The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy

Jacoby is at his best in in The End of Utopia, which could be read along with his earlier work The Last Intellectuals. Few authors reach the understanding of contemporary society as does Jacoby!

As a former student of Professor Jacoby at UCLA, I felt that this was a wonderful book explaining his philosophy on the fall of Utopian thinking. His knowledge on the subject comes through as clearly as it did in class. This should be a must read for anyone interested in why we no longer dream of a perfect society to exist in the future, and have become content with something that falls dramatically short of it.

This book should be on your short list of "must-read" material.Russell Jacoby's willingness to think critically and his trust that his audience is willing to do the same inevitably result in the finest cultural and intellectual criticism available in the United States.This book is no exception and is an important read for anyone who wonders if there's a better way available to our society. Before we can answer that question, the dead wood of the last century must be cleared away.Jacoby does so by pointing out how thoroughly enervated left/liberal political and social thought has become. Jacoby's conclusion is frightening in its implications -- leftists and liberals have essentially given up on the complex task of forging a new, better future for all.In place of that utopian impulse, leftists and liberals have substituted cynicism, academic careerism and outright moral defeat. No longer certain that they can change the world, they seem intent on obscuring their total surrender to the existing sociopolitical milieu.Jacoby's book is brief, but does a great job of documenting this shift in liberal/leftist thought from ardent desire to improve society to abject acceptance of what exists. Western societies need people who are willing to think on a grand scale about how the lives of people living in those societies can be improved. What the liberal/left now offers is an incoherent insistence that nothing can be improved, that all is simply rhetorical strategies designed to perpetuate systems of dominance and subjugation.The society that is currently emerging from the turmoil of technological ferment desperately needs moral, political and intellectual leadership informed by a vision of a better future. In its current incarnation, left/liberal thought is incapable of providing that vision.The frightening thing is that this tradition is probably the only one capable of conceiving and implementing social change that would make the new technology serve us rather than the other way around. Jacoby's book is a tough-minded call to arms for those of us who aren't ready to give up on humanity and don't believe that the market place is a mechanism that necessarily best adjudicates complex social interactions and promotes the values of a humane society -- equality, justice, peace and prosperity.

Russell is adept in his honesty that most the writers of the "left" have bent to the mainstream ideology as they toss token ideas into the mill.

Politics, as Russell Jacoby observes, has become boring. Hardly anyone talks about political ideas anymore. Where there is little talk, there is even less action. I have long believed that an effective left needs some kind of positive vision for the future. Changing society takes enormous energy and requires something more than a belief that a change "is the right thing to do," or that "it might do some good." This attitude leads to sporadic and half hearted efforts while those convinced they are creating a new world are capable of sustaining their passion over a lifetime while inspiring others along the way.Nevertheless, a recognition of the left's loss of faith in its ability to create a better world has been missing, curiously so since such hopes have nourished it for over two centuries. For years I could find no mention of it anywhere. So my heart was ineffably gladdened when I stumbled onto The End of Utopia, a superlative work that focuses on this issue.Russell Jacoby is a highly respected intellectual historian who made a splash a decade ago with the excellent and well received The Last Intellectuals. He is a brilliant writer with a biting wit, one of those rare people who can make the discussion of even the dullest writers interesting. His excoriation of current leftist theory is great fun. In a review in Dissent Magazine, George Scialabba commented that Jacoby is "a cultural hygeinist, scouring verbal plaque and conceptual decay with his high-powered electric-sarcastic drill."Jacoby's thesis is that the left needs to be open to the possibility of utopian thinking. By utopian, Jacoby isn't referring to an attempt to create a perfect world, but that we can hope "that the future could fundamentally surpass the present." His primary focus is the botch that contemporary leftist theory has become without it. He is perhaps best when reviewing multiculturism. While agreeing with the basic premise that we need to be more inclusive of racial and ethnic groups, he derides multiculturism's pretenses of radicalism. He points out that we are becoming more culturally uniform, not diverse. Everyone buys the same goods, looks at the same TV shows and movies, "pursue the same activities and have the same desires -- more or less -- for success." There is, moreover, no vision inherent in multiculturism. Its efforts are primarily directed toward getting its people more power with everyone wanting "a bigger piece of the same action," suggesting "patronage more than revolution," leading people to specialize "in marginalization to up their market value." The radical pretenses of multiculturism "might be characterized as jargon attached to an air compressor." Ultimately, it assumes that the future will be like the present, only with more options.Jacoby is also deeply concerned with the left's abandonment of universal values in favor of the local and particular, the tendency to aestheticize reality and