A perfect world.

Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age, by Russell Jacoby (Columbia, 240 pp., $24.95)

TWENTY years ago, in the Reagan years, Russell Jacoby was brooding over what he regarded as the taming of the American Left--in particular, of the generation that had come of age in the 1960s. What had happened to the young intellectual firebrands of that decade? Were they dead, exiled, imprisoned in the far-flung outposts of the American gulag? No. They were comfortably ensconced in the academy, seduced by tenure, producing unreadable monographs and feeling very self-righteous.

Jacoby wanted to write about this sad state of affairs, issuing a reproach and a call to arms, but he realized--or perhaps his literary agent reminded him--that only a few hundred people would be likely to buy such a book. So he conceived a grand thesis: Intellectuals in America, of whatever ideological stripe, were an endangered species. Old campaigners such as Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, and others of their generation--lucid, socially engaged, accountable to a large public--were still on the scene, but their successors were missing, swallowed up by the omnivorous university and the soulless suburbs. Here were the makings of a jeremiad, even if the author himself only half believed the story he was telling.

The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe was published in 1987 to wide acclaim. Many people who should have known better (Christopher Lasch, for one) praised it, perhaps simply because they relished the much-deserved skewering of academic follies. The book rudely yoked the sectarian interests that animated Jacoby's project in the first place--two long chapters are devoted to "The New Left on Campus"--with sweeping pronouncements that read like warmed-over George Steiner: "The rhythm of the lives of intellectuals permeates their writings. This is not surprising. If telephoning supplants letters and cafes yield to conferences, thinking itself--its density and parameters--may echo the shifts. The decline of bohemia may entail not simply the decline of urban intellectuals and their audience, but of urban intelligence as well."

It's clear in 2005--as at least some readers had already recognized in 1987--how preposterous all this was. While Jacoby was wistfully looking back at the "bohemia" of yore, the Internet was about to explode. (Please don't leap up to say that much of what gets posted on the web is sludge. And what came from Jacoby's cherished caf,s and coffeehouses was pure gold?) Urban intelligence is alive and well today--which is to say it's as vigorous and flawed and penetrating and perverse as it was in New York in 1950--and rural and suburban intelligence too, emanating from Michael Pollan's Connecticut garden; from Wendell Berry's farm in Port Royal, Ky.; from D. J. Waldie's Lakewood in the suburbs of Los Angeles; from Victor Davis Hanson's acreage outside Fresno, Calif.; and from other redoubts of contrarian conviction. Thinking itself--its density and parameters, its specific gravity and quantum spin--lurches on.

Jacoby's new book, Picture Imperfect, is in some respects a replay of The Last Intellectuals. Here the grand thesis is that "we" (who exactly are "we," anyway?) have lost the capacity to envision a different world: "Buoyant idealism has long disappeared. In an age of permanent emergencies, more than ever we have become narrow utilitarians, dedicated to fixing, not reinventing, the here and now."

If, in the earlier book, the forces of complacency were represented by the academy, here Jacoby directs his fire against the "anti-utopian ethos" exemplified by Karl Popper, Isaiah Berlin, and Hannah Arendt. By exaggerating the link between utopian aspirations and totalitarianism, Jacoby charges, these dour spirits have constrained our capacity to think creatively about the future. And they've been aided and abetted by the ceaseless bombardment of images accompanying our every waking moment, images that kill the imagination.

The utopian tradition itself is not without fault, Jacoby concedes. The detailed "blueprints" for the future that characterize many utopias--prescriptions for dress and diet and spelling reform and whatever other bees are buzzing in the visionary bonnet--often have a barely hidden authoritarian cast, and they soon become dated even when they are not immediately absurd. An antidote is to be found among the "Jewish iconoclastic utopians," as Jacoby calls them--figures such as Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Gustav Landauer, and Ernst Bloch, who "longed, waited, or worked for utopia but did not visualize it." These thinkers, Jacoby claims, "did not privilege the eye, but the ear"; in doing so, "they obeyed the commandment prohibiting graven images. God, the absolute, and the future defied visual representation."

