THE IDEA OF UTOPIA, the source of so many promises to transform the human future, seems to be enduring the most ordinary of temporal fates: glib consignment to the dustbin of history. All manner of observers, from conservative political philosophers to postmodern theorists of popcult resistance to tireless Internet prophets of the "Long Boom," seem to agree that utopia is an idea whose time has gone. Why dream of a future deliverance from the opaque and coercive social relations of ages past? All these problems have been miniaturized and factored out of all the prosperity now delivered briskly to computer desktops the world over. Information wants to be free, and it seems that humanity will follow gratefully in its wake.

This is also to say nothing of the often dismal utopian track record: Over the past century, Utopias have proved to be catnip to authoritarians and totalitarians of all description. They combine the irrational impulses that govern a dream with the grim, implacable logic of modern state-idolatry. Nearly every political horror across the twentieth century bore a utopian birthright of one sort or another: the Soviet New Man, the Cambodian Year Zero, the Nazis' Thousand Year Reich. It's small wonder, then, that here at the end of history, we can pause, collect ourselves, and glance back over the past several centuries of folly and blood expended in pursuit of an ideal society and permit ourselves a small moment of self-congratulation: We've arrived there ourselves, with little conscious intent, no nightmarish hortatory tracts, command economies, spying children, or state-sponsored terrors.

But as events from the Temple Mount to NASDAQ's virtual trading floor remind us, history has a nasty way of overtaking you just as you are bidding it one last sentimental farewell -- so we do well, in sizing up utopias past, to guard against what historian E. P. Thompson called "the enormous condescension of posterity." And we might begin by recalling that Western utopias have not always (or even for all that long) served as a byword for the health of the state. Indeed, one of the benefits of casting a backward glance over the curious welter of Western utopias is to appreciate their comparative modesty, at least on the demand side of the equation. The vision of spontaneous social harmony and everlasting peace thrust itself into theological and literary prominence precisely because so much of the small-bore experience of history was determinedly unaccommodating to even fugitive approximations of happiness. A moment of leisure, a redemptive bit of learning, a sustained bid to square the strain of one's thankless labor up with the promise of general abundance -- for any of this to seem remotely possible throughout much of the Western past, society would have to be simply leveled and rebuilt from the ground up.

This, needless to say, involved a great deal of imaginative work -- and, more important, a great deal of reimagining the nature of work. Hailing at least as far back as Thomas More's eponymous 1516 foundation text, utopia has been the West's most fertile source of criticism about work and arrangements of property. In Utopia, More writes, "Everything belongs to everybody, no man need fear that, so long as the public warehouses are filled, he will ever lack for anything he needs. Distribution is simply not one of their problems; in Utopia no men are poor, no men are beggars. Though no man owns everything, everyone is rich. For what can be greater riches than for a man to live joyfully and peacefully, free from all anxieties, and without worries about making a living?" What indeed? The motifs of such utopian criticism run the gamut from the biblical (as in the bewildering flux of millenarian peasant movements kicked up in the wake of the Reformation) to the aggressively secular (the reveries of Marx and his epigones) to something rather absurdly in between (as in Henri de Saint-Simon's New Christianity or Robert Owen's The Book of New Moral World). But they all contend, in wildly different compasses, with the same question: How can something so expressive of our spirit as our day's labor have so little to do with our actual well-being?

THE MOST COMMON of utopian fantasies was for centuries the dream of uncoerced abundance -- wherein labor is either completely superfluous or so spontaneously joyful that citizens contend cheerfully among themselves to work for each other. In William Morris's early utopian novel News from Nowhere, people thoughtlessly lay down gold-embroidered garments to ease their workmates' passage through the mud; in Edward Bellamy's 1888 utopian novel, Looking Backward, consumer goods whiz through twenty-first century Boston in pneumatic tubes with only nominal fuss over their ordering or payment, and their cost written off to the metropolis's great volunteer army of workers.

