ABSTRACT
The political maps of the present are systematic misprojections of its real social geographies. Such, in effect, was the thesis of Raymond Williams’s Towards 2000. 1 Indeed, the idea of the world as a patchwork of singular societies is itself an anachronism: the real spaces of human activity expand or shrink according to perspective, purpose and occasion. And all significant societies are either larger or smaller than the nation state. The political institutions of a ‘sustainable socialist future’ would undo the false identification of social and territorial sovereignties, surpassing not merely the pattern of the nation state but the very principle of ‘all-purpose’ social boundaries. Societies, as the effective unities of collective life, would be ‘variable’ in extent, with decision-making practices to match.
