Utopia as Ontology

Abstract

In Chapter 5, I argued that sociologists have subjected themselves to a triple repression: of the future, of normativity and of what it means to be human. New students are frequently inducted into sociology through an interrogation of the idea of human nature, emphasizing that what we understand as ‘human nature’ is what seems to be normal among the human beings we encounter, but that this is historically and socially determined and variable. Thus the skills, habits, tastes, beliefs and social practices of human beings in the bronze age differed markedly from our own, as did the customary ways of being of pre conquest indigenous peoples in the Americas, Australia and Africa. Hence Mills’s question of ‘[w]hat varieties of men and women now prevail in this society and in this period? … In what ways are they selected and formed, liberated and repressed, made sensitive and blunted?’.¹ Hence also Marx’s reluctance to specify in detail the institutions of a future good society because we cannot predict the needs and wants of future generations. The insistence on the social formation of persons, of personality or of character predates Marx: Owen’s doctrine of circumstances argued that any character, from the best to the worst, could be given to individuals and communities by appropriate social arrangements.