American socio-philosophical utopia: the genesis and problems of representation

Philosophy

Abstract

The genesis of the genre of socio-philosophical utopia in American intellectual culture seems an important research topic since it is in this concept that the ontological, epistemological, anthropological, axiological, philosophical and historical meanings of the era and culture come together. The purpose of the work is to discover the semantic unity of the American utopia and understand the reasons for its crisis. The tradition of American utopia is taken for analysis due to the significance that it had for the formation of this culture and civilization as the embodied «city upon a hill», «society of equal opportunities», «beacon of hope». Henry Thoreau, Burres Fredrick Skinner, Robert Nozick, and Richard Rorty are taken as representatives of the American socio-philosophical utopia. Attention is drawn to the distinctive feature of the American utopia — its open nature, the absence of fundamental, predetermined guidelines, and pluralism. The paper provides conclusions about the causes of the crisis of utopian theorizing in American culture, which, in our opinion, is associated with: the feeling of the «end of history» that has become established in the public consciousness of the era of late capitalism, which leads to the rejection of the future in favor of the endless repetition of the same plots and to being doomed to remain in frozen time; retrotopia as a search for an optimal life project in the past, not the future; hauntology as a state of once existing but never realized hope for a progressive movement into the future; conspiracy theories as a way of explaining the world through conspiracy and deception. For the globalized society of late capitalism, all this gives rise to disappointment, depression as the main symptom of the time, longing for other, no longer accessible cultural development scenarios, and a nagging feeling of nostalgia.