A collaborative article by the Editorial Collective of Social Imaginaries. Investigations into social imaginaries have burgeoned in recent years. From ‘the capitalist imaginary’ to the ‘democratic imaginary’, from the ‘ecological imaginary’ to ‘the global imaginary’ – and beyond – the social imaginaries field has expanded across disciplines and beyond the academy. The recent debates on social imaginaries and potential new imaginaries reveal a recognisable field and paradigm-in-the-making. We argue that Castoriadis, Ricoeur, and Taylor have articulated the most important theoretical frameworks (...) for understanding social imaginaries, although the field as a whole remains heterogeneous. We further argue that the notion of social imaginaries draws on the modern understanding of the imagination as authentically creative. We contend that an elaboration of social imaginaries involves a significant, qualitative shift in the understanding of societies as collectively and politically-instituted formations that are irreducible to inter-subjectivity or systemic logics. After marking out the contours of the field and recounting a philosophical history of the imagination, the essay turns to debates on social imaginaries in more concrete contexts, specifically political-economic imaginaries, the ecological imaginary, multiple modernities and their inter-civilisational encounters. The social imaginaries field imparts powerful messages for the human sciences and wider publics. In particular, social imaginaries hold significant implications for ontological, phenomenological and philosophical anthropological questions; for the cultural, social, and political horizons of contemporary worlds; and for ecological and economic phenomena. The essay concludes with the argument that social imaginaries as a paradigm-in-the-making offers valuable means by which movements towards social change can be elucidated as well providing an open horizon for the critiques of existing social practices. (shrink)

This paper explores John Dewey’s debt to Hegel by examining the relationship between his conception of growth and Bildung. Dewey’s notion of the progressive subject takes the project of education as unending—it is both a personal and collective process that strives to synthesise competing social values democratically. Despite Dewey’s rejection of absolutism and idealism, his teleological commitment to democracy reveals his tendency to revert to Hegel’s philosophical ideals. Although Dewey was aware of capitalism’s power to eclipse the advance of democracy, (...) the Deweyan subject is no less a rational actor than homo economicus, making educational and democratic growth easily susceptible to market forces. This examination questions the extent to which our contemporary understanding of educational growth, inherited from Dewey, grounds itself in self-limitation—a quality that is central to the degrowth movement. This paper will evaluate whether Dewey’s concept of growth is compatible with economic degrowth and its understanding of finite natural resources and the environmental dangers of capitalist expansion. An answer lies in the philosophy of Cornelius Castoriadis, who contended that self-limitation is essential for democracy to thrive and for the character of the social imaginary to shift. As we face a global environmental crisis, this shift is necessary. This article investigates whether Bildung, growth, and Castoriadis’ concept of paideia are all the same idea by different names, equally prone to neoliberal ‘reconciliation’ or able to penetrate the current dominant imaginary towards degrowth. (shrink)

This article critically engages with Castoriadis’s elucidation of autonomy. It does so by taking into account the implications of Castoriadis’s enduring interest in the ecological devastation of the natural world, on the one hand, and the changing configuration of his philosophical anthropology, on the other—especially in regard to his reconsideration of the creativity of nature in the 1980s and the reconfiguration of the nomos and physis problematic. It contextualizes these movements in his thought within a broader hermeneutic of modernity that, (...) following Johann Arnason, emphasizes the cultural currents of both Romanticism and the Enlightenment as constitutive of modernity as a field of tensions. In an extension of Arnason’s elaboration, however, the present article argues that a latent opening towards an ecological worldhood is implicit to Castoriadis’s hermeneutic of modernity that, conversely, also finds Castoriadis at the limits of autonomy. (shrink)

