This article examines the transformation of apocalypticism as a framework for interpreting crisis in late-modern society, focusing on the far-right populist AfD in Germany. Drawing on Blühdorn's (2024) theory of "untenability," it explores how apocalyptic narratives, once central to emancipatory movements with utopian visions, have shifted toward hollow, anti-political interpretations, particularly within right-wing populism. This transformation reflects a societal depletion of the capacity for collective, democratic responses to crises. By analyzing this shift, the article reveals the contradictions in contemporary society's struggle to address challenges such as climate change and social inequality while maintaining the promises of freedom and emancipation.

The article presents an analysis of the concepts of the ideal city as proposed by Frank Lloyd Wright, Paolo Soleri, and Sergey Valentinovich Nepomnyashchy. These thinkers are representative of an intellectual tradition rooted in the notion of "organic architecture," which aims to harmonize the relationship between urban environments, humanity, and nature. The objective of this study is to identify and systematize the key social ideas of each author and to illustrate their relevance in light of contemporary global challenges, such as environmental crises and social inequality. Through a comparative analysis of the social dimensions of these concepts, this research addresses a gap in domestic literature concerning the specific viewpoints of these architects. The findings indicate that, while all three authors focus on minimizing the divide between nature and urban areas, their urban planning approaches differ considerably. For instance, Frank Lloyd Wright’s "Acrotown" embodies a decentralized model, whereas Paolo Soleri’s "Arkosanti" and Sergey Nepomnyashchy’s "Heliocluster" advocate for high-density structures. The comparative analysis further reveals an evolution in the social ideals and values embedded within these architectural theories, transitioning from utopian visions to pragmatic solutions. The originality of this work lies in its thorough comparative analysis and contextualization of S. V. Nepomnyashchy’s contributions within the broader framework of organic architecture. The practical implications of this research highlight the necessity of reviving certain principles established by the founders of organic architecture to devise sustainable urban models that effectively address the pressing needs of contemporary society. This work aims to provide guidance for enhancing current urban practices amid ongoing global challenges.

ABSTRACT This essay draws on social scientific and philosophical work from Central Eastern Europe (CEE) to argue that utopian imagination is a key indicator of authoritarian regimes’ ambition to install totalitarian rule. Communication scholars can find evidence (or lack thereof) of utopian imagination in public discourse. I analyze three Executive Orders issued by the second Trump administration to show that while these texts clearly display authoritarian tendencies, rest on a language ideology of control, and perform a moral evaluation of social reality, they lack a conception of utopia. These insights indicate limited ambition for the complete, revolutionary transformation of society, and temper the concern that contemporary authoritarianism inevitably evolves into totalitarianism. In fact, CEE scholarship suggests that nationalist authoritarian regimes are likely to drift even further from utopia as they embrace ethnicism.

ABSTRACT When sustainability is on the agenda, school and education are often assigned a key societal role in providing relevant knowledge and values. However, sustainability advocacy could be problematic when considered against parents’ and children’s formal rights to freedom of thought/belief, creating an ethical tension for teachers. We suggest that classrooms should be pedagogical interspaces and then argue for a narrative ethics approach focusing on utopian visions of sustainable society, without compromising individual agency. Imaginary futures, like fiction, offer to students knowledge of the possibilities to see and preparation for possible scenarios. Narratives also constitute contexts where the individual can expand their perspective, where it may be important to let conflicting narratives clash, allowing for enlarged thought generated in democratic iterations. They also allow students to move between the individual and the planet, from past to the future, and from the human to the more-than-human.

This article presents a dialogue between Martin Heidegger’s existential phenomenology of death (being-toward-death) and Bernard Suits’ utopian vision of life as ‘game-playing’. Where Heidegger frames death as the horizon that singularises Dasein and demands an authentic confrontation with finitude, Suits reimagines mortality as a lusory challenge: by voluntarily embracing self-imposed obstacles, play becomes a therapeutic means to disarm existential terror. Through an analysis of Suits’ posthumous Return of the Grasshopper (2023), we argue that his ‘lusory attitude’ mirrors Heideggerian ‘resoluteness’, recasting death not as life’s interruption but as its constitutive rule—a necessary limit that grants meaning to the ‘game’ of existence. While both thinkers converge on death as a catalyst for freedom—Heidegger through Angst and Suits through ludic reframing—we interrogate whether their approaches risk trivializing mortality: Heidegger’s existential weight may overburden death’s role, whereas Suits’ playful pragmatism could dilute its irreducibility. Ultimately, the tension between hermeneutic depth and analytic utility reveals unresolved questions about how finitude should shape human projects—whether through solemn confrontation or strategic play.

