Utopia and the present

2016 marked the 500th anniversary of the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia. As part of the celebrations and reflections on the continuing influence of utopian thought, scholars and intellectuals across the world have discussed ways in which utopia may be reconceptualised today. It appears to be a challenging and urgent undertaking, if we accept Henri Lefebvre’s position that “today more than ever, there is no theory without utopia”. In the Western cultural tradition, utopian thought has attempted for centuries to make sense of the fascinating and complex interdependence between the human past, present and future, and has enlivened it with collective and personal desires, searches for power, and hopes for social stability and happiness. Different epochs have produced diverse forms of utopia according to shared aspirations, the imagination of a better future, and allegiance to ideologies and structures of power. In the global present of mass movement and rapid technological development, however, once-fixed categories of time, place, and identity seem to have lost stability, and change is a constitutive feature of our present. Utopia seems to have become a site of contestation, even though the past and the future have been made somewhat less relevant by the pressures of our present, and the utopian appeal of the future appears to be consequently tarnished.