The Social Economy and Utopia: Paradoxes, Realism and the Theory of Complex Social Systems

This chapter considers utopia as prospective statements about social realities, representing “pole stars” for developing social thinking in development programs and policies. It aims to reconstruct the concept of utopia from a social economy point of view, striving to highlight what conceptual criteria can be used to classify different types of utopias, especially “feasible” and “unfeasible” on the one hand, and “good” and “bad” utopias on the other. To achieve these results, elements of complexity theory, social systems theory in the social sciences, and critical realism in philosophy are considered. Some examples referred to organization in the social economy are used to show how definitions and conceptual categories can be applied to real-world cases, or to utopian ideas that achieved some degree of relevance in culture and science (Hedrén, 2014).