Renewables are now vastly cheaper sources of power than fossil fuels. The immediate savings would be vast, and the long-term benefits immeasurable. For at stake is nothing less than the threat of the collapse of civilisation, and the extinction of humanity itself as temperatures rise above 3°C and our planet becomes one vast Sahara. In what way is utopianism distinct from the broader categories of hope, wishful thinking and the imagination?

Fourthly, we need to shift towards a concept of public luxury, shared by all in museums, festivals, including free public transport and the like, and away from private luxury, and at the same time shift our values towards ‘consuming’ experience shared with others (or alone, as in some computer games) and away from consuming unsustainable commodities. This will require remodelling cities to give a feeling of neighbourhood and ‘belongingness’, a sense of place with which we can identify, and which is in my view also a central goal of utopianism historically. Everyone interested in the past, present, and future of utopianism will find something of value in this book, as well as things to argue against. Here I want to focus on one point where I diverge from Claeys. Throughout Utopianism for a Dying Planet, and in his others writings on the utopian tradition, Claeys is adamant that it is necessary to draw a distinction between utopianism and science fiction. They are different genres, with different aims and ambitions. In Utopianism for a Dying Planet he makes the point in several places. Science fiction, he writes, is “generally excluded” from his analysis (18n38); elsewhere, he contends that utopian fiction “is a form of fantasy fiction but is closer to the realistic or realizable end of the spectrum, compared with the more extreme fantasy of science fiction” (27). This move follows, in part, from his commitment to the enhanced sociability model of utopianism; he wants to exclude science fiction narratives because, on his account, they do not engage extensively with this topic. As such, they are not serious instances of utopianism. I am not persuaded by this boundary-work. Gregory Claeys unfolds his argument through a wide-ranging consideration of utopian literature, social theory, and intentional communities. He defends a realist definition of utopia, focusing on ideas of sociability and belonging as central to utopian narratives. He surveys the development of these themes during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries before examining twentieth- and twenty-first-century debates about alternatives to consumerism. Claeys contends that the current global warming limit of 1.5C (2.7F) will result in cataclysm if there is no further reduction in the cap. In response, he offers a radical Green New Deal program, which combines ideas from the theory of sociability with proposals to withdraw from fossil fuels and cease reliance on unsustainable commodities. These are attainable goals. They are not, by and large, shared by our political leaders. But we can now act to ensure their introduction, and our survival. We must wake them up. The alternative is too terrifying to contemplate. And so we must act now, or forever regret our inaction. See you on the streets.

What utopianism almost uniquely offers us is firstly a demand that we think about long-term futures rather than the short four- to five-year economic and political cycles which typically dominate our thinking. Secondly, utopian thought usually envisions a vastly better future than the one we live in. Thirdly, it involves a concern with the common good rather than the profits of the few. And fourthly, it is predicated on a vision of improved social relations between people, on enhanced solidarity, amicability, mutuality, respect, and greater social equality. These are the key utopian values, portrayed in thousands of ideal worlds from the Renaissance to the present. For four reasons I have chosen to portray this response in terms of the long tradition known as utopianism, which dates from the publication of Thomas More’s famous Utopia (1516), but stretches through to early socialism and Karl Marx to the early environmentalist writers and the deeper green thinkers of the 1980s and later. Twelfth, and perhaps most obviously, we must drastically restrict carbon consumption to reduce C0 2 and other emissions. This will entail an immediate move to renewable forms of energy, reforestation, a drastic reduction in the most dangerous forms of consumption, and many other measures. Thirdly, we need to reduce the impact of fashion on consumption, again perhaps by legislating against advertising, impossible though this sounds. Eleventh, we must eliminate the expectation that speed of delivery and the volume of the product are the ultimate goals in consumption. This process, sometimes termed the McDonaldization of society [George Ritzer. The McDonaldization of Society (9th edn, Sage Publications, 2019)] places a premium on quantity over quality, and haste (‘fast food’) and instant gratification over sociability and delayed satisfaction. It also encourages indebtedness (‘buy now, pay later’), and the downward spiral of shopping-to-compensate for the depression we feel from being indebted as a result of shopping too much. Slower is often better.

