Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age

"Like most of Jacoby's work, Picture Imperfect is sui generis. It is an erudite polemic, spirited and consistently engaging. The writing is epigrammatic and the scholarship broad-ranging."
-James Miller, Professor of Political Science, New School of Social Research

"A brilliant analysis of iconoclastic utopian speculation, especially important at a time when even the proponents of universal health care are decried as obtrusive fanatics."
-Amos Elon

"Russel Jacoby challenges the all too common wisdom that utopian dreams breed dystopian political nightmares. His passionate brief for a distinctively non-totalitarian strand of utopian thought indicts a contemporary failure of imagination. Writing on the sharp edge of the divide between utopians and anti-utopian liberals, he cuts through much of the pretense of a generation of political philosophers who famously regarded passionate hope and totalitarian genocide as issuing from the same source. His spirited, indeed utopian essay, restores the "anarchic breeze" that informed those iconoclastic thinkers for whom neglected, spurned, and new ideas were not anathema."
-Anson Rabinbach, Professor of History, Director of the Program in European Cultural Studies, Princeton University

Utopianism suffers from an image problem: A recent exhibition on utopias in Paris and New York included photographs of Hitler's Mein Kampf and a Nazi concentration camp. Meanwhile, many consider the violence wrought by brutal dictatorships and terrorists as outgrowths of utopian thought. However, as Russell Jacoby argues in this salient, polemical, and innovative work, not only has utopianism been unfairly characterized, a return to an iconoclastic utopian spirit is vital for society. Shaped by the works of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Gustav Landauer, and other predominantly Jewish thinkers, iconoclastic utopianism revives society´s dormant imagination and offers hope for a better future.
Writing against the grain of history, Jacoby reexamines the anti-utopian mindset and identifies how utopian thought came to be regarded with such suspicion -a suspicion that paradoxically goes back to the originator of the utopia genre, Thomas More. He challenges standard readings of such anti-utopian classics as 1984 and Brave New World and offers stinging critiques of the influential liberal theorists Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, and Karl Popper. Jacoby argues that these thinkers, who have had a profound influence on contemporary thought, mistakenly equate utopianism with totalitarianism.

The reputation of utopian thought has also suffered from the failures of what Jacoby terms the "blueprint" utopian tradition and its oppressive emphasis on detail and images of the future. In contrast, the iconoclastic utopians, like those who follow God's prohibition against graven images, resist both the blueprinters' obsession with detail and the modern seduction of images. Jacoby suggests that by learning from the spirit of iconoclastic utopians and their willingness to hope without blueprints of what might be, we open ourselves to new and more imaginative ideas of the future.

Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
1. An Anarchic Breeze
2. On Anti-Utopianism: More or Less
3. To Shake the World off Its Hinges
4. A Longing That Cannot Be Uttered
Epilogue

Notes
Index

Russell Jacoby