Normal View Dyslexic View
Coming to Terms With
What is society’s potential to be otherwise?
,
Lydia Morris‡
, Shirin M. Rai§
, , 
Abstract
In these grim times, the potential for societies to advance social justice, address unequal access to rights, undo harms, and responsibly grow more sustainable ecologies, seems both challenging to find and ever more necessary. With dystopic developments coming increasingly to the fore, this collection of papers explores the concept of society’s potential to be otherwise and the methodological and evidentiary questions this raises. Such questions include: what is this otherwise and where is it found? How can we know? Is there evidence for any of these possibilities and what kind of evidence do we want or need? How are time and temporality addressed in thinking about futures? Is society’s potential part of its deep ontology, is it made, collectively and with effort, is it something imagined—that we can or should treat as if it existed—and what can we learn from dystopias both on the horizon and those present? These contributions address these themes through reflecting on the role of rights and civic stratification; utopias and the prefigurative; and through concepts of the moral economy.
Keywords
societyfuturesutopianprefigurativerightscivic stratificationmoral economySociological theorising of varieties of society that change in times of crisis
Sylvia Walby
Introduction
There are alternative futures. These include not only the turn towards authoritarianism, but also the possibility of advancing social justice and forms of development that are sustainable. This paper draws on the legacy of sociology, in which the ‘sociological imagination’ is invoked to turn private troubles into public issues for analysis (Wright Mills 1959). It mobilises concepts to help think through alternative futures (Cooper 2025); and different imaginaries of society (Castoriadis 1997 [1975]). It shares concerns with social inequalities (Savage 2021), the depletions due to gendered exploitation (Rai 2024), and the actions of the state (Morris 2025). Addressing ‘society’s potential to be otherwise’ requires consideration of the meaning of the concepts of ‘society’, ‘otherwise’, and ‘potential’. ‘Society’ is a contested term in need of redefinition as sociology rethinks the notion of nation-states in response to the challenge of removing coloniality from its core concepts. To think ‘otherwise’ mobilises not only the sociological imagination that insists on combining the analysis of private troubles with public issues but also the use and development of comparative and historical methodologies. The notion of ‘potential’ invokes reflection on two different theoretical vocabularies of social change: rethinking the traditional gradualism of cumulative change bound up with the notion of modernity and replacing it with the implications of crisis for sudden change into divergent paths of development.
What is ‘society’?
Drawing on and developing the concept of society is important for the scale of the analysis needed to successfully address alternative futures. It is part of a turn to the macro-level of society that is needed to analyse the immense changes of our times. The concept of society captures the multiple ways people live together, and the institutions, systems, and practices involved. These include multiple institutional domains of economy, polity, violence, and civil society; and multiple intersecting regimes of inequality: gender, coloniality, and capitalism. It involves multiple scales, from the global to the local and in between, so that, while everyday life is important, it is important to link private troubles to public issues, and to analyse the macro-level of society. This means going beyond the old concept of society as a nation-state, being cognisant of empire, coloniality, global capital, and gender regimes. It means developing a complex systems approach to society, to enable the combination of gender, coloniality, and class, across multiple institutional domains, and different types of societal change from gradualism to non-linear changes in crisis (Walby 2009).
What is ‘otherwise’?
While a uni-directional notion of progress through modernisation has long ago been rejected, its replacement is contested. There are multiple imaginative ways of building alternative societies, at different scales. Some concern local experiments in building utopia now that might be scaled up (Wright 2010) or focus on addressing specific inequalities such as feminism (Walby 2011). My focus here is on comparative analysis of the current macro-level, where at least three major varieties of society have been identified: social democracy, (neo)liberalism, and authoritarianism (Walby & Shire 2024), although, until recently, authoritarianism has been relatively under-analysed.
There has been a long-held duality or continuum of social democracy and (neo)liberalism, variously articulated with discussions of social democracy in Sweden as a historic compromise between capital and labour (Korpi 1983), a new balance between social democracy and neoliberalism in a Third Way (Giddens 1998), and nuancing with the additional category of conservative corporatism (Esping-Andersen 1990).
The relative neglect of authoritarianism is not only no longer viable, but it never was. There has always been an authoritarian route through industrialisation. Historical sociology has compared the routes to democracy or dictatorship, for example, as an outcome of the struggles between social forces associated with class relations during societal transformations consequent on industrialisation (Moore 1966).
While the current insurgency of authoritarianism is sometimes treated as surprising or exceptional in Europe and North America, it should not be, because of mid-20th-century fascism and centuries of empire and coloniality. But the increasingly visible power of countries that never made a full transition to democracy with industrialisation, confirms the relevance of authoritarianism today.
In thinking about how society might be otherwise, there are actually existing three major varieties: social democracy, neoliberalism, and authoritarianism.
What is ‘potential’?
There are alternative ways of thinking about the ‘potential’ of society. One way is through the notions of ‘imaginary’ (Castoriadis 1997) and ‘conceptual activism’ (Cooper 2025) or putting concepts of ‘utopia’ into everyday practice (Wright 2010). The focus here is on alternative forms of macro-level change: in particular, gradualism and various forms of crisis.
The traditional approach to societal change in sociology had been to see it as a process of cumulative development, as in much modernisation theory, in which economic development drove changes in democracy, education, and secularisation. This has been largely abandoned, not least since these processes do not always occur at the same time.
