ERIK OLIN WRIGHT: Envisioning Real Utopias London 2010 Verso, 394 p. M any intellectuals and activists in the West linked the collapse of the state socialist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe with the hope, not only of a »peace dividend,« but also of a more open debate on better and more appealing alternatives to their capitalist societies. The outcome was quite the opposite: dis­cussion of structural reforms and systemic transformation was even rarer than before and, despite a few isolated attempts to strike new paths, left-wing politics and debate have stagnated and the prospects for new ideas about the future did not appear particularly favorable. Recently, however, that seems to have changed. Sociologist Erik Olin Wright, president elect of the American Sociological Association and one of the few uni­versity teachers in the usa who is well-versed in left-wing and Marxist thought, has produced a tour de force. He started the»Real Utopias Project« in 1992 with the intention of focusing»on specific proposals for the fundamental redesign of different arenas of social institutions rather than on either general, abstract formu­lations of grand design, or on small immediately attainable reforms of existing practices«(p. 10). Since then, a number of publications have appeared and this, the most recent volume represents the project’s culmination. It is remarkable by virtue of its genesis alone: over four years Wright held more than 50 lectures and discussions in 18 countries on particular aspects of the book. As a result, the quality is particularly high, representing the summation of the experiences, findings, and evaluations of this comprehensive, intensive, and multifaceted dis­course which the author terms»emancipatory social science.« The very title of the book indicates that Wright’s aim is to surmount currently dominant habits of thought: utopias and reality may be opposites, but it is precisely his aim to take seriously the tension between dreams and practice and to turn it to account:»utopian ideals that are grounded in the real potentials of hu­manity, utopian destinations that have accessible waystations, utopian designs of institutions that can inform our practical tasks of navigating a world of imperfect conditions for social change«(p. 6). The book is divided into three sections. First, the essential diagnoses and critiques of capitalism as an economic system are expounded, summarized, and concisely presented in terms of eleven key criticisms. In part two, possible alternatives are taken up: the traditional Marxist approach(for example, its fixation on the state) is assessed as inadequate and replaced with an approach based on the increasing social empowerment of civil society, both in the state and in the economy. Following that, a wide spectrum of concrete concepts and examples of alternative institutions are described, which include real alternative ipg 1/2011 Rezensionen/Book Reviews 167