This is a large book on a monumental topic. In recent decades, Gregory Claeys has established himself as one of the leading scholars of the utopian tradition. Across numerous works, from articles and monographs to edited collections and anthologies of primary texts, he has helped to map the complex history of utopianism in European political thought from the early modern world into our own age. This book is a milestone in his career-long quest to make sense of utopianism, its past and its future, its dangers and its possibilities. In the face of Earth's environmental breakdown, it is clear that technological innovation alone won't save our planet. A more radical approach is required, one that involves profound changes in individual and collective behavior. Utopianism for a Dying Planet examines the ways the expansive history of utopian thought, from its origins in ancient Sparta and ideas of the Golden Age through to today's thinkers, can offer moral and imaginative guidance in the face of catastrophe. The utopian tradition, which has been critical of conspicuous consumption and luxurious indulgence, might light a path to a society that emphasizes equality, sociability, and sustainability.A society defined by belongingness cannot be conjured out of nothing, but must rely on precedents of viable human behaviour. For most of us, by contrast to past utopianism, which has often urged a “return to nature” on the land, city life defines our basic existence. But cities are often unliveable, and created or developed largely for profit rather than for human life. In Utopianism for a Dying Planet: Life After Consumerism (Princeton University Press, August 2022) I conjecture that group theory indicates that neighbourhood identity can provide a vital form of belongingness in large modern cities, to counter the sense of alienation which living in large masses often produces. But cities will also have to become much more pleasant and sustainable, even as temperatures rise significantly in the coming decades. They will have to become much greener, with many more parks, outdoor plazas, and public meeting places, free of most automobile traffic, and easier to move around in, by free public transportation. Festivals and subsidised communal activities will need to provide many more opportunities to meet and enjoy the company of others — I term this a neo-Fourierist approach, after the famous French socialist Charles Fourier. The future utopia must be made as “attractive” (one of Fourier’s favourite terms) as possible. These features will allow us to compensate for a decline in attachment to luxuries and unsustainable consumption, and the many attendant difficulties and frugality which transition to a sustainable society will entail, by ensuring greater means of self-expression and forms of communal pleasure. My own response, after following this scenario across some forty years, is spelled out in a new book, Utopianism for a Dying Planet: Life After Consumerism. My arguments rest on accepting the premise that the current scenario is as dire as can be, that we do genuinely face the prospect of extinction, and therefore that tinkering with the present system is a waste of time. Much more radical solutions, and a much more radical “green new deal”, are required, which will include a fundamental change in our outlook towards nature and towards the consumption of resources. Sober readers will point out that such results could have been predicted (and were) long ago. We have known for decades that the process known as global warming was a near-inevitable result of industrialisation. But we doubted its severity and, bombarded by downright lies and widespread disinformation from the fossil fuel industry, we chose instead to embrace the comforting thought that our high (northern) standard of living need not be upset by a few degrees of further heat. Indeed Claeys admits that the line is hard to hold. This is most notable in the twentieth century and through to the present. After all, many of the most prominent utopian (or dystopian) writers of the era, including H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Ursula Le Guin and Kim Stanley Robinson, are at once canonical science fiction writers and regarded as among the most important contributors to the utopian tradition. (Margaret Atwood is a more awkward case, because she long denied – implausibly – that her work was science fiction, even as it was widely read and analyzed as a prominent example of it). This isn’t just a matter of locating writers in the appropriate genre, or of recognizing the utopian claims of much science fiction. Rather, it speaks to both a conceptual point about the character of utopian thought and an historical point about what happens to utopianism in the twentieth century.

When self-styled ‘realists’ respond to looming environmental collapse by defending business as usual, utopian thinking becomes itself a form of realism. Dispelling the illusions of those who have not understood the magnitude of the social and personal changes needed to confront our current crisis, Claeys presents a forceful account of the twenty-first-century utopia we must embrace as a condition of planetary survival.”—Kate Soper, emeritus professor of philosophy, London Metropolitan University What do you believe is the connection between utopia and action? Does utopia help motivate and mobilize in ways that other kinds of messaging do not? Should we, with Marx, be worried that utopia can be counter-revolutionary?Secondly, we need to curtail certain forms of advertising – it has recently been proposed that the use of attractive young men and women to sell anything should be abolished. [Oliver James. Affluenza, p. 333.] This will not release us from the tyranny of branding, nor will it end the emulation of social ideal types, but it is a step in the right direction. Radical changes in individual and collective behaviour may be required to mitigate the impact of climate change over the coming decades. Drawing on a new book, Gregory Claeys argues that a utopian outlook can provide the impetus for transitioning to a more sustainable way of life. Book Review: National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy by Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin So my book proposes that the history and concepts associated with the utopian tradition can be extremely helpful in the transition to sustainability. The utopian tradition has long relied on the idea that both individual and social happiness rests on substantial social equality, and that such equality in turn rests upon a contempt for vanity and the obsessive consumption of luxury goods. This we glean both from the theory of works like Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) or William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), but equally from large numbers of practical utopian communal experiments, mostly from the 16th century onwards, in which the price of social harmony has often been calculated in terms of a willingness to place needs above wants, and to discourage excessive consumption.