Such visions come down to us now as laughably naive, evidence of a quaint dementia, a touching, misplaced faith in the democratic promise of rational economic accumulation -- or, at best, an effort to carry over the sometimes gruesome historical costs of industrialism as a continually expanding asset on future social accounts. But in their historical settings they seemed an entirely logical upping of the ante for a system of labor, and a moment in history, still very much up for grabs. And this, indeed, is one of the signal benefits of attending to the imaginative labors of a largely vanished generation of utopians, the Russian modernists. In the bewildering series of political and cultural convulsions both presaging and succeeding the 1917 revolution, this group of intellectuals, writers, and artists imagined themselves standing athwart some new reckoning of everything.

In 1918, the poet Aleksandr Blok announced that the events of the previous October were to "raise a world-wide cyclone, which will carry warm winds and the sweet scent of orange groves to snow-covered lands, moisten the sun-scorched steps of the South with cool northern rain." And as the disparate, disheveled flanks of the Russian avant-garde grew similarly intoxicated on the Bolshevik promise of reinventing every element of everyday life, they laid claim to ever growing tracts of the revolution's public dreamscape. As Catriona Kelly writes in her introduction to the modernist anthology Utopias, this cohort of aesthetic radicals "dominated culture in [postrevolutionary] Russia to an extent unmatched anywhere else in the world...after 1921, when a group of avant-garde painters and sculptors formed the Constructivist movement, art began reaching out into every day life... architecture, furnishings, fabrics, clothes and tableware all reflected the determination of young and idealistic left-wingers to construct a utopian new society, a 'scientific,' rationalistic, collectivist community in which citizens would work contentedly and efficiently in modern offices and factories before returning home to streamlined apartments with shared cooking, eating and child-care facilities."

Of course, nothing today could seem more unappetizing, particularly in full retrospective knowledge of the large terrors and countless smaller social indignities to come, but as Kelly's collection reminds us, most of these figures are anything but grim augurs of the Stalinist nightmare. (The most ardent Bolshevik among them, poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, committed suicide in 1930 after successive assaults on his work from champions of Stalin-sanctioned "proletarian arts.") Rather, their writings read today like dispatches from another world altogether, in which virtually any sort of reform could be gleefully appended to the provisional forward march of the worker's civitas. When, for example, poet Velimir Khlebnikov composed a prerevolutionary futurist platform of utopian reforms, it was difficult to tell when he might be joking. In one breath he proposes such comparatively mundane measures as "Let air travel and wireless communication be the two legs humanity stands on" or "Establish a single written language for all Indo-Europeans," and in the next he will call for a Bellamy-style reform of housing codes to secure "the right to have a room of your own in any city whatsoever and the right to move whenever you want" or to propose that "all the ideas of Planet Earth (there aren't that many), like the houses on a street, should be designated by individual numbers, and this visual code used to communicate and to exchange ideas."

By Stalin's "Cultural Revolution" of 1927-28, this giddy mood of unlicensed social reinvention succumbed to the dictats of socialist realist boy-meets-tractor state propaganda. Transitional Soviet modernists like the poet Andrei Platonov wind up bearing inadvertent witness to the rhetorical transfer of utopia into the hands of the state. An early passage Platonov's mordant 1930 novel, The Foundation Pit -- banned from publication until the glasnost era -- depicts a civil engineer named Prushevsky, who is overseeing the construction of a projected grand Soviet subterranean "Palace of the Future." Like other characters in Platonov's half-propagandistic, half-despairing allegory, he interprets the mandates of state production in stricken, existential terms: "From the point of view of both aesthetics and static mechanics, Prushevsky could already see what sort of structure would be required in the centre of the earth, but he was unable to get a sense of the psychic structure of the inhabitants of his common home in the middle of the plain, let alone imagine that of the people who would live in the tower in the centre of the earth... Prushevsky wanted to know all this now, so the walls of his construction would not be built in vain; the building would have to be occupied by people, and people were filled by that surplus vital warmth that had once been termed the soul."

