On the 27th and the 28th of April 2023, the research group “Democracy in East Central European utopianism” funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation and based at CEU’s Democracy Institute, organized and hosted its first major academic event – a workshop titled “Utopia and Democracy”. Fifteen scholars from various backgrounds, sharing an interest in the …
Continue reading ““Utopia and Democracy” workshop – A brief reflection”
27-28 Apr, 2023 Our workshop at CEU Democracy Institute will begin soon, on 27 April, 2023. You can also join online in Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@ceudemocracyinstitute730 This workshop aims to investigate the relationship of utopia and democracy, primarily in the 19th and 20th centuries, up to contemporary problems. We intend to enrich the intellectual history of the …
This new book published by Princeton University Press in 2022 is probably the most important volume in utopian studies for quite some time. The author is Gregory Claeys, professor emeritus of the history of ideas at Royal Holloway (University of London) and chair of the Utopian Studies Society (Europe). He is one of the best …
Continue reading “Utopianism for a Dying Planet – toward a post-consumer society”
Last week’s blog post addressed the significance of the journals, or little magazines of the Central European avant-garde, that were influenced by utopian artistic movements in the region and often served as disseminators of their ideas. That short piece was mostly focused on the activist magazine Út, published in Hungarian on the territory of the …
Continue reading “Central European Avant-Gardes and Their Utopian Journals, Part II”
The avant-garde artistic and political movements from the 1920s anticipated revolution, called for a utopian society brought about by the birth of a “new man” and did so through a desire for surpassing national boundaries. As Timothy Benson and Éva Forgács note, although the avant-garde circles of Central Europe were an essential part of modernism …
Continue reading “Central European Avant-Gardes and Their Utopian Journals, Part I”
When we focus on the literary aspect of utopia, the fictional nature of utopian texts often appears as a problem in their interpretation (for the other aspects read here). The feature of fictionality makes some historians and social scientist ignore such texts when they look at fact and fiction being in a binary opposition. Literary …
We have discussed in previous posts the difficulties and complexities of delineating a fixed borderline between the East and the West, and the role Eastern and Central Europe play in this regard. As Timothy Benson and Éva Forgács emphasize, the term East Central Europe started to be used as a political concept around 1918-19, when …
Continue reading “Central European Avant-Gardes: A Few Utopian Examples”
One of the earliest and most influential artistic and political movements based on the concept of utopia in Yugoslavia was Zenitism (Zenithism), formed with the launching of the international magazine Zenit (Zenith) first published in Zagreb (1921-1923) and then in Belgrade (1923-1926), by its main progenitor Ljubomir Micić, Serbian poet and writer (1895-1971). The journal …
Continue reading “The Modern Balkan “Barbarian”: A Yugoslav Utopia”
The interpretation of utopias is a contested issue. Rather than looking at them as a destination to reach, it is suggested that they open a horizon toward which we may move.
Dystopias, or negative utopias are the product of utopianism, and in contemporary societies, they are even more widespread than utopias. In his 2016 study Dystopia: A Natural History, Gregory Claeys proposes that utopia and dystopia are twins, the progeny of the same parents, sharing more than it is often supposed (7). As Claeys points out …
Continue reading “Negativity and Failure in Thinking about (Queer) Utopias and Dystopias”
Utopia and democracy 