Political Imagination and Utopian Energies in Central and Eastern Europe

1 Utopianism as a feature of modernity

The history of Central and Eastern Europe—whether medieval, modern, or contemporary—can provide us a rich spectrum of political imagination. Politicians and political thinkers have always had particular fantasies about the best possible organization of political institutions and social relations, sometimes even about the best possible qualities of individuals needed in the desired political system. Some of these fantasies were realizable within shorter horizon of time, some of them were utopian in the sense of being rather abstract targets. But even these utopian thoughts are important since they are capable to open our minds to new possibilities, clarify our social and political values, and give us directions that we need in order to move. The 13^th Central and Eastern European Forum of Young Legal, Political and Social Theorists, the proceedings of which you are about to read in this book, tried to map precisely this field of political imagination and utopian energies in Central and Eastern Europe. The papers presented at the conference introduced to the audience many particular examples of political projects in the region, some of them rather forgotten (and potentially ready to be revived), some of them very current. And—what is important—many of them are quite unknown outside their national communities, given the language plurality of the region and the fact that many Central and Eastern European political writings are not translated into English as the universal language of today.

Before looking at some concrete projects and thoughts in the following chapters, we should, however, at first briefly clarify the context and meaning of the terms in the book’s title. Most importantly, we should remark that the issues analyzed in this book lie in the temporal context of modernity as an era characterized by several elements that enabled us to imagine in particularly political (and utopian) way. We have in mind especially the specific “regime of historicity” in which the future is a dominant temporality and in which societies do not intend to repeat the past, but to march progressively toward an ideal alternative to the present.¹ Moreover, even the very concept of society was not common in the pre-modern vocabulary,² especially in the meaning of an entity that could be controlled and directed.

In the pre-modern times, according to a classical interpretation by a German historian Reinhardt Koselleck, the temporality of everyday life—and also of politics—was mostly repetitive. Social change took place so slowly that the primary instructional tools for future actions were past examples: “the expectations cultivated in this peasant-artisan world […] subsisted entirely on the experiences of their predecessors, experiences which in turn became those of their successors.” The only expectations that “went beyond all previous experiences” were eschatological ones—that of the End of the World, the Final Judgment.³ So, in a very generalized way, we can say that the images of the future were either that of historia magistra vitae, or that of apocalypse—not that of progress in this world.

This begins to change in the 16^th and 17^th century. At that time, the religious apocalyptic readings of the future were sidelined as a part of the attempt of the (absolutist) monarchs to suppress brutal religious civil wars of the period.⁴ This was the goal of the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, the witness not only of the English Civil War (1642–1651) but also of the European Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). Hobbes’s main thesis is based on the observation that “civil wars will rage as long as there exist supernatural entities that citizens feel they have a right to petition when they are persecuted by the authorities of this lower world.” Thus, Hobbes wanted to rediscover (Catholic) unity by denying “all appeals to entities higher than civil authority.”⁵ Simultaneously, new discoveries, both scientific and geographical (especially that of the New World), allowed people to experience other dramatic changes in the span of few generations that substantially broadened peoples’ horizons. According to Koselleck, this slowly “helped create a consciousness of a general history which led into an altogether neue Zeit.” So, Koselleck continues, “the divide between previous experience and coming expectation opened up” and “expectations have distanced themselves evermore from all previous experience.”⁶

This development, together with the increasing rationalism of 18^th-century European thought, led to a specific political ideal-type—the Enlightened monarch and his state apparatus. The emphasis on the break with medieval customs was represented by two processes. The first one consisted in weakening of the “intermediary institutions” lying between the state and the individual. The enlightened intellectuals demanded from monarchs the substantial reduction of the estate system “with its separate laws governing each social stratum,” for example, “the noble privilege, self-government of cities, guilds that block economic freedom, the separate status of Jews, and the privileged status of the clergy.”⁷ Even when these institutions were preserved and survived what Otto von Gierke called the “war of annihilation” against the institutional remnants of the Middle Ages, they were not legitimized by their previous functioning and tradition. They had to be “legitimized by various governmental agencies in order to have the right to continue operating,” even though many of them “were historically antecedent to the state.”⁸ In other words, the state that tries not only to discover and follow the past, but to create the ideal future, has to fight against centrifugal tendencies represented by these parallel centers of power. Thus, the second, related process was that of pozitivization of law. Contrary to customary law that finds its legitimacy in the past (in the factuality of tradition), positive law sets norms for the society “contrafactually” and pro futuro, that is, with regard to the legislator’s vision of future society.

Modern opening of the future, made possible by the above-mentioned development, increased the possibility to imagine that our society can be otherwise. In the first chapter of this book, Krzysztof Katkowski reminds us of Zygmunt Bauman’s conception of societal imagination presented in the book Socialism: The Active Utopia. Bauman states that the future is a unique phenomenon, “a mode of time qualitatively distinct from the past in the sense of being not-entirely-determined,” and even mentions the “human ability to decline to learn, to resist the conditioning pressure.”⁹ In a similar way, Erik Olin Wright suggests that imagination can be sometimes more useful than (scientific) knowledge by saying that “our capacity to generate scientifically credible knowledge about social conditions beyond the near future is very limited.” There is always a gap between “the time-horizons of scientific theory and the time-horizons of transformative struggles.”¹⁰ So, both authors try to say that we should be able to think in a utopian way, that is, to imagine the future without deducing it (scientifically) from the past and present.

In this volume, we also work with the notion of utopia as an ideal that is not necessarily evident and predictable from the present state of affairs. The utopian method was recently described in a useful way by Ruth Levitas who defines the core of utopia as “the desire for being otherwise, individually and collectively, subjectively and objectively” and describes three modes of “utopia as method.” According to Levitas, the method of Imaginary Reconstruction of Society has (1) an archaeological mode of “piecing together the images of the good society that are embedded in political programmes and social and economic policies”; (2) an ontological mode, which addresses the issue of human flourishing and examines “what capabilities are valued, encouraged and genuinely enabled, or blocked and suppressed, by specific existing or potential social arrangements”; and (3) an architectural mode, by which she means “the imagination of potential alternative scenarios for the future,” even including more detailed institutional arrangements.¹¹

However, concrete institutional arrangements, as we know them from classical literary utopias such as that written by Thomas More, are not indispensable parts of utopian thought. Russell Jacoby suggests to distinguish between blueprint utopias that are precisely those detailed images of the ideal future and iconoclastic utopias that dream of a superior society as well, but decline “to give its precise measurements,” following the Jewish tradition of the prohibition of idolatry, that is, of making graven images of supernatural entities. Iconoclastic utopianism, that is present, for example, in the works of the students of Jewish messianism like Gerschom Scholem or even Jewish atheists like Ernst Bloch is less about looking into the future and more about listening for it, following the voices of harmony, peace, or pleasure.¹²

3 Scientific control of society

The idea of the progressive evolution of society was crucial for the political imagination of the second half of the 19^th and the first half of the 20^th century—and the region of Central and Eastern Europe was not an exception. And what was considered more and more necessary in order to achieve social progress was the ability to know society better with the help of science: economy, psychology, but especially sociology. In the first half of the 20^th century, we can even speak about the unprecedently optimistic belief in the possibility to regulate society by the means of science and law. Duncan Kennedy understands this tendency as a global trend characterized by “rethinking law as a purposive activity, as a regulatory mechanism that could and should facilitate the evolution of social life.”²⁴ What is specific to this tendency is that the blueprints of this era of “solid modernity” were “marked by territoriality,” “intrinsically linked to the spatial form of the nation-state, and to a degree of engagement within such spaces by all classes of society.”²⁵