By way of a vision

When we were writing this book, we were facing a dilemma. We were certain that what the world needs is usable knowledge and workable solutions to address a series of urgent problems that have been laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, we were torn between presenting workable, tested policies and an urgent, inspiring vision. While it makes sense to focus on concrete solutions to society's problems, just outlining policies threatens to regress into a shopping list without an inspirational idea that holds it together. It shackles the badly needed utopian imagination. It risks ‘binding “real” or “viable” utopias too close to the present’ as Ruth Levitas says (2013, 148). The well-known legal scholar and activist Robert Unger (1998, 4) puts it as follows:

Unger says here that an exclusive focus on technical solutions, important as these are, entails both a loss and a risk. Focusing on getting things done risks embracing what we called in the preceding chapter the engineering approach to climate change – exemplified by the ‘moonshot’ narrative promoted by the EU Commission president. Slowing down global warming, reforming the global finance system, providing affordable housing, and so on, require large amounts of technical expertise. But these are not isolated, standalone problems. By seeing them as ‘just’ technical problems we lose a relational understanding of the issue at hand. Societal problems are always embedded in a wider context of beliefs values, meanings and practices. They also hang together in complex ways, as we argued throughout this book. By ignoring or denying this, as Unger says, you risk being left emptyhanded when your preferred solution fails – as it is likely to do in a world of complexity.