ABSTRACT
The utopia of civil society starts out from the obviously plausible counterthesis according to which the Western liberal democracies, unlike Soviet-type societies, are civil societies, however imperfect. Admittedly, democratic utopias drawing on the resource of solidarity and projecting the vast expansion of communicative processes of will formation can also he, and have often been, totalizing. Revolutionary utopias can use versions of genuine immanent criticism, relying on the contradictions between counterfactual norms and actual institutions, only inconsistently, since the idea of rupture excludes the notion that something is intrinsically worth saving. The issue of the desirability of revolution in a given context cannot be decided from the point of view of utopian projects alone, especially when the overthrow of an oppressive system is involved. Totalizing utopias, especially those linked to the idea of revolutionary rupture, aim for a constitutive rather than a regulative relation to politics.
