Social Imaginaries: Critical Interventions 1786607751, 9781786607751

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgements
Foreword • George H. Taylor
The Social Imaginaries Field: Overview and Introduction • Suzi Adams and Jeremy C. A. Smith
1 Clarifying Social Imaginaries: Castoriadis, Ricoeur and Taylorin Discussion • Suzi Adams
2 Rethinking the History of the Productive Imagination in Relation to Common Sense • John W. M. Krummel
3 History, Civilisations, Imaginaries • Jeremy C. A. Smith
4 Political and Constitutional Imaginaries • Paul Blokker
5 The Political Imaginary of European Hypermodernity: Marcel Gauchet and Contemporary Neo-Liberal Democracy • Natalie J. Doyle
Index
Notes on Contributors

Citation preview

Social Imaginaries

Social Imaginaries Series Editors: Suzi Adams, Paul Blokker, Natalie J. Doyle, John W. M. Krummel and Jeremy C. A. Smith This groundbreaking series aims to investigate social imaginaries from theoretical, comparative, historical and interdisciplinary perspectives. Its objective is to foster challenging research on the burgeoning but heterogeneous field of social imaginaries, on the one hand, and the related field of the creative imagination, on the other. The series seeks to publish rigorous and innovative research that reflects the international, multi-regional and interdisciplinary scope across these fields. Titles in the Series Ricoeur and Castoriadis in Discussion, edited by Suzi Adams Productive Imagination, edited by Saulius Geniusas and Dmitri Nikulin Stretching the Limits of Productive Imagination, edited by Saulius Geniusas Social Imaginaries: Critical Interventions, edited by Suzi Adams and Jeremy C. A. Smith

Social Imaginaries Critical Interventions Edited by Suzi Adams and Jeremy C. A. Smith

London • New York

Published by Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd. 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd. is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and London (UK) www.rowman.com Copyright © 2019 by Suzi Adams and Jeremy C. A. Smith Copyright in individual chapters is held by the respective chapter authors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB 978-1-78660-775-1 ISBN: PB 978-1-78660-776-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN: 978-1-78660-775-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-1-78660-776-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-1-78660-777-5 (electronic) TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Acknowledgements

vii

Foreword George H. Taylor

ix

The Social Imaginaries Field: Overview and Introduction Suzi Adams and Jeremy C. A. Smith 1

2

3 4 5

Clarifying Social Imaginaries: Castoriadis, Ricoeur and Taylor in Discussion Suzi Adams Rethinking the History of the Productive Imagination in Relation to Common Sense John W. M. Krummel History, Civilisations, Imaginaries Jeremy C. A. Smith Political and Constitutional Imaginaries Paul Blokker The Political Imaginary of European Hypermodernity: Marcel Gauchet and Contemporary Neo-Liberal Democracy Natalie J. Doyle

xxiii

1

45 77 111

145

Index

183

Notes on Contributors

189

v

Acknowledgements

This book is the fruit of the Social Imaginaries project and many discussions with the editorial collective and its circle of scholars. We’re fortunate to be part of such a lively and dedicated editorial collective—thanks to Paul Blokker, Natalie Doyle, John Krummel, and to our new editor, Saulius Geniusas. Johann Arnason, Craig Calhoun and George Taylor are especially supportive of the Social Imaginaries project; we value their input greatly and would like to thank them here. We’re grateful to Sarah Campbell, Frankie Mace and Rebecca Anastasi from Rowman & Littlefield International for commissioning and then steering this project to fruition; we really appreciate your enthusiasm for our book series! We would like to thank Hannah Fisher and her copyediting team for their fine-grained work on the manuscript. We’d also like to thank our respective families for their patience with our social imaginaries adventures!

vii

Foreword George H. Taylor

One of the pronounced insights of the social imaginaries field, admirably demonstrated in the present volume, is the challenge to the sufficiency of the Enlightenment model of reason. Our reason is not disembodied but rather situated within social, cultural and political environments that inform our judgment. In this Foreword, I would like to consider the larger significance of a social imaginary understanding as a predicate for the more detailed studies that follow. In particular I want to assess the implications of the claim—sometimes explicit in these chapters, sometimes assumed—that the social imaginary is constitutive of social reality. I begin with the justification for the claim on its own terms, consider the implications of this claim, turn to other theories in cognitive theory that positively interrelate with and lend support to the social imaginaries claim, and then return to the social imaginaries field to assess the claim’s challenges. THE SOCIAL IMAGINARY AS CONSTITUTIVE It seems useful at the outset to recognise that ascription of the social imaginary as constitutive of social reality is at bottom more of a descriptive claim, and this descriptive characterisation may in turn lead either to more positive or negative implications. Characterisation of the social imaginary as constitutive is not necessarily a positive commendation. It might be, for instance, that theorists of the social imaginary argue that we now know that it is false to equate human reasoning with a more objective form of rationality and that instead humans reason on the basis of the imaginary as illusion or deception, the false. I will return to the potentially positive or negative implications of the social imaginary as constitutive but begin with the more descriptive ix

x

George H. Taylor

claim. The descriptive claim is well captured in the separate critiques by Cornelius Castoriadis and Paul Ricoeur of Marx (e.g., Castoriadis 1987, 132; Ricoeur 1986, 107). Marx and Engels famously wrote that human mental productions—such as politics, law and religion—are the ‘efflux’ of material economic behaviour (Marx and Engels 1963, 47). For Marx, economic activity is the real base—the infrastructure—of human action, whereas ideas and conceptions are derivative from this economic activity—merely superstructural. The critique is that Marx is mistaken. The social imaginary is not derivative from but inextricably implicated in the very nature of human activity. Human activity does not exist apart from the social imaginary. The social imaginary is in that sense constitutive of social reality. How are these broad claims justified? As John Krummel most directly addresses in this volume, Kant’s elaboration in the Critique of Pure Reason of the role of the productive imagination in empirical understanding is essential (Kant 1965). The productive imagination bridges between the sensory impression and the intelligible, the conceptual. In contrast to the claims of Hume, we humans are not provided a sensory impression first to which we then add conceptual structure. Rather, in the very act of perception, we engage in conceptual structuring through the role of the imagination. 1 Often this structuring is called a form of language, but we may comprehend the role more broadly as a form of signification. In the broader context of the social imaginary, Ricoeur offers the useful example that we do not view someone raising their arm as first a physical motion and then only subsequently as having symbolic meaning, for we immediately interpret the action as, depending on the context, a greeting, a vote or hailing a taxi (Ricoeur 1984, 57–58). In the realm of human action, the social imaginary goes all the way down. The imaginary in social life is not ephemeral or merely aesthetic; it is ineradicable and so constitutive. The inherency of conceptual structuring in the imagination suggests also the ineluctability of the symbolic structuring of social reality. 2 Those conceptual elements that Marx found to be merely ideational and superstructural are indeed infrastructural. Paul Blokker argues appropriately in this volume, for instance, that political institutions cannot be reduced to economic or political interests. A larger domain of meaning may be entrenched in social institutions, as Suzi Adams and Jeremy C. A. Smith write in the volume’s introduction. Contrary to the standard narrative about the priority of contemporary values as economically based, the social imaginary widens the lens to show how the symbolic structuring of reality may allow our grounding in other forms of values, an issue then needing closer empirical analysis. The recognition of the symbolic structuring of social reality also leads to the insight that we think from within and on the basis of this symbolic structuring. We do not have access to simple fact, for the facts are framed by symbolic structuring. Our practices are embedded in a ‘constituting, symbol-