ABSTRACT Cormac McCarthy’s The Gardener’s Son shows how miasma, or moral pollution, has seeped into the fabric of Graniteville society at every level: domestic, religious, educational, social, civil, and environmental. The mill founder William Gregg’s funeral eulogy, which is tantamount to a proclamation of his utopian vision of Graniteville and the benisons the Graniteville Manufacturing Company allegedly confers, is a façade of an upright society that conceals injustice, hypocrisy, and corruption. McCarthy’s drama conveys the extent of this miasma by drawing on images, themes, and ideas from Attic Greek tragedy, Medieval Arthurian Grail legends, Shakespearean tragedy, and the Hebraic scapegoating ritual of atonement to fashion a tragedy of injustice. Scholarly discussion frequently posits that Robert McEvoy’s shooting of James Gregg is ambiguously motivated, but McCarthy’s screenplay, supported by the historical record, sympathizes with McEvoy’s indignation against the inequalities within Graniteville society. The article closes by suggesting that McCarthy’s narrative works by negative example in evoking the “damned outrage” of an unjust world and asking, as the lawyer W.J. Whipper asks of his court, “Is there anybody here who believes in justice?”

Sociological discussions on alternative futures have proliferated in recent years, yet the role of professional labour and expertise in building transformative social change remains underexplored. This article provides an original contribution by introducing the concept of transformative expertise, enabling a new framework that bridges the sociology of futures with feminist debates on expertise. Drawing on unique empirical data from interviews with feminist professionals engaged in networks that advocate alternative economic thinking and policies, we investigate how specialised knowledge is mobilised to imagine and build alternative, socially just futures. We identify three interrelated dimensions of transformative expertise: (1) exposing the harms of hegemonic future imaginaries; (2) carving out paths to desired futures; (3) sustaining potentialities for socially just futures. Our findings reveal that managing temporalities and developing a temporal orientation are pivotal in the struggle for alternative futures based on the identified potentialities for change. By illuminating the link between the politics of the future and the politics of knowledge, we advance theoretical and practical insights into how feminist expertise can shape alternative, utopian imaginaries and prefigurative politics.

ABSTRACT Amidst the deepening ecological crisis of capitalism, Western eco-Marxism has delivered a profound and pathological diagnosis yet remains trapped in a “practical vacuum,” unable to offer curative solutions. In stark contrast, the “Two Mountains Theory,” born of China's practical experience and at the core of Xi Jinping's Ecological Civilisation thought, has spearheaded a sweeping socialist ecological practice over the past two decades. This paper aims to establish a critical dialogue between the two, arguing that the “Two Mountains Theory” not only resonates with the former in its critique of the logic of capital but also answers the historical question of “how to achieve” through its “socialist dialectics of praxis.” This approach leverages state capacity to master rather than submit to capital. We contend that the “Two Mountains Theory” signifies an emerging socialist ecological pathway. Transcending utopian visions, it offers tangible insights into struggle and institutional references for the global left contemplating ecological transformation.

Fully automated luxury communism (FALC) advocates a post-capitalist utopian vision in which technological automation eliminates the need for drudgery, abundant material goods are universally available, and economic planning is algorithmically assisted and democratically guided. While objections to FALC often focus on the (in)feasibility of its goals, this paper follows recent critiques of FALC in shifting the focus to desirability: should we want a world structured around full automation, universally accessible luxury, and AI-augmented democracy? This paper first outlines FALC’s theoretical foundations before developing a semi-detailed model of a FALCist society (FALC-S). Then, employing a pluralistic evaluative framework, it provides reasons to affirm FALC-S’s desirability across five key dimensions: freedom, equality, well-being, solidarity, and security. It also addresses major objections, including concerns that FALC would deprive humans of labor and the meaning it provides, as well as critiques of its commitment to luxury from anti-consumerist and eco-aesthetic perspectives. FALC-S is well-positioned to satisfy the normative criteria for a highly desirable political future. While broad in scope, this analysis is intended as preliminary rather than definitive, laying the groundwork for further exploration of FALC in debates on utopianism, technology, and post-scarcity within Marxist discourse.

