ABSTRACT
Gill characterizes the public imagination of today’s world in utopian/dystopian thinking, building upon Gramsci’s concept of the Modern Prince (1929–35). The praxis of the post-modern Prince/Princess invokes a radical politics of redistribution, recognition, and emancipation. Since Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 have resumed prominence in the concerned public imagination. Both works discuss how repressive autocratic/totalitarian elements place subject populations under regimes of total surveillance. The USA is caught at an impasse amidst a concatenation of global crises. Democratic and radical potentials have to be assessed in relation to the dominant reactionary and regressive alternatives now being posed as challenges to the supremacy of market-based disciplinary neoliberalism. The “post-modern Prince” reflects plural, progressive forces in collective action, with the goal of recreating work and society and their relations to the biosphere in a fruitful, forward looking and socially just manner. The dialectic of utopia/dystopia offers interpretations of the present with an eye to an imaginary yet positive future. Gill concludes with the idea of a feasible utopia as an alternative type of society, which is appropriate to the post-modern conditions of the 21st century and its potential future.