Such a summary hardly conveys the bravura incoherence, the portentous nullity, and the sheer bad faith of this book. Just as he began The Last Intellectuals by acknowledging that his grand thesis was perhaps exaggerated, not to say downright false, so Jacoby begins Picture Imperfect by hedging: "Every generalization is false. We live in an age of hope and transformation. We also live in an age of resignation, routine, and perhaps alarm." Then why proceed to write a book on the premise that we live in an "anti-utopian age"? Do we or don't we?

What, by the way, would the opposite of an "anti-utopian age" look like? To emphasize the contrast with our allegedly anti-utopian age, Jacoby notes that many utopian communities sprang up in 19thcentury America. But this was the same period in which European travelers and not a few homegrown dissidents routinely bemoaned the relentless materialism of Americans, their single-minded pursuit of the almighty dollar. In our own time--when the dreams of the Sixties sustain a veritable industry dealing in utopian nostalgia--the equivalent of those 19thcentury communities can be found in the so-called New Religious Movements, which are proliferating at a rapid rate, many of them animated by utopian strains. And we hear every day the unapologetically utopian rhetoric of biotechnology and artificial intelligence. (Has Jacoby never read Ray Kurzweil or any of his ilk?) Claims that human beings are about to remake themselves in godlike fashion do not suggest weary resignation to the here and now. We're going to live forever, we're going to download our consciousnesses and become "spiritual machines," we're on the cusp of the most epochal transformation in the long eons of human evolution-so the utopian futurists say. Jacoby, meanwhile, takes a close look at the four walls of his study and issues his magisterial verdict: "Today, however, the utopian vision has flagged; it excites little interest."

Yet even more bizarre is the political logic of Jacoby's argument. On the first page of the first chapter, he asserts that "the choice we have is not between reasonable proposals and an unreasonable utopianism. Utopian thinking does not undermine or discount real reforms. Indeed, it is almost the opposite: practical reforms depend on utopian dreaming--or at least utopian thinking drives incremental improvements." That's a provocative assertion, and when Jacoby suggests that it is the Jewish iconoclastic utopians in particular who should inspire "a utopian passion with practical politics," the claim becomes not merely provocative but well-nigh incredible; it's not easy to make the case for Scholem, Benjamin, Adorno, Landauer, and Bloch--however rich their tangled legacies--as driving "practical reform" and "incremental improvement." So the reader waits with interest to see how Jacoby will do it. And waits. And waits.

If Jacoby wanted to argue that what passes as the common wisdom--the "realism" that scorns genuine alternatives as hopelessly naive--is often blind arrogance, he would be on strong ground. Even when the Soviet Union was on the brink of collapse, the "realists" insisted that talk about the imminent demise of the Communist bloc was wishful thinking, and dangerous too. Yet so attached is he to his incoherent thesis, Jacoby cites the "collapse of the Communist states beginning in 1989" as one of the principal reasons for the supposed absence today of bold, hopeful thinking about the future, thinking "against the grain."

A good book illuminates; a bad book muddles. This is a very bad book, with muddle on almost every page. (Walter Benjamin, he of The Arcades Project, privileging "the ear, not the eye"? Or consider Jacoby's account of the long-discredited theories of Thorleif Boman, which Jacoby wants to revive: "He judges Greek thinking static, peaceful, and moderate, and Hebrew dynamic, vigorous, and passionate." Will someone please point Professor Jacoby to the works of G. E. R. Lloyd, for starters, for an account of the fundamentally adversarial character of Greek culture? So it goes throughout.) With the exception of the designer, who has produced a handsome volume, everyone connected with this project should repent and do penance. For Jacoby himself I recommend a vow of silence. Whereof one is incompetent to speak, thereof one should keep his mouth shut.

Mr. Wilson is the editor of Books & Culture.