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ABSTRACT
The role of Concrete Utopias in the works of Roy Bhaskar are contrasted with the ‘Real Utopias’ of Erik Olin Wright. Critical Realism treats them as ‘possibilities’ that are real because realizable. Conversely, to Wright, they are extrapolations of existing social forms whose future combination could result in socialism. As such, Bhaskar's philosophical contribution is supplemented by the Morphogenic Approach (Archer) developed for use in the social sciences. ‘Real Utopias’ are considered to be necessarily Actualist, thus limiting future change in social forms to those that already exist, despite transformation being ‘activity dependent’. Critical Realism attaches more importance to structural and cultural constraints and to agential ingenuity in transforming them. In short, Real Utopias are realistic rather than real though preferable to existing social formations, whilst Concrete Utopias allow for new novelty, such as de-growth, giving hope for reshaping global society.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Margaret S. Archer founded the Centre for Social Ontology at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in 2011, when she was Professor of Social Theory. She is now Visiting Professor at three European universities. Archer was elected as the first woman President of the International Sociological Association at the 12th World Congress of Sociology (1986–90). Pope Francis appointed her as President of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences during 2014–19. She was a founding member of PASS and the Academy of Learned Societies in the Social Sciences and is a trustee of the Centre for Critical Realism. She has published 43 volumes and had six devoted to her work. She has been awarded two honoris causa by the University of Navarra, Spain and the Uniwersytet Kardynala Stefana Wyszynkiego, Warsaw, Poland.
Notes
1 ‘Reflexivity is the regular exercise of the mental ability, shared by all normal people, to consider themselves in relation to their (social) contexts and vice versa’ (Archer Citation2007, 4). This definition of reflexivity is common to all my work.
2 See Chapter 1 of Structure, Culture and the Internal Conversation (Archer Citation2003).
3 ‘Corporate Agents’ are collectivities who have articulated their aims and organized to seek their accomplishments (Archer Citation1995, Chapter 8).
4 A point first made by Stefano Zamagni who goes on to say that the common good is more akin to a multiplication sum. If one entry is zero, so is the total (Zamagni Citation2011, 322–3.).
5 This did not involve using the morphogenetic/morphostatic (M/M) approach as an explanatory approach, since the M/M does not explain anything, just as a realist social ontology does not explain anything (see Porpora Citation2013, 26). The shift to discussing the morphogenic society was a move to theorizing the possible advent of a social configuration that might displace that of Late Modernity.
6 In brief, contra Rosa, there seem to be four intractable problems attaching to any empirical estimation of the rapidity of social change. First, what is included is necessarily incomplete because certain changes will have occurred without yet producing their full manifestations, especially given the lack of proportionality between cause and effect. In other words, that legendary butterfly may just have flapped its wings in Tokyo. That is the ontological problem. Epistemologically we may also be incapable of knowing it. Second, what we do know more or less correctly about recent social change will be a series of incommensurables, literally a list without common measure, preventing any comparison or weighting of the items listed. For example, in Europe, proportionately more people came on-line and less of them got married in the last quarter of century. However, we can neither say that these two changes make equally important contributions to change in general, nor can we assert the opposite. Third, change often involves displacement. As the sale of machine-made knitted goods increased, those with the ability to knit has diminished. However, fourth, it cannot be concluded that a (hypothetical) rate of displacement would be a better measure of the rapidity of change. This is because we also know that ‘displacement’ is often artificial (planned obsolescence) and may involve no significant change at all (cosmetics).
7 The full array of Logics of Protection, Correction, Competition and Opportunity were first elaborated in my (1988) book Culture and Agency.
8 Which I do throughout the series but probably of most importance is its appearance on p.2 of the last volume (Archer Citation2017b, 2).
9 I am in full agreement with Sayer (Citation2011, 125) that ‘our own flourishing comes to be dependent upon the flourishing of our commitments … There is thus no clear distinction between our own flourishing and that of our commitments; they are fused’.
10 An argument first advanced by Dahrendorf (Citation1994). See also Archer (Citation2017b).
11 See Rosa (Citation2003) and various critiques of his thesis in our Volume 2 of the Centre for Social Ontology series on morphogenesis (Archer Citation2014).
12 A similar slippage was the theme of Campbell’s (Citation1998) excellent Myth of Social Action, where he traced how the broader Weberian concept of ‘action’ was sedulously truncated into ‘social action’ by later theorists.
13 Wright (Citation2013, 2) goes on to admit ‘when concrete claims are made about the specific mechanisms that generate these harms’ they tend to be ‘very controversial’.