Foreword

xi

ic and meaning-giving background’ (Blokker, in this volume). Our actions are ‘always already’ framed by the social imaginary; they provide a ‘latent background knowledge’ (Krummel, in this volume). We think not from simple fact but on the basis of interpretation oriented by symbolic structuring. These insights contribute not only to the critique of the sufficiency of the Enlightenment emphasis on reason or economic rationality but argue that in fact these other approaches are themselves grounded in implicit and unanalysed social imaginaries (see, e.g., Blokker, on the ‘economic imaginary’). The basis for social imaginaries in interpretation framed by the symbolic structuring of reality leads social imaginaries to incorporate, implicitly or explicitly, a hermeneutic approach (Adams, in this volume). (I return to the larger consequences of this insight.) Both Castoriadis and Ricoeur explicitly respond to Marx’s challenge that philosophers have only interpreted the world while the task is to change it (Marx 1963, 123) by claiming that we must interpret the world in order to change it (Adams, in this volume; Castoriadis 1987, 164; Ricoeur 1986, 70). It is a substantial contribution of the social imaginaries field to emphasise that this hermeneutic is broadened beyond personal interpretation to a cultural hermeneutic (Adams, in this volume). The frame becomes societal interpretation rather than merely subjective, individual interpretation. The social imaginary is not simply a matter of internalisation of an interpretive perspective but its manifestation externally in social, cultural and political objects. In this regard, one of the signal insights of Castoriadis is his emphasis on the social imaginary as manifested by and in social institutions. Additionally noteworthy here is the recognition that these external manifestations in social institutions can be positive and enhancing. Contrary to often prevalent views that institutions are necessarily alienating and reifying, institutional objectification of social imaginaries may contribute to personal and social welfare. Ricoeur locates his ethical model, for instance, within the pursuit of ‘just institutions’ (Ricoeur 1992, 172; Adams, in this volume). Natalie Doyle notes in this volume that deinstitutionalisation can by contrast lead to loss of a symbolic realm. IMPLICATIONS: HORIZONTAL, VERTICAL, TEMPORAL AND ONTOLOGICAL The implications of the interpretive character of social imaginaries are significant. I concentrate on four dimensions of such implications: horizontal, vertical, temporal and ontological. At the horizontal level, social imaginaries are marked by plurality. Social imaginary analysis draws from and applies to the diverse frameworks of a range of scholarly disciplines. Our authors mention fields such as anthropology, history, law, philosophy, political theory,

xii

George H. Taylor

psychology and psychoanalysis, religious studies, social theory and sociology. The types of social imaginaries are themselves quite diverse. Our authors reference the following kinds of imaginaries, each of which needs to establish its own contours within the larger field: capitalist, constitutional, cosmopolitan, democratic, ecological, economic, feminist, global, historical, hypermodern, humanitarian, nationalist, political, politico-juridical, populist and religious. One of the most noteworthy achievements of the volume is also to show the varying perspectives on the social imaginary beyond Western analysis, whether by Asian theorists (Krummel) or through intercivilisational encounter (Smith). Plurality exists not only across different social imaginaries but internal to each approach. Because of the need to interpret the symbolic structuring of reality, contestation may arise over a common social imaginary domain, such as the constitutional order (Blokker), as we are very much witnessing at present internal to various societies internationally. There may be ‘counter-imaginaries’ (Blokker) that challenge dominant social imaginaries within a particular arena. If one of the commendable aims of the volume is to show that the social imaginaries are a ‘paradigm-in-the-making’, an approach my comments largely address as well, the volume also demonstrates that the paradigm occurs at the level of broader themes, whereas the horizontal, plural capacity of social imaginaries leaves much to be debated and filled in at the diverse level of the specificity of each regional social imaginary. At a vertical level, social imaginaries hold significance because they may help address the availability or lack thereof of underlying societal values. Long the domain of religion, the availability of underlying societal values has been challenged by the rise of secularisation and bureaucratic, instrumental reason. Natalie Doyle in this volume discusses, for instance, the ‘loss of vertical authority of European states’ due to their desacralisation. Attention to social imaginaries may allow a renewed space for religion within an intellectual environment dismissive of it as superstition, to the extent that religion can be conceptualised as itself a form of social (and individual) imaginary, arguing for a greater depth to the symbolic structuring of social reality. Yet the vertical dimension of social imaginaries is not limited to religion but incorporates what may be other deep societal values, including what Natalie Doyle emphasises as civil religion or secular religion. Given contemporary debates, can we continue to speak of some underlying cultural sensibility of what it means to be French or what social and political formation the United States Constitution undergirds? To the extent that there has been loss, the framework of the social imaginary is helpful in understanding the nature and importance of that loss to the meaning of a society. It may also suggest the need for more creative formation attentive to the recovering or development of orienting social values, a subject I attend more directly when considering the temporal function of social imaginaries. As in the other levels of the

Foreword

xiii

social imaginary, the vertical dimension is also one subject to intense contestation, as, again, we are witnessing in countries around the world. One of the trying questions we face here is to what extent can underlying symbolic social cohesion permit disagreement over the meaning of this cohesion or even consider it constructive without sundering (Doyle). By the temporal dimension of social imaginaries, I mean both their look back in time and their look forward. The look back encompasses the origin of symbolic systems of values, just discussed, but also how these values’ original promises may have been unfulfilled and need continued pursuit to be attained. The United States Declaration of Independence, for example, declares that all people are created equal, a challenge that remains aspirational. Social imaginaries can also look forward, open to inspirational, transformational change. As symbolic these imaginaries are not fixed but retain plasticity, a capacity to be reworked and reframed. The essential element of the temporal dimension, much emphasised in the present volume, is creativity. As Castoriadis in particular insists, attention must be drawn to instituting imaginaries (Castoriadis 1987; Adams and Smith; Blokker). The imagination is vital not only for aesthetic creation but for social, cultural and political creation as well. We are not imprisoned within existing social and political structures but can break from them. Ricoeur claims that the utopia is a vehicle to show an alternative world that may ‘shatter’ existing social reality; it is not merely a dream but something potentially realisable (Ricoeur 1986, 273; Adams; Blokker; Krummel). As Ricoeur stresses both in his work on utopia and in his larger theory of the productive imagination (Ricoeur, forthcoming), the fiction may have ontological significance because it offers a restructuring of current symbolic significations (Adams; Blokker; Krummel). 3 The final characteristic of the social imaginary that I want to consider at this point is the domain’s ontological implications. This trait perhaps sums the social imaginary perspective. The insight that social reality is inextricably symbolically structured is not just a sociological observation; it is an ontological claim about the nature of human reality. For our authors, this ontological claim of the social imaginary has particular significance in the endorsement of the ontological capacity of human creativity (e.g., Adams, Krummel). Human creativity is not epiphenomenal but potentially foundational in its transfigurative possibilities. The assertion is that the social imaginary’s comprehension of the symbolic structuring of reality more adequately encompasses the nature of the human condition than dominant theories focussed on instrumental and self-interested forms of reason. I shall return to this ontology’s methodological implications. Across the horizontal, vertical and temporal dimensions of social imaginaries it is vital to appreciate the availability of critique. (I return in my final section to the question of the availability of critique within the ontological dimension.) None of these three dimensions permits monolithic interpreta-