This bleak set piece serves as a suitable and moving epitaph for Russian modernism -- a utopian movement that was, in all too literal a fashion, swallowed by the earth. It also highlights the otherworldly isolation of the state hireling charged with commemorating a working future that will never arrive; Prushevsky confesses, just prior to a bout of suicidal depression, that he is "fearful of erecting empty buildings."

ON THE OTHER HAND, it seems that (at least for interpretative purposes) Susan Buck-Morss has never met an empty building she didn't like. Buck-Morss, a Marxist philosopher at Cornell University, has marshaled a wide range of signifying monuments -- from Lenin atop Boris M. Iofan's never-executed design for the Palace of the Soviets to King Kong atop the Empire State Building -- in an effort to demonstrate the deep semiotic identity of the American and Soviet mass utopias in the twentieth century. Across the ambitious, copiously illustrated expanse of Dreamworld and Catastrophe, Buck-Morss pitches her argument not on the obvious, inconvenient considerations of the two nations' wildly dissimilar track records on ideology, economic development, or domestic political repression and terror, but rather on a collection of aesthetic resemblances between the U.S. consumer utopia and the Soviet workers' one. For Buck-Morss, both the superpower states were embarked on the same prolonged and dubious legitimation binge, which she dubs, in theoryspeak, the "political imaginary of mass utopia."

It all sounds oddly theatrical for a mobilization of ideologies with such a calamitous body count, and that's one of the central difficulties with Buck-Morss's clipped and selective tour through the dioramas of modern utopias past. Her resolute bid to aestheticize latter-day ideology requires historical distortion, which in turn shapes the book's odd and ultra-self-conscious presentation. Buck-Morss finds it necessary, for example, to dislodge many of the gruesome details of the Stalinist domestic terror from their customary place at the center of the Soviet Union's political history, and consign them instead to key-worded "hypertext" of close-set type at the bottom of the page in her opening section, which bears the leaden title "The Political Frame." Thus miniaturized, these unlovely facts are further shoehorned into an explanatory "frame" of high-concept, but underargued and tediously superficial, resemblances. The Soviet Communist Party, for example, as the political arm of the "workers' state" conferred operations upon itself that "legitimately, were secret, taking place within a wild zone of power that was theoretically limitless in scope." The United States for its part, ran the Cold War as a near-totalitarian export trade, "ensuring the establishment within nominally constitutional democracies of enormous wild zones of state violence." In this telling, nothing appears to distinguish the "wild zone" of collectivized mass starvation within the borders of the Soviet state from the "wild zone" of America's often reckless Cold War interventionism -- except the fact that murderous Soviet mass utopia was pleased to consider itself a worker's state.

History thus dispensed with, Buck-Morss marshals much of her argument to the more pliable interpretive realm of popular culture and monumental public architecture. We learn at considerable length of the critical shared traits of Lenin and King Kong ("Lenin has in common with King Kong the fact that both are symbols of the masses, displayed as spectacles for the masses... It is through seduction that they exert control"), the 1959 Khruschev-Nixon "kitchen debate" in Moscow, and the evident role of all such spectacles in reinforcing the state-commanded and commodity-driven "construction of desire" in mass utopia. Even when Buck-Morss's research delivers truly suggestive material, it is unquestioningly delivered into her own overstrained discursive "frame." For instance, in 1929, Soviet architect Konstantin Melkinov produced plans for a "Laboratory of Sleep" in a Pravda-sponsored Moscow architectural competition to design an ideal socialist "Green City." This collection of built-in beds would be housed in a slanted glass-walled structure whose gentle inclines obviated the need for pillows. And, as one chronicler relates, it would boast state-of-the-art special effects: "Specialists working 'according to scientific facts' would transmit from the control center a range of sounds gauged to intensify the process of slumber... Should these fail, the mechanized beds would then begin to gently rock until consciousness was lost. At this point, the natural sounds might continue or, at the command of trained specialists in the control booths, specially commissioned poems or works of music would be performed so as to obliterate any residual tensions or anxieties from the world of consciousness." Melkinov's plan, needless to say, didn't win the approval of Pravda's panel of judges, who deemed him both "romantic" and "antisocialist." But two years later, it did catch the attention of American real-estate impresario "Roxy" Roth, who was conducting a tour of the world to collect design ideas for New York's Radio City Music Hall. The punchline here is exactly what you might expect. Within months of his return to the States, "Roth's publicity department was bombarding the American public with the Melkinovian claim that 'two hours in the washed, ionized, ozoned, ultra-solarized air [of Radio City Music Hall] are worth a month in the country."

