I wonder if Utopianism is just the initil stage of an 'abstract notion' the idea recognize which gives rise to a movement as organized around that ideal.
So for example you suddenly label sexism because women are becoming conscious of it and organized in opposition to it. It wasn't that it didn't exist previously, simply that it was not something people were 'aware' or conscious of. So movement then objectify themselves in material/cultural forms so you end up with then the laws of anti-harassment and dismantling of formally prejudiced laws for abstract equal ones.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/Jamison.pdfFurther, just as a social movement is mobilised behind an ideal, what Jamison calls a ‘cosmology’ – a concept of how the world might be other than it is, at its completion and objectification within the larger community, its ideal has not disappeared, but remains within the language and ideological cosmos of the existing society as a concept, modifying the social practices of the community.
So this dreaming is at least a positing of a solution to a problem, it becomes more concrete of course as it is actually pursued in reality and sought to be actualized/realized although imperfectly. THe ideal end typically differs from the realized end, but the realized end becomes the new starting point in pursuit of the ideal which itself might be adapted to past problems and overcoming them.
As such, there is a concept for everything, the ideal sense of it which is of course perfect but it simultaneously acts as the guide and measure of reality even if it's never achievable.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/story-concept.htmBy “Idea,” Hegel means the development of humanity as an ethical community. He says that the Idea is the identity of intuition and concept, but intuition and concept are never identical. We feel a need, but in endeavouring to satisfy that need we create a new means of mediation, thereby generating new needs. Things never turn out just as we thought; we satisfy a need but we are still dissatisfied. So the ‘identity’ of intuition and concept, Idea, is in fact a non-identity, constituted in a never-ending struggle to overcome its internal contradictions each time only generating more contradictions. This is how the universal is constructed. The Idea is defined as the identity of intuition and concept, but this identity is forever out of reach! Human life is by its very nature contradictory, and in an eternal struggle to overcome this contradiction. Putting this another way: there is always a difference between the particular and the universal. The universal exists only in and through the particular, and is implicit in it, but every particular is also different from the universal. The universal is the idea manifested in every particular, its aim and object.
But the ideal or universal, when considered one-sidedly and outside of its relation to the particular or not yet realized in particular form ie the difference between unionism and a specific teachers union in some country, it acts as a regulative ideal of what things should be like even while as understand they'll never be perfect.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdfThe relation between ideals and ethics is this: ordinarily, what is ethical is expressed by means of an ideal, a regulative ideal; the ideal expresses the way the world would be if everyone adhered to the given ethic or moral precept, i.e., if the ethical principle were to be universalised. On the basis of an agreed ideal, it is then possible to determine what is ethical: what are your rights, what is your duty and what is virtuous. In the broader terrain of postmodern multicultural society, and in the domain of ethical politics, no such agreement is possible. But what is relied upon are the ethical principles governing collaboration - these must be agreed. Collaboration aims at practical agreement; theoretical agreement is generally immaterial.
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Regulative ideals are the “utopian” images of society which allow us to make sense of ethical propositions. A regulative ideal is the abstract generalisation of an ethic, how the world would be if an ethical principle were to be generalised. Laissez faire, the idyllic village community, the socialist utopia, are examples which demonstrate that regulative ideals need to be used with care. Nevertheless, I believe they have an important place in ethical political struggle.
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In other words, the regulative ideals by means of which a person organises their norms and values ought not to be taken as a future state of the world at which history must one day arrive. One can be a Christian without believing in the Second Coming, a Communist without believing in a future world lacking in all social conflict and a liberal without believing in the end of history - that is in fact precisely what it means to be an “ethical Christian,” an “ethical communist” or an “ethical liberal.”
