Rediscovering Utopia

The National Party’s current dominance, unchecked and extended across the best part of a decade now, is matched by the ongoing decline of left-wing thinking and organisation in this country. These are the Bad New Days we face, and they demand of us a thoroughgoing stock-take of the depleted Left arsenal. One thing is certain: repeated invocations of possibilities just around the corner, however comforting they may be psychologically, offer little useful for thinking about strategy. A certain spirit of pessimism—of what Terry Eagleton calls ‘hope without optimism’—may instead be salutary. In that spirit, this essay traces, in schematic, doubtless inadequate form, a history of the Utopian impulse in New Zealand Left thinking so as to ask how it might fertilise new growth today.