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.

Following the Tet Offensive, the struggle to define the war intensified. The most widespread antiwar activity during 1968 was mobilizing behind the presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy. Peace forces coalesced at the beginning of 1968 for what many perceived as a quixotic effort to replace a president who had promised peace with one who would actually secure peace. Lyndon Johnson’s withdrawal from the race in late March inspired a realistic potential for an antiwar Democratic Party nominee. Kennedy’s death in early June ended that hope, however, and strained the collaboration between movement insiders and outsiders. Street demonstrations and growing dissent within the military worked in conjunction with persistent critics within the federal government. Liberal emphasis on electoral campaigns reduced their impact in the national coalition. Leftists, radicals, and the counterculture played a greater role in the spring National Mobilization, the nationwide student strikes, and the August confrontation in Chicago. The government used the courts to deter ongoing draft resistance but without noticeable effect.

Kerouac’s On the Road had a profound impact on the 1960s’ counterculture. This chapter shows how the ethos of On the Road joined with the ethos of the rock movement that was ushered in shortly after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963 by the appearance of The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964. In addition, the psychedelic rock movement, also inspired by The Beatles, and led by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, pointed to Kerouac’s On the Road as a clarion call of the 1960s’ countercultural zeitgeist. With unprecedented influence over the youth culture of their times, such rock artists as Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead, Jim Morrison of The Doors, among others pointed to On the Road as a seminal influence on their lives and art. Furthermore, the political wing of the counterculture, including Abbie Hoffman, also viewed On the Road as an inspiring text. This chapter explores the impact of On the Road on the counterculture, despite the novel’s often conservative message, and views it as a bookend to the 1960s’ counterculture.

This chapter explores a line of influence in the architecture of American intentional communities from the Associationist movement of the nineteenth century down to the hippy communes that emerged in 1965, built, after Drop City, around the shape of the geodesic dome. This hippy modernism borrowed freely from the ideas of Charles Fourier and Buckminster Fuller and fostered a community that included Stewart Brand, who went on to think about the shape of space colonies and early models of the Internet.

This chapter studies the developments of autobiography as a literary genre in the graphic novel production since the 1960s. It analyzes the formal connections between author, narrator, and character, paying attention to the pragmatic aspects of the contract between author and reader, whose commitment to authenticity distinguishes autobiography from autofiction or semi-autobiography. The chapter starts with a historical overview of the genre, absent in comics for a long time, then rapidly coming to prominence in the graphic novel. It emphasizes the role of underground comix and engages in a close reading of two works: Justin Green’s Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin (1972) and Craig Thompson’s Blankets (2001). Although both share a similar (critical) concern with the role of religion, their stylistic and narrative features and context are widely divergent. Green’s work is a clear example of countercultural transgression, whereas Blankets exemplifies the growing overlap between the graphic novel and young adult literature.

Chapter 7 focuses on the 1970s, when anti-colonial movements sought to turn global hierarchies upside down. Their efforts moved from the US civil rights movement to expose the racism and sexism embedded in professional work, as in education, social work, and medicine. Teachers observed their ‘hidden curriculum’, which excluded those they long claimed to help. Lawyers noted their close alliance to capital and sought, for the less-powerful, alternative routes to legal service. Engineers, who up to this point claimed that they had literally built civilization, began to ask whether they had in fact condemned society to live in concrete boxes and breathe polluted air. Even accountants were not immune. The high and fluctuating inflation that characterized the end of the moral-economic order established after the Second World War produced a legitimation crisis that required, in Britain, a Royal Commission on something as fundamental to capitalism as the calculation of profit.

Chapter 6 investigates the debate surrounding Julian’s final – and fundamental, in the eyes of late Roman intellectuals – objection to Christianity: his critique of its universalising rhetoric. Third- and fourth-century bishops legitimised their increasing political prominence through competitive arguments pointing to Christianity as the only philosophy that was accessible to everyone, including the ill-educated. Julian set in opposition to this the Platonist belief that any self-confessed system of knowledge appealing to the many disqualifies its intellectual authority by revealing crowd-pleasing (hence, deceptive) ambitions. The reaction of upper-class Christians, divided between the popular consensus and allegiance to Julian’s elitist sensibilities, demonstrates the criticality of this argument. Yet – as I show in the second section – the Neoplatonic objection to the Christian rhetoric of universalism ultimately displaced non-Christian philosophers from the political scene (Eunapius’ Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists). Moreover, the rising popularity of ascetic leaders encouraged even highly authoritative ecclesiastical voices (e.g., John Chrysostom) to question the validity of Greco-Roman education. This, ironically, resulted in a power-driven challenge to the validity of the cultural system whose adaptation had been key to stabilising Christian power.

