ABSTRACT
Utopia highlights social problems by imagining their absence, whereas dystopia extrapolates from them a nightmarish future projection of society. Dystopian texts explore the disruptive potential of irrational forces. Any social order that would claim utopian status for itself is revealed to be vulnerable. The 'dehumanizing' element identified by dystopian writers as a problematic feature of utopia is intimately connected with the balance between individual and collective. If dystopian texts ask tough questions of utopia, critical responses to dystopia often try to question the questioners, and seek to expose the presuppositions and agendas of the dystopian critique. The totalitarianism of utopia is visible at its most fatal whenever the utopian project of building an ideal collective resorts to excessive measures in the pursuit of definitive decidability and exclusion. Chief among the many challenges posed to the idea of utopia in the early twentieth century was an increasing disillusionment with the optimistic narrative of progress and the modern, rationalist-scientific world-view underlying it.
