Eduard Batalov's The American Utopia is one of the more surprising things Progress Publishers put into English in the mid-1980s: a genuine monograph, by a genuine specialist, on a subject most of the export list would not have touched. Batalov was a philosopher on the staff of the Institute of U.S. and Canadian Studies in Moscow — Georgi Arbatov's institute, the closest thing the Soviet Union had to a professional Americanist establishment — and he had already given Progress a serious book on Herbert Marcuse and the New Left (The Philosophy of Revolt, 1975) and, with colleagues, a study of American political consciousness. This is not a folder of clippings dressed as a book, of the kind the series usually meets. It is an argument, built out of wide reading in its subject, about why a nation that likes to think of itself as the most hard-headed and pragmatic on earth has in fact been one of the great producers of social dreams.
The English carries 1985 on the spine, and that is the translation date. The text is a little older. Its latest heavy sources are Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave (1980) and Daniel Bell writing in 1975; its political present is the Reagan turn — the "shift to the right, recently discussed so much in the West," the moment when "champions of this policy gain control of the government, the way it happened in the United States in the early 1980s." So this is a book of the very early Reagan years, written in Russian around 1981–82 and reaching English readers three or four years later. Nothing in it needs a later date; nothing in it reads like glasnost. It belongs to the last Brezhnev winter, and it is worth reading with that clock in mind.
It is worth asking, too, what a book like this was for. The Institute of U.S. and Canadian Studies existed to produce expert knowledge of the American adversary — some of it genuinely serious, some of it the raw material of foreign policy, all of it under the constraint that the knowledge could travel in one direction only. A study of the American utopian imagination sat comfortably inside that mandate: it let a Soviet scholar demonstrate real command of American culture while arriving, by a sophisticated route, at the reassuring conclusion that American dreaming is the froth on an insoluble contradiction of American capitalism. Unlike much of the export list, this volume is unusually free of the ritual deviation-vocabulary — the drumbeat of "opportunism" and "revisionism" — that fills the Institute's more polemical productions; Batalov's weapon is not denunciation but the calm application of a theory. That is what makes the book effective, and it is also what makes its single exemption so conspicuous. A theory this general, applied this carefully, that nonetheless never once completes the circuit back to the society that funded it, tells you something the polemics conceal: the limit was not the author's competence but the permitted direction of the instrument.
What the book actually covers is broad and, for the most part, competently mapped. Batalov begins with a theoretical chapter — what a utopia is, what functions it serves — and then traces the American utopian tradition across two centuries: the folk utopias of the lower orders and the "official" utopias manufactured at the top; the agrarian dream of a farmers' America; the romantic utopia; the utopian socialism of the nineteenth century and the communitarian experiments it inspired, from Owen's New Harmony through Fourierist phalanxes to Cabet's Icaria; the antiutopia, from Ignatius Donnelly's Caesar's Column through Huxley and Orwell; and, at greatest length, what he calls the modern technocratic utopia — the post-industrial and futurological literature of Daniel Bell, John Kenneth Galbraith, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Herman Kahn, B. F. Skinner and Toffler. A closing chapter on "the living utopia" returns to the communes, nineteenth-century and 1960s alike. The reach is real, the sources are read in the original, and a reader who wants a Marxist's guided tour of American social dreaming will find one here.
The engine of the book is the oldest distinction in the tradition: Engels's separation of utopian from scientific socialism. Batalov never lets it out of his hand. A utopia, for him, is an ideal "postulated arbitrarily by consciousness" — "an image (ideal) of the desired (and in this sense, perfect) human commonwealth." Utopian consciousness is the kind of thinking "oriented on a break with the objective laws governing the operation and development of nature and society, and on arbitrary construction of an ideal." Against this he sets the Marxist procedure, in which the social ideal "should not be simply thought up, even by a good thinker, but deduced from the actual historical development of society" — Marx's insistence, as Batalov puts it, that the ideal be "the image of its necessary state," arising "from the solution of the existing contradictions." The utopian invents his future; the scientific socialist reads it out of the present. This is Engels's argument in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880), and Batalov applies it with care.
He also applies, and this is the best thing in the book, the corollary that a utopia is never merely a mistake. It is a symptom. "Utopias are coded expressions of social ideals and actual interests of classes, groups and individuals"; to decode a utopia is to read off the real contradiction that produced it and that the utopia exists precisely in order not to resolve. Handled this way, the method is genuinely illuminating, and the chapters on the technocratic utopia are where it pays off. Batalov sees, correctly, that the American futurology of the 1960s and 70s had quietly changed the meaning of the word. The classical utopia projected the stability "of a society which had reached the uppermost limits of perfection"; the technocratic utopia projects something meaner and more revealing — "the stability of a system threatened by disintegration, stability as a means of survival." He catches Galbraith admitting that an organization's overriding goal is "its own survival," and turns it against the whole genre: this is not a dream of the good life but a dream of not collapsing, dressed as one. He is sharp on the class content of the meritocratic promise — the "welfare state" minimum offered in exchange for the surrender of any control over the system's direction — and sharp on the futurologists' habit of transferring power from politicians to "experts" while calling the result freedom, when in it "freedom is not an end... but only a means of maintaining society's rational and effective functioning." When Kahn and Bruce-Briggs paint their post-industrial paradise of two homes and household robots and "little Sally who is sleeping around," Batalov's deflation of it as a bourgeois daydream needs no help. This is real criticism, and where the book does it, it should be credited plainly.
