Utopia and the critique of political economy

These remarks concern the nature and role of utopia in the aftermath of the global financial crash of 2007-08, at a time when capitalism is being called into question and more and more people are imagining and inventing alternatives-when activists and academics are, as Frank Stillwell put it, 'pushing for political economy to have a central place in economic discourse'. My focus is on our contemporary situation, in line with the general goal of the Wheelwright lecture series: 'to promote public discussion in Australia about contemporary political economic issues'. But I want to start my investigation further back in time, in the middle of the nineteenth century, when-in the United States, Australia, and elsewhere around the globe-during the Age of Capital (to borrow Eric Hobsbawm's apt characterization), a new kind of utopia was being imagined and enacted.