446g_Envisioning Real Utopias repaginated (harry).indd
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چکیده
There was a time, not so long ago, when both critics and defenders of capitalism believed that “another world was possible.” It was generally called “socialism.” While the right condemned socialism as violating individual rights to private property and unleashing monstrous forms of state oppression, and the left saw socialism as opening up new vistas of social equality, genuine freedom and the development of human potentials, both believed that a fundamental alternative to capitalism was possible. Most people in the world today, especially in its economically developed regions, no longer believe in this possibility. Capitalism seems to them part of the natural order of things, and pessimism has replaced the optimism of the will that Gramsci once said would be essential if the world was to be transformed. In this book I hope to contribute to rebuilding a sense of possibility for emancipatory social change by investigating the feasibility of radically different kinds of institutions and social relations that could potentially advance the democratic egalitarian goals historically associated with the idea of socialism. In part this investigation will be empirical, examining cases of institutional innovations that embody in one way or another emancipatory alternatives to the dominant forms of social organization. In part it will be more speculative, exploring theoretical proposals that have not yet been implemented but nevertheless are attentive to realistic problems of institutional design and social feasibility. The idea is to provide empirical and theoretical grounding for radical democratic egalitarian visions of an alternative social world.
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446g_Envisioning Real Utopias repaginated (harry).indd
In this chapter and the next we will explore a range of real utopian proposals that try to satisfy three main criteria: First, the institutional designs involved are desirable in terms of radical democratic egalitarian emancipatory ideals. Second, they constitute viable alternatives to existing arrangements (i.e. they are consistent with what we know about how institutions work and, if implemen...
متن کامل446g_Envisioning Real Utopias repaginated (harry).indd
In the absence of a comprehensive institutional design for a radical democratic egalitarian alternative to capitalism what we need to work out are principles of institutional innovation and change which will tell us whether we are at least moving in the right direction. In this chapter we will explore one way of doing this. I will begin by interrogating the meaning of the word “social” in socia...
متن کامل446g_Envisioning Real Utopias repaginated (harry).indd
Envisioning real utopias is a central component of a broader intellectual enterprise that can be called emancipatory social science. Emancipatory social science seeks to generate scientifi c knowledge relevant to the collective project of challenging various forms of human oppression. To call this a form of social science, rather than simply social criticism or social philosophy, recognizes the...
متن کامل446g_Envisioning Real Utopias repaginated (harry).indd
At the center of a socialist alternative to capitalism, in whatever way socialism is understood, is the problem of economic institutions, specifi cally the social organization of power over the allocation of resources and control of production and distribution. In statist conceptions of socialism such power and control operates primarily through the state, in the strongest version through the d...
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