An alternative is to think about the potential for radical disjuncture at moments of crisis, into divergent paths of development into different varieties of society. The analysis of crisis is part of this. A definition is: ‘A crisis is an event that has the potential to cause a large change to the social system and in which there is a lack of proportionality between cause and consequence’ (Walby 2015). In this definition, crisis is a temporal process, with a distinctive contribution to societal change. It is a process that lacks proportionality, as conventionally understood, in which what happens during the crisis event is disproportionately important to the outcome. The lack of proportionality is linked to an understanding that complex systems mutually adapt when they interact, rather than cause simple one-directional change. Hence change is non-linear.
Four types of outcomes of crisis can be distinguished: recuperation; intensification; transformation; and catastrophe. Recuperation is the most usual outcome of a crisis, in which, despite instability and change for a short period of time, the outcome is to settle back into pre-existing societal patterns, with few lasting consequences. Examples include a ‘scandal’ in politics, or a ‘bubble’ in the economy.
In intensification, the path of societal development, while not changed by the crisis, is speeded up, accelerated. This conceptualisation can be seen in the work of Schumpeter in the restructuring of the economy, and more recently by Rosa (2013) on the acceleration of modernity.
The potential for radical transformation of society to be the outcome of a crisis is often the focus of analysis. This concept of transformation of society into new divergent paths of development underpins the work of Korpi (1983) on the historical settlement of social democracy, Esping-Andersen (1990) and three forms of welfare capitalism, and Moore (1966) on dictatorship and democracy.
The notion of catastrophe as the outcome of the crisis lurks at the back of many of these analyses as a possibility. It comes to the fore in accounts of climate change, and the tipping point into irreversible destruction of the planet for purposes of human habitation.
Concluding thoughts
Understanding the potential for society to be otherwise requires thinking about what is meant by ‘society’, ‘otherwise’, and ‘potential’. Here, I have mobilised insights from comparative historical sociology, which has investigated the different ways in which societies have been organised, and the processes of change in crisis, not only those that are cumulative. The growth of authoritarianism is neither new nor inevitable, even if more attention has been paid to social democratic and neoliberal varieties of society.
The sociological imagination has always tried to link private troubles with public issues and contributed to the development of projects for alternative forms of society. There is much to share more widely from sociological analysis of comparative examples of different varieties of society, and of the processes, often in crises, that lead to changes in the multiple complex systems that make up society.
The world may be more authoritarian than many sociologists imagined would be the case a few years ago, but there are alternative visions for the future and alternative societal forms in the present.
Society’s potential to be otherwise: the dynamic nature of rights
Lydia Morris
The question we have been asked to address for this collection points towards a future whose nature, by implication, is yet to be determined. So, we are invited to engage our imaginations in considering what shape it might take and, more crucially, to consider the influences that can be brought to bear in producing an emergent form. But conversely, in seeking to understand and analyse change, we can also look to the past and examine the ways in which change has previously been established, by which forces, by what means, and to what effect. In speaking of the ‘shape’ of society, we are usually making implicit reference to the macro social and political structures that contain and colour the experience of social life, while such structures also provide one means by which we represent the social world. So, to ask about society’s potential to be otherwise is at least in part a question about how far such structures are amenable to, or even accessible to, change, and even how far they set the terms under which change is possible.
One aspect of the way that society is constituted can be found in the allocation of rights. Rights serve to delineate the external boundaries of society by determining who is allowed entry to the national space, and under what terms and conditions. They also shape the way in which society is constituted from the inside, through the granting or denial of rights to different groups, and through the various processes governing entitlement, delivery, and claims-making that can favour some and disadvantage others. While the language of rights carries a sense of ethical and legal certainty, none of these processes is either fixed or fully transparent—witness the degree of judicial disagreement when it comes to interpretation. Hence, the study of rights in practice offers a vital supplement to macro-level analysis of societal change via a meso-level that focusses more specifically on process; that is, on how change happens.
As a contribution to the present discussion, I offer one approach to this question from the perspective of my own research, which can be broadly conceived as a sociology of rights. Indeed, if we look back through the history of British society, we can see clear evidence of changes that have been wrought through the gradual accretion of rights by a variety of groups that had previously been disadvantaged and/or discriminated against—by virtue of race, class, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, etc. Yet we are currently confronted by threats to a number of the rights that we have come to take for granted: threats not only in the form of gradual erosions (think of welfare rights or civil rights), but also a fundamental questioning of their legitimacy (notably in growing signs of withdrawal from commitment to universal human rights). In considering society’s potential for change, we must therefore consider the shape such rights might take in the future.
A sociological focus on the analysis and significance of rights is a relatively recent field of interest, but can arguably traced back to Marshall’s (1950) model of citizenship as a guarantee of social inclusion through the delivery of basic rights. These rights were argued to ameliorate the effects of class inequality and to lessen the hierarchical nature of society and hence ‘flatten’ its architecture—although contemporary writers note Marshall’s failure to address the role of rights in defining and defending the exclusionary boundaries of society. My own work in this area has been strongly influenced by Lockwood (1996), who engages with Marshall’s model, but in doing so reverses his argument to see rights as part of a stratified system. His key insight is, therefore, that the allocation and delivery of rights can itself amount to a system of inequality, or what he terms ‘civic stratification’.