xiv

George H. Taylor

tion; diverse horizontal, vertical or temporal vantage points will each make of the social imaginary something different. Social imaginaries construct frameworks but can also engage in the deconstruction of others’ structures (Krummel); they assess continuity and discontinuity (Smith); they permit affirmation and contestation (Adams). The availability of critique offers an antidote to the criticism, often laid against hermeneutic endeavours, of being conservative in the descriptive sense of being caught within a world of existing prejudgments. Within the social imaginary, interpretive frames can challenge and contest one another. RELATION OF THE SOCIAL IMAGINARY TO COGNITIVE THEORY Before turning in my final section to some of the challenges facing the social imaginaries field, I want in the present section to argue for the greater import of the field by locating it in relation to other contemporary work that challenges the adequacy of the Enlightenment vision grounded in an autonomous human reason. My example of other work will be drawn from cognitive theory—the operation of the mind—as illuminated in cognitive psychology by the eminent scholarship of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. Their work has gained substantial attention within the field of what is known as behavioural economics, which itself challenges a prior generation of economists who argue that humans are rational utility maximisers. Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 for his efforts. (The Nobel undoubtedly would have gone to Tversky also, but it is awarded only to those alive at the time of the award, and Tversky died in 1996.) I draw particularly on Kahneman’s masterful presentation of the behavioural economics field in Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman 2011). My larger claim here is that the insights of the social imaginaries field themselves valuably expand the understanding of human cognition and judgment offered by behavioural economics. Behavioural economics contends that the brain operates on the basis of two different systems. System 1 represents more instinctive and automatic activity and proceeds quickly and unconsciously, without reflection. System 2 is more reflective and operates more slowly and consciously by means of systematic evaluation. System 1 is the brain’s default system. Much of our daily activity is quite automatic and based on habit. Drivers typically do not think about the process of driving while travelling to work. We could not function if we had to engage in deliberate reflection to undertake much of our daily activity. System 1 also involves intuitive, emotive reactions. We often respond to situations on the basis of bodily reactions, before we can or need to engage in more analytic reflection. The reflective apparatus takes longer to

Foreword

xv

engage and frequently will find no need to engage if a situation is addressed by system 1. This system 1 design is typically effective and allows us to move forward. The reputation of behavioural economics arises from its principal insight that system 1 does not always work appropriately but may proceed on the basis of inaccurate and dysfunctional shortcuts (heuristics). System 1 is better at gravitating toward the striking example, which allows quick judgment, rather than reflecting on whether the striking example is in fact statistically accurate. Consistent with the larger themes that the present volume and my own comments reflect, behavioural economics criticises the adequacy of the Enlightenment prioritisation of reason, in this case for its inaccurate understanding of the nature of human economic behaviour. Instead, the mind works much more typically on the basis of the intuitive and affective elements of system 1. For present purposes I am less concerned about the criticism of system 1’s inappropriate reliance on heuristics than on the priority the human mind grants to system 1 and to the potential integration of system 1 and system 2. Deliberative forms of system 2 reflection and training can be incorporated over time into system 1. The expert—such as the chess master—does not need to undertake slow, step-by-step system 2 decision making in response to an opponent’s move, because their training permits rapid, more intuitive system 1 responses to the game as it is being played. The same might be said of a veteran attorney or an athlete. In any of these fields, system 2 reflection may not be absent, but it is surrounded and abetted by system 1 instinctive responses that incorporate expert learning. My claim is that social imaginaries can similarly inhabit system 1. Whether we learn social imaginaries consciously and reflectively or more intuitively through participation in social structures and institutions, they become part of our symbolic structuring. Importantly, as already noted, these social imaginaries can also become more intuitive symbolic frameworks within institutions themselves; they are not imaginaries simply of individuals. Part of my contention here is that the social imaginaries field in fact enhances and broadens the orientation of behavioural economics by extending the analysis of system 1 beyond economic behaviour to more general forms of social and political orientations, as the contributions to this volume splendidly attest. As previously referenced, social imaginaries form our ‘meaning-giving background’ (Blokker), a ‘latent background knowledge’ (Krummel). My hope is that this volume and others in the social imaginaries field will be vehicles for outreach to and contributions in the larger debate about human understanding and about the institutions that do or do not offer support to human sustenance.

xvi

George H. Taylor

SOCIAL IMAGINARIES AND THEIR CHALLENGES In this final section I conclude by raising various challenges that are faced by social imaginaries. My comments come as someone sympathetic to and writing within the social imaginaries field who wants at the same time to recognise complexities of the field that should be addressed. I turn from prior discussion of how social imaginaries are constitutive to how they are employed. I raise four points. First, as noted at the outset of my remarks, recognition that social imaginaries are constitutive of reality has no necessary correlation with whether those imaginaries are in fact positive, either for individuals or a society. The social imaginaries may be ideologically distortive. Nazism was a social imaginary. Social imaginaries may be illusory, whether sociologically or psychologically, in the sense that they may function as escapes from reality or otherwise be incapable of achievement and thus unreal even aspirationally. Creativity is not necessarily constructive. Second, as our authors recognise, even if we might accept a particular social imaginary as positive on its own terms, we must be careful of the relation between the social imaginary and its invocation by social or political power. There can be a difference between the rhetorical invocation of a social imaginary by political powers and the actual goals of implementation. Further, some social imaginaries can call upon power to impose their interpretation. A legal judgment is an interpretation but one backed by the force of the state (West 1987). This argument is a corrective to the hermeneutic emphasis on interpretation and interpretive debate alone. Third, social imaginaries seem prototypically grounded in belief. It is not simply a matter of our reasoning from rather than to our social imaginaries or of the positive interconnection between emotion and reason (Damasio 1994; Nussbaum 2001). Rather, the belief in a social imaginary represents an oftendeep-seated allegiance and fidelity that is difficult to dislodge simply by claimed rational argument. Ricoeur notably discusses the role of belief in his elaboration of legitimation as one form of ideology (Ricoeur 1986; Adams; Taylor 2012). The role of belief in social imaginaries in part hearkens back to prior consideration of their vertical dimension, but here I want to emphasise the challenge to critique. It is a mistake to attempt to convince others of the errors of their social imaginary by appeal simply to ‘reason’; that appeal will usually not reach the deeper values that a social imaginary may protect. It remains ill-founded, for example, perhaps especially in the divisiveness of the contemporary political context that commentators and, indeed, some political parties (such as the Democrats in the United States) attempt to persuade largely by appeal to programmes and policies rather than to underlying values. Voting behaviour is often predicated on more than what is in the voter’s rational economic interest. (This can be positive, an adherence to larger values despite personal economic cost, or delusive, a mistaken as-