Chapter 2 reviews the hippie movement’s history and ideology. Using the flower children metaphor often used to describe the hippies, the review relates to four periods labeled as seeding (1945–1964), sprouting (1965–1966), growing (1967–1969), and blossoming and withering (1970–1973). The hippie ideology is described according to five dominant ethics: dope, sex, rock, community, and cultural opposition. This chapter also summarizes the literature exploring where all the hippies went and what legacy they contributed to the world.

This chapter explores the music, musicians, social and historical content, and reception of the ‘Krautrock’ band Can – formed by Holger Czukay, Irmin Schmidt, Michael Karoli, and Hans ‘Jaki’ Liebezeit. It does so by investigating the instigation of the band within its historical context and that of post-1945 German and international pop music, jazz, and new music. The chapter then discusses Can’s innovative, and in many ways unique, musical practice noting their growing successes in Germany and across Europe (particularly in Britain) and how this was received by fans and journalists. This discussion is divided into sections that discuss their practice, releases, and touring in relation to their vocalist at the time – Malcolm Mooney, Kenji ‘Damo’ Suzuki, and the latter period in which vocals were shared between the founder members. It concludes by exploring Can’s influence upon artists across genres including post-punk, indie, alternative and experimental rock, dance music, and hip-hop. The chapter argues that few bands encapsulated the internationally oriented and experimental European countercultural left quite like Can or left such an enduring template for musical practice.

The chapter analyses Faust‘s work, situating their sound within the diverse Krautrock trend and outlining their history to explain their political and artistic aims as a German music group. Faust‘s music celebrates a disruptive, avant-garde approach to rock music, influenced by dada and fluxus artists to create musical cut-ups and sound collages that blur the difference between noise and music. This methodology positions the band outside the structures of civilization, as per the framework of the Romantic hero, and reflects their conflicted disruption of German identity through the coincident political, phenomenological, and spiritual anxieties present in their music, lyrics, and performances. Faust‘s experimentation and aesthetics have influenced the ways noise has been incorporated into popular music, anticipating the development of industrial music.

This chapter discusses the psychedelic rock band Amon Düül. The band was representative of the West German commune movement of the late 1960s, and their communal approach to music-making was part of their alternative lifestyle. Initially, all members of the commune participated, including children and non-musicians. They also had connections to radical groups, such as the Kommune 1 political commune. Amon Düül II split off from the original group and further developed their sound, incorporating electronic instruments and ethnic influences, as well as dealing with their identity as a German rock band in subversive and humorous ways. Their lyrics dealt with dark and uncomfortable subject matter and were intended to shock bourgeois pop music consumers. Amon Düül II were unique among bands of the Krautrock era in featuring a female lead singer. The band gained a following outside of Germany during their career, and continue to play concerts today.

The Elmhirsts emerged from the First World War feeling that orthodox Christianity was no longer adequate as a guide either to belief or to conduct. Like others of their era, they looked for new forms of spiritual meaning, a new guide to moral behaviour, new sources of affective or social fulfilment and different frameworks for understanding the nature of society as a whole. Collectively, this chapter terms these searches ‘socio-spiritual questing’. It considers four approaches taken at Dartington to filling the gap left by Christianity. The Elmhirsts tried re-shaping the Church with the help of the arts, explored the possibilities of Eastern spirituality, worked to advance humankind’s unity through group spiritual exploration and experimented with a planned regime of ‘psycho-physical hygiene’. Interwar socio-spiritual questing was so wide-ranging and amorphous that it defies comprehensive survey. Dartington Hall provides an alternative way of drawing together its various strands: an unusual convergence in a diffuse landscape of seeking.

