Dreams of Peace and Freedom: Utopian Moments in the Twentieth Century

by Jay Murray Winter

In the wake of the monstrous projects of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and others in the twentieth century, the idea of utopia has been discredited. Yet, historian Jay Winter suggests, alongside the “major utopians” who murdered millions in their attempts to transform the world were disparate groups of people trying in their own separate ways to imagine a radically better world. This original book focuses on some of the twentieth-century’s “minor utopias” whose stories, overshadowed by the horrors of the Holocaust and the Gulag, suggest that the future need not be as catastrophic as the past.

The book is organized around six key moments when utopian ideas and projects flourished in Europe: 1900 (the Paris World's Fair), 1919 (the Paris Peace Conference), 1937 (the Paris exhibition celebrating science and light), 1948 (the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), 1968 (moral indictments and student revolt), and 1992 (the emergence of visions of global citizenship). Winter considers the dreamers and the nature of their dreams as well as their connections to one another and to the history of utopian thought. By restoring minor utopias to their rightful place in the recent past, Winter fills an important gap in the history of social thought and action in the twentieth century.

Genres: History, Utopia, Nonfiction

272 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2006

Reviews

[Mike Clinton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jay Winter visits six moments during the 20th century when "minor utopian" visions offered more beneficent and just alternative trajectories than those "major utopian" projects that resulted in massive human devastation - liberal and socialist pacifism in 1900; the "Wilsonian moment" of self-determination in 1919; a celebration of enlightened scientific progress at the 1937 Paris World's Fair; the framing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948; counter-cultural movements across the "three worlds" in 1968; and prospects for recalibrating global identities along with conventional notions of sovereignty and citizenship since the 1990s. While in many ways these chapters and their sub-chapters retain an appealing vignette quality, they also offer insightful meditations on thought-provoking issues that have animated many hopeful yet regularly frustrated activists working towards more ideal configurations of social and political organization linking the local, national, and global. My favorite sections were the chapter that folded a biography of Rene Cassin into a complex analysis of the UDHR and the sections in the chapter on 1968 that addressed the liberation theology movement and the student movements in Berlin and Paris.