Christian Hope and the Politics of Utopia (Critical Essay‪)‬

It is often taken for granted that an intrinsic, positive relationship exists between "utopia" and "hope." They nurture and feed off each other, hope driving the utopian impulse, utopianism inspiring hope. It is, indeed, almost standard practice to refer to utopian texts as "figures" or "visions" of hope. So closely related are they that Henri Desroche describes the two as "twin sisters" (23). Scratch the surface of this relationship, however, and tensions and complexities appear. When Tom Moylan identifies "radical hope" as "the correlate sociopolitical position" of the utopian genre (Scraps of the Untainted Sky 157), this identification clearly implies the existence of "non-radical" modes of hoping which, presumably, lack any correlation with utopia. Ruth Levitas, on the other hand, distinguishes between two forms of utopian expression: utopia as system (which is representational, prescriptive, instrumental and transformative), and utopia as process (which is heuristic and exploratory, more concerned with process than content, centred more around the wishfull act of imagining than the will-full act of political transformation). While the former does indeed embody and carry hope, the latter, argues Levitas, is merely expressive of desire (Levitas and Sargisson 16). To complicate matters further, the process of utopianism which, for Levitas, signals a retreat from transformative hope is precisely the mode of utopian expression championed by Moylan as the locus of radical hope. Already, then, the simple notion that utopia operates as a vision of hope is rendered problematic by the sheer multiplicity of terms and concepts. The problems involved in defining utopia are, of course, longstanding and well-known. Regarding the question of hope, the past two decades have witnessed a proliferation of literature spanning a range of academic disciplines. Within the health sciences alone, two recent studies identify twenty-six theories of hope and fifty-four definitions (Lopez et al; Benzein and Saveman). It is clear that hope is a highly contested category of experience just as utopia is a highly contested concept. The interplay between the two is, as a consequence, a complex field of investigation. Aiming to contribute toward such an investigation, this article focuses on Christian hope and tries to make sense of its complex interactions with both "utopia as system" and "utopia as process."