Knowledge, authority, and heroism in Edward Bellamy’s : Looking backward 2000-1887

Abstract EN

This article revisits Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward 2000-1888 (1887) with reference to its socialist and globalist themes in the light of the recent developments that have recently led to the triumph of liberal ideology over communism.

Combining elements of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the novel as expounded in Simon Dentith’s Bakhtinian Thought (1996), and Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (1936), it reads the novel as an attempt to historicize the nineteenth-century capitalist society in a bid to renegotiate the social contract on new bases.

Thanks to their accumulated symbolic and cultural capital, and the medial position they hold between the conflicting parties (capital and labor), the intelligentsia self-appointed themselves as social mediators.

Their influence on politics and their participation as experts or members of think-tanks seem to have made of them objective allies of today’s liberal globalizing trends.