Dystopia

About: Dystopia is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2146 publications have been published within this topic receiving 15163 citations. The topic is also known as: cacotopia.

Eco-Catastrophe, Arithmetic Patriotism and the Thatcherite Promise of Nature

Abstract: This essay describes how the renovated 1970s liberalism that would become a major thread of Thatcherism grew on the back of public perceptions of crisis, and adapted worries about ecology to worries about ‘financial ecology’, or money supply. The natural conditions of money movement have a particular place in the British constitution as the original basis of authority for the 1688 state, when Newtonian ideas of eternal laws of physics were ‘financialised’ by John Locke. In this thinking, the property basis of citizenship itself is nature, and must be underwired by universal terms of exchange following natural rules. Although Thatcherism has often been described as an alien credo, it was largely enabled by this promise of a return to a financial natural law. In the terms borrowed from Luc Boltanski by William Davies, it returns to a ‘political physics’ which now takes on a moral role preventing catastrophe, or an ‘economic patriotism’ seen to protect the constitution from political force. The 1970s return to Locke’s understanding of nature builds on and repurposes visions of the catastrophic in popular culture, fiction, children’s books and TV, which I describe here. It begins with those eco-catastrophes that describe a ‘disaster of nature’, which it sees as also including the disaster of the property-producing role of labour, in the ‘despotic’ role of trade unions, and the perceived threat to money as a universal measure, a disaster that would increasingly be given an arithmetic measure in inflation. For key liberal or neo-Lockean think-tanks of the mid­1970s, the attack on natural law by despotic power, measured in inflation, could be seen as a mass erosion of individual responsibility, as dystopian, and as always calling for a restoration of the balances of nature. The result is a permanent and quotidian vigilance over threats to nature that sees their solution, paradoxically, as the creation of more property. Understanding this binding between nature and property in the constitution that gave rise to Anglophone capitalist modernity also helps give a fix on the way stories of ecological disaster can, as Frederick Buell has described, themselves be given values and repurposed for increased consumption.

Parenthood Demands: Resisting A Dystopia In The Workplace

Abstract: Parenthood is a high impact, and culturally divisive issue; its influence over organisational life is as normalised as the negative consequences for working parents. The parental problem is indicat...

Utopian spaces of modernism : British literature and culture, 1885-1945

Abstract: Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors Introduction B.Kohlmann PART I: AMBIGUOUS UTOPIANISM Socially Empty Space and Dystopian Utopianism in the Late Nineteenth Century M.Beaumont 'On the Eve of the Fourth Dimension': Utopian Higher Space M.Blacklock Modernism's Material Futures: Glass, and Several Kinds of Plastic D.Trotter Minor Utopias and the British Literary Temperament, 1880-1945 J.Winter PART II: LIVING IN UTOPIA Utopian Bloomsbury: The Grounds for Social Dreaming in William Morris's News from Nowhere M.Ingleby Utopia from the Rooftops: H.G. Wells, Modernism, and the Panorama-City D.Cook 'The Strange High Singing of Some Aeroplane Overhead': War, Utopia and the Everyday in Virginia Woolf's Fiction C.Britzolakis 'Hellhole and Paradise': The Heterotopic Spaces of Berlin A.Thacker PART III: TESTING THE LIMITS OF UTOPIA The Re-Conceptualization of Space in Edwardian Prophecy Fiction: Heterotopia, Utopia, and the Apocalypse A.Stahler 'No Less Than a Planet': Scale-Bending in Modernist Fiction J.Hegglund The Unseen Side of Things: Eliot and Stevens D.Mao PART IV: EPILOGUE Two Towers, Plus One: The Ends of Utopia I.Sinclair Index

From Owenite Socialism to Blairite Social-ism: Utopia and Dystopia in Robert Owen and New Labour

Abstract: In this paper we explore some of the enduring themes that arguably characterise Owen and Blair and their respective followers. While Owen and Blair are separated by two centuries, there is a considerable degree of coincidence in their approaches and agendas. New Labour sees itself as constructing a new Britain, a new welfare system and a Third Way approach to politics and the state, which is constructed as new in that it purports to ‘go beyond’ both ‘Old’ Labour and the Conservatives. As with Blair and New Labour, for Owen constructing a particular vision of ‘new’ society was an important objective. This ‘newness’ is reflected in his most famous icon, New Lanark, as well as in his ideas for a ‘new Society’ and a ‘New Moral World’. For both Owen and the Owenites, and Blair and New Labour, there is a shared effort to distance themselves from ‘past failures’ while projecting an image of the future, an attempt to construct a model or vision of what a ‘good’ society should look like. Here ideas of utopia and d...