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The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy
 
 

The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy (Paperback)

by Russell Jacoby (Author) "In September 1955, several hundred writers and scholars from Raymond Aron to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., assembled in Milan's National Museum of Science and Technology to..." (more)
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Product details

  • Paperback: 256 pages
  • Publisher: Basic Books (28 April 2000)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0465020011
  • ISBN-13: 978-0465020010
  • Product Dimensions: 20.4 x 13 x 1.6 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 610,266 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Amazon.co.uk Review
The near-total triumph of free market capitalism around the world has put a damper on utopian visions, leading many politicians and activists to believe that radical change is impossible, that at best one can hope for slight modifications of the status quo. For Russell Jacoby, this attitude is not so much the result of practicality as it is the product of exhaustion and he argues that, as a society, we can do much better. The End of Utopia is an uncompromising look at the intellectual caliber of late 20th-century liberal and leftist politics, particularly within the academy. He portrays the class of professional intellectuals as insiders adopting the pose of marginality and lambasts the current practicioners of "cultural studies" in particular for their tendency toward banal "analysis" of mass culture in tortured, jargon-laced prose. (In contrast, he holds up Dwight MacDonald, Theodor Adorno and Matthew Arnold as writers who could address mass culture in plain language yet with deep, critical intelligence.) And he proposes that multiculturalism may be little more than a last ditch attempt at differentiation within the one, dominant culture. "What is to be done?" he asks after cataloguing this state of affairs. "The question, routinely addressed to all critics, insists on a practicality inimical to utopianism. Nothing is to be done. Yet that does not mean nothing is to be thought or imagined or dreamed." The End of Utopia shows to what extent the dreams have been abandoned, with the means of rekindling them yet within grasp. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Description
We are facing the end of politics altogether, Russell Jacoby argues in The End of Utopia. Political contestation is premised on peoples capacity for offering competing visions of the future, but in a world that has run out of political ideas and no longer harbors 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 honors 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 phenomenathe end of the Cold War, the rise of multiculturalism, the acceptance of mass culture, the eclipse of independent intellectualsJacoby 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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In September 1955, several hundred writers and scholars from Raymond Aron to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., assembled in Milan's National Museum of Science and Technology to discuss "the future of freedom." Read the first page
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars A Utopian approach to Utopia, 13 Oct 2000
By A Customer
Today there is only one political problem. Forget war, racism, unemployment and global pollution, the issue which causes the longest bouts of insomnia among politicians and the intelligentsia is the embarrassing absence of a Big Idea, the one clear vision around which political legitimacy can be built and supported. Russell Jacoby's frightening and amusing The End of Utopia describes this political vacuum perfectly.

Most readers will be aware of the search for the elusive Big Idea, but Jacoby's book distinguishes itself from the rest in its refusal to artificially create one out of thin air. Recent attempts have either collapsed under their own levity (in Britain we can still recall John Major's short-lived 'Back to Basics' campaign, and have yet to see a concrete expression of Tony Blair's 'Third Way'). Alternatively, they have turned out to be nothing more than a minor tinkering with existing policy, but labelled a 'grand plan'. Jacoby lambastes those who invest their intellectual energy in such tinkerings. For instance, the socialist John E Roemer, who presents a non-convertible coupon scheme as a radical way forward for society, is deserving of every bit of Jacoby's excoriating irony.

Instead of attempting to blueprint a Big Idea, The End of Utopia charts a decline both in political scope and in intellectual standards, with the worthy aim of reversing this decline. Multiculturalism - the motif underlying almost every Western government's public policy - is first to come under Jacoby's critical eye. Whilst acknowledging that it is reasonable and necessary for "students to know that there were black scientists, Jewish gangsters and women artists", he exposes the attempt to go beyond this as meaningless and even dangerous. Sure, there are differences in the appearances of people and in the activities they undertake, but different appearances and activities do not necessarily imply different cultures. In fact, considering that modern economic and sociological conditions (usually ignored by multicultural theorists) mean that more or less everyone partakes of the same daily routine, the same aspirations and the same concerns, a monoculture is altogether more likely. This does not, however, prevent the proponents of multiculturalism from advancing their meaningless demands for 'recognition' and presenting such demands in a language abstruse and riddled with empty buzzwords.

In the remaining chapters Jacoby directs his criticism toward several other themes that characterise the vacuity within intellectual and political life today: the celebration of mass culture and the denigration of high culture; the philosophical rejection of universal concepts (relevant everywhere) in favour of particulars (relevant only locally); the promotion of utilitarianism - in which visions of the future are reduced to a 'realistic' choice about the present. In each of these cases Jacoby elicits the tendency of those who hold such views to lower their horizons, precluding any possibility of their envisaging a future which is not simply an extrapolation of the present.

Throughout The End of Utopia Jacoby admirably holds fast to the ideas and concepts that allow expansive and imaginative thinking. However, it is this hold which ultimately acts as his weakness as well as his strength. His insistence in the relevance of utopian ideas is unfortunately nothing more than that - an insistence and not a demonstration. For instance, despite the rationality behind the notion of a monoculture, Jacoby fails to explain why multiculturalist ideas have such purchase on the popular imagination. He fails to explain why we often feel that there are different and diverging cultures within society (the so-called criminal fraternity, for example) who do not share our values and who apply an alien logic to everyday situations. Had he extended his economic and sociological analyses further Jacoby might have seen that, as well as bringing the masses together under similar conditions, the market also forces them apart along the lines of employed/employer, male/female, etc, and that government policies often compound divisions or create new ones (such as the deserving/undeserving poor). While real forces such as these exist, ideas which assume social fragmentation will thrive.

Thus, like all the great utopians before him, Jacoby promises everything, is intelligent, witty, far-sighted and eminently readable. However, The End of Utopia fails because it is too utopian (perhaps this makes it a success?). Jacoby's rallying cry is based on far-reaching ideals, but he is unable to engage with the divisive social forces which create the narrow-minded yet insistent concerns of multiculturalism, mass culture and utilitarianism. Unfortunately, the creation of a utopia requires one's feet to be fixed firmly on the ground.

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