This short blog is an argument for civil society to grow its capacity to incubate alternatives and to promote the idea of a collective ‘laboratory of social possibilities’. The very concept of civil society is a contested one with much debate concerning civil society’s relationship to the state. There can be little doubt that the Irish state has used tools of govermentality (commissioning, procurement, logic models, metrics, legislation etc.) to suck civil society into delivering on the functions of the neo-liberal state and market. In this way, the state controls and limits the creativity of civil society as a core part of democracy and as an incubator of alternatives. My interest is in how society can incubate alternatives, just as civil society did prior to the founding the Irish state.
The danger of limiting what we think is possible
Keynes stressed that difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas, as escaping old ones. He warned that we are cognitively locked into mental frames where we think that only what we know and are familiar with, is possible. We need to be conscious of how we limit our capacity to be open to new ideas and alternative narratives. Without these, we are stuck and unable to imagine real alternatives, unable to articulate what change would look like and unable to convince people that, a new social settlement; a different combination of environment, society, state and market is both possible, beneficial and needed, to tackle societal challenges, including climate change. This ability to vision and articulate alternatives is essential to any project that offers people ‘a sense of belonging’ and a confidence that there is a future worth fighting for.
This is not to say there is no impactful work contributing to a more equal society. Community Law and Mediation Service celebrated their 50th anniversary last week. A great example of solidarity and networking and of ‘social acupuncture’, using the right pressure in the right place at the right time to achieve significant impactful change. One speaker Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, with great wisdom earned through years of struggle, added to Connolly’s 100-year-old sage advice to ‘organize, educate, and agitate’. She stressed that in times such as these, it is necessary to also ‘consolidate’, in order to hold the ground and not be pushed back. The importance of durable organization with institutional memory of past struggle and historical contexts is very important.
She drew further on the past, offering Gramsci’s famous 1926 quote as a way of making sense of contemporary times. ‘The old is dying and the new cannot be born’. In this interregnum, a great diversity of morbid symptoms arises.
The quote is associated with the phrase ‘now is the time of monsters[1]. Monsters is a very apt description of our time – they typically possess unnatural or dangerous qualities that threaten the stability of society, combining incompatible features in weird, and perhaps dangerous, ways. No wonder people feel insecure.
However the past is a different country, we need to look forward
Graeber and Wengrow argue that society is stuck[2] and unable to imagine alternative social orders, a perquisite to moving forward. Their precapitalist analysis, highlights how people were generally more capable than we are now of imagining alternative social orders, ones that could balance care, equality, freedom and power in ways that we simply cannot imagine and in ways that our more advanced political and governance systems are simply failing to do.
The societies studied by anthropologist Graeber and archaeologist Wengrow offer insight into how pre-enlightenment societies were flexibly able to entertain and adopt a range of social possibilities. They had political self-consciousness and a very well-developed capacity for political imagination. They lament how our own alternatives for social settlement seem to focus on a very narrow range of social contract possibilities starting with Hobbes and Rosseau and so ignoring thousands of years of social and political imagination.
Laboratories of social possibility
They describe the concept of ‘laboratories of social possibility’ (p 117), often manifested as seasonal festivals, and precursors to modern cultural phenomena of pantomime, theatre and arts. ‘Turning the world upside down’ was a mechanism to foster political self-consciousness and to develop a ‘veritable encyclopedia of possible political forms’ (2021 p 118). Play and theatrical mechanisms offered ways to break apart and reassemble societies at different scales and in different forms to meet societal challenges. Modern cultural equivalents allow us to do the same, the Spectacle of Defiance in Ireland in 2011 creatively used historical role to play to enact responses to austerity.
Reimagining freedom as collective freedom that protects individuals from domination
They identify as core ‘freedom to create new and different forms of reality’. They argue the possibilities for human intervention are much larger than we think and that we need to be ready for the occasional moments in societies history when frames of reference shift (building on the Greek notion of Kairos p 524).
Inclusive imagination
We need to develop approaches that address barriers to a form of collective imagining and leave no one behind. Playful imaginative process needs to address the lack of appropriate language, lack of inclusive forms of participation, and inequality as well as a lack of imagination. Without addressing such barriers, we will remain ‘stuck’, perpetuating the status quo and unable to respond to societal challenges and poly-crisis.
Shifting away from a focus on policy to cultivate a collective, inclusive imagination. A discourse centered on what we want, guided by political vision - a shared compass for our future.
There are clear links between freedom and capabilities and our individual and collective imagination. Democratic deliberation and political justification are crucial; capabilities need to be continuously ‘contested and remade’ (Nussbaum,2005). Imagination is a crucial capability. Leicester (2020, p 54) stresses the importance of imagination or ‘future consciousness’ as a societal capacity. People ‘give to’ and ‘receive from’ society, but also ‘judge’ and have capacity for democracy and for political struggle (Bonvin and Larrufa, 2018). Society has always experimented with diverse forms of social organisation; many alternative and intentional communities still do this. Deliberating about how to live together is intrinsic to human capacity for self- creation and self-determination. The freedom to re- invent ‘us’, individually and collectively, is what makes us human.
Social and political struggle requires social and political imagination that mixes hope and fear, anger and action. ‘Political imaginary’ refers to how our individual and collective understanding of, and experiences of, politics shapes, or constrains, our motivations and mobilisation for political and social change. Developing our imagination also develops critical capacity to understand how the dominant political imaginary is working to exclude so many. Bringing us back to the monsters and our critical capacity to understand what they are doing and why.
The ideas in this blog were first presented at a Solidarity Network event on 5th March 2025 to argue society should work collectively to develop inclusive imaginative creative ‘laboratories of social possibility’.
About the Author: Mary Murphy is Professor of Sociology at Maynooth University. A former campaigner and policy analyst, she researches eco-social policy, civil society, and gender equality. She was appointed to the Council of State in 2019 and regularly contributes to TASC’s blog.
[1] Attributed to a loose translation of Gramsci’s words , commonly attributed to Gramsci by Slavoj Žižek,
[2] Graeber D and Wengrow D 2021 The dawn of everything: A new History of Humanity 2021 London Allen Lane Publishing
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