over it. However, the response to those horrors was a more complex matter than the familiar narrative Davidson advances has it, with World War I’s “industrial slaughter” meriting examination here. The “conventional wisdom” insists that the war showed that what reason and progress gave to Fallen, sinful, irrational humans was more efficient ways to kill each other (machine guns, poison gas, etc.), and that despair about human reason and progress were the only possible response. However, a great many persons saw those horrors and, well aware of that persistence of the Old Regime, did not blame reason and progress as having been treacherous illusions, or malign sin- and evil-tainted “human nature,” but held instead that, far from reason having failed or betrayed humanity, reason had never been tried. That is, they contended that the evil that really had to be faced lay in the enduring social system rather than “human nature,” and that the choice humanity faced between progress and barbarism (or worse) was simply the clearer and more urgent, and progress worth fighting for. Thus, as some bewailed “technology” and “human nature” amid the industrial slaughter, they held that humanity must move toward the saner and the better. Many of them helped make the Ten Days That Shook the World in 1917, and others sympathized, supported, and took inspiration from those events, all far more widely and enduringly than “respectable” opinion cares to admit (which Davidson, attending only to the Russian Revolution's "degeneration," would seem to shortchange). Likewise, if some beheld Hiroshima and saw in it the end of the line for humanity, others seeing the same horror said, “There must be an end to war.” Indeed, Davidson's entirely appropriate attention to the upsurge of utopianism in the 1960s and 1970s—well after the catastrophes of 1945 (and written amid the struggles against racism and colonialism, the counterculture, etc.)—is a reminder that, just like the optimism of the nineteenth century, the pessimism of the twentieth is often exaggerated, and sits awkwardly with his own account of the broader history.

The respect for conventional wisdom Davidson displays on that point, even when it seems belied by the portion of post-war history that (to his credit) he does not ignore becomes more dissonant as Davidson (again to his credit) looks at parts of it more closely. Thus, in laying out the history of the twentieth century as a story of the collapse of utopianism in that uncritical fashion, Davidson accepts both the profoundly misnomered “Cold War liberalism” and the view that it was impossible for utopia to “simply carry on in the face of [its] charges that” utopia “is a harbinger of totalitarianism” (p. 34). Significantly coloring Davidson’s examination of the critical utopia in particular—even if he holds that such works "questioned the association between utopia and totalitarianism" (p. 64) —is the impression he leaves that this "irrefutable" argument left the would-be utopian with a choice between “ambiguous” utopias perhaps unworthy of the name and no utopias at all. (Davidson, apparently, little aware of how even many Cold War liberals became somewhat abashed about their old “mystical” image of totalitarianism, as the foremost of the American “liberals,” the arch-Cold Warrior Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., admitted in the introduction to a 1998 edition of his The Vital Center [1949]).

Meanwhile, Davidson time and again lumps together in a common “anti-utopianism” this anti-Marxist Cold War liberalism with the Marxist criticism of the attempts to build socialism without due regard for what social science had to say about the practical possibilities of building a better world, that Marx denigrated as “utopian socialism.” In doing so, he slights the profound differences between the Marxists, whom (quoting Theodor Adorno) Davidson admits were “‘enemies of Utopia for the sake of utopia’s realization’” (p. 52), and the anti-Marxists who were just plain enemies of utopia. Likewise, contrary to Davidson’s suggestion that there is less anti-utopianism about than before, anti-utopianism is as pervasive, strident, and forceful as it has ever been, with the “end of history” bringing about not a more nuanced view but rather locking in anti-utopianism’s Anti-Communist variant as conventional and official wisdom. Thus, history as told by Robert Conquest stands, no matter the recanting of old Cold Warriors or what later researchers (J. Arch Getty, Stephen Wheatcroft, etc.) discovered in former Soviet archives.  This despite the fact that, for all their triumphalist, crowing Anti-Communists got only more strident and extreme, certainly to go by how Timothy Snyder channels Ernst Nolte today with very few seeming to think anything of it. (Indeed, Davidson’s treatment of the Cold Warrior’s view here reflects how hegemonic their thinking has been.)