Marcel Gauchet’s recently published theory of democracy sheds light on the way his understanding of modernity emerged from Castoriadis’s notion of autonomy but also deepened it by contextualizing it within a discussion of modern historicity. Modern autonomy means re-shaping the world through a new, transformative, form of power that draws on humanity’s capacity for imaginary creation. Gauchet’s theory of modernity, however, rejects the possibility of radical historical creation. Faithful to the teachings of structuralism, it explores the structural conditions behind the (...) genesis of modern power, which favoured the emergence of a new societal form that produces its own future. Encompassing capitalism, Gauchet’s modern power proposes an essentially paradoxical definition of modern democracy that stresses its essentially liberal dimension neglected by Castoriadis. In modern democracy, humans make their own history by liberating individual subjectivities but this deprives them of the means to direct history: liberalism goes against the aspirations to collective sovereignty. (shrink)

In the context of nationalizing, secularizing or Kemalist states, analyses of Islamist movements are often thrown back on notions of traditionalism or atavism. In a related vein, for certain social theorists writing on modernity, the uniqueness of the West is clarified through an imaginative [mis]interpretation of other cultures or civilizations. Too often, however, the apparent gains in Western self-insight reflect an ‘inability to constitute oneself without excluding the other’ (Cornelius Castoriadis). Ironically Castoriadis himself, in a project we might term an (...) ethnography of the West (see his writings on ecology, capitalism, rationality, contemporary culture, racism, Greek philosophy/history, and the environment) is prone to the same vice, especially in his identification of the West as the sole autonomous society. This article argues that in the shariainstitution of a legal autonomy, Islam and Islamism alike demonstrate an affinity with modernity as defined by Castoriadis. In the light of this Islamist autonomy, it concludes that Castoriadis’ vision of modernity as a struggle between opposed imaginaries of autonomy and rational mastery needs reformulating. (shrink)

This paper uses Castoriadis’s idea of the imaginary and Agnes Heller’s conceptualization of modernity as an interplay of the historical and technological imaginations, to examine how modernity engages with the idea of development to foster a particular vision of the future as always in progression. It uses the examples of Tasmania and Kerala, in Australia and India, respectively, as case studies which challenge the dominant perception of development as a linear and progressive ideology of growth that translates into ‘the development (...) of productive forces and the rational mastery of nature’. The case studies also show how, despite the radically different paths through modernity, it is the same logics of modernity that are at work in both locations. (shrink)

The phrase “statements of fact” has a clear, unequivocal ring. It speaks of a stable place untouchable by contests in epistemology and in more secular places, around questions of constructivism, subjectivism, and the politics of knowledge. It offers fixity, a locus of constancy in a shifting landscape where traditional certainties have ceased to hold, maintains a vantage point outside the fray, where knowledge-seekers can continue to believe in some degree of “correspondence” between items of knowledge and events in the world. (...) Within the social institutions and practices where knowledge is an issue, it designates a secure starting place for deliberation, a way of ensuring that processes of decision-making remain cognizant of the “realities” they have to address.In the institutions of knowledge production and knowledgeable practice that generate the examples I appeal to in this essay – medicine and law – “statements of fact” appear to comprise an incontestable core around which interpretive strategies may indeed have to be enlisted, but which itself functions as a kind of interpretation-exempt zone. There are good reasons for its retaining that status, for resisting the instabilities and sheer whimsicalities that would follow from dislodging it. (shrink)

The phrase “statements of fact” has a clear, unequivocal ring. It speaks of a stable place untouchable by contests in epistemology and in more secular places, around questions of constructivism, subjectivism, and the politics of knowledge. It offers fixity, a locus of constancy in a shifting landscape where traditional certainties have ceased to hold, maintains a vantage point outside the fray, where knowledge-seekers can continue to believe in some degree of “correspondence” between items of knowledge and events in the world. (...) Within the social institutions and practices where knowledge is an issue, it designates a secure starting place for deliberation, a way of ensuring that processes of decision-making remain cognizant of the “realities” they have to address.In the institutions of knowledge production and knowledgeable practice that generate the examples I appeal to in this essay – medicine and law – “statements of fact” appear to comprise an incontestable core around which interpretive strategies may indeed have to be enlisted, but which itself functions as a kind of interpretation-exempt zone. There are good reasons for its retaining that status, for resisting the instabilities and sheer whimsicalities that would follow from dislodging it. (shrink)