Foreword

xvii

sumption that the values will in fact create personal economic benefit.) The plurality of social imaginaries offers the opportunity and space for critique, but that critique will not be successful unless it reaches deeper values. Ricoeur writes of the need to confront ideology by utopia (and vice versa) (Ricoeur 1986, 312). As I shall return to, Ricoeur generalises the point by arguing that metaphor needs to counter metaphor (Ricoeur 1986, 154). Fourth and finally and at some greater length, we need to consider the potential implications of social imaginaries existing within the symbolic structuring of reality, of their being interpretive, hermeneutic. John Krummel in this volume, for instance, writes of truth as ‘socially-historically contextual’. The challenge here is suggested by an apparent tension within the work of Castoriadis. On the one hand he is willing to accept that his—and anyone’s—vantage point is contained within a larger social imaginary interpretive framework. In his dialogue with Ricoeur he acknowledges that ‘when you say that there’s no absolute rupture, that one always remains in the rules of language, that is certainly true’ (Ricoeur and Castoriadis 2017, 12–13; Castoriadis 1997, 333–36). At the same time, Castoriadis nevertheless goes on to insist in the dialogue on an ‘absolute rupture’ in history (Castoriadis 1997, 14). My point is not to engage in debate on the status of Castoriadis’s approach. My general perspective throughout has been oriented to his acceptance of his own location within an interpretive framework, and it is noteworthy that our authors criticise him to the extent that he may not sufficiently (Adams; Smith). Citing the incisive work of Johann Arnason, Jeremy C. A. Smith maintains in his chapter that Castoriadis’s ‘ontology of ex nihilo institutions suppresses “the background and context of creativity, more precisely their interpretive relationship to something other than themselves”’. I wonder whether Castoriadis’s strong ontological claim of the availability of new beginnings ex nihilo (e.g., Castoriadis 1987, 3)—of ‘radical otherness or of the absolutely new’ (Castoriadis 1987, 172), of ‘rupture’ (Castoriadis 1987, 204), of what he seems repeatedly to sum as the ‘radical imaginary’ (e.g., Castoriadis 1987, 329–31; Castoriadis 1997)—is indeed a claim not of interpretation but of truth, of something that lies beyond an interpretive framework. To what degree is it necessary to locate a stance outside an interpretive framework and instead rest on fact in order to mount a viable ontological claim? If social imaginaries indicate existence within interpretive frameworks, how can a social imaginary defend any ontological claim to truth rather than simply to an interpretive viewpoint? How can we move beyond the situation where you have your interpretive viewpoint and I have mine? The question seems pressing not only for individuals and societal institutions but for the methodology of the social imaginary field. Is the claim that the social imaginary is constitutive of social reality itself merely an interpretive perspective?

xviii

George H. Taylor

In raising these questions, I am less concerned about the contemporary rise of ‘post-fact’ advocacy, though that raises interesting issues about the use of the representativeness heuristic instead of statistical norm (Kahneman 2011) and about deception and self-deception (Trivers 2011). I am more focussed on the enclosing of facts within social imaginaries of diverse types, where the competition between them typically rests more on the social imaginary than on the weight of the fact itself. Given the temporal dimension of the social imaginary and the role of creativity, one of the additional difficulties here is that evidence—the fact—may unfold over time. The social visionary (across the political spectrum) may seize upon what is only a glimmer of reality and seeks to bring the reality to life. The social imaginary defends its vision even though the facts may be only incipient. An additional problem is the assertion of a social imaginary as a future truth on the basis of will. During the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, for instance, a senior adviser famously criticised those in ‘the reality-based community’, who ‘believe that solutions emerge from . . . judicious study of discernible reality’. By contrast, the adviser claimed, when the Bush administration acts, ‘we create our own reality’ (Suskind 2004). The social imaginary here seeks to create its own facts. The social imaginary field must address the challenge not only of interpretation versus interpretation internal to a social imaginary framework but of the external methodological challenge to interpretation by fact, as in the claims by social scientific approaches that assert that they are based more in empirical assessment. An essential rejoinder here evaluates to what degree these empirical claims are themselves located within interpretive frameworks (e.g., again see Blokker on the ‘economic imaginary’). As I have indicated, as the work in the chapters that follows attest, the emphasis is not that social imaginaries disregard facts but that they orient facts within larger interpretive frameworks. As I have suggested, then, my larger question is how does the social imaginary field justify its own ontological claims that the social imaginary is constitutive of human reality, when that claim is itself an interpretive claim? There is no location that transcends social imaginary frameworks. In the language of Ricoeur, speaking of the dialectic between ideology and utopia, ‘no point of view exists outside the game’ (Ricoeur 1986, 173). In my concluding remarks, I want to draw upon Ricoeur to offer a response to this challenge. I begin by recalling Ricoeur’s insight that the juxtaposition between ideology and utopia may be described as one between metaphor and metaphor (Ricoeur 1986, 154). This characterisation is itself fruitful to comprehending that the test is not between fact and fact but between two deepseated ascriptions. In fact, my contention is that if we take seriously the underpinning of social imaginaries in metaphor, we may move closer both to the heart of my opening discussion of what it means to assert the social

Foreword

xix

imaginary is constitutive and to the possibility of analysis of social imaginaries in contestation. In some cryptic language in The Rule of Metaphor, Ricoeur offers the hypothesis of what he calls a basic metaphoric of thought (Ricoeur 1977, 22, citing Gadamer 1992 [1960], 429). Categorisation begins in metaphor, and metaphor subsequently demonstrates how we can break with existing categorisation. Both in The Rule of Metaphor and subsequently in Time and Narrative, Ricoeur extends this insight by generalising this metaphoric capacity as one of figuration (Taylor 2018). Ricoeur is quite overt in clarifying his claim that human action is always symbolically structured—always encompassed within a social imaginary—by asserting that it is ‘always figured’; there is a fundamental ‘figuration of human action’ (Ricoeur 1991, 469). Figuration returns us to the two sides of the Kantian schema in sensible intuition and thought that the imagination bridges. Indeed, in my reading of Ricoeur, he claims that figuration is the common root of the schema’s two sides. On the one side, figuring speaks to the ‘sensible’ and the role of affect and non-lexical, emergent meaning. Figuration on this impressional, experiential side shows how the productive imagination can arise and allow for emergent and potentially transfigurative, classification-transforming meaning within social imaginaries. This side of figuration shows figuration as action, event, dynamic, a work; it is creative and engendering. The second side of figuring exemplifies its function as figuring or structuring, its ‘conceptual’ side, its creation of figures. For Ricoeur, what he calls the speculative side of thought—its analytic power—‘is not extrinsic to the figurative mode’ (Ricoeur 1982, 73). On both sides, the character of figuration renders more precise what the productive imagination entails. We may then refine the defence of the availability of effective critique of a social imaginary in at least two ways. The structuring side of figuration provides us access to the language and conceptual framework of social imaginaries that can be analysed if we appreciate that this language and framework evoke the creative, affective, more metaphoric side of figuration. We can analyse the structuring side of figuration not on its own but only as it provides a lens into the more inchoate, metaphoric side of figuration. The structuring side of figuration is not opaque, in the sense of blocked off and isolable from the metaphoric side, and on the other hand it is not transparent, providing simply a clear window to the quality of the metaphoric. Instead, the structuring side of figuration remains translucent, providing, like stained glass, a vehicle for transmission of metaphoric light but colouring that light also with its structuring qualities (Taylor 2010). The relation of translucence between an underlying metaphoric, figurative framework and its figurative structuring indicates that the foundational figurative framework in turn is not opaque—inaccessible to thought or analysis because mystical or simply belief—but analysable through the lens of its figurative structuring.

