Oliver Silverman

(they/them)

I am a PhD Candidate in political theory at The CUNY Graduate Center and a ‘25-26 Fellow at the Future’s Initiative. I hold an MA in politics from the New School for Social Research.

My dissertation, Profane Heaven: Utopia, Apocalypse, and the Politics of the Imagination, offers a novel account of the concept of utopia through readings in political theory, utopian fiction, and popular revolutionary writings of the Early Modern period. While new methods in political theory that travel under the banner of the “archival turn” have attended to hitherto marginalized voices in the canon, I argue that these methods can also obscure how canonical political ideas, namely utopia, have developed in direct antagonism to contemporaneous revolutionary movements—movements with their own rich archives of political concepts and forms that are resistant to inclusion in a shared project.

Profane Heaven stages a crucial but largely unknown conflict: the first utopian authors were not primarily writing to imagine better worlds, but to counter the radical visions of their contemporary revolutionary opponents–figures we paradoxically tend to think of as utopians. Reading three of the earliest written utopias in historical context, Profane Heaven argues that utopia was a genre of law, constitutionalism, and wealth and property accumulation in the 16th and 17th centuries. Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626), and James Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) created fictional spaces for exploring fears of heretical lower-class rebellions in Europe and addressing the legal demands of colonial development and global maritime trade. These early utopian texts transformed ideas born of concrete struggles against private property into theoretical visions of ideal societies. Further, they furnished a new concept for the elite political imagination: utopia, a secularized version of heaven. Like heaven, utopia is a u-topos–literally “no-place.” While heaven deferred the promise of happiness and universal abundance to the afterlife, utopian fiction functioned as a secular counterpart that depicted an ideal polis while reinforcing the impossibility of common ownership on earth. The project explores a counter-archive of the radical adversaries of the first utopian authors, all advocates of apocalyptic political ideas: Thomas Müntzer and the German Peasants' War (1525) against More; the anti-enclosure Enslow Hill rioters (1596) against Bacon; and the Levellers, Diggers, and Ranters (1642-1651) against Harrington. If Early Modern utopias relied on individual genius to imagine always-elsewhere, ideal states, heretical, apocalyptic movements were utopia’s perfect inverse. Apocalypticism’s defining feature was to unite what had been deliberately separated for the purposes of social domination: inner spiritual life and outer social structures, heaven and earth, words and deeds, and the rich and the poor.

My academic writings have appeared in Political Theory, History of the Present, Utopian Studies, and Theory & Event .

You can reach me at lsilverman at gradcenter dot cuny dot edu.