Being Interested: Amateur Reports on Books and Ideas

As the second millennium came to a close, a time when many were pondering humanity’s past and prospects, historian Russell Jacoby was fretting over our inability to imagine a utopian future. In a book that saw itself as bucking the trend of anti-utopian polemics that populated the post-war world, The End of Utopia  was itself sharpened with a polemical edge. Looking at the intellectual state of the left in his home country of America and abroad, Jacoby saw a scarcity of dare and originality in the one area where historically it had enjoyed a monopoly: imagining society in a vastly different state than it is now. Jacoby’s argument in The End of Utopia began by taking seriously a thesis few other leftists did, Francis Fukuyama’s declaration of the end of history upon the wrapping up of the Cold War. Jacoby credited Fukuyama with indirectly hitting upon the staleness of a political scene robbed of utopian visions (the final paragraph of Fukuyama’s original essay). 'Today soc...