Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination

there are very different rhythms of change for different things, like the very long time horizons for transforming infrastructures, developing new drugs or changing the make-up of the armed forces. At the other extreme, there are the very short time horizons of news cycles and software development. In between are the rhythms of schools and hospital

Beyond committed individuals, there’s an important role for political parties that are willing to engage with imagination to set up commissions, deliberations and explorations of the landscape ahead of them. Since parties remain our only institutions designed to create synthetic programmes that can win majority support, it’s vital that they attend

Collectively, we also need pictures of societal futures that go beyond today’s status quo. They complement but do not replace the necessary work of activism that fights against the injustices of the present. We also need new answers to new problems—the vulnerabilities caused by a more connected world, or by potentially lethal artificial intelligenc

there was a time when social scientists saw themselves as shapers and designers of possible futures rather than only as analysts. H.G. Wells, for example, wrote that ‘sociology is the description of the Ideal Society and its relation to existing societies’, a view shared by very few sociologists today.

It promises a reckoning, a payback after wrongs. But it doesn’t offer what philosopher Martha Nussbaum calls ‘the transition’ of moving beyond anger to thinking about what lies after. In this sense, the very fierceness of imagining the moment of violence crowds out imagination of the world beyond.

The most influential ideas tend to be quite simple: generative concepts that can spark multiple interpretations and adaptations.

Countries that used to define themselves through creating bold new institutions no longer do so—there are no recent equivalents to the NHS or the BBC in Britain; no equivalents of NASA or DARPA in the US. In much of academic life, too, you are more likely to succeed by slightly tweaking an established idea than creating a novel one.18

societies that become too specialised, or too optimised in a particular way, are likely to struggle when conditions change. That is just as true if they seem to be doing well, since history never stands still. In this sense, imagination is functional rather than a luxury. It generates possibilities and keeps them alive.

For society’s imagineers, there are not so many obvious tools, the raw materials being life and society themselves; and there are few academies or colleges that teach the craft of change.