Like Marshall, Lockwood’s concerns are focussed, for the most part, on citizenship from the inside, to ask how far this notionally equal status delivers on its promise of guaranteed inclusion—although, of course, the concept of civic stratification has even stronger purchase if we extend it to consider the growing variety of positions occupied by non-citizens who are present on national territory. However, the point of particular interest for the remit of this collection must be the way that Lockwood builds movement into his analysis of access to and delivery of rights, by theorising the dynamic and changeable nature of the whole system. One implication of this argument is that rights are by no means ‘fixed’ by virtue of the existing structures of society but are constantly made, re-made, or even un-made.
According to Lockwood, the dynamic nature of rights operates through two cross-cutting axes: the presence or absence of rights, which refers to access to formal entitlements; and the possession of moral and material resources, which denotes the informal effects of stigma and prestige. I will focus for present purposes on moral resources, and how moral standing in society can be at play in the realisation and delivery of rights. According to Lockwood’s model, groups can accrue moral credibility or achieve moral standing largely through civic activism, often combined with legal challenges. In this way, disadvantaged or discriminated groups can push for ‘civic expansion’ (an improved position with respect to rights) by gaining public recognition of the legitimacy of their claims. For historical examples, think of the feminist movement, or more recently the gay rights movement, both of which have fundamentally changed the way society operates and the very conception of social inclusion. However, we should also note that Lockwood neglected to consider the reverse dynamic: that is, the possibility of civic contraction and the consequent diminution of rights.
Given the focus of the present collection on society’s potential for change, we should look in more depth at how this dynamic occurs, and one resource for addressing the process can be found in a different theoretical tradition, which began with E.P. Thompson’s notion of ‘moral economy’. Thompson (1971) offers an analysis of popular protest against the rising price of corn in 18th-century England, in which the landless called on landlords to honour the obligations implied by a customary ‘moral economy of the poor’. However, my own work and that of a number of others, has turned this insight around to argue that moral economy is not only asserted from below, but can be imposed from above. Recall David Cameron’s moral mission of welfare reform, which harnessed a moral economy of austerity to justify the contraction of both welfare rights and migrants’ rights (see Morris 2019), one particular manifestation of broader trends towards the reconfiguration of welfare, economy, and solidarity within a changing global division of labour. This reconfiguration has been characterised by Munch (2012) in his conception of the ‘liberal competition state’, denoting a turn away from collectivised social inclusion towards more individualised forms. Within this process, social provisions lose the status of rights and become tools deployed as strategies of activation and deterrence. Such devices are in turn underpinned by a distinctive moral construction of economic and social relations, and Munch notes that a key issue in this process is who succeeds in the ‘symbolic struggle’. Such a struggle operates in great part at the level of political rhetoric, which can shape the way that welfare problems are perceived and tackled, and thus the nature of society’s potential for change.
To take the example of social rights a little further, a social insurance system essentially collectivises risk, involving some acceptance of a sense of collective fate, and some recognition of the equal standing of participants—hence Marshall’s (1950) conception of citizenship as a confirmation of equal social worth. However, as Mau (2003: 45–6) has argued, a willingness to share depends on the ‘moral persuasiveness’ of welfare institutions, and this is in turn based on perceptions of the legitimacy of different claimant groups. The factors at play in terms of public acceptability are financial contribution, personal desert, and social belonging, raising questions as to what is fair, who is worthy, and who is a ‘member’ of society, which have no ready answer, each being amenable to interpretation, manipulation, or persuasion.
It is the likely battle over perception and representation that feeds into Lockwood’s (1996: 536) argument that: ‘the ethos and practice of citizenship is at least as likely as class relations to structure group interests and thereby fields of conflict and discontent’. In austerity Britain, we saw political discourse deployed in an erosion of the moral standing of key target groups, notably welfare recipients and international migrants, in a manner that also set these two groupings in mutual opposition. The transformative power of such moves is evident in the very significant role this discourse played in garnering support for Brexit, despite Cameron’s overall objective to reform but remain within the EU. We should also note current reports that the Council of Europe (which oversees the European Convention of Human Rights) has asserted states’ ‘undeniable sovereign right’ to control their borders (see Declaration 46).
We can link the underlying process to a further theoretical resource: that is, Douglas’s (1986) call to address an ‘unsociological view of human cognition’ by paying attention to the epistemological nature of classification. In her account, the classifications adopted by formal institutions are not grounded in the identification of phenomena existing in the world, but instead are a means of imposing order on the world. Hence, she argues that the way we perceive comes ready prepared by our own institutions, for how can we think about our own or others’ position without using the classifications established by the administrative systems that organise society, and indeed also define its boundaries. So Douglas, in writing of ‘how institutions think’, was referring to the official designation and perception of groups that then become the targets of policy.