xx

George H. Taylor

More effective critique is available in a second sense as a metaphoric relation between the competing social imaginaries themselves. Metaphor, Ricoeur writes, ‘reveals the logical structure of “the similar” because, in the metaphorical statement, “the similar” is perceived despite difference, in spite of contradiction’ (Ricoeur 1977, 196, emphases in original). In metaphor, he goes on, ‘the identity and the difference do not melt together but confront each other’ (Ricoeur 1977, 199). There is a ‘clash between sameness and difference’ (Ricoeur 1977, 196). In part, as I have suggested, for distance to be overcome, it must be on the basis of attention to the underlying metaphoric or figurative framework—the social imaginary—rather than more simply to a debate about facts. But the bridging may also be creative in itself, creating a productive, metaphoric moment, where a new metaphoric relation arises that brings closer together differing perspectives that seemed historically to be logically far apart. More generally, we may say with Ricoeur that the metaphoric bridging of what customary logic deems to be distance lies at the heart of creative, productive imagination (Ricoeur, forthcoming). The task of interpretation remains one of practical judgment instead of syllogistic reason. Persuasion is a matter of argument being more or less convincing rather than being absolute. Ricoeur’s theory of narrative expands our understanding of the nature of practical judgment. The challenge is to seek concordance across remaining discordance (Ricoeur 1983). Narrative itself seeks to ‘extract a figure from a succession’ (Ricoeur 1983, 66). In seeking to wrestle with some of the deeper insights and consequences of social imaginary analysis that the chapters in this volume attend, I hope to have strengthened the reader’s interest in the probing discussions of social imaginaries that follow. NOTES 1. The role of imagination even in perception indicates a role for imagination in the natural sciences, beyond the humanities and social sciences. One of the tasks of Ricoeur’s Lectures on Imagination (Ricoeur, forthcoming) is to argue for the role of imagination across the domains of thought: ‘If we can show that imagination is creative in the same way in [scientific] models and in poetry, then we have a unifying view of the way in which thought in general is capable of novelty’. 2. For purposes of space I set aside Suzi Adams’s very astute observation and discussion in this volume of the separation between the social imaginary and the symbolic in the early Castoriadis. As she notes, Castoriadis moves away from this emphasis over time. I return to some of the implications of Castoriadis’s early stance for his ontology. 3. I would add that reference to the relevance of fiction to social imaginaries suggests the need to incorporate literary theory within the disciplines of the social imaginary. Ricoeur’s Lectures on Imagination (Ricoeur, forthcoming) pays considerable attention to literary theory, and the relevance of literary theory is very evident also, for instance, in the work of historian Hayden White (White 1973) and anthropologist Clifford Geertz. Geertz’s work responds to his concern that in the social sciences, apart from a few, ‘the question of how symbols symbolize, how they function to mediate meanings has simply been bypassed’ (Geertz 1973, 208). Else-

Foreword

xxi

where he notes how the anthropological work of sorting structures of signification is akin to the task of a literary critic (Geertz 1973, 9).

REFERENCES Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1987. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Castoriadis, Cornelius. ‘Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary’. In The Castoriadis Reader, translated and edited by David Ames Curtis, 319–37. Oxford: Blackwell. Damasio, Antonio R. 1994. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: G. P. Putnam. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1992. Truth and Method. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Crossroad. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kant, Immanuel. 1965. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. 1963. The German Ideology, parts I and III. Edited by R. Pascal. New York: International Publishers. Nussbaum, Martha C. 2001. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. New York: Cambridge University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. The Rule of Metaphor. 1977. Translated by Robert Czerny. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1982. ‘The Status of Vorstellung in Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion’. In Meaning, Truth and God, edited by Leroy S. Rounder, 70–88. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1984. Time and Narrative (volume 1). Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1986. Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. Edited by George H. Taylor. New York: Columbia University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1991. ‘The Creativity of Language’ [interview with Richard Kearney]. In A Ricoeur Reader, edited by Mario J. Valdés, 463–81. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1992. Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, Paul. Forthcoming. Lectures on Imagination. Edited by George H. Taylor, Patrick F. Crosby, and Robert D. Sweeney. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, Paul, and Cornelius Castoriadis. 2017. ‘Dialogue on History and the Social Imaginary’. In Ricoeur and Castoriadis in Discussion: On Human Creation, Historical Novelty, and the Social Imaginary, edited by Suzi Adams, 3–20. London: Rowman & Littlefield International. Suskind, Ron. 2004. ‘Without a Doubt’. New York Times Magazine, October 17. Taylor, George H. 2010. ‘Legal Interpretation: The Window of the Text as Transparent, Opaque, or Translucent’. Nevada Law Journal 10: 700–18. Taylor, George H. 2011. ‘Understanding as Metaphoric, Not a Fusion of Horizons’. In Gadamer and Ricoeur: Critical Horizons for Contemporary Hermeneutics, edited by Francis J. Mootz III and George H. Taylor, 104–18. London: Continuum. Taylor, George H. 2012. ‘Developing Ricoeur’s Concept of Political Legitimacy: The Question of Political Faith’. In Paul Ricoeur and the Task of Political Philosophy, edited by Dan Stiver and Greg Johnson, 159–82. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Taylor, George H. 2018. ‘The Deeper Significance of Ricoeur’s Philosophy of Productive Imagination: The Role of Figuration’. In Productive Imagination: Its History, Meaning, and Significance, edited by Saulius Geniusas and Dmitri Nikulin, 157–81. London: Rowman & Littlefield.

xxii

George H. Taylor

Trivers, Robert. 2011. The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life. New York: Basic Books. West, Robin L. 1987. ‘Adjudication Is Not Interpretation: Some Reservations About the LawAs-Literature Movement’. Tennessee Law Review 54: 203–78. White, Hayden. 1973. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

The Social Imaginaries Field Overview and Introduction Suzi Adams and Jeremy C. A. Smith

