In the latest issue of Dissent, a social democratic journal
founded by Irving Howe in 1954, there’s a remarkably vituperative
review of Erik Olin Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias by Russell
Jacoby, a UCLA professor. This is the most vicious paragraph:
WHAT IS one to make of this morass? Wright seems to know nothing
about the history of utopian thought, communities, or
cooperatives. He refers to exactly one book in the utopian
tradition, Martin Buber’s 1949 Paths in Utopia. Buber’s book
closed with a discussion of the kibbutz, a subject that would seem
to call out to Wright. After all, the kibbutz is a “real utopia”
with a socialist ethos and decades of practice. Are there lessons
to be found here? Daniel Gavron’s suggestive book The Kibbutz,
subtitled “Awakening from Utopia,” sought to appraise its past and
future. Wright says nothing about the kibbutz or the literature on
it. Nor does he say much about the “real utopias” in Brazil,
Canada, and Spain. He says little about anything. The empirical
information he provides is perfunctory at best. His command of
Marxism seems limited. His historical reach extends to his own
earlier works. His vast theoretical apparatus is jimmy-rigged and
empty. The graphs are inane, the writing atrocious. To call this
book dull as dish water maligns dish water.
It must be understood that Jacoby has a special interest in
knocking down someone who writes about utopian socialism,
especially a figure with some authority in the academic milieu
that is home to both of them. Reading Jacoby’s appraisal of
Wright, one wonders if there is a kind of envy at work:
He [Wright] is a chaired professor who has just been elected
president of the American Sociological Association, the premier
professional organization of the field. He often lectures at
universities across the globe. He teaches in what many consider
the finest sociology department in the country, at the University
of Wisconsin, Madison. The Madison department is where C. Wright
Mills received his doctorate, and it housed his mentor, Hans
Gerth, an émigré scholar who was a student of another sociologist,
Karl Mannheim, whose 1929 Ideology and Utopia remains a touchstone
study.
From the looks of it, Wright has won more blue ribbons than
Heineken beer, as my good friend the late Mark Jones once
described David Harvey. In this rarefied arena, the competition is
very intense when it comes to Marxism, at least as defined as
published articles and books that few sans-culottes activists will
ever have the time or the energy to read.
full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/01/26/dueling-utopias/
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