Synopsis
"The Socialist Register is compulsory reading for people who refuse to be resigned to the idea that there can be no alternative to our unacceptable society."
--Daniel Singer, author of Whose Millennium?
When mainstream commentators talk about the future, they tend to predict dire doomsday apocalypses or spin wild techno-fantasies. In spite of their radically hi-tech edge, these futuristic scenarios usually assume that current social structures will persist.
Necessary and Unnecessary Utopias points toward a very different way of thinking about the future. While rejecting schematic blueprints, this book reasserts the need for a bold and revolutionary social imagination, one aimed at saner ways of living and more rational ways of organizing society.
Taking up such vital topics as work and its structure, democracy and the state, localism and internationalism, relations between the sexes, and technology and its social uses, Necessary and Unnecessary Utopias makes the case that a socialist vision of the future remains not only realistic but necessary.
More than one dozen internationally celebrated scholars, including Terry Eagleton, Frigga Haug, Johanna Brenner, Kate Soper, Carl Boggs, and Norman Geras, are contributors.
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About the Authors
Leo Panitch is professor of political science at York University in Toronto and author of Renewing Socialism: Democracy, Strategy, and Imagination.
Colin Leys is Emeritus Professor of Political Studies at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.
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