Two crucial insights are at the heart of this learned and wide-ranging book: “a driving force” in the invention of any utopia is “indignation at a world badly formed” (3), and the ultimate goal of utopia is the achievement of justice. Douglas Mao brings together these two aspects of the utopian project in the figure of Nemesis, associated in classical tradition with justice, who abandons humankind in righteous anger at its fallen state. Nemesis personifies the feeling of indignation provoked by the wrongness of things along with the conviction that setting them right can happen only once the claims of justice are honored.
Neither indignation nor justice figures prominently in the large corpus of critical writing on utopia whose foundational work is Ernst Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia. For Mao, indignation names the sense of outrage at the bungled arrangements that lead to human suffering. Unlike satire, to which it...
