A Need for Utopia

Analysis: A Need for Utopia will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4, and from this page, on Thursday 19 December at 2030 GMT.

Once the dream of a perfect society, Utopia came to symbolise the worst horrors of the 20th century.

But now that pragmatism has replaced political ideology, are we also turning our backs on the idealism that inspired human progress?

Kenan Malik asks whether public engagement and even politics itself is possible without an utopian dimension.

Past utopias soon became the stuff of nightmares as the great experiments with human society have ended in tragedy; the terror of the French and Russian Revolutions, Stalin's gulags, Hitler's death-camps, Mao's Cultural Revolution and Pol Pot's mass graves.

To be an Utopian, as Martin Amis has put it, is to "declare war on human nature".

There is now a general acceptance that grand schemes of social change are doomed.

Politics today is less about transforming society than about managing social problems. Competing values can no longer be expressed as simple ideological conflicts.

Analysis asks why there's been such a transformation in our attitudes. Is it because science has dispelled illusions about Utopianism and provided ammunition for a more pessimistic view of human politics?

Does the critique of Utopianism express disenchantment with politics itself?

Has public disengagement with politics forced politicians to give up on Utopian schemes?

Might anti-Utopianism end up abandoning the very process of social betterment and progress?

Presenter: Kenan Malik
Producer: Zareer Masani
Editor: Nicola Meyrick