The American Utopia

A genuine monograph, by a genuine specialist, on a subject most of the export list would not have touched: why a nation that likes to think of itself as the most hard-headed and pragmatic on earth has been one of the great producers of social dreams.

Eduard Batalov was a philosopher at the Institute of US and Canadian Studies - Arbatov's institute, the closest thing the Soviet Union had to a professional Americanist establishment - and he had already produced a serious study of Marcuse and the New Left and, with colleagues, a book on American political consciousness.

This is an argument built out of wide reading in its subject: the utopian strain in American thought from the colonial settlements and the nineteenth-century communities through the technocratic and managerial utopias to the counterculture and the futurology of the 1970s, with Toffler and Daniel Bell among the heavier recent sources.

It let a Soviet scholar demonstrate real command of American culture while arriving, by a sophisticated route, at a conclusion his own side found reassuring - and the command is not in doubt.

The text is of the very early Reagan years, written in Russian around 1981-82 and reaching English readers three or four years later. Its political present is the shift to the right and the moment its champions took the American government.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.