Al di là del principio rassegnazione: la riscoperta dell'utopia da parte delle scienze sociali

This historiographical essay reflects on the recovery of the theme of utopia in the social sciences, examining the basic characteristics and some of the most significant trends that have emerged in recent years in the wake of the debate on Public Sociology and the transformation that has affected the production of imagery in digital societies. The 21st century, which seemed to have opened with Tocqueville's conviction that great revolutions would become rare, i.e. under the sign of what Svetlana Boym called " a global epidemic of nostalgia" and Zygmunt Bauman named a the tendency towards Retrotopia has instead unexpectedly rediscovered the notion of utopias, in the plural understood as processes and methods for conceiving alternatives to existing social institutions and structures. The hypothesis is that the social sciences, freed from the conditioning of the bitter debates on the link between utopia and totalitarianism, which have in part trapped the history of political thought, have ended up recovering the most genuine sense of Morean's proposal.