This book offers a series of programmatic interventions in the social imaginaries field. In that sense, it is idiosyncratic rather than systematic. Authored by members of the Social Imaginaries Editorial Collective, it takes social imaginaries as a paradigm-in-the-making and critically engages with key problematics while developing the conceptual frameworks. Like the social imaginaries field itself, this book is interdisciplinary and multi-focussed. It is concerned with theoretical debates that constitute the field, with historical analyses that investigate and interpret social and civilisational worlds, and with critical diagnoses of contemporary times. Debates on social imaginaries have burgeoned in recent years. Breaching the confines of academic discourse, contemporary manifestations of social imaginaries—such as the global imaginary, the capitalist imaginary, the humanitarian imaginary or the ecological imaginary—have now entered into public discourse. Concomitantly, the importance of creativity and the imagination, not only for the cultural-artistic sphere but for articulating responses to contemporary social issues, is increasingly emphasised. The scope and direction of the chapters are organised around a flow of arguments and responses to central questions that animate the Social Imaginaries book series. These questions are: First, what are social imaginaries? How can the key theoretical approaches be brought into greater dialogue, and what problematics do new approaches need to address? Debates on social imaginaries comprise a heterogeneous field, which investigates social, historical and political imaginaries; the imaginal, the imaginary and the symbolic; the creative imagination; and beyond. Social imaginaries are often connected to varieties of cultural meaning, but, on closer inspection, they xxiii

xxiv

Suzi Adams and Jeremy C. A. Smith

always already involve modes of social action, power, embodiment, institution and the world horizon. Second, how can the various modes of the creative imagination in the construction of meaning vis-à-vis the human social collective, especially within ontological, phenomenological and hermeneutic frameworks be understood? From Aristotle’s articulation of phantasia onwards, the imagination—and the lingering questions over its creativity—had for many centuries been viewed suspiciously as anarchic or as potentially deviant. With the onset of modernity, and the shift in thinking the imagination from merely reproductive or imitative to authentically creative, the landscape changed. Kant is a watershed figure in this regard. He rediscovered the productivity of the imagination for understanding (in the first Critique)—although with hesitations and retreats, as evinced in the changes he made from the first to the second edition—and for art (in the third Critique). Since then, the Frühromantiker, phenomenologists and others have continued to clarify Kant’s reflections. In so doing, the creative imagination was expanded from the subject to the intersubjective sphere, up to the frontiers of the transsubjective dimension of the social-historical. Its activity—in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, at least—has been often regarded as ontologically significant. The results of this trend toward the philosophical embrace of the imagination are not limited to Western philosophy. Philosophical reflections on the creative imagination have a long and intercultural history. For example, the work of twelfth-century Sufi philosopher Ibn ’Arabi, who casts the imagination as the creative wellspring of existence, is significant in this context. More recently, twentieth-century Japanese philosophers Nakamura Yujiro and Miki Kiyoshi have taken up the question of the productive imagination in distinctive ways. There is a potential tension in the ‘collective’ focus of social imaginaries and the ‘individual’ focus of the creative imagination. We regard it, however, as a productive tension. Historically, the social imaginaries field brought together the sociological problematic of social creativity and the philosophical question of the creative imagination. While there is a focus on collective contexts, there is also always the question of how to situate the self within the broader, collective context and the interplay between the two levels. Third, how are social imaginaries relevant for richer, more historical understandings of the human condition, including those in interplay with civilisational frameworks and/or experiences of modernities? This question invites us to rethink the interconnections between the historicity of the human condition and social imaginaries. Although an understanding of social change is central to historical investigations, the issue of continuity or discontinuity remains open. Research into historical imaginaries is an emergent field. While scholars in civilisational analysis, for example, have examined continuities and discontinuities evident in different historical constellations

The Social Imaginaries Field: Overview and Introduction

xxv

over longer periods of time, theories of modernity foreground conditions and problématiques of the modern world, and tend to draw different conclusions about continuities with the past. Finally, how are the central problematics of contemporary social and political life addressed in the field of social imaginaries, including the crisis of the imagination in its various manifestations? Conversely, how can emerging social imaginaries contribute to a diagnostic of our times? This question petitions responses that articulate particular imaginaries, such as capitalist, ecological, cosmopolitan, constitutional, democratic and nationalist imaginaries, and/or that tackle the contemporary predicament of the imagination and the associated ‘rise of insignificancy’, to use Castoriadis’s terminology. While some imaginaries have already lengthy histories (such as the pursuit of rational mastery), others are nascent (such as entrepreneurial risk cultures), and still others carry a sense of crisis within—and challenge for— the human condition as a whole (such as ecological imaginaries). First emerging in the Francophone context, debates on social imaginaries have flourished in the twenty-first century. However, the intellectual sources and trajectories are exceedingly diverse and interdisciplinary—from sociology to philosophy, from anthropology to psychoanalysis, from politics to critical theory, and beyond. Because of this, social imaginary phenomena are articulated in quite different—and often conflicting—ways. Let us turn to consider the field’s most important intellectual sources, breakthroughs and paths of expansion. Émile Durkheim’s work is a key source for the social imaginaries field, especially his notion of ‘collective representations’. The idea of collective representations—rather than the collective conscience—is more significant as it removes the emphasis from ‘mind/spirit’ and is more amenable to rethinking the social imaginaries as the domain of meaning embedded in social doing and institutions. Although Durkheim wrote about collective representations as an enduring theme, they come to full expression in his last major work, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (Durkheim 1995 [1912]). In this way, collective representations, which are linked to the creativity of society—‘society has a creative power which no other observable being can equal’ (Durkheim 1995, 446)—and express ‘collective realities’ (Durkheim 1995, 10), can be understood as a precursor to social imaginaries. Durkheim and Mauss inaugurated an interdisciplinary sociological and anthropological current that included ongoing dialogue with politics, philosophy and history. More so than for Durkheim, the notion of collective representations becomes linked to articulations of the symbolic for Marcel Mauss (1966), which was then radicalised by Claude Lévi-Strauss. His now famous critique of Mauss contended that the symbolic was the source and not the effect of society (Lévi-Strauss 1987 [1950]). Lévi-Strauss’s Elementary Structures of Kinship

