American socio-philosophical utopia is an interesting phenomenon, since it was in it that the ontological, epistemological, anthropological, axiological, philosophical
and historical meanings of American culture, as the embodied “City on a Hil”, “Society of Equal Opportunities”, “Lighthouse of hope” found their manifestation. As an immanent dimension of social, including philosophical consciousness, and as a natural companion to the socio-political practice of the American nation, utopia has never been produced anywhere on such a scale and has not taken such diverse forms as in the United States. Interest in studying the phenomenon of utopia is also due to the fact that they are the key to deciphering political consciousness, since much of what does not find adequate expression in scientifically verified discourse, but is of value for a given group, often finds its expression in utopias or dystopias. The purpose of the work is to trace the genesis of this phenomenon, indicate the general, constitutive meanings of the American utopia and understand the reasons for its crisis. Henry Thoreau, Burrhus Fredrick Skinner, Robert Nozick and Richard Rorty were taken as representatives of the American socio-philosophical utopia, in whose works the distinctive feature of the American utopia was most fully manifested — its “anti-fundamentalism”, open character, pluralism, openness of the project to new content. The novelty of the approach lies in the attempt to consider in one context such different forms of social and philosophical projects as Walden of the American transcendentalist-libertarian Thoreau, Walden of the Two Behaviorists Skinner, the project of a “minimal state” from the position of analytical philosophy of Nozick and “postmodern bourgeois liberalism” of Rorty. Conclusions have been drawn about the causes of the crisis of utopian theorizing in American culture, which, in our opinion, is associated with the feeling of the “end of history” that has become established in the public consciousness of the era of late capitalism, which leads to the abandonment of the future in favor of the endless repetition of the same plots and the doom of staying in frozen time; retrotopia, as a search for an optimal life project in the past, not the future; huntology, as a state of once existing, but never realized hope for progressive movement into the future; conspiracy theories as a way of explaining the world through conspiracy and deception. All this gives rise to various forms of resentment, depression, and a nagging feeling of nostalgia, which prevent the generation of utopian meanings.
For citation: Kulikov M.V. The formation and decline of American social and philosophical utopia in 19th—20th centuries: on the question of the “end of history”,
Ivanovo State University Bulletin, Series: Humanities, 2024, iss. 4, pp. 151—161.