2
The Utopian International Society and its Enemies
Many republics and kingdoms have been imagined that were never seen or known to exist in reality. The manner
in which we live and that in which we ought to live are things so wide asunder, that he who quits the one to betake
himself to the other is more likely to destroy than to save himself; since any who would act up to a perfect
standard of goodness in everything must be ruined among so many who are anything but good.
Machiavelli,
Utopianism has not featured strongly in international theory. It has been neglected and, all too often,
abused. Machiavelli’s warning – that to think and, even worse, to act in a utopian fashion is to court disaster –
has been well met in the field of international politics. For at least a century, no international theorist has claimed
the title ‘utopian’ (it is significant that that ‘realistic utopian’, John Rawls, was a political philosopher) and no
historian of international thought, since the redoubtable Melian Stawell, writing in 1929, has including utopian
writers in their studies. Both omissions, I suggest, are errors. There are reasons to take utopian thinking seriously
in international politics, and there are reasons to examine again the arguments of past utopias. Before outlining
them, however, it is necessary to revisit the case put by the enemies of the utopian international society.
This paper makes, in essence, three points. It questions – and in large part dismisses – the various
aspects of the antiutopian case as it was assembled in the middle decades of the twentieth century, a case
which informed not merely the rejection of utopian thinking, but, in no small part, the whole project of political
philosophy. By way of a reading of the original
Utopia, composed by Thomas More, it investigates the
possibilities offered by the utopian mode of political argument. Finally, it argues that the readmission of
utopianism to the study of international politics would further the reintegration of political philosophy into the field
that has been in progress for some thirty years and, perhaps more importantly, it would open the space for
1
Quoted in F. Melian Stawell,
The Growth of International Thought (London: Thornton Butterworth Ltd, 1929), 823.
Convention