Review of The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier: Selected Texts on Work, Love, and Passionate Attraction

Capitalist commodity production subordinates concrete and distinct forms of creative activity to the quantifiable and homogeneous category of abstract labor. In order for commodities to be exchanged on the market, products of specific types of human labor must be equalized as measurable units of abstract labor-time. Capital’s logic of value separates us from the essential human capacity to labor, turning human activity into a means of obtaining a wage for workers and producing surplus-value for capitalists. Marx’s theory of alienation shows that, under capitalism, workers have been alienated from their species-being, or their ability to fulfill biological and social needs through conscious activity in and on the world. This process reduces qualitatively distinct forms of human activity to quantifiable units of abstract labor-time. The subordination of concrete labor to abstract labor-time alienates workers from their essential human capacity to consciously and creatively act in and on the world—their ability, that is, to engage in unalienated labor—while also subsuming non-capitalist forms of time to the logic of value production. Anti-colonial resistance to the subordination of all forms of life to the logic of value represents a concrete example of the struggle against alienation in practice. By viewing elements of the past as an ongoing site of contestation, Romantic Marxism seeks to combine a living tradition of life and resistance with working-class organizing in the present, as part of a movement toward a qualitatively different communist society in the future. Integrating the Romantic view of the past with Marx’s critique of alienation expands the utopian vision of communist freedom, while remaining grounded in, and emerging from, the material conditions of the present.

The rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has created a polarised public response, oscillating between utopian visions and existential fear. This analysis refutes these extremes, arguing that such anxiety is not a new phenomenon but a recurring historical cycle associated with the externalisation of human faculties. By examining historical precedents, the text reframes the AI challenge as a manageable variable rather than an uncontrollable force. The Socratic critique of writing, which warned of cognitive atrophy from externalised memory, is presented as an ancient parallel to modern concerns about AI fostering superficial competence. Similarly, the 19th-century Luddite movement is reinterpreted not as an irrational opposition to technology, but as a rational response by skilled artisans to the deskilling of their labour and the degradation of product quality-an analogue to fears that AI will devalue human expertise. Further parallels from the 20th-century "calculator wars" in education illustrate how curricula shifted from rote computation to higher-order problem-solving. These historical examples collectively argue that technological disruptions compel a redefinition of human competence and create new opportunities, rather than simply leading to cognitive or economic decline. Building on this historical perspective, the analysis proposes that the antidote to technological anxiety is a disciplined, managerial approach grounded in rigorous contingency planning. Through corporate case studies-contrasting Kodak’s strategic inertia with Fujifilm’s successful diversification, alongside the proactive pivots of Intel and Netflix-the text illustrates that organisational resilience depends on the ability to critically reassess core capabilities and cannibalise legacy models when necessary. This evidence informs a comprehensive, tiered risk management framework designed for professionals and institutions. "Plan A" focuses on Mitigation and Integration, advocating a "Centaur" model in which humans and AI collaborate as distinct but complementary agents, preserving human authority and using cognitive forcing functions to prevent automation complacency. "Plan B," a Contingency and Diversification strategy, involves developing multi-skilled, "M-shaped" professionals and cultivating an "analogue hedge" in roles requiring physical presence or legal accountability. Finally, "Plan C" outlines a strategy for Resilience and Sovereignty, serving as a last resort against systemic failure through the development of technological sovereignty via locally controlled AI and the willingness to execute a radical pivot to entirely new sectors. The overarching thesis is that by establishing these explicit contingency plans, organisations can transform existential risk into a manageable operational procedure, navigating the AI revolution with strategic preparedness rather than reactive panic.

