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

Joseph Beuys and led to his concept of social sculpture.

Ideas never come from nowhere. They are always extensions, graftings or inversions of things that are already in the world.

In each field we can deliberately try to push the boundaries, developing sketches of alternative routes to see if they make sense, if they would work and if anyone would feel at home in a world where they were implemented. By multiplying these ideas across different fields, we create larger ‘possibility spaces’, a bigger menu of options for our soc

Democracy is founded on the idea that it is not the state as such that is the problem, but rather how it is run. The promise of democracy is that the state can become a possession of the people—indeed, that was an animating ideal for social imagination in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and a further evolution of that ideal gives us at lea

Anyone wanting to change the world needs to cultivate a mix of rationality and intuition, as well as a mix of arrogance and humility: the arrogance to believe that they may be able to alter the course of human history, but also the humility to observe and change their views.

they deal with the visible while societies are made up of what’s invisible.

I like a related idea that comes from the Iroquois and other North American First Nations about the need to imagine those seven generations ahead in the future, as well as those seven generations behind in the past.8 Reflecting on what they might think, say or suggest can serve as a useful corrective to the intense ‘presentness’ of generations imme

Exploratory economics would combine the insights of the discipline with the use of creative tools to design possible ways of organising firms, sectors, trading and investment in the future. Exploratory sociology would look at new ways of organising care, friendship or families. Exploratory urban geography might look at how we could organise cities,

The most powerful movements of social change are ‘thick’ and manage to function at all four levels.