The Trouble with Nowhere

Martin Jay

• The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy by Russell Jacoby
  Basic Books, 256 pp, £17.95, April 1999, ISBN 0 465 02000 3
• Utopias: Russian Modernist Texts 1905-40 edited by Catriona Kelly
  Penguin, 378 pp, £9.99, September 1999, ISBN 0 14 118081 1
• The Faber Book of Utopias edited by John Carey
  Faber, 560 pp, £20.00, October 1999, ISBN 0 571 19785 X
• The Nazi War on Cancer by Robert Proctor
  Princeton, 390 pp, £18.95, May 1999, ISBN 0 691 00196 0

In 1967, Herbert Marcuse published a little essay entitled 'The End of Utopia', which now reads like a document of a long lost civilisation. Arguing against the pejorative use of the word as a synonym for the absurdly unrealisable, he held that 'there is one valid criterion for possible realisation, namely, when the material and intellectual forces for the transformation are technically at hand although their rational application is prevented by the existing organisation of the forces of production. And in this sense, I believe, we can today actually speak of an end to utopia.' Combining a faith in technology with the confidence that only the wrong mode of production stands in the way of its fully beneficial application, Marcuse encapsulated the innocent euphoria of the 1960s in one glorious moment of revolutionary intoxication. 'Precisely because the so-called utopian possibilities are not at all utopian but rather the determinate socio-historical negation of what exists,' he concluded, 'a very real and pragmatic opposition is required of us if we are to make ourselves and others conscious of these possibilities and the forces that hinder and deny them.'