xxvi

Suzi Adams and Jeremy C. A. Smith

(1969 [1949]) placed the symbolic—as the symbolic order—on the map. Drawing on Bachelard, Jung and others, Gilbert Durand’s (1992 [1969]) approach to the anthropological structures of the imaginary (that is, the repertory of what is possible to imagine for a subject or a collective) developed an influential research path that included a centre and journal. These sociological-anthropological currents of thought further entwined with phenomenological debates—Merleau-Ponty’s ‘From Mauss to Claude Lévi-Strauss’ (1974a) epitomises this engagement—as well as with psychoanalysis (we return to this later). The notion of the imaginary emerges from French philosophical thought, with especial reference to post-Heideggerian phenomenology. In connection with the phenomenological imagination, it first appeared in Sartre’s text L’imaginaire (1940) albeit in a different, more negative sense. Lacan’s structuralist psychoanalytic ordering of human existence into the ‘symbolic’, ‘the imaginary’ and ‘the real’ can be considered a response to Sartre. Before Lacan become interested in the symbolic (dating from 1953)—chiefly through an engagement with Lévi-Strauss—he was more interested in articulating the imaginary as the imago (1936–1953; Lacan 1977): his work has been influential for some approaches to social imaginaries. Still within structuralism, Louis Althusser took Lacan’s notion of the imaginary and the mirror stage to rethink Marx’s understanding of ideology (Althusser 1971). Within phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty also included reflections on the imaginary dimension, especially in his late work (1974b), which suggested that the imaginary was to be understood as a dimension of the real. Importantly, Merleau-Ponty’s work was a crucial source for the significant advances of the following two decades, when the ‘social imaginary’ becomes a question in its own right. The first major breakthroughs in the then-emergent social imaginaries field appeared in the 1960s and 1970s. A group of thinkers—variously associated with one or more of the journals Socialisme ou Barbarie, Textures and Libre—at which core (in various configurations at various times) were Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, Marc Richir, Marcel Gauchet and Miguel Abensour—drew on these streams of thought in diverse ways. Castoriadis’s The Imaginary Institution of Society (1987 [1975]) is perhaps the most important contribution to the field: his elucidation of the imaginary element as distinct from the rational and the symbolic drew on Lacan but reconfigured this triad in far-reaching ways that was more reminiscent of a radicalisation of Merleau-Ponty. While both Castoriadis and Lefort understood society as a political institution, Lefort’s work has been more associated with political imaginaries than Castoriadis’s, perhaps in part due to the greater uptake of Lefort’s work in political philosophy. Yet Lefort drew less on the imaginary and more on the symbolic and developed an intriguing approach that owes clear debts to Merleau-Ponty, Marx and Lacan (e.g., Lefort 1985). Marc

The Social Imaginaries Field: Overview and Introduction

xxvii

Richir’s work (1975) is not as well known in the Anglosphere, but he developed a rich phenomenology that included a rethinking of the imaginary in connection with the symbolic, the institution and the creativity of artistic practice. Marcel Gauchet and Miguel Abensour both worked with Castoriadis and Lefort. Drawing more on Lefort, Abensour developed his approach in relation to utopia and democracy (e.g., 2011), whereas Gauchet drew on both Lefort and Castoriadis to articulate his historical anthropological vision of the human condition, and, although neither he nor Abensour explicitly use the term ‘imaginary’, it appears in their work in other guises (Gauchet 2005). In 1975—the same year that Castoriadis published The Imaginary Institution of Society—Ricoeur presented two series of lectures in the fall semester at the University of Chicago. The first was on the social imaginary—entitled Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (1986)—and the second was on the philosophy of the imagination (Ricoeur, forthcoming). However, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia was not published until a decade or so later, and the philosophy of the imagination lectures are to be published for the first time in 2019. This has meant that Ricoeur’s distinctive and characteristically thoughtful approach to interrelated questions of the social imaginary, the imagination and creativity was not known until much later, and his influence for the social imaginaries field as a whole has been more marginal than it deserves. By the 1980s, social imaginary debates were expanding. Bronislaw Baczko published Les imaginaires sociaux (1984), which was influential for Charles Taylor, as was Benedict Anderson’s neo-Durkheimian, Imagined Communities (2006 [1983]). Drawing on debates at the juncture of critical theory and hermeneutics, John Thompson trod a pathway between Lefort and Castoriadis, but gave a hermeneutic twist to a Lefortian approach to ideology and symbolic forms in combination with Castoriadis’s understanding of the social-historical and social creativity (Thompson 1990). Before elaborating the expansion of social imaginaries from the 1990s, let us briefly consider the interrelated domain of the creative imagination, with particular attention paid to openings onto the collective dimension in recent thought. Building on post-Kantian philosophy, discussions of the creative imagination revolve around questions of the constitution of the world. Drawing on Ricoeur’s thought, Richard Kearney developed a distinctive approach to the creative imagination as multidimensional (Kearney 1998). Similarly drawing on Ricoeur, George H. Taylor further elaborates the interplay of imagination and social imaginaries, with a particular emphasis on its capacity for creativity and critique (Taylor 1986; 2017a). It is easy to see a more complete and nuanced reconception of historical creation in these further elaborations of Ricoeur (Taylor 2017b). Nakamura Yukiro developed a collective image of creation by building on Miki Kiyoshi’s reformulation of myth (Miki 2016). Kathleen Lennon’s account of the productive imagination

xxviii

Suzi Adams and Jeremy C. A. Smith

and corporeal imaginaries build on Merleau-Ponty and Spinoza, among others (Lennon 2004; 2015). Finally, Saulius Geniusas’s bridge between Cassirer and Heidegger opens onto collective contexts of the imagination (Geniusas 2018). In the 1980s and 1990s, social imaginaries perspectives began to proliferate further. Building on his work on praxis, and drawing on Castoriadis, Weber and Merleau-Ponty, Johann Arnason retheorised culture and modernity from an imaginary perspective (Arnason 1989a; 1989b). New evaluations of modernity saw plurality (particularly in Peter Wagner and S. N. Eisenstadt’s work), where earlier assessments had focussed on Europe as the fons et origo of a singular constellation of modernity. In this phase, a pluralist vision on multiple modernities emerged. Traversing philosophy, history and sociology, Arnason has elucidated the imaginary significations of wealth, power and meaning in numerous civilisations and world regions. Ranging across phenomenology and the comparative analysis of multiple modernities and civilisations, his projects continue to examine the imaginary dimension of all the major social constellations (see, e.g., Arnason 2003). This leads us to Charles Taylor’s landmark work (Taylor 2004). 1 A formative collaboration with the Centre for Transcultural Studies shaped his conception of social imaginaries (Lee and Gaonkar 2002). Taylor’s approach is quotidian, touching on how people imagine the social world through their daily experiences. Multiple social imaginaries supply moral self-understanding, legitimacy, belonging and core normative meaning to different social worlds. The rich sense of plurality of imaginaries in the Taylorian rendition of social imaginaries, along with his unambiguous gesture toward multiple constellations of these imaginaries, refines the pronounced turn to plurality. The collaborative circle reconvened fifteen years later to review developments in the wake of Taylor’s book (Calhoun et al 2015), noting new imaginaries around risk, entrepreneurship, cities, science and ecology. Social imaginaries perspectives became increasingly interdisciplinary at the turn of the twenty-first century. Craig Calhoun combines sociology with a sharp historical sensibility in theorising the nationalist imaginary (Calhoun 2007). Like Taylor, he grounds his accounts in social practices. While his language of ‘imagined solidarities’ may sound Anderson-esque, he transcends the distinction between novelty and continuity made in so many studies of nationalism. Instead, a focus on the imaginary puts his viewpoint squarely in the contemporary field. As a perspective on modernity and the present, Peter Wagner’s relevance to the field has been two-fold. First, he sustains Castoriadis’s imaginary significations of autonomy and mastery as major markers of modernity (Wagner 2008). Autonomy and mastery are present, second, in the variety of interpretations of the problématiques of collective life (political, economic and epistemic). Moreover, as Wagner has progressed his research, he has revised the theoretical terms of all three