This review explores the intertwined psychological processes of collective remembering and imagining, emphasizing their shared roots in present-day uncertainty. We propose a multidirectional model of collective mental time travel, where the present acts as a catalyst for navigating both the past and future through culturally embedded narratives and symbolic resources. Drawing on recent interdisciplinary research, we argue that these processes are not linear but multilinear, shaped by social identities, historical contexts, and culturally specific worldviews of time. Collective remembering and imagining serve as mechanisms of meaning-making and self-regulation, enabling social groups to interpret uncertainty, foster agency, and mobilize for change. While nostalgia may anchor groups in idealized pasts, utopian visions can inspire transformative futures. However, the direction and impact of these temporal orientations vary across cultures and depend on how time is conceptualized. Our model highlights the feedback loop between temporal reflection and present-day action, showing how collective memory and imagination can either reinforce the status quo or catalyse social transformation. Ultimately, we advocate for a nuanced understanding of CMTT as a dynamic, socially situated process that plays a critical role in shaping collective agency and envisioning alternative futures.

Abstract Immanuel Kant's The Dispute between the Faculties (1798) contains a footnote referencing four utopian states — Atlantis, Utopia, Oceana, and Severambia. This passage has largely been overlooked in Kantian scholarship. This paper revisits this neglected passage to explore Kant's engagement with utopian literature and its implications for his philosophy of history and political thought. The footnote, though brief, sheds light on Kant's views regarding the feasibility of ideal states and their connection to revolutionary change. It reveals Kant's nuanced perspective on the role of utopian visions in shaping political ideals and the duties of individuals and governments in realizing such ideals. While Kant acknowledges these utopias as “sweet dreams,” he also questions their practicality and warns against revolutionary approaches to achieving them. This paper examines how Kant's references to these utopian constructs reflect his broader philosophical concerns about progress and reform, emphasizing that progress must occur through gradual, lawful reform rather than through revolutionary upheaval. By analyzing Kant's treatment of these literary fictions, the paper aims to illuminate his complex relationship with utopian thought and its place within his broader theoretical framework.

In the twenty-first century, leftist politics has taken a turn toward antiwork philosophy and postwork imaginaries. These politics critique not only the work-centered capitalist society but also challenge the “productivist ethics” of other leftist traditions. A popular variation of this antiwork/postwork politics calls for full automation, the replacement of as much human labor as possible with technological alternatives. Positioning work as a realm of unfreedom, these thinkers argue that human liberation can only be achieved in a world with less work. This article reads Oscar Wilde’s “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” (1891) as a precocious articulation of a postwork imaginary that demands full automation. In response to contemporaries like William Morris, who argued that capitalism had severed humanity from a natural affinity for work, Wilde expresses an antiwork position, arguing that humanity was made for contemplative leisure and creative expression. Thus, automated labor becomes a key element of his utopian vision. Though Wilde formulates a necessary critique of a Victorian radical politics that was decidedly prowork, his postwork utopia is based on a troubling premise: “civilization requires slaves.” In reading twenty-first-century postwork thinkers alongside Wilde, we find the same premise still subtly operative within this politics.

ABSTRACT This article reads J.G. Ballard’s Cocaine Nights alongside Disneyland as parallel case studies in the absorption of utopian desire into the architectures of late capitalism. It examines the novel as a critical intervention into the cultural logic of late capitalism, focusing on its representation of leisure societies as hyperreal utopias sustained by commodified transgression. It will be argued that Estrella de Mar, the novel’s luxury resort on Spain’s Costa del Sol, mirrors Disneyland’s meticulous spatial design and thematic simulation, yet inverts its logic: where Disneyland suppresses conflict to preserve the fantasy of harmony, Estrella deliberately engineers deviance to sustain social cohesion. Drawing on Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, and David Harvey, the paper situates Ballard’s narrative within broader debates on the waning of affect and the domestication of dissent. By reading Ballard’s fictional resort alongside Disneyland’s cheerful authoritarianism, the article argues that utopian desire in the neoliberal era is not extinguished but perverted. Under such conditions, rebellion is aestheticized, dissent becomes a lifestyle accessory, and the utopian imagination is redirected into forms that reinforce the very systems it once sought to resist.

