Utopian Common Sense
= " the paradoxical coupling of an idealised, non-existent state with the faculty of ordinary, shared judgement." [1]
Description
Jonathan Rowson:
"A sensibility, oriented toward a vision of how the world should be, that renders the impossible sensible by treating necessity, rather than present possibility, as its starting point; hence, the practice or disposition of extending the prevailing bounds of the possible until a formerly utopian vision becomes unremarkable, or normal.
Now chiefly used of a mode of thought or action that dissolves the presumed opposition between idealism and realism, holding that, in the context of multiple indications of civilisational collapse, what is ‘unreasonable’ and what is ‘realistic’ name a single demand viewed from two sides."
(https://perspecteeva.substack.com/p/utopian-common-sense?)
Characteristics
Jonathan Rowson:
"My impression is that for a suggestion to have utopian common sense, it has to pass three tests:
1. Necessity: Does the idea target the scope and scale of what a problematic situation demands, rather than responding to a smaller and more manageable problem?
2. Imagination: Does the suggestion venture beyond the assumptions of prevailing common sense, opening a new landscape of possibilities rather than optimising within the existing possibility space?
3. Normality: Does the proposal have the texture and accessibility to become genuinely shared as a new common sense for the many, rather than an inspiring vision for the few?
(https://perspecteeva.substack.com/p/utopian-common-sense?)
Discussion
Jonathan Rowson:
"Reality is a puppet on a stage that climbs up on its own strings, releases the puppeteer, and comes back down to play freely. Reality is a serious joke, an atmosphere that can also be an affordance, and a setting that can become a plot. Reality is a constraint, and a good one, but it is flexible and pliable, and it need not be a trap. Reality can be a journey from illusion to liberation to play, or, to give it some religious heft, from maya to moksha to lila, but, alas, it rarely is. Mostly we are stuck.
But let’s not kill each other. Let’s not destroy our only home. Let’s ensure people have dignified places to live and worthwhile things to do. Let’s create and steward technology that serves our highest ends and brings out the best in all of us. Let’s protect what we love. Let’s not create artificial entities that might incidentally kill us. Let’s take decisions in ways that confer legitimacy and trust. Let’s have clean air and drinking water. Let’s keep learning how to be worthy of our precious planet and the sacred gift of life.
These ideas seem quaint, naive and utopian today, as if they were not grounded in our shared reality. The coinage introduced here, utopian common sense, seeks to address this dissonance.
‘Utopian common sense ... insists on the sensible impossible.’
This conceptual innovation helps us navigate a world where supposedly reasonable ideas often seem unreal, while introducing a new flavour of radical pragmatism in which unreasonable ideas feel painfully real. I highlight a pattern that connects a wide variety of ideas and initiatives that many wrongly dismiss as merely idealistic or simply unrealistic.
The problem with Utopia is that there is no such place. The problem with common sense is that it is no longer shaped through the commons, and it doesn’t always make sense. But ‘utopian common sense’ combines these ideas to say: the place we seek is simply a shared reality that makes sense for everyone. The idea brings together desire, imagination, beauty, necessity and possibility; it takes the challenge of making what appears desirable and necessary become possible. In doing so, it questions the distinction between idealism and realism, and seeks to forge a renewed sense of normality. What’s at stake is our collective capacity to entertain ideas that transgress our current construction of reality, and thereby reshape it.'
(https://perspecteeva.substack.com/p/utopian-common-sense?)
When Realism Fails
Jonathan Rowson:
"The injunction to be realistic no longer seems reasonable, because realism has been severed from reality, or rather co-opted by a particular form of it. The part of reality concerned with power, technology, law and capital, what integral theorists call the ‘inter-objective’, has in recent years become imperious. By that I mean it has coloured, invaded, denatured and sometimes taken over those aspects of reality that are subjective (psychological), inter-subjective (cultural) and objective (scientific). This is roughly what Habermas meant when he wrote that ‘the system’ has colonised ‘the lifeworld’.[2]
What I am really after with utopian common sense is an antidote to the hyper-agency created by domination of life’s inter-objective features and the power that confers. The defining feature of hyper-agency is context creation. While agency may lead someone to train to be a good teacher, hyper-agency could mean buying a school and changing the curriculum. Most of us can fly less if we choose to, but hyper-agents create new airlines, build new airports and advertise holiday destinations.[3] Many hyper-agents are authoritarians with a weakness for corruption; some are billionaire engineers with a weakness for sci-fi; some are podcast hosts with a weakness for their own voices; and many are financiers with a weakness for a good rate of return. Between them, they shape the political economy and design the socio-digital context of attention, attachment, addiction and agency that increasingly characterises our lifeworlds. We are not helpless, and these powers-that-be are not omnipotent, but we are obliged to live in a reality not of our own making more than we might choose to. This is why one of Perspectiva’s ten premises is: ‘What we need is not “action” but power to create context.’
