Making Dreams Come True

Utopias have usually been thought of as ideas, as imaginary visions that are, almost by definition, impractical. Our ‘handy’ Webster’s College Dictionary, published in the 1950s, defines Utopian as “relating to an imaginary ideal state (Utopia) or condition; hence, idealistic but not practical”. In her study of Science in Utopia from 1967, Nell Eurich similarly characterized Utopias as “fictional, imaginative stories”; for Eurich, as for the countless other historians of utopianism, it was the literary visions that occupied the center of attention (1). But times are changing. Frank and Fritzie Manuel, in their recent survey of Utopian Thought in the Western World (1979), admit that there is both a practical and an impractical side to utopianism. However, they are content, once they have introduced the notion of ‘utopian practice’, to leave it outside the compass of their monograph. They claim that “there has been a functional division of labor between writers of Utopias and activist Utopians”, and make the intriguing suggestion that “were a new science to be founded … it would be valid to distinguish between theoretical utopistics [sic] and applied utopistics”. The practice has, they admit, “sometimes affected later theorists; but on the whole the ardor of a utopian innovator in the moment of creation is overwhelming and is not dampened by his knowledge of previous defeats” (2). The Manuels are thus able to focus on what really interests them, namely the idealized visions of the past: utopian thought.