518
FRANCIS GOLFFING
the subject been attacked radically enough. I should like to point
out some of the difficulties inherent in every attempt to sketch
a viable scheme of the future . The most serious of these attempts
recently (Paul and Percival Goodman
Communitas,
Collingwood
The New Leviathan,
Herbert Marcuse
Eros and Civilization,
Norman O . Brown
Life Against Death)
have followed either the
Freudian or the Marxian inspiration-or tried to amalgamate the
two. The strongly ideological basis apparent in them-while it
by no means detracts from their brilliance, and their often pro–
found originality-nevertheless suggests a central desperate crux
facing every writer on the subject. To what extent is the Utopist
under an intellectual obligation to found his scheme on antecedent
endeavors? Is he really anchoring his vision more securely by
quoting authority? Or is such historicism and eclecticism a per–
versity-plausible but still a perversity-because it flies in the
face of the very notion of Utopia? And leaving aside the question
of intellectual responsibility and the acknowledgment of debts,
how
necessary,
from a pragmatic point of view, is this kind of
anchorage?
I believe that it is not only unethical but altogether
impossible to bypass the great ideological systems of the recent
past. The use of antecedents is discretionary with each Utopist,
so long as he remains alert to the danger of a) overbalancing his
scheme with previous evidence and suggestions and b) lamely
synthesizing, or redacting, notions that reveal their full significance
only in the context of the system from which they derive. Neither
of these faults has been entirely avoided even by the writers I
have named. The main reason for this seems to have been psycho–
logical, rather than methodological or pragmatic. To write a
Utopia is today, more than ever, a task requiring extraordinary
temerity and, in the eyes of both the scholarly and the lay public,
an eccentric, almost absurd undertaking. Small wonder, then, that
Utopists (who in most instances are scholars as well) feel com–
pelled to give their treatises every appearance of solidity in order
to obviate the charge-always ready to hand-of charlatanism.
Even in those instances where past systems are creatively criticized
with a view to future realizations-not merely brought in as
alibis-the writer is liable to an involuntary displacement of focus