So does it also go with Davidson’s inconsistent but overall slighting treatment of neoliberalism. At times seeming dismissive of the term (as when blowing off Marxist—and postcolonial, and feminist—discussion of how “new forms of capitalism … disrupted the traditional contours of modern temporality” [p. 47]), and at others seeming to be confused about the term’s meaning (as when he suggests that neoliberalism was “a continuation of the revolutionary experiments of the 1960s and 1970s” [p. 124]), Davidson ultimately gives it short shrift as again a secondary factor (“reinforc[ing] the broader crisis of the future”), rather than giving it its due as (per his citation of Mark Fisher) what finished off the revolts of the 1960s and 1970s so important in his discussion. After all, as scholars like David Harvey showed, the neoliberal turn came at a moment in which business, and especially the financial sector, were caught between a crisis of profitability and those demands for a more just order from “First World” working people, and the developing countries. Moreover, if the shareholder value-exalting “activist” investor partisans of ultra-financialization may have seen no further than the bottom line, those who implemented the “neoliberal project” were often mindful of its being a broader and deeper political counter-offensive against all those who sought to make a different world. Certainly this was the case with a Margaret Thatcher, who refurbished Spencer’s “There Is No Alternative” for a new era, and after her tenure as Prime Minister recognized in the capitulations of New Labour, and the associated foreclosing of possibilities for change, her greatest achievement. Indeed, one cannot begin to appreciate the pessimism of the present without understanding just what the premise that "There Is No Alternative" provides no alternative to—namely a “Golden Straitjacket”-wearing world in which the short-term interests of megacorporatized Big Business and its principal beneficiaries (the Hugo van Arkady-David Rothkopf  “superclass” of the 0.0001 percent, the Davos Men, the Friends of Jeffrey Epstein et al.) are everything, and everything else nothing, ruling out any address of any problem. Thus we have the contradictions of that situation in which billionaires fight tooth and nail for the status quo, even as their knowledge of its unsustainability has them investing in luxury doomsday bunkers where they hope to be secure and comfortable as the world they spent their lives setting afire burns. (Indeed, the hopelessness so many feel about the climate crisis in particular is inseparable from how this politics has thwarted a desperately needed “energy transition” for a half century.)

Accordingly Davidson’s (very conventional) understanding of the pessimistic twentieth century as the inevitable result of an apocalypse whose revelations left humanity suitably chastened is at best incomplete and oversimplistic. It represents an unquestioning acceptance of the narrative of an anti-utopian right which sneers at the caricature, the straw man, they made of the Enlightenment and its champions—an anti-utopian right that says “now we know better, humanity has had its painful but necessary lesson”—rather than a recognition of the actual complexity of people’s attitudes in modern times. It would be far more consistent with the facts to say that the opponents of modern time consciousness, progress, and utopia, were in power through this era, and thus dominant, and the proponents of that consciousness were an underdog opposition, often little more than an underground resistance. It would also be far more consistent with the facts to say that, if the utopians’ resistance was more confident, vigorous, broadly-based, plausible-seeming and harder to ignore at some times than at others, that what dealt the blow to the expectation of progress  was not the “natural” or “only possible” human response to events but anti-utopian conservatives’ use of their immense political advantages to marginalize and even persecute those who ever thought differently, and impose their interpretation of events on the mainstream as its conventional wisdom and “common sense.”. That indeed the anti-utopianism that Davidson treats as secondary and reinforcing of the collapse was actually the primary factor in that event (to the extent that one can really speak of “collapse” happening at all). Davidson’s own aforementioned timeline betrays this with that upsurge of demands for positive change in the ’60s—neither the first nor the last time that utopianism’s death proved greatly exaggerated, as a glance at our own times today shows. For all the damage it did to progressives, neoliberal triumphalism is today a far cry from what it was when Golden Straitjacket shill Thomas Friedman gushed over Ken Lay and Enron as economic heroes. Meanwhile, Francis Fukuyama is rather less sanguine about his own declaration about the end of history than he used to be. And it was not amid the ’60s-era utopian upsurge but in 2019 that “[f]or the first time in American history, a president of the United States, in a nationwide television address, denounced … growing popular support for socialism.”