ABSTRACT In a 1085-page novel brimming with utopian imagery, utopian thought, and utopian projects (real, imagined, and in-between), one utopian vision stands out: the book’s final sequence, in which a blimp piloted by a crew of teenage aeronauts (“The Chums of Chance”) escapes from low-earth orbit and becomes a self-contained unit, no longer beholden to the world below. Critics have overwhelmingly interpreted this scene as a total and transcendent realization of the utopian imaginary that has so far eluded our characters: a triumphalism that signifies the ultimate overcoming of contradictions. This paper offers a revisionist reading of Against the Day’s closing scene, and, in doing so, complicates our understanding of Pynchon’s utopian thought. The Chums’ exodus may gesture toward a transcendent overcoming, but only to perpetuate that which they had sought to dismantle. Contra the Chums, the paper locates an alternative utopian site in the novel’s conjecutral locomotive undercommons. Its power lies in the flux of undecidability that resists codification through plans, blueprints, or programs – not a condition but a condition of possibility.

ABSTRACT This article argues that contemporary urban crises demand a radical rethinking of planning history, yet these crises simultaneously constrain the capacity for radical imagination, a tension conceptualized here as the radical catch. Urban planning and history have historically served as instruments of statecraft and capitalist development, contributing to the very crises they now confront. This article reframes radical planning history not merely as documentation of subversive practices but as a historiographical project aimed at transforming the epistemic foundations of how planning’s past is known and narrated. It first defines radical planning history and its urgency, exposing the ideological and institutional roots of urban crises. Historicizing the Crisis interrogates planning’s presumed neutrality and foregrounds its role as a modality of power. An Alternative to Crisis recovers forgotten planning practices and utopian visions to unlock imagination and challenge closed epistemologies. An Alternative to Crisis Determinism critiques linear historical causality, emphasizing the contingent and reversible nature of urban development. Through these three movements, critique, recovery, and epistemic re-foundation, the article positions radical historiography as a method for converting crisis from obstacle to opportunity, offering frameworks for more just, inclusive, and resilient urban futures.

The current geopolitical climate, spearheaded by an infectious U.S.-American MAGA mentality, as well as the globally widening wealth gap should presumably invite and encourage the cultural imagination to frequently wander off into utopian territory.And yet, utopia seems to have mutated into a foreign country, if not a distant planet, lately.Indeed, in his eye-opening analysis of the genre on U.S.-American turf published almost fifty years ago, Heinz Ickstadt even situates its endgame in the 1930s, after Theodore Roosevelt's presidency, and coinciding with the institutionalization of political protest on the part of the progressive movement (514).As long as the utopian novel repudiated an economic individualism that gave rise to conflicts over social cohesion, the author argues, it offered a counter-model of a more just and projectable society.Once utopian visions were integrated into the self-conception of a socio-economic system, he contends, they turned into "a foil for negative models of the anti-utopia" (514). 1 Not surprisingly, almost one century later, dystopia undoubtedly seems a place close to home.This dawning of dark futures may, in turn, have motivated the persistent "memory boom" emerging in the 1990s which subsequently inspired a preoccupation with memory cultures in literary and cultural studies.In 2000, Andreas Huyssen declared the "obsessions with memory and the past" (25) a "most surprising cultural and political phenomen[on]" that "stands in stark contrast to the privileging of the future so characteristic of earlier decades of twentieth-century modernity" ( 21).Yet, such mourning does sound somewhat nostalgic.Is the assessment that utopian longings no longer linger, leaving the domain of imagined futures to dystopian fiction, accurate?Not really, Heinz Ickstadt advises.These longings persist just as much as utopian fiction, by no means an endangered species, lingers on in newly transmuted forms.Each generation, Ickstadt notes, evolves utopias of their own, fictions

In the early 1960s, global actors and international organizations embraced desalination as a promising development tool and a fresh expression of technology's power to control nature. Amid postwar reconstruction, decolonization, and Cold War tensions, desalination symbolized progress and promised equitable, universally accessible fresh water. Yet, despite its compelling appeal, desalination was prohibitively expensive compared to existing sources of water, with numerous technical and economic uncertainties remaining unresolved. By looking at the cases of Tunisia and Chile, this article explores the techno-political mismatch between utopian visions of desalination solving water scarcity across any geography and the political, financial, and environmental realities of implementation. As a form of hope and aspiration, desalination demonstrates how high-modernist ideals materialized unevenly, shaped by diverse and contested global contexts. By tracing this transnational pursuit, the article foregrounds a significant yet relatively unknown global history of technological optimism and shows how universalist visions ran up against local geographies and postcolonial development agendas.