Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society 2013th Edition, Kindle Edition

This is a well written and very scholarly book, the author has apparently spent many years reading and teach about the ideas of other authors. Reading it is a quick way to become familiar with a lot of scholarship that would be very tiresome to read in the original. She has a good way of conceptualizing the different kinds of work in the field, viewing them through the metaphors of archaeology, ontology and Architecture. She argues that all social science has a Utopian aspect in that it has an implicit or explicit model of how society could be better. And she argues that the discipline of sociology would be more interesting and useful if it made this explicit and worked harder to develop its models of a better society. As a retired sociologist, I agree that sociology would benefit from doing so. I was eagerly awaiting her last chapter, on the "Archaeology of Utopia" where she would put together her own model, or at least show us how to put together a utopia for our time. It was a disappointment. She is an old Marxist who wants all the good things, and thinks the best way to accomplish this in today's world is to give everyone an guaranteed income whether they work or not. This wouldn't necessarily mean equality since people might have the right to work and earn more money (or maybe not). She cites the Occupy Wall Street movement as the most vital embodiment of her ideal in today's world, but the problem with Occupy is it knew what it was against but not what it was for. This is where a Utopian analysis could make a vital contribution with a description of the "architecture" of how such a world would work. But Professor Levitas drops the ball. She says that cooperatives won't be enough, and that a state will still be needed with "public ownership and control of the assets currently in private hands". Then she brushes off criticism of this model with the "usual response" that the problem with socialism is that "has never been tried." But of course, it has, in so many places and so many ways. Is North Korea a utopian vision? Did they not try to create socialism? Perhaps I was expecting too much from this work, it is a book on "Method", not a Utopia. She does cite various authors who have tried to answer the question of a post-Communist utopia, such as Erik Olin Wright. But the Method can't be just to analyze and criticize the works of other authors, It has to be about building a utopia for the twenty-first century, Will it be Hugo Chavez's "twenty-first century socialism"? If so, she should mention it. A utopia for the future would have to deal with technological change in some way, with The "Singularity" as utopia, artificial intelligence, transhumanism, and so on. If you're going to review literature, how about Heinz Dieterich? How about Ray Kurzweil? This book needed more on futurism and less on the history of socialist ideas in Britain.

Very innovative!

Very relevant and well written