Tuesday, January 27, 2026 at 10:10 AM until Tuesday, May 19, 2026 at 1:10 PMEastern Standard Time UTC -05:00
Bard College
Utopia as a distinctive genre of writing is to describe the ideal society – “place of nowhere”, as the word meant in Greek. As a genre utopia overlaps with science fiction and satire. In modern times dystopia became the more attractive genre to express critiques of idealizations. In economic thinking therefore “utopian” now has a commonly pejorative connotation, not a positive or scientific one. The purpose of the course is to show the contexts in which economic theories of free-markets or scientific socialism became utopian and vice versa. Despite its liability to faults, classic utopian literature, as we will see in this course, often contained a fresh description of the purely social and economic parameters. Our aim spans the boundaries, type of organization, tendency to violence, the economics (property, money, labor), technological development and inner contradictions. The utopian tradition is rich, and time is scarce, so we will focus on such books as Republic of Plato, Utopia of Thomas More, The New Atlantis of Francis Bacon, Charles Fourier on Harmony and Phalansteries, early British political economic writing, and others. Special attention will be paid to Utopias of Enlightenment as Alexander Radishchev, soviet utopias of Kazimir Malevich and Alexander Chayanov and more contemporary projects. At a time when capitalism is unable to cope with the challenges of inequality, catastrophic climate change and the loss of political balance, and when hopes for socialism are receding into the past with the collapse of the USSR, the search for a new utopia is becoming increasingly relevant. The proposed course will serve as a laboratory for this search. The course aims to bring together those studying philosophy, literature, history, political science and economics.