There does not yet exist a regulative ideal (Utopian idea) which answers to the multiple value contradictions posed in modernity: autonomy vs. community, freedom vs. equality, positive and negative freedom, virtue vs happiness, and so on. Nevertheless, actual collaboration and social action is necessarily determined by reference to norms and rules, norms and rules which are constantly changing and under challenge, and the values and maxims lying behind the norms and rules change accordingly. Inevitably the regulative ideal implicit in every such value and maxim is constantly brought into focus and counterposed to reality. This process of thinking ethically about what you are doing is an essential part of forming the social and spiritual conditions for a new life-world.
This point about regulative ideals is of course that such ideal are dangerous when truly believed in because they become the standard upon which reality should strive.
http://rickroderick.org/105-hegel-and-modern-life-1990/Real movements for Democracy are oddly enough most threatening in nominal democracies. That’s a principle of Hegelian discourse. In other words, if you live by an ideology, the most dangerous ideology to you is your own, because someone may expect you to do what you say. So, in that sense Communist ideology – as many of you know – was never a real threat in the United States, right. Very few Communists got elected to Senate and so on. It’s just not really popular. On the other hand, our own ideologies of Democracy, Freedom, and Equality have been a great danger to our own society.
But of course many people are cynics and not true believers in such concepts, they are pragmatists and the sort who don't aspire to realize such ideals. To truly believe in such ideals is necessarily radical as it drives one to do radical things, to demand the actualization of that ideal rather than its postponement forever into the future. So it becomes a call to action for many for pressing problems of the day. Whilst for others the problems aren't so pressing and so they dismiss the ideals upon which are born from those predicaments. Think of the white moderate, which existed long before MLK when he wrote his Birmingham letters. The gradualist, blacks will get their freedom some day, just don't rock the boat and make small changes as distinct from someone like John Brown who waged his own war on slavery along with many blacks whose freedom was a pressing matter and not something to wait for.
But if there are certain ideals to capitalist, they are to be found in their one sided and ideological abstractions. Concepts which are too abstract and include the inessential in order to mask the contingent nature of their ideals but instead present them as eternal.
https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2014/07/21/abstraction-abstract-labor-and-ilyenkov/The goal of this abstraction is to eventually identify the essential connections between different abstract aspects, slowly piecing the pieces together to give us a concrete picture of the whole. However this can only happen if we abstract correctly. There are two senses in with Marx talks of abstractions, a good and a bad way of abstracting. When abstraction has gone bad Marx often refers to the abstraction as ‘one-sided’. This means that the abstraction views an aspect of reality in an incomplete, one-sided way. An essential aspect of the nature of the object has been left out. Often Marx critiques bourgeois economists for making one-sided abstractions that make it seem like capitalism is a universal, a-historical system by abstracting away all of the historically specific aspects of capital. For instance, if we say that capital is just tools used to make more tools we have performed a sloppy, 1-sided abstraction. We are viewing capital merely from the abstract general features that capital has of increasing physical quantities of things while abstracting away the historically specific value-relations that give capitalism its essential nature.
This shows that abstraction can be arbitrary. If we are free to select one general feature over another we can radically change the concept of capital. If we choose only the ahistorical features we can make capital seem eternal. If abstraction is just seen as the identification of general features then we have no choice but to be arbitrary in our abstractions. But if abstraction is seen differently, as identifying the essential nature of an object, as identifying the “relation within which this thing is this thing” as Ilenkov puts it, then we can be scientific about our abstractions. When we make an abstraction we want to select that aspect of the object which identifies its essence. Since the essence of things is in their relation to other things, we want to identify the essential relations which govern the object, abstracting away other non-essential aspects.
So while many are cynical about capitalism and even more so alternatives to it to attempts to change it, there is a tendency to focus on inessential qualities as essential in order to speak of reform or to frame capitalism in a positive light ie that's just crony capitalism or that's not real socialism. The inadequacies of the reality clearly showed up against the concept but the concept is seen as not being truly realized and as to why then becomes the focus and often it is partial apologetics which do have truth but also can sometimes be a way to not take ownership of failure while aligning ones self with the ideal.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics