Stephen’s Toulmin’s Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity describes the modern use of theoretical and instrumental reason to transform the self and world into a unified rational order. Such a goal guided the Russian intelligentsia whose historical mission was the political redemption of Russia and the world through the rational application of scientific laws to unite the world, society, and the self in a perfect harmony based on scientific principles. (Berlin Russian Thinkers) In 1920 Evgeny Zamyatin, a trained engineer and older Bolshevik, wrote We, a satiric account of a utopian society that becomes one more dystopian no place when human nature reasserts itself. After a brief discussion of Toulmin’s account of modernity’s hidden agenda I will first discuss Zamyatin’s revolutionary political utopia in relation to Isaiah Berlin’s critique of utopian thought and then contrast it with Aldous Huxley’s stable consumer utopia in Brave New World. This comparison will provide the basis for a brief conclusion about why dystopian writing is a necessary part of modern and, for that matter, postmodern culture.
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