The first thing you notice about Utopia for Realists is just how seriously it has been endorsed. On the front cover and inside sleeve you’ll find quotes from luminaries including acclaimed social theorist, Zygmunt Bauman and Harvard psychologist, Steven Pinker. This is before you even get to Richard Wilkinson, author of The Spirit Level, or Philippe Van Parijs, grandfather of basic income thinking. Wilkinson, whose 2009 book on the ill-effects of inequality did more to put inequality on the map than even Thomas Piketty’s Capital, describes it as ‘Brilliant’, adding ‘If we can get enough people to read this, the world will start to become a better place’. High praise indeed. But can the book live up to it?
It hinges on four core theses: three utopian policy-ideals and one overarching principle. The latter, simply put, is that ideas can change the world. ‘Never forget’, Bregman argues, ‘that people are the motors of history and ideas the motors of people’. The task for any progressive, then, is to make the un-thinkable thinkable and to bring the horizon of a better future constantly back into view.
In this, as in much else, Bregman is inspired by the ‘enemy’ as much as he is by his allies. The book’s entire last chapter is devoted to re-telling the story of the rise of Neoliberalism. This is because Bregman knows that however awful and life-denying that philosophy may be, its architects were nevertheless brilliant organisers and ingenious strategists. They realised before anyone else that ‘what matters most in the pursuit of social change is whose ideas are lying around when crisis strikes’. Now, he argues, it’s up to us to be just as well organised and to ensure that our ideas are the ones at hand when the world next comes tumbling down. ‘Free money for everyone’. At first it sounds mad.