I have recently combined this argument with another aspect of her work (Douglas 2002 [1966]), which offers an analysis of primitive religion in terms of the classificatory distinction of purity and danger, as in the opposition between sacred and profane, or the clean and the unclean. However, we can also apply this distinction to our own contemporary society, and could take as an example the treatment of asylum seekers, currently the object of a ‘moral panic’ in Britain as a response to the arrival of people seeking refuge by crossing the channel in precarious small vessels. Once these asylum seekers are designated ‘illegal migrants’ (in a manner that likely contravenes the Geneva Conventions), then purity stands for the defence of our national sovereignty, and danger the incursion of those in flight into our national space. We could here recall a related quotation that was taken up by Douglas (2002: 48): ‘dirt is matter out of place’—the asylum seekers arriving in small boats are quite literally out of place once they are termed unlawful entrants. Following Douglas’s analysis, we can see how classification is an attempt to make the world conform to an idea, but in this process we could reverse the epistemological frame to see purity as the defence of universal rights and danger as their denial.
So following these reflections, we can return to the question of ‘how does society change?’ One possible route (among others) to an answer would be to look at how groups acquire moral standing or, conversely, how it is eroded, to examine the process by which this happens, and to elaborate the consequences by mapping the outcome in terms of an expansion or contraction of rights. Such issues feed into broader questions about what we mean by society; how society itself is constituted; how membership is defined; and how the boundaries of society are established and maintained.
Foregrounding power: what can we learn from the neoliberal remaking of 20th-century society?
Mike Savage
In this brief note I reflect on what we might learn from the very real-world ‘making of society otherwise’ that has been staged by the neoliberal project over the past century. This is a revealing case study, since very few, if anyone, writing in the mid-1970s would have imagined contemporary societies to take the ‘neoliberal’ form that they now have. The cold war stand-off between the Soviet states and the capitalist ‘West’ was seen to have an enduring force. What was then called the ‘third world’, with its entrenched high levels of poverty and deprivation, was seen as locked in permanent relations of dependence to the rich nations. Occasional maverick arguments to the contrary (notably Warren 2020) were greeted with scepticism. In the aftermath of European de-colonisation, independent nation-states were seen as the ‘natural’ unit of jurisdiction (outside the Soviet states, which retained an imperial imprint), and these nation-states were largely seen as requiring some kind of bureaucratic and rationalised way of operating through some kind of operation of the rule of law.
And yet, in the mid-2020s, society is ‘otherwise’ to all this! Market-based, ‘neoliberal’ capitalism has become dominant across the world, even though it takes different modalities, especially between the liberal ‘meritocratic’ and authoritarian versions (Milanovic 2019). In the 1970s, whereas political understandings across the globe shared an emphasis on promoting social solidarity, modulating divisive inequalities, and endorsing the rule of law, by the 2020s, genocidal wars have returned with a vengeance, unaccountable elites seek to render the world in their own image, and empire building and xenophobic politics have become renascent. As late as 1993 Francis Fukuyama was claiming ‘the end of history’. This does not seem to have aged well (Fukuyama 2006).
So, what broader lessons can we learn from this recent episode of ‘society being made otherwise’? What was the potential for a different kind of society that existed in the mid-20th century that came to be mobilised so effectively—and indeed has produced such generative effects just a few decades later? My suggestion is that we need to centre the generative importance of ‘world-making projects’ through a greater appreciation of the significance of power. This concept, which has been central to social scientific debate from the 1950s to 1980s, has somewhat receded in the face of conceptual stand-offs, notably between those emphasising ‘power over’ rather than ‘power to’ concepts (see Savage 2026), and it needs to be revived today.
This is important since, along with most social scientists, I would want to refute any kind of technological or evolutionary determinism: for instance of the kind that sees some post-industrial or late capitalist logic at work. I am guided by influential social theorists in science and technology studies who understand technologies and infrastructures of various kinds as thoroughly imbricated in social life, so that it is not analytically useful to treat them as an exogenous motor or driver of change. There is no obvious evolutionary logic that led from societies fifty years ago, to the form that they have now taken (see also my arguments in Savage 2021).
Instead, we need to centre the importance of strategic projects that do indeed seek to disrupt existing social forms and seek to make them otherwise. These take the form of melding intellectual blueprints with forces of power. I deliberately centre the analysis of power because I think this is key to the understanding of potential (it is not incidental that these two words are etymologically related). In recent decades, social science has wavered between perspectives that see power as either associated with direct contestation between parties (‘power over’, as in the classic Weberian tradition) or alternatively as productive for generating outcomes (‘power to’, as in the tradition of Foucault and Latour). I have become interested in how we might combine the best features of these perspectives, so that we can see power as ‘world-making projects’, in which the ‘productive’, causal role of power can be seen through the gravitational power of wealth (this argument is fully laid out in Savage 2026). Here, the close alliance between accumulating private wealth and intellectual models which champion the commodification of assets has played a key role in making 20th century otherwise.
Of particular importance has been the seeding of libertarian and free market thinking in a range of think tanks, political agencies, and elite networks (Slobodian 2018). Even though, as social scientists, we are sensitive to the power of unintended consequences, this ‘neoliberal’ project has certainly been the conscious and intended actions of powerful individuals, backed by wealthy sponsors, who pushed for society to be organised along these lines—helping to establish what some sociologists now identify as ‘the wealth society’ (Adkins et al. 2023). The fusion of these ideas with forms of private wealth has been hugely significant.
The modes of knowledge and expertise involved in the success of this neoliberal project broke from the conventional academic separation of scholarship from the worldly business of social life. Academic cultures—and the progressive values that are today closely embedded in them—remain largely embedded in the monastic world from which they spawned. This somehow sees scholarship as requiring separation from the hurly burly of everyday life–in precisely the way that Bourdieu (1998) famously excavated through his critique of the ‘scholastic point of view’. But the neoliberals had no time for this scholastic point of view. They operated very differently by building networks which linked libertarian and pro-market thinking to powerful wealthy, corporate, administrative, and governmental interests.
