Content area
Full text
Griffin, Michael J., and Tom Moylan, eds. Exploring the Utopian Impulse: Essays on Utopian Thought and Practice. Bern: Peter Lang, 2007. Ralahine Utopian Studies 2. Paperback. 434 pp. ISBN-10: 1661-5875 ISBN-13: 978-303910-913-5. $49.95.
The second of a projected five-book series developed by the Ralahine Centre for Utopian Studies at the University of Limerick, Exploring the Utopian Impulse is as erudite, discursive, and important as the first volume, Utopia Method Vision: The Use Value of Social Dreaming (2007). The Ralahine Centre was founded in 2003; the book series project is a collaborative effort of the Centre and the Department of Intercultural Studies in Translation, Languages and Culture, University of Bologna at Forlì. Edited by Michael J. Griffin and the venerable Tom Moylan, this second book features twenty essays divided into three sections entitled "Utopian Thought," "Utopian Texts," and "Utopian Politics." Although the essays were peer reviewed, all of them have roots in Exploring the Utopian Impulse, the Ralahine Centre's first international conference, held in Limerick in March 2005. Most of the contributors are European, mainly Irish or British, and the locus of discussion is more European than not. All of the pieces are well researched, and there is a comprehensive index. The editors of the present volume tell us that "Utopianism [...] is best understood as a process of social dreaming that unleashes and informs efforts to make the world a better place, not to the letter of a plan but to the spirit of an open-ended process" (9). Ernst Bloch's hopefulness informs Utopian studies and every entry in this volume.
The five essays comprising "Utopian Thought" address obstacles to clear Utopian thinking and attempt to theorize a way to transcend them. Ruth Levitas begins with an essay about time and physical change in Hammersmith. This once idyllic neighborhood that was the model for William Morris's utopia in News From Nowhere is now divided by a motorway beneath which lie the footprints of lost architecture. Levitas tells us that "You cannot walk that way again" (40). But you can share in her recreation of the time, the people, and places of a historical moment and physical spot that should not be forgotten, that should in some sense coexist with the present.
In "'Towards Justice to Come':...