Davidson’s reliance on a popular but untenable reading of history not only leaves him with a theory of utopia’s decline that does not fit the facts, but still slights much of the field he surveys—and especially those works of a more classically utopian character that did appear, and which one might have hoped would get their all too rare due here. Thus he mentions Robinson’s Mars trilogy, but does no more than that, as he totally ignores many of the best-known or most striking manifestations of the utopian tradition, not least in the post-1970s period, even where clearly relevant to his themes. Exemplary of this, Davidson makes no mention whatsoever of Norman Spinrad’s critical utopias of the ‘90s, Russian Spring (1991) and Greenhouse Summer (1999), in the latter of which Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms rescue the Soviet experiment, enabling it to play a positive role in building a more peaceful, freer, fairer world. Also belying Davidson’s Cold War liberal-colored narrative, in Summer the inhabitants of a greenhouse effect-ravaged Earth confront the danger of the problem getting much, much worse, and perceive the contrast between facing climate change under capitalism and doing so under a syndicalist order. Davidson likewise says nothing of two much-noted cycles of classically utopian fiction of the post-1970s era, Iain M. Banks’ post-scarcity Culture novels (1987-2012) and the functioning Communism of Ken MacLeod’s Fall Revolution (1995-99).

Meanwhile, even as Davidson quite rightly acknowledges that one person’s utopia is another’s dystopia, he rarely heeds that piece of wisdom himself as he judges the literature, identifying utopia and dystopia with what the right says it is, and so for the most part equating utopia with leftist works and dystopia with rightist works attacking the left’s thinking, goals, efforts. As a result, Davidson slights those leftist dystopias rooted in untrammeled capitalism, corporate power and political reaction like Wells’s The Sleeper Awakes (1899), or London’s Iron Heel, or Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth’s story of hyper-capitalism, ecological collapse and attempt at a new beginning in The Space Merchants (1952)—again, none of which works Davidson mentions. At the same time, Davidson tends to miss the right’s rarely acknowledged utopian impulses, not least that the neoliberalism so damaging to progressives’ utopianism was itself a utopian project for the libertarian right, and that this utopianism was a presence in some of the major science fiction works of the day (like Neal Stephenson’s blend of Neo-Victorian mores, “Equity Lord,” hyper-capitalism, and nanotechnology in The Diamond Age [1995]). Especially given that Davidson focuses on print works but does not wholly exclude audiovisual media from his study, it is also fair to point out his ignoring what for all its admittedly significant limitations is the most popular, and frequently acknowledged, piece of utopian fiction within living memory, Star Trek (the worthier of examination given the controversial evolutions of the franchise since its appearance in the 1960s).

Had Davidson been less captive to the weaknesses of the Koselleckian premise, he might not have spent so much time straining so hard to read against the grain and at the margins to search out evidences of utopian thinking and feeling. In doing so, he missed much that was right in front of him—and arguably mistook the important part of the story he tells for a greater part of the story than it really is, precisely because, like anti-utopia, unabashed utopia, is a far greater presence in contemporary culture than most admit. The result of those limitations is a book that all too often acquiesces in or even affirms the anti-utopianism that its author clearly meant it to challenge. Still, even if Davidson all too often looked for answers in the wrong places, he struck me as at least asking worthwhile questions. Moreover, if in addressing them his analysis was more often compelling in regard to the secondary questions than the primary ones, that is in itself quite enough to make Saving Utopia an engaging and useful work. That said, the very contradictions of Davidson's analysis themselves suggest a stronger, more lucid, work trapped within the postmodernist argumentation that today's academic life alas makes mandatory if one wishes to be taken seriously within it as a scholar—a fault of the milieu as a whole than of any one researcher. Since reality's hard knocks may just be bringing the reign of the postmoderns to an end, though, I, for one, would be interested to see where Davidson goes with this work next, should he continue to pursue it.