Overview

We are facing the end of politics altogether, Russell Jacoby argues in The End of Utopia. Political contestation is premised on people's capacity for offering competing visions of the future, but in a world that has run out of political ideas and no longer harbours any utopian visions, real political opposition is no longer possible. In particular, Jacoby traces the demise of liberal and leftist politics. Leftist intellectuals and critics no longer envision a different society, only a modified one. The left once dismissed the market as exploitative, but now honours it as rational and humane. The left used to disdain mass culture, but now celebrates it as rebellious. The left once rejected pluralism as superficial, but now resurrects pluralist ideas in the guise of multiculturalism. Ranging across a wide terrain of cultural and political phenomena, the end of the Cold War, the rise of multiculturalism, the acceptance of mass culture, the eclipse of independent intellectuals, Jacoby documents and laments a widespread retreat from the utopian spirit that has always been the engine for social and political change.

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An ill-spirited but perceptive blast at contemporary political action, ideology, and theory. Jacoby (History/UCLA; Dogmatic Wisdom: How the Culture Wars Divert Education and Distract America, 1994, etc.) argues that we have lost the conception of an absolute goal, a vision of the good, that is necessary for change to take place in society. Absent a belief that the world could be different, it remains the same, and politics degenerates into an uninspiring choice between the status quo and the even worse options of the past. Moreover, the disappearance of utopian faith corrupts personal as well as political life. The infatuation with careerism among today's students, for example, reflects not an economic collapse, but rather the collapse of a belief in a future that might be different. Whether change genuinely requires a reference point outside current reality or can proceed incrementally in reaction to it is debatable, but historically, political dynamism has rested on claims of universal truths used as battering rams against perceived injustices. Jacoby doesn't make his point and then go forward, however; rather than espousing revolution, he expends his energy attacking the insipid intellectuals of the left who refuse to be revolutionaries. He condemns the anemic concepts and timid politics of liberal multiculturalism, the atrophy of current political thinking, and the contemporary philosophers who exchange truth for art appreciation. Even those who agree with his criticisms will wonder if this hyperbole is really the route to utopia. If Jacoby takes his own argument seriously, is he better served by beating what are - in his mind - dead horses or by making an effort to supply what he believes we lack? Ultimately, this is an irritating book because the valuable central point will surely be lost in the furor over a critique that does not further the author's stated agenda. This effort does not distance Jacoby from those he attacks. (Kirkus Reviews)

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