Isaiah Berlin, William Morris, and the politics of utopia

This essay considers the logic of what might be termed the 'pluralistic school' of anti-utopian liberal argument by addressing the following question: is utopian political theorising necessarily totalitarian? Its central argument is that the alleged link between utopianism and totalitarianismc annotb e assessedw ithout a prior determinationo f the interpretative approach appropriate to a given utopian text. This determination will vary from text to text, as well as in some cases across different parts of a single text. It concludes, therefore, that while it is possiblet o formulate illuminating argumentsa boutt he 'utopiani mpulse' or 'the utopian tendency', those who make sweeping generalisations aboutt he necessaryre lationshipb etweenu topianisma nd totalitarianism engage in precisely the sort of ideological dogmatism they mistakenly ascribe to the utopian.