As these projects gained prominence, they became concretised in exemplars, small-scale projects which demonstrated the traction of these modes of thinking. These exemplars took different forms, famous examples being Pinochet’s overthrowing of Allende’s socialist government in Chile, and the Thatcherite project in the United Kingdom. These venues acted as seeding centres for these modes of social organisations, and offered models that could then be spawned elsewhere—such as in the dramatic remaking of economic and social life in Eastern Europe after the fall of Soviet communism.
The broader point here is that the potential to make society otherwise comes from the intersection between knowledge and power, which requires intellectual ‘models’ to be elaborated, tested, and honed. To put this another way—as a huge range of thinkers from Machiavelli to Lenin and Gramsci realised well enough—the capacity to make society otherwise is bound up with elaborating innovative strategies of power.
This approach to centring power therefore helps us to understand the potential of societies to be otherwise. We can overcome the problem that ‘thinking power’ has got bogged down in an ultimately unproductive stand-off between classical theories—in which power was seen as linked to some kind of executive decision-making capacity—and post-structuralist concepts ranging from Foucault to Latour, who championed decentred concepts of power. Here, the focus was the way that power circulates through disparate socio-technical infrastructures and could not meaningfully be ‘wielded’ by singular elites. In fact, the neoliberal project demonstrates that both of these modes of power combine together. Specific individuals did indeed command executive force on numerous occasions, but this needs to be placed in the context of a wider socio-technical infrastructure, such as the affordances of digital communication. The capacity to manage and operate through socio-technical infrastructures is a key feature of the powers of key neoliberal agents ranging from Elon Musk to Peter Thiel, and in a different vein, the Chinese Communist Party’s refusal to allow Western platforms into Chinese digital space. This can be rendered as a ‘gravitational’ approach to power (see Savage 2026).
If then, the potential for society to be otherwise comes from intervening in hegemonic projects of power and domination, this also highlights the importance of contestations over power. Bourdieu’s (1998) concept of the ‘field of power’ helpfully illuminates the way that contestation between differing elite factions is fundamental to the organisation of power itself. In this respect, he was largely following the arguments of classical elite theorists who saw the internecine internal struggles between elites as vital dynamics of social change. In a related vein, Elias (2000 [1939]) identified the configurations of the court, with their myriad negotiations between those who had the sovereign’s ear, and those who did not, as fundamental to the ‘civilising process’ itself.
What we learn from this, for those of seeking to make society otherwise today, is that we need to engage with the stakes of power, rather than retreat into some kind of defensive position. This is one reason why I find utopian thinking only partially useful. Although these acts of imagination can certainly inspire alternative vistas and offer hope in what can seem like hopeless times, projects which actually become effective do not seek to implant their utopian vision, which soon becomes contaminated by myriad practical considerations, but instead operate on a strategic basis. Here their ultimate ends and ideals are rarely spelled out—but opponents are identified, marginalised, or even eliminated. Here again we can learn from the success of neoliberal strategy, which has been far clearer on what it opposes—state regulation, and concerns to mitigate inequality and structural disadvantage—than on what it actually stands for.
This is therefore an argument for centring the role of powerful elites (see, in general, Méndez et al. (2026) for a recent collection of essays exploring this theme). The very jostling and competition for power that elites manifest is bound to pitch them against each other, and in this contestation it becomes possible for new ideas to seed. It is by mobilising in this protean space of power and winning over ‘outsider elites’ who feel excluded from ultimate power, and who may find it attractive to work across a wider social canvas, that political coalitions to bring about social change can operate.
An interesting recent argument by Mau and his co-authors has identified the current weakness of progressive political strategy as lying in the way that single issues become ‘triggerpoints’—often sparked off by deliberate manipulation, but also gaining resonance because they seem to flout the norms that are widely held across society (Mau et al. 2026). Imagining society to be otherwise demands more holistic understanding of the kind of social ordering that can operate across society as a whole than holding up these kinds of visceral triggers: in this respect, utopian thinking has a real value. Neoliberalism became successful because it provided such a political ontology through construing the world on market principles, in which an instrumental transactional logic was held to govern all of social life ranging from the macro to the micro, all the time obscuring the ways that this was all underpinned by an interventionist and punitive state.
In this brief commentary I have therefore tried to draw lessons from recent events to develop a set of building blocks that might allow us to better understand society’s potential to be otherwise from the fractured, inequitable, and hostile place it largely is today. I hope my brief thoughts might be valuable in seeding ideas about how we can make society otherwise to the neoliberal, elite-dominated dystopias that we see across the globe today.
Minor rehearsals or something more: prefiguration, utopianism, and the now
Davina Cooper
The potential for society to be otherwise can seem a future-directed question: what changes are imagined as possible for an unfolding block of time that is yet to come. And yet, society’s potential speaks to the present—to something that currently exists (or doesn’t), thanks, in part, to how we understand both society and potential. I want to explore these relations through two contemporary concepts: utopianism and prefiguration. Both foreground society’s potential, but they get there by configuring societal time in different nonlinear ways. They also, if paradoxically, invest in the present as a time when the otherwise happens. Considering society otherwise returns to the concepts that Sylvia Walby addresses and offers an alternative way of thinking about the mechanisms of change identified by Mike Savage and explored by Lydia Morris in relation to rights.
