L’Utopia necessaria. La dimensione utopica della conoscenza sociologica

Five hundred years after Thomas More’s Utopia, it is necessary to return to this text, which is still very timely, and to the political value it bears, to revisit a conception of sociology as a form of knowledge aimed at improving the living conditions of human beings. Recalling the thought of Ralf Dahrendorf, Charles Wright Mills, Karl Mannheim and others, this intervention asks whether, against the backdrop of an Earth, ever more threatened in its ecological balance by the effects of global pollution that has perhaps reached a point of no return and still globally crossed by conflicts, inequalities and poverty, it is now more than ever necessary for sociology to reaffirm itself in public debate as a critical, consciously political discourse, open to the territories of imagination and promoter of an ethics based on responsibility, hope and the desire for a better world.