ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the utopian search for more just and free societies and it also considers a range of imagined futures. It looks at how Dialectical Critical Realism (DCR) strengthens utopian analyses. DCR places morality at the centre of hopes of creating good or at least better societies. The emancipation of all is the core theme of DCR, Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom. DCR also highlights movement, process, ontology, open totalities and transformative change versus more static difference. The chapter describes relations between sociology and utopian research and, it also describes the potential alternative, the gift economy. Price and gift are both incomplete, partial economies. They co-exist, but gift is sidelined and desecrated, often made invisible, unrecognised and absent. The price economy has all-pervasive, dominant, negative views of human nature, relationships and structures. To explain the gift economy, Lewis Hyde drew on myths, fairy tales and psychoanalysis, all exploring the deep human psyche.