Utopianism
Within the popular imagination, utopianism has long been derided and dismissed for its depiction of a perfect, static, harmonious world where conflict has been eliminated, and everyone’s needs met. From left and right, critics have argued that this imagined ideal imposes one individual or group’s vision on others, misses the improvised and messy way that societies develop and change, ignores the place of struggle, and creates a diversionary desire for something that cannot be accomplished. Utopia may be the good place, but it is also the impossible no-place.
This understanding of utopia, however, has been thoroughly shaken in recent years by utopian studies (e.g., Levitas 1990, 2013; Moylan 2018; Sargisson 2012). Gone are notions of perfection, fixity, and impossible ideals. Instead, utopias are associated with designs and desires for better ways of living (and governing) that are plural, changing, imperfect, and agonistic. This approach to utopianism runs through more recent utopian fiction. It can also be found in enacted utopian projects. These embody utopian impulses—the desire or longing for significant social change—and give rise to experimental shards in living and organising, rather than holistic utopian societies. For instance, we might think of alternative food systems, radical schools, participatory budgeting, or local exchange networks. Understood as minor, real, or everyday utopias, they demonstrate society’s capacity to be otherwise—at least in small-scale, partial, temporary ways (Cooper 2014; Thaler 2022; Wright 2010), and they sit alongside other projects that carry a utopian impulse, such as political electioneering and constitution writing (e.g., Hetland 2024). But one thing that can get lost in the process of finding everyday examples is utopia’s no-place (its outopia as well as eutopia). This is present in initiatives and other actions that carry a utopian impulse, but in the focus on achievability and viability, it often gets lost. The no-place is about radical ambition, but it is also more than that, as I will return to shortly.
Prefigurative practice
Prefiguration and utopianism overlap. While they come out of different intellectual and political trajectories, they share a common interest in transformative social practice. Today, the two concepts are often treated as interchangeable or combined. For instance, everyday utopias can be described as prefiguring how daily practices—of schooling, governing, trading, feeding, and more—might be re-organised. However, while utopianism is the good place that is no-place, prefiguration concerns time out of joint, as the future is prematurely practised within the now. Within political practice, prefiguration’s establishing principle is for desired ends to be embodied in the present—whether this involves communal living, border abolition, participatory democracy, or something else (and of course this can be a reactionary else, as witnessed in the prefiguring of the neoliberal state; see also Savage’s contribution).
In prefigurative practice, ends become means and means are treated as ends (see Swain 2019; Yates 2015). Instead of relying on arguments and campaigns for change (putting pressure on others who will bring the desired revisions into being), people enact the changes they want to see. This might involve the anticipatory representation of a sought-after future—as de Cesari (2012) explores in relation to Palestine, where art and museum initiatives, such as a pavilion at the Venice Biennale, prefigured claims to statehood. It might involve small-scale forms of realisation, such as housing co-ops—where prefiguring is intended to spur replication or scaling-up. Or it might involve speculative rehearsals of radical legal change. Between 2018 and 2022, I was part of a research project engaged in prefigurative law reform—where we explored (and designed) a legislative proposal to abolish legal sex status (decertification). This proposal was prefigurative in several ways. It treated a (future) legislative outcome as a mechanism for undertaking research in (and on) the present; for critics, it was an instance of the means becoming ends—researching decertification, for them, blurred into (blended with) its legislative promotion; and it was a rehearsal and simulation that treated legal sex abolition as if it was a plausible addition to the law reform table (see Cooper & Renz 2023).
Prefigurative practices often engage the ‘as if’—acting as if a local currency network can generate real money; or acting as if local government can be an international state actor—engaged in foreign policy, such as to sanction and boycott Israel. But how does this ‘as if’ relate to society’s potential to be otherwise? The pessimistic response is that such ‘as if’s are fictions—practices that simulate changes to what is and, so, attach themselves to what is, without meaningfully impacting on current arrangements despite pretending to do so. Indeed, their failure demonstrates how powerful mainstream society is—since otherwise they would simply be changes rather than modes of acting ‘as if’. We do not think of legislative reform, typically, as an ‘as if’, because it is deemed to bring about the changes it proffers or at least to give legal authorisation to them—even if implementation proves faulty or partial. Prefiguration, it would seem, depends, definitionally, on being out of joint with what is possible. Academics may design laws that they deem desirable, but such designs, however much they resemble ‘real’ legislation, do not carry with them legal authority and power. Like utopianism, prefiguration may express a desire for society to be otherwise, but its status as prefigurative suggests that what is otherwise is desire not society. Can prefiguration, then, tell us anything about society’s potential?
