Chapter 9 asks how we can critically evaluate competition in this kind of society, particularly from within its own terms of reference - that is, as an ‘immanent critique’. The premise that domesticated competition is a work of human artifice implies that it is something we have some control over and can shape. I argue that the pervasive image of the rule-governed game, and ideas such as ‘the level playing field’, encode the basic cultural resources from which any criticism must be constructed. Moreover, competition works best within certain bounded spheres of practice - e.g. business, democracy, science - and its worst distortions are often a result of competition transgressing these boundaries, as when money interferes with politics. I argue that maintaining such separation and balances of power among distinct institutional spheres, arenas of competition, is critical for liberal society.

The paper probes the relationship between the institutional and the material dimensions of the ‘material constitution’.The analysis centres on two readings of that relationship that are offered first by structuralist and then by Hegelian strands of Marxist theory; thereafter it transfers Luhmann’s discussion of ‘semantics and structures’ to constitutional semantics and the ‘underlying’ material structures in order to offer an account of how the improbable dynamic between materiality and constitutionality might be rendered. The ‘materialist turn’ thereby re-orients constitutional thought to the material practices of the political economy and constitutional formation attaches to changing dynamics in the material relations of production and social reproduction.

Chapter 1 begins to define the concept of social pathology and to assess its usefulness for social philosophy. It distinguishes five conceptions of social illness different from the one employed in this book, which places dysfunction, rather than suffering, at the core of social illness. It argues, further, that while social pathologies must be bad in some way for social members, those individuals are not typically ill themselves. Although there are good reasons for approaching the concept of social pathology with caution – societies differ in important ways from biological organisms, for example – judicious use of the concept can bring to light critique-worthy social phenomena to which theories focused exclusively on justice are blind. The method espoused for diagnosing social illnesses is a form of ethically informed immanent critique that bears some similarities to medical diagnosis but refrains from ascribing moral blame to the individual participants in unhealthy social practices.

This chapter contributes to the debates about Samuel Johnson’s politics by considering the inadequacy of “Tory” as a label as balanced by Johnson’s unique contribution to the British public sphere in light of his determination to oppose aggressive forms of cultural nationalism. Considering Johnson’s journalism, his critical biographies, and Rasselas, Hawes explores Johnson’s deliberate cultivation of an anti-colonial perspective that burst through the usual framework for public discussions of the Seven Years War. In opposing the “Whig interpretation of history,” Johnson set himself against the principal vector of expansionist ideology. In his ability to combine anti-slavery and anti-colonial positions, Hawes argues, Johnson is uniquely prescient – and sometimes politically quite radical. His politics need to be understood as specifically anti-colonial, often reframing discussions of supposedly national affairs as manifestations of a colonial agenda.

Chapter 6 concludes the book by reconstructing both the pitfalls and the horizons of contemporary utopianism. Based on a comparative reading of my three constellations, my final point is that utopianism remains structurally pervaded by the following three fault lines: indeterminacy, wishful thinking and defeatism. Since these fault lines derive from enduring features of utopianism, the best manner of coping with them would be to openly avow their pervasiveness and prepare for the eventual traps that any form of social dreaming might fall into. If we conceive of utopianism as the education of our desire for being and living otherwise, we should, the chapter insists, also remain constantly alert to the multiple respects in which these pedagogical efforts may go awry. Critical self-reflexivity is therefore pivotal to the orientative function that all utopias in the Anthropocene seek to perform. The book ends with a discussion of how such a self-reflective attitude could be cultivated so as to accommodate the failures that social dreaming succumbs to. The anti-hero of Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities can assist us in gaining valuable insights into this issue.