Utopia/Dystopia

The practice of social dreaming has a long history in philosophical thinking, stretching back to Tao Yuanming and Plato. What constitutes a perfect or ideal society? Or, if no such place is possible, what makes for a well-functioning society? Likewise, what constitutes a terrible society? What kind of places and spaces do we want to avoid? These are important questions for human ecologists to ask as we seek to improve our relationships with our natural, social, and technological environments. To explore questions of imaginary, ideal, and flawed places, this course studies the concepts of utopia and dystopia across a range of philosophical, political, and literary writings. Although we will focus our attention on theoretical literature, we will read one novel and several short stories.

Additional course questions include: What motivates us to envision utopias and dystopias? Does political philosophy require a utopian vision? What do utopias and dystopias tell us about social fears, anxieties, and hopes? Are utopia and dystopia inherently connected? What theoretical questions spring from the utopia/dystopia binary? We will read texts such as, Plato’s Republic, Thomas More’s Utopia, Rokeya Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream, Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, Elizabeth Grosz’s The Time of Architecture; William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, José Estaban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia, Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Ursula K. LaGuin’s The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, Laozi's Tao Te Ching, Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, Alex Zamalin’s Black Utopia, and selections from The Utopian Reader by Gregory Claeys and Lyman Tower Sargent.