This chapter considers the ambiguous utopian impulses of literary, filmic, and television works published and produced in the 1970s. Drawing on the concept of post-imperial melancholy, the chapter traces the utopian contours of these texts’ forceful, often shocking, critique of British imperial nostalgia. It focuses on sub-genres that emerged during this significant decade, including the British alternate history, the dystopia, and reworkings of the classical literary utopia, with reference to writers such as Daphne Du Maurier, Len Deighton, Anthony Burgess, Emma Tennant, Angela Carter, and J. G. Ballard. These three genres, the chapter argues, critically interrogate the utopian impulse in the 1970s and its possible instantiations in national and transnational imagined communities, as well as the built environment in which the modernity of these communities is expressed. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Derek Jarman’s Jubilee, identifying how this iconic 1970s punk film reframes the classical narrative structure of literary utopias.

In section 11 of the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding [EHU], “Of a Particular Providence and of a Future State,” Hume attempts to sketch a method for natural theology, a method that establishes clear limits as to what natural theology can show. Unsurprisingly, he does so in the form of a dialogue. I argue that this dialogue is important because, in it, Hume offers a response to the reasoning Butler employs in the Analogy of Religion (1736) in order to establish the existence of a providential God, or what Butler calls a “moral governor” of the universe. Appreciating Hume’s strategy in this dialogue helps us better appreciate Hume’s more radical position in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and suggests a way of understanding the significance of Philo’s reversal in the final section. I claim that what appears to be a concession to religion actually turns out to have significant irreligious implications when considered as an extension of Hume’s response to Butler in EHU 11.

This chapter considers what kind of utopian articulations can be glimpsed in contemporary British experimental poetry. Three experimental poets writing in the 2010s are analysed in detail: Sean Bonney, Verity Spott, and Callie Gardner. The chapter situates these poets within the British experimental poetry scene, tracing an ecosystem of small-scale independent publishing. DIY poetry magazines such as Zarf (produced in Cardiff, Leeds, and Glasgow) and presses such as the87press, Aquifer, DATABLEED, Sad Press, and many others operated outside of formalised spheres of paid labour. In the 2010s, communities of British poets, publishers, audiences, and readers sustained themselves through a non-commercial ethos of gift exchange. This ethos was explicitly utopian in its attempt to construct an alternative to capitalism through non-alienated economic and social structures. Whilst Herbert Marcuse’s utopian theorisation of the 1960s counterculture feels relevant to this moment in the British experimental poetry scene, the chapter explores how many of these poets expressed scepticism about the form’s inherent political potential. For them, politics, rather than aesthetics, contained the germs of utopian possibility. Their experimental works offer precursors to a futurity that is not yet here, but the arrival of which is necessary for the survival of progressive politics.

Much of Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is spent debating the experimental design argument for the existence of God. A change of scene occurs in the ninth part of the Dialogues when the character of Demea presents an a priori cosmological argument that purports to demonstrate God’s necessary existence. The argument is then criticized by the characters of Cleanthes and Philo. The conversation in the ninth part of the dialogue has occasioned a mixed legacy. For some scholars, the objections raised by Cleanthes and Philo to the cosmological argument in Part 9 are persuasive and inspiring, whereas for others the objections are ineffective and overrated. This paper critically assesses the mixed legacy of Hume against the cosmological argument, in particular, one of Cleanthes’s famous objections to do with a collection of twenty particles of matter. This objection has had a lasting impact in the philosophy of religion literature in the form of the much disputed, ‘Hume-Edwards Principle’ (HEP). However, I claim that the HEP misrepresents the text on two counts, and that via the spokesperson of Cleanthes, Hume’s point against the cosmological argument has yet to be fully appreciated by critics.

This chapter examines the ‘peculiar’ utopian temporality of the contemporary moment as expressed in the fictional works of three Black British female writers: Queenie (2019), by Candace Carty-Williams, Swing Time (2016) by Zadie Smith, and Girl, Woman, Other (2019) by Bernadine Evaristo. The chapter argues that these novels represent a particular incarnation of utopian realism. This names a strong commitment in contemporary British fiction to articulating post-racial futures. In utopian realist texts, writers use realism not to convey mimetic depictions of the present here and now but, rather, to convince readers of the viability of alternative, transformed futures. Utopian realists such as Candace Carty-Williams, Zadie Smith, Bernadine Evaristo, Monica Ali, and Diana Evans foreground a relationship between utopian thinking and models drawn from personal and historic experience. Like design fictions, the term given for fictional narratives used by designers of prototype products and technologies to help imagine their future use, these texts offer readers identifiable utopian alternatives to contemporary Britain. Shaped in relation to the long history of Black experience in the United Kingdom, as well as gender and queerness, these novels reveal the need to consider the future not as a speculative possibility but a realisable plan for how we might live.

