Pretty Much like Ourselves

Terry Eagleton

  • Modern British Utopias 1700-1850 by Gregory Claeys
    Pickering & Chatto, 4128 pp, £550.00, March 1997, ISBN 1 85196 319 7

Utopia is the most self-undermining of literary forms. If an ideal society can be portrayed only in the language of the present, it risks being betrayed as soon as we speak of it. Anything we can speak of must fall short of the otherness we desire. Utopias rebel against the unimaginativeness of the present, and in doing so find themselves simply reproducing it. All utopian writing is also dystopian, since, like Kant’s sublime, it cannot help reminding us of our mental limits in the act of striving to go beyond them.

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