University of Chicago Press, 1992. They found that the publication of utopian novels as a percentage of all novels published clusters in the downturn phase of the Kondraetieff wave, peaking during the period when economic conditions turn for the better after a long crisis.
Hegemonic decline amplifies the cultural response to the economy.
The relationship between ideological and economic conditions is turbulent at best. But over the long term, the cultural atmosphere surrounding economic conditions shifts with the seasonal pattern of economic stagnation and expansion, and hegemonic stability and decline. Wagar, a historian at SUNY Binghamton and colleague of Immanuel Wallerstein, has written a utopian vision from a deliberately world-systemic point of view. As a novel, it reads rather like a historian's extrapolation based on an explicit theory. It is full of long treatises on changing world conditions, with only occasional epistolary interludes to add human characters to what is otherwise all plot.