By Alexandrine Lapoutte
For a time banished for having led to the worst, then swallowed up by galloping liberalism, utopias seem to come back to our consciousnesses and imaginaries. Very recently, Covid has given rise to a certain utopian effervescence around sustainability and the ecological transition, and has put the question of the “world after” on the public and political scene (Allen, 2022; Claeys, 2022).
Utopia remains at the core of the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE), although it has been confronted with the phenomenon of isomorphism. The work of Desroche (1976) has made a considerable contribution to this subject, by studying the different utopias at the origins of cooperative enterprises and by formalizing the trajectory from written utopias to practiced utopias.
What forms do the utopia of the SSE take today? Within a working group of the CIRIEC International, we meant to investigate this issue by focusing on imaginary narratives of all kinds: books as novels or science fiction, music, desirable futures, etc.
As a theoretical reference, we share a common reference to Castoriadis’ work (1975) about the concept of social imaginary, i.e., the shared imaginary representations. The social imaginary comprises a duality, bearing a double social function: at the same time to allow each one to order his practices within a social world legitimized by a base of beliefs, myths and shared ideologies, but also to allow each one to contribute to the creation of a new society through dreams, fantasies, utopias. Castoriadis distinguishes an instituting, creative function, and an instituted function, guiding the behaviours, both in tension. We mainly focus here on the instituting social imaginary driven by SSE.
After several collective seminars, we have brought together 10 contributions, that, in a multidisciplinary approach (communication sciences, economics, sociology, psychosocial studies, management and organizational sciences, political science, and philosophy), emphasise the decisive nature of the SSE imaginary. Our findings and insights highlight four patterns: stories and mobilization within organizations, utopia as a catalyst for local transitions, imagining solidarity through cultural works, and finally deconstructing economic myths.
We believe that these contributions open up a new field of research by exploring the links between the SSE and the imaginary. It doesn’t claim to be exhaustive an may call for further developments. On the societal side, this work may help to rediscover the path of collective and solidarity imaginary narratives in shaping, with the civil society, the way for a more just and inclusive society.
All these contributions have been brought together in the book ‘Imagine, Studying the Relationship between Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) and Imaginary in the Era of Capitalocene’ in the CIRIEC STUDIES SERIES.
References
Allen, L.J. Sustainable Utopias (2022), The Art and Politics of Hope in Germany. Harvard University Press.
Castoriadis, C. (1975), L’institution imaginaire de la société, Paris, Seuil.
Claeys, G. (2022), Utopianism for a Dying Planet: Life After Consumerism, Princeton University Press.
Desroche, H. (1976), Le projet coopératif. Son utopie et sa pratique, ses appareils et ses réseaux, ses espérances et ses déconvenues, Paris, Les éditions ouvrières.
