A utopian method relevant to the twenty-first century […] is both appropriate and necessary. It provides a critical tool for exposing the limitations of current policy discourses about economic growth and ecological sustainability. It facilitates genuinely holistic thinking about possible futures, combined with reflexivity, provisionality and democratic engagement with the principles and practices of those futures. And it requires us to think about our conceptions of human needs and human flourishing in those possible futures. The core of utopia is the desire for being otherwise, individually and collectively, subjectively and objectively. Its expressions explore and bring to debate the potential contents and contexts of human flourishing. It is thus better understood as a method than a goal – a method elaborated here as the Imaginary Reconstitution of Society, or IROS. Levitas, Utopia as Method, Introduction, p. xi

The economic and ecological crises mean that change is both essential and inevitable. It is the nature of that change that is in question. We need to think about what kind of social and economic system can deliver secure and sustainable livelihoods and ways of life for all. For those who still think that utopia is about the impossible, what really is impossible is to carry on as we are, with social and economic systems that enrich a few but destroy the environment and impoverish most of the world’s population. Our very survival depends on finding another way of living. Levitas, Utopia as Method, Introduction, p. xii

The encounter between sociology and utopia implies reconfiguring sociology itself. Sociology must affirm holism and must extend this to include ‘the environment’, locating our human and social existence within the ‘natural’ or material world. It must embrace the normativity that it has systematically sought to exclude, address the future which it has systematically sought to evade and engage with what it means and might mean to be human. Insistence on the historical determination of human nature distances such existential questions, but all images of the good society unavoidably posit what is necessary for human happiness and human flourishing. Levitas, Utopia as Method, Introduction, p. xv

This encounter also implies thinking differently about what constitutes knowledge. It challenges the assumption that sociology constitutes a form of knowledge while utopianism is simply a form of speculation, and seeks to legitimize utopian thought not as a new, but as a repressed, already existing, form of knowledge about possible futures. […] The distinctive feature of knowledge in the contemporary global economy is its commodification. Increasingly, knowledge is not something possessed as part of ‘the commons’, but is privately owned and exploited for profit. All societies restrict access to knowledge, especially knowledge that generates power or profit, but the contemporary extent of this is unprecedented. Knowledge is also very fragmented. This is partly the result of complexity and necessary specialization but is also connected to the institutional organization of knowledge and especially the emergence of separate ‘disciplines’ within universities. The current emphasis on interdisciplinarity is, of course, an attempt to overcome some of these problems and return to more integrated thinking, while discursively reinforcing the primacy of disciplines. This fragmentation accompanies a short-term orientation to problem solving in which the future appears only as an extrapolation of the present: ‘if present trends continue’. Favoured forms of knowledge are those which are non-evaluative and highly specialized and which can be sold as ‘real’ knowledge under the badge of ‘science’. Other, exploratory, evaluative, holistic forms of knowledge do not receive this endorsement. The consequence is a situation better described as the stupid society than the knowledge society. The explication and defense of utopia as method challenges these assumptions. Levitas, Utopia as Method, Introduction, p. xv-xvi

The French sociologist André Gorz argued that ‘it is the function of utopias, in the sense the term has assumed in the work of Ernst Bloch or Paul Ricoeur, to provide us with the distance from the existing state of affairs which allows us to judge what we are doing in the light of what we could or should do’. This reading is supported by Bloch’s claim that ‘utopian conscience-and-knowledge … confutes and judges the existent if it is failing, and failing inhumanly; indeed, first and foremost it provides the standard to measure such facticity precisely as departure from the Right’. This suggests that utopia is at least a regulative ideal, a standpoint or measure for evaluating our circumstances and actions. As such, its literal plausibility and desirability are crucial. But neither Gorz nor Bloch would be content to leave it there, for if utopia is no more than that, it is stripped of the transformative capacity that both of them intend – a transformation both of existential experience and of the objective structures of the social world that generates that experience. Levitas, Utopia as Method, Introduction, p. xvii

Part III maps out the Imaginary Reconstitution of Society as a method, and one which has three aspects. The first of these is an analytical, archaeological mode; the second an ontological mode; and the third a constructive, architectural mode. The architectural mode is precisely what characterizes the literary form of utopia, and gives it its sociological character. It involves the institutional design and delineation of the good society – and, in the case of intentional communities or prefigurative practices, its partial concrete instantiation. The archaeological mode complements this, for it involves the interpellation of absent or implicit elements in political, literary or artistic utopian ‘accounts’. Its similarity with archaeology lies in the excavation of fragments and shards and their recombination into a coherent whole. The point of such archaeology is to lay the underpinning model of the good society open to scrutiny and to public critique. And the ontological mode is concerned precisely with the subjects and agents of utopia, the selves interpellated within it, that utopia encourages or allows. These modes or facets of the utopian method are analytically separable from one another but are also intertwined; for the distinctive characteristics of IROS are its holism and its institutional specificity. Wherever we start in the process of imagining ourselves and our world otherwise, all three modes must eventually come into play. Levitas, Utopia as Method, Introduction, p. xvii

There are several advantages of utopian thinking as a method. It is holistic. Unlike political philosophy and political theory, which have been more open than sociology to normative approaches, this holism is expressed at the level of concrete social institutions and processes. It allows, as both Gorz and Bloch suggest, an element of ethical and institutional separation from the present. Although the critical edge of utopianism depends upon imagined alternatives possessing a reasonable degree of internal coherence and at least theoretical possibility, it is less constrained by what now seems immediately possible. Importantly, its explicitly hypothetical character enables us to insist on utopia’s provisionality, reflexivity and dialogic mode. Explicit alternative scenarios for the future are fundamental to any kind of democratic debate. This means envisioning alternatives, but also setting out the images of the good society buried in the constant barrage of political rhetoric and policies. The utopian method involves both making explicit the kinds of society implied in existing political programmes and constructing alternatives. It entails also considering the kinds of people we want to become and that different forms of society will promote or inhibit. Our institutional arrangements affect both the imagination and the reality of human flourishing through the values, skills, capabilities, experiences and relationships they encourage or suppress. To put it another way, utopia as method is concerned with the potential institutions of a just, equitable and sustainable society which begins to provide the conditions for grace. Levitas, Utopia as Method, Introduction, p. xviii