The Utopian Impulse: Mnemonics of Affective Society

Abstract

One of the more enduring feints of modernist ideology is its lofty pose/posture of liberalism, pertaining to the economic domain usually, but also extant in some of its varying political moods (free ranging from outright fascism to a more populist republicanism, depending largely, but not exclusively, on the extant nature of labor supplies). In the scope of the specific slogans/victories of the French and American Revolutions, Europe prides itself on its demotic and democratic achievements where the political value rests squarely, or so it is believed, on the “free citizen” as the fulcrum of consent and legitimization. Viewed in this gratuitously roseate light, non-European polities (past and present), prima facie, appear, in contrast, to be abject tyrannies, symptomatic of one or other variant of “oriental despotism” another stock obloquy of the enlightenment.