Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Editorial

Envisioning Society

by Grant Bartley and Rick Lewis

Disasters and threats of disasters of all kinds, global and local, raise their snarling heads over our societies, casting shadows on the news bulletins and front pages. There’s nothing particularily new about this. But it does demonstrate that society is still liable to change, if only because it must adapt to the world that societies themselves change. This awareness of the inevitability of change, and the nagging awareness of imperfections in the current processes of politics and economics, lead to the questions, “What can we make our world into?” and “What will society become?” Those questions are surely rattling around somewhere inside every curious and intelligent mind. But to discover good answers, we first have to understand what society is, how it works and the possibilities of change it presents given limitations of various kinds.

…