The overthrow of the dictatorship of no alternatives requires a different way of thinking about structural change and structural alternatives, especially in the technical, specialized disciplines, beginning with those closest to power—economics and law—a way of thinking that affirms the primacy of structural vision but rejects the illusions of false necessity.

What we require is an approach that can bring both of these together in some way. In recent work Arran Gare has made a compelling case for how this involves a renewed acceptance and embrace of speculative thinking (Gare 2018). For physicist Lee Smolin and philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger (2015), whose collaborative work over eight years has resulted in a fascinating book entitled The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time, bringing together the big picture of the universe as a whole with the micro-level advances of physics, entails no less than a return to the practice of Natural Philosophy proper. In referring to “normativity as a force of nature”, I have thus far only used as a teaser, or perhaps appetizer, the idea that normativity might be able to span the chasm between the bottom up and the top down, and thus serve as a conceptual lynchpin of a renewed speculative natural philosophy. There will be more to come. But it should also be acknowledged that attempting to bring together a top-down with a bottom-up approach, even to also address questions of integration and unification is not entirely new.