This interpretive chapter attends to an often overlooked feature of the Dialogues: the tone of its repeated disputes. It asks what is the meaning of the tone and probes its value. To do so, it begins with a consideration of character in a dual-sense: the moral character of these disputes between literary characters. It argues that critical engagement with characterization via the lens of literary theory reveals that it is a category mistake to reduce the voice of a fictional character (e.g., Philo) to that of a real person (e.g., Hume). It further contends that if we think of each fictional character as merely a solitary component of a larger narrative flow we are more likely to focus on the basic action that is internal to the narrative, that is: disagreement, rather than who the character speaks for. Finally, it claims that the virtuous disagreement between interlocutors here rehearses an ethics of responsiveness that can be viewed as pointing towards a moral element. Hume’s dramatic sensibilities obscure the ethical temperament of the disagreements yet their posture reflects a gestural phenomenon of responsiveness (per Elise Springer) that might come close to expressing Hume’s ideal form of religion.

This paper examines the themes of history, psychology, and epistemology in Hume’s Natural History of Religion. In the first half, I argue that the origin of religion Hume seeks to uncover in this work is psychological rather than chronological: he is looking for religion’s origin in human nature rather than human history. In doing so, I reject the common view, going all the way back to Hume’s near contemporary Dugald Stewart, that the Natural History is a work of “conjectural history”. Examination of the work itself, and of the use of the term “history” at the time, corroborates the view that a “natural history” of religion, for Hume and his contemporaries, was an early form of what we would now call a theory of religious psychology.

This chapter, which introduces the collection, maps a distinctively British utopian impulse in literature and culture from the end of World War II to the present. Drawing on philosophical works by Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, and Ernst Bloch, the chapter explores the utopian impulse in literary works, films, zines, poetry, art, and music. It situates these works in their materialist contexts, from the swinging 1960s and more apocalyptic 1970s to the political riots of 1980s British cities and blistering critiques of Thatcherite neoliberalism that persisted into the 1990s and early 2000s, concluding with the utopian turn in the 2010s and 2020s as financial, ecological, and political crises gripped the British state. Taking its inspiration from the Welsh cultural materialist Raymond Williams and British postcolonial scholars Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, the chapter argues that British countercultures and subcultures have yielded a powerful utopian surplus that persists into the present. Like an explosive, the image Bloch privileges for utopian rupture, the texts, novelists, filmmakers, poets, zine-makers, and playwrights explored in this collection rip through the prevailing discourse to reveal a utopian surplus; ‘that which is not yet fulfilled’.

This chapter analyses the utopian possibilities of the British counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. Countercultural aesthetics and politics responded to contemporary crises in urban planning, ecological destruction, and fractured identities of nation and class – issues that remain pressing in the twenty-first century. Tracing the origins of post-punk utopianism, the chapter argues that the ambiguity of the British counterculture’s utopian possibilities may be explored via an excavation of its class basis. Drawing on the work of Raymond Williams, Ernst Bloch, and Herbert Marcuse, the chapter analyses the 1974 BBC TV play Penda’s Fen. It suggests that Penda’s Fen contains conflicting utopian visions, reflecting the differing class factions that comprised the counterculture and anticipated the neoliberal present of twenty-first-century Britain. The chapter concludes by suggesting that this iconic TV play has lessons to teach us in the contemporary moment. Its class politics, which explores homosexual desire between working-class and middle-class characters, offers a utopian image of cross-class solidarity and sexuality set against the backdrop of a mythic vision of Britain.

In this chapter, I consider the Dialogues as a text that formulates and criticises a particular argument for design (‘the argument for design’). After presenting the relevant material from the Dialogues, I consider the strengths and weaknesses of the formulation of the argument that is the object of Hume’s criticisms, and set out what I take to be the full range of criticisms that Hume makes of it. I then assess the strength of these criticisms, paying particular attention to writers – for example Paley, Reid, Dawkins, and Hawthorne and Isaacs – who have claimed that Hume’s objections to ‘the argument for design’ are weak or ineffectual. Next, I consider the originality of Hume’s critique of ‘the argument for design’; I argue that, on the evidence that I have considered, Hume deserves most of the credit for the objections to ‘the argument for design’ in the Dialogues. I conclude with some brief remarks about the relative importance of the success of the criticisms of ‘the argument for design’ to the overall project of the Dialogues.

There are significant ambiguities in how “atheism” is to be understood or interpreted. Having considered these, we turn to Hume’s arguments and assess to what extent his views in the Dialogues should be interpreted in these terms. While it is evident that Hume opposed “superstition” and that he was, in this sense, plainly an irreligious thinker, this does not settle the question of his “atheism”. Although Hume has been read by some as an theist of a minimal kind, and by others as a sceptic or agnostic, both these accounts are rejected. Hume was, it is argued, a “hard sceptical atheist”, by which we understand him to take the view that we have probable (non-dogmatic) grounds for denying the theist hypothesis in all its forms. His “speculative atheism” is accompanied by a “practical atheism” which, while firmly opposed “superstition”, is willing to ally itself with both sceptics and those theists (or deists) who share Hume’s opposition to “superstition”.

I take this chapter as an opportunity to ask what Hume might think of rational religious belief given developments in philosophy of religion, epistemology and contemporary cognitive science of religion (which explores the natural roots of religion). To that end, I will consider some basic findings in the cognitive science of religion concerning the origins of religion in human nature. I will also reflect on some significant developments in twentieth-Century philosophy, including recent developments in religious epistemology, that I think Hume might have found insightful. I will argue that twenty-first-century Hume, perhaps ironically in line with the thought of Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff (who in turn align themselves with Thomas Reid), would defend rational belief in God.