At its most modest, prefiguration reveals the limited extent of societal plasticity. Anticipatory representations, small-scale realisations, acting ‘as if’ are possible but not more challenging kinds of change. In other words, life can be lived, organised, and experimented with in counterhegemonic ways, but these are small-scale, transient, or simulated ways. Utopianism and prefiguration are often dismissed as insignificant given the really needed changes that transform hegemonic society. But, while both utopianism and prefiguration may signal failure and the no-place, they are not inherently small-scale or transient. Utopias may be holistic imaginaries oriented to world-making projects, prefiguration can be (and is) done by governments, global bodies, and transnational social movements. And both prefigurative and utopian practices may endure. What about the fictive? Are both prefiguration and utopianism imaginary enactments of what society could be like? This is what I want to discuss by exploring the question of prefigurative and utopian space. Is it within society or does it point to multiple coexisting societies, with their different iterations of ‘otherwise’?
Society’s plural now
Prefiguration and utopianism can be seen as practices taking place within a common society. They offer ways of thinking about society that recognise its complex performances: the place of the prefigurative ‘as if’; or the no-place, which utopianism carries. We might think of the prefigurative ‘as if’ as fine self-rooting threads, unanchored in vertical authority, that can, sometimes, knot and pull at social life in unexpected ways—think of the force exerted by alternative conceptions of family, parenting, or property when lived as if they were valid. Utopia’s no-place, by contrast, suggests a kind of shadowing—a societal object that does not fully exist or, if it does exist, is on a plane that isn’t fully recognised within a police order which gives everything a place but yet cannot give a place to things that seem unintelligible—nudism within the fashion sector, democratic schools like Summerhill within the education system, alternative exchange and trading networks when it comes to economic data, and so on (Cooper 2014). This lack of place may be temporary or a site of tension, but while it exists, the utopian impulse acts as a shadow to mainstream institutions, an alternative, and often elusive alternative, to how things must be done. And yet, as threads and shadows, prefiguration and utopia are not exceptional. Arguably, all aspects of society are lived as if they were real (apart from those that don’t claim to be real, like speculative fiction—paradoxically, one kind of real that is not ‘as if’). Likewise, the elusive and indeterminate properties of utopianism, with its speculative approach to what society could become, replay qualities endemic to mainstream practices (see also Levitas 2010).
Questions, then, about whether the prefigurative ‘as if’ and utopian ‘no-place’ are real or operative at meaningful scales, miss the point. The tangling and shadowing they signal are integral to complex social geometries working in overdetermined ways. But what also emerges from considering the ontology of prefigurative and utopian practice is a troubling of the assumption that, in any given time–space, a single society exists which, however complex, can (at least theoretically) be known. This singularity underpins the question of societal potential—that, despite the fact society can (and does) change and that it can hold capaciously different possible futures, there is a society holding us, even as society is continuously formed from institutional and everyday practices. But there is another way of thinking about society’s potential to be otherwise; this one vests in plurality as societies overlay, constitute, and pull away from each other (see also Rai). Considering this plurality takes us away from society-as-container to societies as in-formation, less or more tightly forged (on ‘societalisation’ as a ‘process of moving towards the greater alignment of social systems’; see Walby 2021: 317). What utopianism and prefiguration contribute to this discussion is a recognition of other interlayered societies, which counter the ontoepistemic assumptions of the mainstream and dominant (including what is real), that are continuously made and remade, anchored in other values, social relations, and understandings. Utopianism and prefiguration do not, typically, give rise to fully formed and comprehensive societies (apart from in utopian fiction), but in their different ways they demonstrate the diverse society-making projects that exist and coexist.
Taking our cue from the field of legal pluralism, we might think of utopianism and prefiguration as specific kinds of drivers of societal pluralism through how they reinscribe, within shared times and places, their otherness, unconcerned about whether it melds with the norms, systems, and practices that surround it. If legal pluralism is our analogue, we might then ask about these societies’ power, interactions, boundary-making, mutual constitution, borrowings, and meanings, as people straddle, inhabit, and help to forge different societal formations. These formations are not nested inside of each other, and they do not necessarily relate to segmented aspects of social life. Instead, they overlap, may be mutually/partially unintelligible, and may be subject to different understandings of what it means to be or do society.
Whether societal pluralism is a helpful concept remains an open question that no doubt depends on how and where it is used. But what it offers in relation to this discussion of prefiguration and utopianism in relation to society’s potential is the ‘nowness’ of the ‘otherwise’. Hegemonic processes may seek to obscure or deflate this otherwise, but a pluralist conceptual imaginary foregrounds it. Paradoxically, despite the elusiveness and futurity associated with prefiguration and utopianism, what they both demonstrate is an investment in the present as a place (but not the only place) where other ways of doing society are being and can be done.
What is society’s potential to be otherwise? A commentary
Shirin M. Rai
In these grim times, the potential for societies to advance social justice, address unequal access to rights, undo harms, and responsibly grow more sustainable ecologies, seems both challenging and ever more necessary.
In this Special Section of the Journal of the British Academy, four contributors address urgent questions about change/making. They reflect on how we would identify what change might look like over time and how can we imagine alternative futures—both utopic and dystopic—and persuade others of their relevance. All four take the structures of power and influence in society seriously, but outline for us an alternative emergent politics by engaging their imaginations through analyses that address not only the what but the how such a society might take shape. If Sylvia Walby’s analysis of crises allows us to examine the macro-level of societal transformation, Lydia Morris’s analysis of the shape-shifting nature of rights takes a meso-level approach, with the state–citizen relations at the heart of politics. This also resonates with Mike Savage’s analysis of the shared assumptions of social contract and its erosion from the 1970s and now. But Savage’s approach also shares the long durée historical approach at the macro-level. Micro-politics of everyday life is at the heart of Davina Cooper’s contribution—societies have the potential to not be otherwise, she argues, so small incremental change, which can defamiliarise dominant relations has to be part of our approach to change. Of course, as she explains, big-picture utopias can also be enacted—treating Palestine as a legal entity, for example—but the power of everyday utopias remains particularly powerful and immediate, I think. Spatial and temporal analyses are, therefore, at the heart of these interventions, as are structural—the state under conditions of neoliberal capitalism in particular—and agential strategies—acting as if change is possible here and now—towards realising society’s potential to become otherwise.
