Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination

by Geoff Mulgan

As the world confronts both the fast catastrophe of Covid and the slow crisis of climate change, we also face a third, less visible a crisis of imagination. Millions of us can picture the world going awry, yet our confident visions of the future are largely dominated by technology and hardware. Most citizens struggle to envisage how we could live better-improve our democracy, welfare, neighborhoods or education-fueling a pervasive, pessimistic resignation.

This book argues that, although the threats are real, our fatalism has overshot. Achieving a better future depends on creative the ability to see where we might want to go, and how we might want to get there. Political veteran Geoff Mulgan offers the lessons we can learn from the past and the methods we can use now to open up our thinking about the future; to discover how to look at things not only in terms of what they are, but also what they could be.

Drawing on social sciences, the arts, philosophy and history, Mulgan shows how we can recharge our collective imagination. At a time when the public wants to see transformational social change, he provides a roadmap for the future.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics

352 pages, Hardcover

Published September 1, 2022

About the author

Geoff Mulgan is director of the Young Foundation. Between 1997 and 2004 he worked in the UK Prime Minister’s office and Cabinet Office and before that was the founding director of the thinktank Demos. He is a Visiting Professor at LSE, UCL, Melbourne University and the China Executive Leadership Academy. He also works as a part time adviser to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in Australia. His latest book is The Art of Public Strategy: mobilising power and knowledge for the
common good

Reviews

[Sophie Arseneault · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is, at its core, a diagnosis of a collective imagination crisis. It asks a deceptively simple question—“how could we become better at imagining the society in which we might like to live?”—and answers it by showing how constrained that capacity has become. Today, “many now fear the future,” and we are far more fluent in apocalypse than in possibility. The result is what the author describes as das Verschwinden der Zukunft - the disappearance of the future - where the gap between what we hope for and what we believe is possible is widening. This book, in this sense, is about the erosion of our shared ability to picture a better world for all.

What makes the argument compelling is its refusal to indulge in fatalism. The book insists that pessimism is often historically misplaced, reminding us that even moments that have felt unbearably bleak have given way to profound transformation—pushing back against the kind of despair that becomes self-fulfilling. Imagination is not about fully formed visions - it is better after all to favour experimentation over rigid blueprints. The most powerful imaginaries are dialectical, able to move with and against dominant systems, rather than imposing a single logic that risks becoming its own form of violence.

The world is more malleable than we tend to believe. The author challenges our tendency toward reification - treating institutions like markets or governments as fixed realities rather than human constructs. This shift opens up what he calls ‘possibility perception’, a kind of political maturity that allows us to rethink structure we inhabit. The book is clear-eyed about the stakes when we lose faith in the future, whereas energy is diverted from creative action and fatalism begins to reproduce itself. It is an invitation to recover imagination as a collective practice, unfinished, adaptive, and necessary.

[Candela Martínez]

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