Karl Mannheim, who lectured at Dartington in 1941, argued that utopias are always in dialectical tension with the existing order; for all their ‘incongruity’ with the status quo, they remain deeply embedded within a ‘historically specific social life’. The fortunes of Dartington from its foundation to the present day exemplify the messy vitality of the exchange with the real world promised in Mannheim’s formulation. The estate offered countercultural alternatives. Yet its founders were determined that it would develop in symbiosis with the wider world rather than ‘preparing for some hypothetical community’ of the future. Dartington’s communion with the outside world was increased by the international collaborators with whom the Elmhirsts engaged in pursuing their ideal of promoting a unified life. This chapter looks at how, in the ninety-odd years since its foundation, Dartington has offered a reconfigured vision of the outside world, while being both sustained and constrained by this larger environment.

For Mailer, the 1960s were not only notable for the volume of his published writing, but for the extent of his political engagement and participation. Though Mailer wrote and spoke about American politics until the end of his life, he was arguably most directly involved in political protest during the Vietnam War era. During this time, he spoke out frequently against the war, and in 1967 published the stylistically innovative Why Are We In Vietnam?, often read as an allegorical criticism of the national mindset that led to America’s involvement in the unwinnable war. Most notably, Mailer participated in the March on the Pentagon in October of 1967, which provided the foundation for his Pulitzer Prize winning work Armies of the Night (1968), a seminal work of New Journalism that to this day is considered one of the best pieces covering the event.

In September 1968, regular British Vogue columnist Polly Devlin returned from a year working for the magazine’s sister publication in New York, and published a long article commenting on how, in her absence, the mood had changed.

This chapter examines the role of surrealism in a network of underground publications produced in the United States, England, and France during the 1960s, including: The Rebel Worker (Chicago, 1964–66), Resurgence (New York City, 1964–7), Black Mask (New York City, 1966–8), and Surrealist Insurrection (Chicago, 1968–72). By moving beyond aesthetic, literary, commercial, and institutional legacies of surrealism in the postwar period, and investigating the reclamation of surrealism by radical factions of the American and British ultraleft during the 1960s, it becomes apparent that surrealism was not entirely absorbed by the process of academic musealization that assailed most of the early twentieth century avant-gardes. The broad assortment of subcultural mimeographed and printed journals, broadsides, and leaflets that emerged during the era of the student movement and the counterculture reveal that surrealism influenced and was actively incorporated into leftist and activist struggles for civil rights, free speech, anti-war, anti-statist and anti-capitalist efforts.

“The Entheogenic Landscape” examines the development of the idea that dissolving one’s ego provides access to a primary sense of identity with one’s ecosystem. This notion formed the backbone of two experiments in “consciousness expansion” that dominated the American counterculture of the 1960s: psychedelic drug tests and neoprimitivism. These fads dovetailed in ecological meditations such as Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard (1978), which foregrounds the extent to which both traditions drew on the same psychoanalytic source material. A number of predominantly white gurus employed a shaky psychoanalytic vocabulary to claim that, like infants, Indigenous peoples lack advanced symbol systems, and that by evaporating linguistic faculties, psychedelic substances might serve as a threshold into an expansive psychic condition that Indigenous communities ostensibly enjoyed. Native American writers such as Simon Ortiz have long argued that such narratives obscure native peoples’ lived sociopolitical and environmental conditions. Ortiz’s Woven Stone (1992) argues instead that language and narrative construct and enrich ecological affiliations rather than obscure them.

In After the End, John Berger notes that “since the Second World War, a variety of ‘unspeakables’ have seldom been silent, although their utterances have often been disguised or symptomatic.” Berger refers to the traumatizing catastrophes of the Holocaust and the atomic bomb, while Morris Dickstein in Gates of Eden adds “the cold war…, the draft, and Vietnam” to the list of crises that signaled end times. This chapter discusses destruction and regeneration as envisioned in literary and popular writing across the political spectrum in the post-World War II decades: during the era of Cold War consensus, Nobel Laureate William Faulkner enjoyed his literary brethren to “forget” the bomb, and leading white male authors indeed wrote narratives of “personal apocalypse” that bracketed world concerns. African American canonical writers of the period were rarely so sanguine; their anti-apocalyptic writings directly targeted the nuclear threat as intensifying racial oppression at home and/or as urgently pointing white America toward national and international brotherhood.By the late 1960s, as fears of the bomb subsided, establishment writers wrote in the apocalyptic shadow of Charles Manson and the generation of frustrated, radicalized youth thought to follow in his wake.