There is a figure/ground conundrum in the word ‘we’: we typically take the collective first-person plural as the premise when it is actually the question. But on most interpretations of ‘we’, we do not yet have the power to create context at the requisite scale to act as a countervailing force to hyper-agency. Operative collective agency worthy of our planetary predicament has yet to be born; it is not clear that it has even been properly conceived. There are promising signs. Legal imagination is no longer oxymoronic, renewable energy looks like it could, in principle, eventually displace fossil fuels, the rate of destruction of the Amazon rainforest is slowing, and people like Meredith Whittaker, Carissa Véliz, Jaron Lanier, Tristan Harris and Audrey Tang remind us that it is possible to be sane about technology. But as an emerging planetary people, we are finding our way rather slowly. Mostly, we don’t seem to know what to do. And when the continuity of normal life is under attack, our aim cannot be better tax rates, smooth roads and timely bin collections.
I believe this may be the early stages of a new kind of axial age, that a transformation of consciousness is well underway, and that we have a role to play in bringing it about, but that is neither displacement nor hopium. We are not crazy to hold out for, and even practise towards, diaphanous awareness (Gebser), the supramental (Aurobindo), final participation (Barfield) or the imaginal realm (Bourgeault), but we are still obliged to do what we can, with what we have, where we are. While we wait for the cosmic bus to pick us up, we can still try to walk in the right direction. That’s the point of utopian common sense: to help us figure out which way to go and which steps to take.
The premise of utopian common sense, then, is the plausibility of systemic collapse at a civilisational scale, which many believe is already underway. I know this idea is not everyone’s cup of tea, and that collapse can be a performative ‘boo-word’, but is collapse not entirely normal? Have we not all collapsed at the end of the day? Rather than fear collapse, we need to understand it. Luke Kemp’s Goliath’s Curse (2025) makes the important point that collapse is often bad not for everyone, but for existing power structures. Peter Turchin’s End Times (2023) draws on cliodynamics to identify quantitative patterns in history, including ‘elite overproduction’, where societies train more aspirants for elite positions than the system can absorb, producing the intra-elite conflict that Turchin links to war and political violence. And Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory locates the limit in the capacity of richer ‘core’ countries to keep exploiting poorer ‘peripheral’ ones within a single integrated global economy. Wallerstein predicted collapse ‘around 2050’, and put our chances of a broadly positive outcome at ‘50/50, and that’s a lot.’[4]
While it is probably best appreciated as a heuristic rather than an axiom, Complexity theory adds that systems driven far from equilibrium can reach ‘hard fork’ bifurcation points where they can no longer maintain themselves: they either move to a higher level of complexity and integration, or fall apart, with no stable return to their prior configuration.[5] Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988) applies these ideas to human societies, which collapse when the marginal costs of sustaining their complexity through administration, infrastructure and coordination begin to exceed the marginal benefits that complexity provides. At that point, what can look like indefinite investment (as appears to be happening with AI and fossil fuels at the moment) eventually runs out of road, and simplification becomes the only viable path forward."
(https://perspecteeva.substack.com/p/utopian-common-sense?)
The target is to make utopian thinking a kind of common sense
Jonathan Rowson:
"The target is to make utopian thinking a kind of common sense that informs an entirely different kind of populism. My main source here is Sophia Rosenfeld’s prize-winning Common Sense: A Political History (2011), which traces the idea back to Greek and Roman sources, but also to Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, and his 1709 tract Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour. There, common sense appears as a form of aesthetic taste and judgement that serves as a kind of epistemic authority through a ‘sense of the publick weal and of the common interest’. The argument is a little meandering, but it appeals to our capacity to infer what others of similar (good) taste would like, think, assume and value.
I also enjoyed learning about the roots of ‘common sense’ in my hometown of Aberdeen, not least because my late grandfather, Alex Rae, used to tell me: ‘Yer a’ brains and nae common sense.’ Not long after what I enjoy thinking of as the ‘Aberdonian Enlightenment’ [12] Thomas Paine’s 1776 pamphlet Common Sense advocated American independence from Britain. Common sense became a rallying cry, and the signature line is: ‘We have it in our power to begin the world over again.’ That is partly what I am after with utopian common sense.