The historical chapters earn their keep as well. Batalov's distinction between the folk utopia of the lower orders and the official utopia "constructed at the top" is a genuinely useful analytic grid, and he lays it over the American material with a light hand — the Declaration of Independence read as a document whose most stirring clauses were "essentially Utopian," "sharply at variance with the objective trends of capitalist development"; the "American Dream" treated not as propaganda but as a real structure of national feeling with real historical roots in a continent that seemed to promise that "nothing was impossible." His account of the nineteenth-century communitarian experiments — from Owen's New Harmony through the Fourierist phalanxes to Cabet's Icaria — is sober and informed, and he is honest about their fate: the utopian community, in the words of the British Marxist A. L. Morton that Batalov endorses, "may be compared to a bridge, which, when one is on the far side of a river, is a means of crossing it, but which, when once crossed, leads only backwards." He is equally clear-eyed that the modern American utopian socialism of Fromm, Lerner and Michael Harrington is "barren," a retreat from the practicable transformation of capitalist society into moralizing prescription. All of this is competent, and some of it is better than competent. The trouble is never that Batalov cannot think historically about utopia. It is that his history stops at a particular frontier and does not cross it.
It should also be credited for its honesty about its own tradition's ancestors. Batalov does not pretend the utopian socialists were fools. He records Marx and Engels's high regard for Fourier and Saint-Simon; he treats the American communitarians as a serious experiment whose failure taught something. Most striking, he tells on the young Engels. In 1845 Engels had published an enthusiastic notice of the American communist colonies, concluding that "communism... is not only possible but has actually already been realized in many communities in America... with the greatest success." Batalov quotes it in full — and then, quietly, corrects it: Engels's article, he writes, "reflects both insufficiency of information and what a historian has termed 'illusions of previous socialist thought.'" A Soviet author willing to catch Engels believing too easily in a utopia is not a hack. Hold that sentence; we will need it.
Because the book has one enormous blind spot, and it is not an accident of emphasis. It is structural, and it is the reason this volume is worth republishing. The American Utopia is a study of the arbitrary ideal — the promise a society makes about its own future that its real development cannot deliver — written and published by the state that had made the most spectacular such promise of the century, and had just watched it fail. In October 1961 the Twenty-Second Congress of the CPSU had adopted a new Party Programme that pledged to build the material and technical base of communism "in the main" by 1980, and declared, in a sentence every Soviet citizen of Batalov's generation knew, that the present generation of Soviet people would live under communism. By 1985, when this book appeared in English, 1980 was five years in the past and communism had not arrived. The regime had quietly retired the promise, folding it into the indefinite holding-pattern of "developed socialism." Here, if anywhere, was a utopia in Batalov's exact sense: an ideal "postulated arbitrarily," "at variance with the objective trends," proclaimed by the state as its "necessary state" and then contradicted by the state's own history. It is the perfect specimen for his theory, and it is the one specimen the theory is never allowed to touch.
The avoidance is measurable. In roughly 84,000 words about the illusions societies tell themselves, the phrase "Soviet Union" does not occur. "USSR" occurs once — in the biographical note on the back flap, naming one of Batalov's earlier books. "In our country" never appears. The taxonomy that sorts American dreaming into folk, official, romantic, technocratic, democratic and socialist utopias has no category for a Soviet utopia, official or otherwise, and no line to spare for the possibility that the machinery of "official utopia" he describes so well — the ideal "constructed at the top... by professional ideologists working to fulfill a social order of the officialdom," reflecting "the elite's distinct social status" — might have a Moscow address. The nearest the book comes to Russia is its Conclusion, where Batalov reaches for Lenin's 1912 essay "Two Utopias" to supply his "methodological key." But Lenin there is dissecting the pre-revolutionary utopias of the Narodniks and the liberals — utopia safely quarantined in Tsarist Russia, before October. After October, in Batalov's map of the world, utopia is something only other countries have.
