Sublime

federalist (with smaller units nested within bigger ones) or polycentric (with smaller units connected laterally across a network).

Ideologies, as we shall see, map the political and social worlds for us. We simply cannot do without them because we cannot act without making sense of the worlds we inhabit.

he takes a much keener interest in the concrete institutional structure of democratic society than either Horkheimer or Adorno.

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

Patrick Geddes, founder of environmental sociology and much else, described a more ideal city or ‘eutopia’ as lying ‘in the city around us; and it must be planned and realized [with] us as its citizens—each a citizen of both the actual and ideal city seen increasingly as one.’9 In his architectural designs for the city of Edinburgh, for example, he

Mill held that truth emerges from an unfettered competition of ideas and that individual character is most improved when allowed to find its own way uncoerced. That vision was insufficient for 20th-century American liberalism.

This corporate world generates a kind of digital utopianism (Turner 2006). Lanier argues how this reflects the general corporate takeover of much of the world, especially since the growth of neo-liberal discourse and practice from around 1980, first within the US and Britain and then throughout much of the world (Klein 2007).