A Sociology of Real Utopias

On Marx’s tomb in Highgate cemetery is one of his most quoted passages: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” Usually this is taken as a call to action. But it is also a call to produce a certain kind of knowledge, knowledge that is relevant to the task of social transformation.  Such knowledge needs to grapple with four broad problems: specifying the values that drive our search for a better world; developing a rigorous diagnosis and critique of existing social structures and institutions in terms of those values; elaborating models of emancipatory alternatives that better realize those values; and understanding the conditions and strategies for transformations that move us towards those alternatives. Sociology, in its various critical traditions, has focused mainly on the second of these – the diagnosis and critique of the way existing social processes generate harms in the world. It is now especially imperative that we engage the rest of this agenda. The idea of “real utopias” is one way of doing this. It is a way of connecting ideas about emancipatory destinations beyond the existing world to practical transformations that prefigure such alternatives. The “utopia” in real utopia insists on developing visions of alternatives that embody our deepest aspirations for a world in which all people have access to the conditions to live flourishing lives; the “real” in real utopia means taking very seriously the problem of the viability of institutions that could effectively move us in the direction of that world.