Also underlying these contributions is an acknowledgement of the need to learn from failures—of rights claims and gains, of neoliberalism’s triumphs over solidaristic politics, of crises of capitalism and its effect as well as, as Savage notes, a change that we do not want to see! Society seems to be changing for the worse, not better; the need for reimagining progressive futures is therefore urgent.
The motive of this special section was to open up the issue of social change to scrutiny in these troubled and troubling times. For me, all these papers contribute towards this agenda. Walby, Morris, and Savage learn lessons from histories—of crises, erosion of rights and of welfare states—of Western capitalism. Cooper takes a prefigurative approach—not just what and how, but what if? Together they not only present me with some important answers to the question of change, but are also generative of further reflection.
First, we need the everyday as a starting and perhaps end point of change—reimagining the everyday can reshape our understanding of dominant power relations under capitalism—what do we need to support everyday life? Security needs rights, and its erosion is generative of conflict. Whether it is reconfiguring and rebuilding the moral standing (Morris) of groups that are systematically marginalised, or whether it is making claims to rights not just as citizens of individual states but as global citizens of a global society, able to make claims on institutions, we need to think through how the everyday is entangled with structures and systems of power. Here prefiguration is useful, but so is an analysis of structures of power that take on board not just the crises and erosions of welfare-state regimes, but also how power circulates globally through socio-technical infrastructures (Savage), through wars and genocides, climate change and its devastating effects in the context of long histories of colonialism.
Second, how do we go global without taking account of the majority world—how capitalism affects the everyday rhythms unequally across the world? I find that change is imagined differently in different temporalities and spaces—a pluralising lens (Mezzadri et al. 2025) can help us understand not only what we do to bring about change, but also where we do it (Ferguson 2017). If, as Cooper suggest, ‘prefiguration’s establishing principle is for desired ends to be embodied in the present’ then we also need to ask two questions—whose present are we imagining and how is this present entangled in their past? Capitalism’s dependence on colonialism for its expansion historically and indeed for developing a welfare state in a world-system of dependency cannot be overlooked in reimagining a future (Bhambhra 2023)—issues of asylum, migration, and rights that Morris raises cannot be answered without a historical analysis that takes account of this trajectory of power. Similarly, the crisis of capitalism is of course, also a crisis of care or social reproduction—the everyday of all is affected by this crisis differentially. So, prefiguration needs to not only be aware of but also connect these arenas of historical marginalisation to reimagine a more equal future.
Third, while crucially important, the nation-state—even in its resurgent right-wing populist form—cannot be the only focus of our analyses. Rather, we need to rethink the entanglements of capital and the state and the environmental catastrophe facing us. The fundamental challenge that threatens society and its potential for progressive change today is climate change—the inexorable slide towards soaring temperatures, extractivism, and increasing pollution of water, air, and earth, is leading to the intensification of depletion of the everyday lives (Rai 2024) of millions; rather than realising society’s potential to deliver a good life for all, we seem to be heading towards a calamity that can undermine society itself. So, the crises and failures of capitalism and the neoliberal state have to be addressed by challenging their pursuit of ‘cheap nature’ (Moore 2015) as well as cheap labour, both of which are experienced as structural and immediate violence, and developing strategies for imagining, pursuing, and building new ecologies of everyday life.
Finally, I would suggest that a performance approach could allow us to bring together an analysis of structures of power—who are the main actors on the political stage and how they mobilise their power in embodied, scripted/discursive ways (Rai et al. 2014). This can also connect with Cooper’s analysis of prefiguration, where ‘people enact the changes they want to see’. This could reveal what makes for felicitous and convincing performances (Austin 2018)—neoliberal articulations of individualised subjectivities or prefigurative imaginaries of collective alternatives—and why certain tropes should not have been felicitous, but become so produce a change in the grammar of politics. Why some representative claim-making (Saward 2010) sticks and others do not. Failure and success can then be part of the same narrative—a historical learning from both would allow us to incorporate prefigurative thinking into an agenda for change.
All the four papers have made me think about change through temporal and spatial lenses, and to push at the limits of both structuralist and poststructuralist frameworks when we think about the potential for change and a society’s potential—to move towards a good life for all, or as Marx worried, towards a barbarism that presents us with new challenges and a potential for collapse.
Declaration of conflict of interest
The authors declare no potential conflict of interest.
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The authors received no financial support for the research and authorship of this article.
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DOI: 10.5871/jba/014.a24
Published on: 29 September 2026
Volume: 14
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Cooper, D., Morris, L., Rai, S.M., Savage, M. & Walby, S. (2026), ‘What is society’s potential to be otherwise?’, Journal of the British Academy, 14(3): a24 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/014.a24Crossref
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