Pilgrim’s Progress : New Candide in seach of Utopia : THE CURIOUS ENLIGHTENMENT OF PROFESSOR CARITAT,<i> By Steven Lukes (Verso: $18.95; 261 pp.)</i>

Dipping a critical toe into the murky waters of political philosophy is one way for novelists to achieve greatness in that proper and necessary fictional effort of touching the raw nerve of our social complacencies and compliances. Think of “Gulliver’s Travels” or “Animal Farm.”

But though Jonathan Swift and George Orwell were tremendous writers, when it came to the detail of political theory and practice they were just ordinary Joes with the regular grudges and grouses of a vexed citizenry. With Steven Lukes, it’s the other way around. “The Curious Enlightenment of Professor Caritat” is only his first novel, and it’s occasionally cumbersome and not deft because of that. But as a professor of political and social theory at the European University in Florence, he can put on paper the necessary anger at the absurdities and inhumanness of our social theories and systems with the perspectives and panache of a true insider. The result is no mere squib, no mere piece of whining or rhythmic grumbling over the way things have gone and are going in western society and civilization, but a wonderful scragging of current political nostrums and shibboleths that packs a real punch.

Lukes’ Everyman is Nicholas Caritat, citizen of Militaria and scholar of the Enlightenment. He’s a fan of the philosopher, bits of whose name he bears--Marie-Jean-Antoine Nicholas de Caritat, the Marquis de Condorcet, he who wrote down his faith in human progress toward justice, equality and liberty, even as he was on the run from the French revolutionaries he helped bring into being.

Caritat is jailed by his country’s latest junta. It’s offended by his stand for humanist optimism, his belief in progress. While he’s in the jug he has to endure the harangues of a priest on the subject of human depravity, cruelty, the Holocaust: all the modern evidence for pessimism about people. But not for long, though, because the regime’s youthful opponents lift him from prison and send him off to neighboring countries, a modern Gulliver or Candide, to find out where Utopia is--the best of all possible worlds. The rest of the novel feature’s Caritat’s bemused and sobering encounters with what the states of Utilitaria, Communitaria and Libertaria have done with the Enlightenment project of liberty and all the rest.

What Caritat finds is that modern enemies of humaneness are everywhere in command. Opportunistic power-seekers like his old enemy, Dr. Orville Globulus, move easily from regime to regime, confidently preaching the meaninglessness of history and the exhaustion of the “meta-narratives” of progress. In Utilitaria, the Iron Lady Prime Minister Hilda Juggernaut (shades of Hilda Margaret Thatcher) denounces the idea of the person. Wearing the same blue suit, the steely lady prime minister of Libertaria, Jugula Hildebrand, denounces the idea of society. Plus ca change. . . .

As with all good satires, Lukes’ power is in the busy accumulation of telling contemporary detail, the briskly accusing assembly of multiplied targets for our time. Again and again Lukes’ prose rejoices in concocting, Swiftian style, some scene of revealingly momentous awfulness, as when Caritat encounters the hellish ticketing system on the Libertarian railway system that’s been parceled out among Fast Track Enterprises, Fare’s Fair Enterprises, the Platform Services Co. and all the other private owners. “And if I don’t pay the platform fee?” “In that case,” said the inspector triumphantly, “I can’t allow you to leave the train. It’s your choice. Freedom of choice! That’s what we believe in here in Libertaria.”

But nothing in this progress through dementing modern politics comes so relished as Caritat’s stay in Communitaria, where what they profess is faith in a fine roster of politically correct goods--heterogeneity, difference, diversity, multiculturalism, the Other. Here, they hold, it’s a crime to be offended against. So even mealtimes have been multiculturalized. During grace, for example, members of one family throw themselves into a frenzy of zany postures, according to creedal preference, variously crouching, kneeling, swaying, staring at the ceiling, putting their hands on their head. Each one has a different dish to eat, of course.

Swift would have chortled. Down at the local university--known as the Unidiversity--he might have cried. Here reason is denounced by the professoriate. They’ve had enough of that Enlightenment jive. Their view is that no view is superior to any other. On this campus, naturally, speech codes have been institutionalized. It’s a way, Caritat observes, of producing conformity of thought. You’d better belong to a community. No other kind of self-definition is allowed. This society is an apotheosis of empowered sectionalism.

One of the funniest parts of Lukes’ novel is the comedy of errors Caritat gets into with the Communitarian feminist Philomena Bodkin. There’s a mix-up over washrooms--nonsexist hieroglyphics on the lavatory doors lead the good professor astray and he ends up in the presence of a showering Bodkin. “Visiting Professor Molests Bare Bodkin” trumpets the student press. The subsequent hearing at the Body of Gender Centre is not at all amusing. What’s crucially missing in this regime, Caritat observes, is not so much a sense of humor--though that would help--as tolerance.

Among Caritat’s endearing charms is his proneness to discuss the ongoing issues with his favorite 18th century thinkers--enlightenment with Kant, vanity with Dr. Johnson, and so on. In the matter of tolerance we hear Kant’s words: “I propose that each citizen be allowed to believe his own reason, and think whatever that enlightened or deluded reason will dictate, provided he doesn’t disturb public order.” This is a cry the novel believes in, a doctrine for a genuine critical pluralism, for a knack the Communitarians do not have of attending to the other person’s views with seriousness. It’s presented as the way forward against all the abounding sectarianism.

One gruesomely intolerant priest of the Communitarians, endorsing his faction’s Rushdie-like fatwa against a satirical rock singer, rejects the use of ridicule: It’s the technique of blasphemy. Against which Caritat defends the necessity of satire as defined by Dr. Johnson’s dictionary--”a poem in which wickedness or folly is censured.” It’s a good gloss on the novel Caritat appears in, and a justification of all its proceedings. For what’s utterly magnetic about Lukes’ book is that it not only makes you see so much folly and wickedness for what they are, but it also convinces you of the glorious utility of works like this one in censuring them.