Liverpool Salon Presents – The Quest for Utopia

The Liverpool Salon has been hosting public discussions around philosophical, political and cultural topics on Merseyside for over seven years. Join us at Liverpool’s iconic Athenaeum club for The Quest for Utopia, the first in a new series of public conversations that take utopia and dystopia as themes for exploring the possibilities of building other, and better, societies, while reflecting on the shortcomings of our own.

Written at the dawn of the modern age, Thomas More’s Utopia imagined the possibility of humanity taking control of its destiny to create an ideal commonwealth, where happiness and justice reigned supreme. Deriving from the Greek ou (not) and topos (place), but also referring to eu (good) – an ideal place that does not exist, Utopia prefigured many social and economic experiments that followed in reality. Published almost 150 years later, James Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana was both an exposition of an ideal constitution and a practical guide for constituting England’s new republican government.

The voyage of discovery, an important part of the historical background to Utopia and New Atlantis, would become a central theme in utopian – and dystopian – literature. The popular appeal of fictional travellers’ tales reflected a growing fascination with real-life voyages of discovery and scientific exploration that collected, recorded, and classified the wonders of newly discovered worlds.

While many of the problems and imagined solutions that excited early utopian thinkers continue to perplex us, we seem today more inclined to expect the worst than hope for something better. Dreams of creating inexhaustible supplies of energy or machines to supply every human need and desire are haunted by Faustian nightmares of endless development, leading to social and ecological collapse. From the horrors of colonialism to the rise of dictatorial governments, hasn’t history shown us that the road to dystopias of disorder and tyranny are frequently paved with dreams of perfection?

If one man or woman’s Utopia is another’s hell on earth, then perhaps the fundamental question at the heart of the endless Quest for Utopia, is not so much the possibility, but the desirability of realising a perfect world.

Want to continue the conversation over a post-event dinner? The Athenaeum’s Dining Room is taking pre-bookings. To find out more and make a booking, please contact reception@theathenaeum.org.uk or phone 0151 709 7770.

Speakers

Rachel Hammersley, Professor of Intellectual History at Newcastle University, working on themes of republicanism, democracy, constitution-building, common land, and revolution in early modern Britain and France. Rachel is the author of several books, including The English Republican Tradition in Eighteenth-Century France (Manchester University Press, 2010), James Harrington: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford University Press, 2019), and Republicanism: An Introduction (Polity Press, 2020).

Vanessa Pupavac, Associate Professor at the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham. Vanessa previously worked for the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia and other international organisations. She has written extensively on human rights politics and humanitarianism and is co-author of Changing European Visions of Disaster and Development: rekindling Faust’s humanism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020).

Ronnie Hughes, A Sense of Place, calls himself “an occasional and formerly enthusiastic utopian practitioner, who’ll bring intellectual interest, his reading, practical knowledge and working experience to our discussion.” And, if you’ll excuse my dropping out of the third person here as it’s obviously me writing this, to which self-aggrandisement I’d add: it’s fair to say I’ve had more than a little trouble with the concept and chequered history of utopia during my recent years of studying it at the University of Liverpool. Meaning I now approach the whole idea as a confirmed sceptic who nevertheless experiences occasional patches of enthusiastic sunshine about it all. Some based on my own memories of how practical utopianism, used as a method, has occasionally helped communities in Liverpool change their lives and places for the better. Which I’ll talk a bit about when we meet. More here at A Sense of Place.

Robert Huxley is a Research Associate and retired Principal Curator at the Natural History Museum, London, where he led the team responsible for the botanical collections including the 17th and 18th century collections of Sir Hans Sloane. Robert now lives in Liverpool where he is a museums and heritage consultant and writer on the history of natural history and collections. He is an Associate Editor for the Journal of the History of Collections, author of the edited collection, The Great Naturalists (2019) and contributor to Rare Treasures from the Library of the Natural History Museum (2015), Naturalists in the Field (2018) and The Collectors: Creating Hans Sloane’s extraordinary herbarium (2019). Rob is also President of the Liverpool Athenaeum and actively involved in its library.

The Quest for Utopia will be chaired by Pauline Hadaway, co-founder of the Liverpool Salon. Pauline completed her doctoral research at the University of Manchester, examining the cultural economy and the politics of peace building in Northern Ireland after the Good Friday Agreement. She works as a researcher and writer, most recently: ‘Escaping the Panopticon’ in Photography Reframed: visions in photographic culture (2018); ‘Callaghan in Northern Ireland’ in James Callaghan: an underrated Prime Minister (2020). For more information on this and other events visit the Liverpool Salon website.

The Liverpool Salon is a not-for-profit organisation. While it can cover expenses, it does not pay fees and gratefully acknowledges the generosity of its speakers and supporters.