ABSTRACT
My topic today is democratic hope, but I want to begin with some reflections on utopia—or, more precisely, what I will call the utopian or emancipatory impulse. Utopia, which literally means ‘no place’ in Greek, is the word that St Thomas More invented to name an imaginary island in which there is presumably a perfect social, legal and political system. But it is a term that has taken on a much more general significance. It isn’t fashionable today, except as a subject of academic dissertations, to talk about utopia. But because of the popularity of Tom Stoppard’s trilogy The Coast of Utopia, the topic of utopia has achieved some currency. If you have seen the plays, you may well have had complex reactions. You may have experienced a sense of charming remoteness—how distant we are from a time when an eccentric group of intellectuals, drunk on philosophical ideas, acted as if their heady talk and proclamations could bring about a radical social and political transformation of backward Russia. But for all the high talk of Hegel, Fichte and Schelling, you might also think how naïve they were about the brute realities and repressive power of the world in which they lived. Isaiah Berlin, in his classic essays on the Russian intelligentsia—one of Stoppard’s sources of inspiration—beautifully captures the spirit of the time: the hopes, dreams, passions, illusions confusions and contradictions of these remarkable intellectuals. Berlin’s great hero is Alexander Herzen. Berlin’s prose is so lively and vivid that it is worth quoting his description of Herzen:
Herzen delighted in independence, variety, the free play of individual temperament. He desired the richest possible development of personal characteristics, valued spontaneity, directness, distinction, pride, passion, sincerity, the style and colour of free individuals; he detested conformism, cowardice, submission to the tyranny of brute force or pressure of opinion, arbitrary violence, and anxious submissiveness; he hated the worship of power, blind reverence for the past, for institutions, for mysteries or myths; the humiliation of the weak by the strong, sectarianism, philistinism, the resentment and envy of majorities, the brutal arrogance of minorities. He desired social justice, economic efficiency, political stability, but these remain secondary to the need for protecting human dignity, the upholding of civilized values, the protection of individuals from aggression, the preservation of sensibility and genius from individual or institutional bullying.1