Closer to the present day, Hannah Arendt reflects on the different meanings of common sense in Kant’s third critique, where he tries to limit the value of common sense to aesthetics. Arendt contends that the boundary between the aesthetic and the political will always be blurred, and even that Kant was doing a kind of political philosophy by stealth. Across much of her career, she became the primary advocate for common sense as a kind of sixth sense particular to social creatures, something we co-create in the public arena through the shared experience of open inquiry. On this reading, common sense becomes the social glue suitable to what Rosenfeld calls ‘a pluralist and talkative world’, one that safeguards ‘the people’ without collapsing them into a homogeneous mass.
However, that kind of common sense depends on a robust public sphere and arguably also the kind of epistemic commons we no longer have. To save Arendt’s notion of common sense as a bulwark against fascism and the lifeblood of democracy, we may have to adapt it for an age of technological imperialism and ecological collapse. That is why I think utopian common sense entails a strong critique of the impact of social media and AI on the public sphere, and an ethical responsibility to resist those effects resolutely.
If part of the value of utopia as a method is that it helps us resist ideology, part of the value of common sense is that it helps us recast and reimagine populism. The anthropology and sociology of common sense contain many references to populism, because one of the main things populists do is strive to construct and consolidate common sense to build political capital. In the context of Thatcherism (not always seen as populist), the social theorist Stuart Hall put it like this:[13]
By ‘populism’ I mean something more than the ability to secure electoral support for a political programme [...]. I mean the project, central to the politics of Thatcherism, to ground neoliberal policies directly in an appeal to ‘the people’; to root them in the essentialist categories of common-sense experience and practical moralism – and thus to construct, not simply awaken, classes, groups and interests into a particular definition of ‘the people’.
Common sense is what populists covet, construct and marshal to build their power. Populists speak from, for and to common sense, and they are doing well as a result, which suggests we can learn from their modus operandi. If so, we have to ask whether divisiveness is really the sine qua non of populism, fuelled by ressentiment and premised on a politics of them and us. Perhaps what makes populism populist is not fundamentally pitting ‘the people’ against ‘the elite’, as Jan Werner Muller, for instance, has argued; that distinction may just be the prevailing strategy for the deeper aim of systematically forging common sense.
The notion of common sense lies at the heart of the case for democracy, including the capacity to form judgements and elect governments. It is also present in legal institutions: not just in common law, which is often based on norms and heuristics rather than strict rules, but in the belief that juries of ordinary people are well placed to establish matters of fact, even if judges establish matters of law. What is often forgotten is how fragile all this is, and that it needs a genuinely free press and high-quality universal education to work. The American pragmatist John Dewey knew this better than anyone, and when he was eighty he wrote a poignant speech that summarised much of his work, delivered as fascism loomed large in Europe, as it does now in many other places, arguably including the United States itself:
For what is the faith of democracy in the role of consultation, of conference, of persuasion, of discussion, in formation of public opinion, which in the long run is self-corrective, except faith in the capacity of the intelligence of the common man to respond with commonsense to the free play of facts and ideas which are secured by effective guarantees of free inquiry, free assembly and free communication? I am willing to leave to upholders of totalitarian states of the right and the left the view that faith in the capacities of intelligence is utopian. For the faith is so deeply embedded in the methods which are intrinsic to democracy that when a professed democrat denies the faith he convicts himself of treachery to his profession.
– John Dewey, Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us (1939)
In other words, the belief in democracy is somewhat utopian, and it also depends on a belief in (educated) common sense. As Rosenfeld shows, common sense was so attractive an ally that it quickly became something worth fighting over.[14]
I am not saying all common sense is utopian, nor that Utopia is common sense. I am saying that we need a new form of common sense that is utopian in spirit, to exist alongside all the other ideas that are shaping the world.
There appears to be an urgent need for a new common sense, where the us/them distinction is thinned out, and the operative logic of society is not protecting ‘the people’ from ‘the elite’ but rather creating what Alex Evans calls ‘a larger us’, with a wiser and more cautious approach to technology, an ecological and planetary perspective, and a tempered egalitarianism as an emerging normal.[15] And if we ask how we can do that, and whether it is not hopelessly utopian, we come back to utopia as a method. Now, however, the method has to be adapted to proactively shape the kind of common sense that helps humanity as a whole avert the worst forms of collapse, and that manifests in popular policies and practices as something every ‘normal’ (norm-bearing) person would think other normal people might also do."