The book's long chapter on the American antiutopia makes the same evasion visible in a second way, because here the mirror is literally in the text and Batalov steadily turns it away from himself. Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World run through these pages, and Batalov reads them with intelligence — but always as warnings addressed to the West. He is scornful of the Cold War use of Orwell, of the American reader who was told the novel's totalitarian nightmare was "a direct result of attempts to implement the 'communist Utopia,'" and he is right that this was a crude weaponizing of a subtle book. He endorses, approvingly, the American futurologist David Goodman's claim that the "Orwellian world" may be "a natural outcome of the functioning of traditional bourgeois-democratic institutions." He quotes Fromm's afterword warning that "men all over the world will lose their most human qualities, will become soulless automatons," and Fromm's plea that the American reader not be "smugly certain that the book had nothing to do with" his own society. Every one of these anti-smug applications points outward, at Washington. Not once does Batalov entertain the possibility that a Soviet reader, in 1985, holding a book about doublethink and the manufacture of official happiness, might find the warning pointed rather closer to home — that the "soulless automaton" and the proclaimed paradise had an address he could see from his office window. Fromm's rebuke of smugness is exactly the rebuke the book itself never absorbs.
This is the finding, and it is worth stating as a general property of the series, not a personal failing of one able scholar. The instruments Batalov turns on Bell and Toffler are precise; the question is whether they could ever be turned on the author's own side. They cannot. He can correct Engels's 1845 credulity about a utopia; he cannot mention the 1961 Programme. The category is built to point outward only. That is the reflexivity test this series applies to every volume, and The American Utopia fails it about as cleanly as a book can, precisely because it is otherwise so good — the sharper the tool, the louder its refusal to cut in the one direction that matters.
The anti-Stalinist left had drawn exactly this conclusion half a century earlier, and with the same instrument. Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed (1936) is, among other things, a demonstration that the Soviet bureaucracy's characteristic product is the official utopia — the proclamation of the ideal as already achieved. Writing of the Stalin Constitution of 1936, which announced that "in the Soviet Union, the principle of socialism is realized," Trotsky called the formula "the lie with which, as a mirror of the ruling stratum, the new constitution is imbued." The mechanism he described is the one Batalov catalogues in others: an ideal detached from the real relations of production, asserted by officialdom, serving to conceal the contradiction it cannot solve. Trotsky even used Batalov's own key word against Batalov's own state. The doctrine of building a completed socialism inside a single backward and encircled country he named, flatly, "the utopian idea of an isolated socialist society." The revolutionary Marxist tradition did not lack the concept of a Soviet utopia. It coined it.
And it did so, crucially, without abandoning the future to the cynics. This is where Trotsky answers not only Batalov's silence but the deeper temptation his book flirts with — the temptation to treat every promise of abundance as a fairy tale. Trotsky insisted on the opposite. Real communism — labor ceasing to be a burden, "the distribution of life's goods, existing in continual abundance" — was no utopia at all; it was "a really modest perspective," and to call it utopian was, he wrote, "pretty dull-witted." The fraud was never the goal. The fraud was proclaiming the goal reached — announcing paradise in order to sanctify the very inequalities that proved it had not come. By Engels's test, which is also Batalov's, the 1961 Programme was utopian in the strict sense: an ideal thought up and imposed from above, "an arbitrary form in relation to the actual world," rather than deduced from what Soviet society could actually become. Batalov had the definition in his hands and the specimen in his own passport, and the book's whole architecture exists to keep the two apart.
None of this means the book should be read cynically or discarded. That would be the lazy conclusion, and it would waste what is here. Batalov is a real reader of American thought, and The American Utopia remains one of the few Soviet studies of its subject with any claim on a serious reader's attention. Its account of the technocratic utopia as a survival-ideology of a system in trouble is a contribution in its own right, one that stands beside the best Western criticism of Bell and Toffler rather than below it. Its treatment of the nineteenth-century communitarian experiments — New Harmony, the Fourierist phalanxes, Icaria — is fair and informed. Even its use of Engels's utopian/scientific distinction is, considered simply as exposition, more careful than most of what the export list produced. Read for what it says about America, the book earns its place. Read for what it cannot say about Russia, it becomes a different and more interesting document: an involuntary self-portrait, in which a Soviet philosopher describes, with real acuity, the exact mechanism by which a ruling stratum manufactures dreams it cannot keep — and never once looks in the mirror he is holding.
The reader who wants the mirror should go to the sources Batalov keeps just out of frame. Engels's Socialism: Utopian and Scientific is the short classic statement of the distinction that governs this whole book, and it is worth reading beside Batalov to see how consistently he applies its outward edge and suppresses its reflexive one. Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed is the text that completes the argument — the demonstration that the "official utopia" Batalov finds everywhere in America had, by 1936, a fully developed Soviet form, and that the categories of utopian and scientific cut both ways or they are not scientific at all. Between the two of them they supply the chapter Batalov did not write, and could not have published: the one on the American utopia's Moscow twin.