Abstract
In social and political theory, the imagination is often used in accounting both for creativity, innovation, and change and for sociopolitical stagnation and the inability to promote innovation and change. To what extent, however, can we attribute such seemingly contradictory outcomes to the same mental faculty? To address this question, this paper develops a comprehensive account of the political imagination, one that explains the various roles played by imagination in politics and thus accounts for the promises and limits of the political imagination. This conceptualization of the political imagination allows us to account for the simultaneous presence of its seemingly contradictory roles—such as promoting stability and order on the one hand while generating creativity and critical innovation on the other.
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Notes
Although many have noted the close relationship between imagination and rationality in some cognitive processes, and especially in counterfactual reasoning (Byrne, 2016).
To mention just few examples, Aristotle, Hobbes and Kant all assign important—albeit quite different—epistemological and psychological roles to the imagination and view it as a central aspect of the production of knowledge (Aristotle, 1907, 433b-434a; Hobbes, 2012; Kant, 1998, p. A78). See also Rundell (1984), Schwartz (2020) and Arendt (1992).
For a further defense of the need to focus on the political, rather than the social imagination, see Grant (2014, p. 411).
An example of this is found in the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought: while the term “reason” appears in tens of pages, there is not a single entry on the “imagination” (Miller et al., 2000). Similarly, 2386 entries in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy include the phrases “rationality” and “reason,” whereas only 658 entries include the phrases “imagination” and “imaginary.” This sort of imbalance has led some authors, such as Ezrahi (2012, p. 7) and Bottici & Challand (2011, p. 4), to portray the imagination as the most neglected human faculty in the history of Western philosophy.
In his published work, Ricoeur rarely addresses the question or problem of the imagination directly and tends to focus instead on the dialectic of ideology and utopia (Ricoeur 1986, p. 1). The only occasion where he addresses the problem of imagination explicitly is in his unpublished lectures on the imagination. For an exploration of those, see Taylor (2006) and Geniusas (2016).
Martin, for example, explains that sensory imagining represents “those distinctive episodes of imagining or imaging which correspond to our use of the distinct senses: so we talk of visualizing corresponding to seeing, or listening in one’s head parallel to audition, and so on. Sensory imagining in this sense can be part of wider cognitive projects—imagery can both accompany and also constitute trains of thought” (Martin, 2002, p. 403).
Importantly, that is not to say that the constitutive imagination defines what kind of imaginary is permissible for a given individual or society. Instead, it limits what one may consider as possible, and thus circumscribes what one may find imaginable. And, as Yablo (1993) argues, the very conceivability of a novel and creative idea normally involves the appearance of its possibility.
In this, the constitutive imagination can be viewed as part of the general phenomena that Currie identifies when he states that “when we imagine a situation and become progressively more ‘immersed’ in it, we start to move from a state that is one of pure imagination to one that is or approaches the condition of belief” (Currie, 2020, p. 17).
This point also highlights the possibility that we may find, within a given society, various groups that hold different constitutive imaginations. While I refer here to the constitutive imagination as something that is shared by the society at large, it is certainly likely that various social groups within the state may hold their own, unique constitutive imagination, which allows them to maintain their own identity, institutions, and shared sense of meaning. Such sub-sets of the constitutive imagination would not necessarily conform with the broader constitutive imagination and could actually challenge it in various ways.
Taylor (1986, pp. xxvii–xxx) interprets this function of utopia in terms of productive, instituting, or constituting imagination, and contrast it to the reproductive, instituted, or constituted imagination that is represented by ideology. For an additional account of the deconstructive and utopian aspect of the imagination, see McManus (2005, pp. 167–169).
For an account of such historical process and the gradual infiltration of individual creative imaginaries into the broader social imagination, see Taylor (2003, p. 24).
In this, the idea of the ‘critical imagination’ resembles C.W. Mills’ concept of the ‘sociological imagination.’ According to him, “the sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical sense in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals. It enables him to take into account how individuals, in the welter of their daily experience, often become falsely conscious of their social positions” (Mills, 1959, p. 15). As a form of self-consciousness, the sociological imagination represents a social and political critique and allows for a sense of historical contingency and social relativity.
In this sense, the sub-group constitutive imaginaries mentioned above (fn. 11) can act as forms of collective critical imagination in their relation to the hegemonic constitutive imagination, especially in the case of marginalized groups.
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Acknowledgements
This essay benefitted from discussions at the Princeton Graduate Student Conference in Political Theory and the Imagination and Social Change conference at Claremont McKenna College. For reading and providing feedback on earlier drafts, thanks go to Natali Levin Schwartz, Hans Lueders, Jade Ngo, Joan O’Brian, Philip Petrov, Rob Reich, Yosef Schwartz, Daniel Slate, Chloe Stowell, and Lauren Sukin. The paper also benefited greatly from the generous feedback and guidance of the Synthese editorial team and anonymous reviewers. Special thanks go to Alison McQueen for providing thoughtful and insightful comments and suggestions on several drafts of this essay. I am enormously grateful to Josiah Ober, who has guided this project from its earliest stages, and whose generous feedback has contributed immensely to the shape and content of the argument present here.
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Schwartz, A.M. Political imagination and its limits. Synthese 199, 3325–3343 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02936-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02936-1