It's a remarkable (if ultimately stillborn) instance of overlapping modern utopian fantasy. But Buck-Morss merely employs it as another didactic reminder that her thesis is holding firm: "Making up to the consumer what was robbed from his or her life as a productive worker was the norm of capitalist culture... [But] by adopting the capitalist heavy-industry definition of economic modernization... Soviet socialism had no alternative but try to produce a utopia out of the production process [and] missed the opportunity to transform the very idea of economic 'development.'"

Rather startling conclusions to draw from a design plan that was never actually realized -- even its Radio City promoters were chiefly seizing, after all, on Melkinov's pseudoscientific rhetoric, since the sleep-inducing performance of verses and music in Radio City would be unmistakable evidence of both an aesthetic and commercial failure. But Buck-Morss's prim lecture on this "missed opportunity" touches, almost in spite of itself, on one of the key themes that clearly demarcates latter-day modernist utopias from their other forebears in the West: the denial that any subjective power over work matters in utopia's realization. Far from idealizing "the production process," Melkinov is rather poignantly preoccupied with managing its most common aftereffect (in the Stalinist regime of industrialization) -- simple mass exhaustion. And, of course, Radio City's Roxy Roth wasn't suggesting a "bait-and-switch" compensation for the labor power that had been "robbed" from workers in a Depression-era America where one-quarter of the population was then unemployed; he was simply promising a restorative good time in an ethereal "city" made of nothing more substantial than airwaves.

The actual nature of work, in other words, counts for precisely nothing in these mass-utopian schemes -- despite the strenuous propaganda claims to the contrary on either side of the Cold War divide. The same is true of most public undertakings in the newly expired, ineffably dreary century of ideology -- on up through the most history-bending and cosmos-conquering fantasies of the Cold War, from the arms race to the space race to Star Wars. Work, for that matter, is the universal enemy in contemporary utopian musings on the transformative powers of the New Economy. The most stalwart prophets of an Information Millennium are preoccupied with its expressive eclat. They're not much detained by the vast traffic in spreadsheets, data retrieval, and outsourced office work kicked up by the information revolution -- let alone the distinctly subutopian cash cows of pornography and gambling that claim pride of place in the Internet's vast consumer bazaar. And once you realize how much high-end tech gadgetry is devoted to powering the home offices of free agents, venture capitalists, and self-employed vendors (the real Western equivalents for the Soviet New Man), the broad outlines of the work-free Internet fantasia don't look all that different from the exuberant reveries plied by Roxy Roth. All that has really changed in this strain of consumer fantasy is the bandwidth.

IF SCHOLARS such as Buck-Morss are documenting (however inadvertently) utopia's glum conscription into the ranks of ideology, the New York Public Library's recently debuted exhibit on Western utopias shunts the utopian idea back into the more comforting precincts of the museum past. In this streamlined chronological presentation of the West's prior utopian imaginings, they come off as cultural playthings, pried at last from the iron, self-important conviction that they ever bore any serious consequence for the course of history. A joint undertaking with the Bibliothèque nationale de France (where it was originally mounted last April), Utopia: The Search for an Ideal Society in the Western World features more than four hundred pieces, making it the largest exhibit the library has yet mounted. It is, above all, a well-considered, handsomely curated show. It features many a striking curio from each library's impressive collection, among them various European reveries on the discovery of the New World and a fair copy of Thomas Jefferson's original draft of the Declaration of Independence, highlighting its blistering attack on George III's sponsorship of the American slave trade.

