This book is a milestone in his career-long quest to make sense of utopianism, its past and its future, its dangers and its possibilities. He sketches a large number of suggestions, ranging from the modest to the transformative, to both limit the damage that humans are doing to the environment and to foment a greater sense of belonging and enhanced sociability. However, climate-driven organizing tactics are often somewhat antisocial: sabotaging deforestation projects, blockading roads, throwing blood at courthouses. But even if it did, it meant that a new phase in utopianism had emerged that reflected, and sought to harness, many of the dominant intellectual, political, and cultural trends of the societies in which it was produced. Claeys argues that Bloch represents an intellectual and political dead-end, his intricate, often elusive, attempt to fuse mysticism and Marxism furnishes a weak foundation on which to construct forms of utopianism capable of challenging political inertia and consumerism.

It is liable to many of the same objections as some of Marx’s key theories, particularly the inevitability of a proletarian revolution to issue in the new world. This move follows, in part, from his commitment to the enhanced sociability model of utopianism; he wants to exclude science fiction narratives because, on his account, they do not engage extensively with this topic. The obsession with consumerism will have to be supplanted by greater self-sufficiency, voluntary simplicity, and the satisfaction of needs rather than wants.And all forms of existing social and political theory which rely on ideas of an indefinite expansion of production, consumption, and population growth, which include most forms of both liberalism and Marxism, are no longer relevant and must be superseded. It was during the eighteenth century, moreover, that ideas of unlimited economic growth and the virtues and vices of consumption helped shape debates over political economy, often couched in the language of luxury – they soon became a central focus of utopian thinkers. Our leaders, awash with the cash generated by the industry and consequently enmired in corruption, willingly connived to deny every worst-case scenario. To the doomers, in one corner of the ring, despair freezes action, and a sense of chilling remorse is supplanted by numbness which denies the possibility of any reprieve. The second began in the late eighteenth century, when utopianism came to be associated with the future, and with ideas of progress – in Reinhart Kosselleck’s apt phrase, utopia was “temporalized”.

No wide-eyed celebrant of utopia in all its manifold forms, Claeys is clear that many visions (and practical examples) of ideal societies have been misguided or dangerous – indeed, some of them have helped to produce the very socio-political conditions that we need to transcend. Drawing together multiple threads, Claeys settles on a comprehensive, albeit unwieldly, definition of utopianism. He effectively synthesizes huge swathes of work produced by historians of political thought and literary scholars during the last half century or more, while approaching the material from his own distinctive vantage point.We can learn lessons from past utopias, both positive and negative, but we also need to think for ourselves. Bloch’s system is moreover closely aligned to Marxism, his addition of a theory of human rights notwithstanding. The utopian tradition has long relied on the idea that both individual and social happiness rests on substantial social equality, and that such equality in turn rests upon a contempt for vanity and the obsessive consumption of luxury goods. Claeys’s account of the historical development of utopian thought, which occupies the bulk of Utopianism for a Dying Planet, is excellent.