Indeed, since the written word figures so heavily in the imagining of human perfectibility (and since all the material here comes out of library collections), books are the most frequently displayed objects here. On both floors of the exhibit, Plexiglas staircase displays mount multiple copies of present-day editions of Utopian and dystopian classics (including, in a strikingly fatalist postutopian concession to contemporary attention spans, a Barron's Book Notes edition of William Golding's already slender junior-high warhorse, Lord of the Flies). The spread on the first floor, which spans the Middle Ages through the nineteenth century, features several forceful reminders of how the stakes of many past utopias hinged on the question of work. One of the earliest biblical illustrations here is a German artist's rendering of the English priest John Ball's peasantry-inciting aphorism of 1381, "When Adam delved and Eve spanned / Who was then the gentleman?" The quotation reappears near the end of the first floor's chronology, as a sort of conceptual bookend, in a William Morris print.

But here, too, the sore spot of labor and its social fruits vanishes the instant we reach the twentieth century, on the library's third floor exhibition space. The Russian modernists are nowhere to be seen (just as in much of official Soviet history); the Soviet regime is represented mainly by high-Stalinist propaganda posters from the 1930s and a smattering of clippings from the triumphalist monthly, The U.S.S.R. in Construction. As the exhibit closes in the recent American past, there's a largely uninterpreted assemblage of material documenting private outposts in what now goes by the name of "intentional living" and an impressive helping of countercultural leisure. These seem to be presented largely as afterthoughts -- as though the whole messy business of visionary social improvement merits, in retrospect, little more than a puzzled shrug. A grisly photograph of the aftermath of MyLai shares a wall with ecstactic scenes from the heyday of Haight-Ashbury; a few yards over is a reproduction of the cover art of the Cream guitar-god opus Disraeli Gears. A TV monitor continuously broadcasts the director's cut of the Woodstock movie -- a vision of utopia nearly as dispiriting as anything you'll find in Huxley or Orwell. Displays on Disney's planned community of Celebration, Florida, and Jim Jones's People's Temple cast them both as utopian experiments -- though to date no government infiltrations have touched off mass suicides in the Magic Kingdom's exurb.

Taking leave of Utopia you realize there's a certain perverse genius to this massive narrative letdown. In chronicling utopia, the exhibitors wound up denying it the very thing it's traded on through the centuries: an arc of progress through the ages. A story that provisionally ends in the semiconscious aftermath of the sixties could presumably pick up with redoubled energy at any random point. And as a fitting reminder of the unfinished business lurking in the unscripted future, two members of the New York Public Library Guild are picketing on the library steps, with a sign that reads "NYPL Is No Utopia." They're handing out leaflets that call for the library to honor its promise of a fifteen percent cost-of-living increase.

Meanwhile, in Bryant Park, the library's back yard, and one of Manhattan's most inviting public spaces for midtown office workers, there is a lunchtime jazz concert and promotional festival for the zero-calorie sugar substitute Splenda. Temp workers clad in odd yellow jumpsuits are urging passersby to check out the show, and handing out free bags of sample Splenda products. If you squint your eyes in the dull, overcast October light, you can half-imagine them as orphans of some abortive William Morris story, urging what uncoerced abundance they can to the passing lunch crowd at the behest of their home-office employers. It's a poor excuse for a utopia, but then again the strictest Latin translation of utopia has always been "no place." What seems oddly heartening, after the rigors of solemn instruction in the dreamworlds of the West, is that somewhere between this aspertine-and-circus spectacle and the bedraggled, unpaid librarians straining for public attention on the front steps are surely the materials for a New World that none of us, caught up in the various distractions here at history's end, have yet begun to imagine.

Chris Lehmann is an editor at the Washington Post.

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