The Social Imaginaries Field: Overview and Introduction

xxix

problématiques to apply to a diverse range of formations and to the imaginary of progress (Wagner 2016). (Wagner’s encounter with Eisenstadt’s notion of multiple modernities influenced the shift.) Although he insists on ‘modernity’ in the singular, he is committed to visions of plurality and contingency, as are other major thinkers in the field. The contemporary period includes the elucidation of other imaginaries: feminist, political, global, capitalist and ecological. Kathleen Lennon and Moira Gatens turn feminist philosophy to problems of collective imaginaries. They explore the images, symbols and representations through which bodies and subjectivities speak to—and are addressed by—discourses of gender and sexuality (Gatens 1996; Lennon 2004). Situated between the imagination and the imaginary, Chiara Bottici’s theorisation of power, which she casts in terms of the imaginal (Bottici 2014), similarly highlights gendered inequality and un-freedom. For her, the reimagination of emancipation leads to an anarcho-feminist politics. Also in search of an effective emancipatory project, María Pía Lara extends feminist critique to narrative imaginaries of the public sphere and the social movements (Lara 1998). Grounding an ideal of emancipatory politics in the historical, she emphasises the breadth of experiences of modernity (including colonial ones). Tellingly, Gatens, Lloyd, Bottici, Lara and Lennon stipulate that a plural conception of imaginaries is indispensable in making sense of the dissonances of different dimensions of the social institution. As well as Castoriadis and Lefort, Chiara Bottici, Yaron Ezrahi, Marcel Gauchet, Dick Howard, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Martin Plot, Gabriel Rockhill, and Ingerid Straume are at the forefront of analysing political imaginaries. Democracy is the most fragile of political imaginaries and, in the twenty-first century, anti-political trends (in Dick Howard’s terms) are undermining it. Other major figures perceive a crisis of democracy in processes of depoliticisation and globalisation, making it harder to imagine alternatives (Bottici, Gauchet and Straume). Some claim that globalisation also has an imaginary dimension (Steger 2008). The ideals of cosmopolitanism arguably arise from the expansion of experiences of international life (in tourism, the creation of an elite global workforce, etc.) (Calhoun et al 2015, 201–13). To be sure, there is globality in cosmopolitanism. Yet, as Calhoun argues, it is never too far from imaginaries grounded in the variety of nations, cities and regions. In his critique of the project of globalisation, Gabriel Rockhill likewise stresses the multiplicity of imaginaries and constellations of lived experience obscured in globalism’s image of the present (Rockhill 2017). The status of the global imaginary remains open to debate and, indeed, it is a problematic calling for further research. That said, discourses on two other imaginaries necessarily return to the global and planetary level. Critical perspectives exploring the multiplication of patterns of capitalism have long left functionalist preconceptions behind.

xxx

Suzi Adams and Jeremy C. A. Smith

A core premise is that dynamics of creation diversify the capitalist imaginary into many instantiations, including across civilisational varieties (Arnason 2001; Browne 2016). The imaginary significations of wealth are central to the emergence of diverse new capitalist constellations. The expansion of wealth is involved in the second imaginary with worldwide dimensions—the ecological. This imaginary invests nature with a host of meanings (scientific, agricultural, romantic), as well as generating counter-discourses to technoindustrial expansion and bio-technological intervention (Calhoun et al 2015; Rundell 2012; Soper 2009). The manifold ecological crisis is the most momentous issue of our times, underlining the case for civilisational re-orientation of the relationship of human and the non-human worlds. We open these critical interventions with Suzi Adams’s chapter, entitled ‘Clarifying Social Imaginaries: Castoriadis, Ricoeur and Taylor in Discussion’. Despite the significance of their respective contributions, comparative research into these thinkers’ social imaginary frameworks has not yet been undertaken. Adams hermeneutically reconstructs key themes in each of their approaches. She first discusses Castoriadis, focussing on his early reflections on the imaginary element as a crucial part of his break from Marx. Here Castoriadis elucidates not only social imaginary significations in relation to institutions, but also to the symbolic and varieties of ‘social doing’. Paul Ricoeur’s articulation of the social imaginary appeared as an open dialectic of ideology and utopia. Of the three, Ricoeur draws the most extensively and thoroughly on sociological sources, and his social imaginary framework is anchored in a theory of creative action. Charles Taylor’s work on modern social imaginaries appeared some two decades later after Ricoeur and Castoriadis’s most systematic work. Taylor came to articulate the social imaginary as a way of rethinking the plurality of modernity, but along the way, it came to be a question in its own right. In bringing Castoriadis, Ricoeur and Taylor into discussion, Adams brings to light key convergences, divergences and disagreements between them. These cluster around questions on the ‘meaning of meaning’, creativity in history, action and institution, the problematic of power, the world horizon and different registers of the social. Adams concludes her discussion with a critical encounter with Vincent Descombes’s rethinking of the objective spirit to more fully articulate social imaginaries as the domain of the social in toto. Moving from social imaginaries to the productive imagination, John W. M. Krummel’s contribution, ‘Rethinking the History of the Productive Imagination in Relation to Common Sense’ interrogates the tension between the imagination and the imaginary by rethinking the connections between the productive imagination and common sense. He argues that the forming capacity of the imagination incorporates an implicit sociality as a form of collective—or communal—sense- and world-formation that underlies collec-

The Social Imaginaries Field: Overview and Introduction

xxxi

tive being-in-the-world. As such it plays an important role in world-interaction, especially in relation to its creativity to a communal sensibility; that is, a ‘common sense’ as sensus communis. Krummel reconstructs the ‘long and precarious’ history of the productive imagination in philosophy and pays particular attention to its links to common sense. Beginning with Aristotle, Krummel maps its intermittent articulation in Kant, Heidegger, Castoriadis, Ricoeur and Miki. In arguing for the ontologically constitutive nature of the imagination, Krummel further contends that the imagination is characterised by a duplicity. It appears as the contradictory tendencies toward both ossification or world-closure and fluidity and world-openness. He also identifies a parallel bifurcation in ‘common sense’, which incorporates not only a sense of ‘social habit’ but a critical aspect, as well. They join together in the formation of social meaning in new contexts of truth. Moving to the macro-historical domain, Jeremy C. A. Smith’s chapter, ‘History, Civilisations, Imaginaries’, addresses perspectives on historical discontinuity and social imaginaries emerging in contemporary civilisational analysis. In the era of post-functionalist thought, historical sociologists and world historians have renewed engagement with social theory. Smith evaluates Charles Taylor, Shmuel Eisenstadt, Benjamin Nelson and Johann Arnason as key thinkers. Arnason’s perspective particularly animates the most significant intersections between the social imaginaries field and the comparative analysis of civilisations. His approach explores the imaginary significations of wealth, meaning and power (that form partly through intercivilisational encounters), as well as the regional contexts of different constellations. By this means, he steers between Eisenstadt’s delimiting association of civilisations and multiple modernities with the world religions and Castoriadis’s view that the instituting imaginary can potentially produce an indefinite diversity of formations. In recent years, Arnason has suggested that comparative and empirical treatment of constellations neglected by civilisational analysis—including the Americas and Africa—is a legitimate pursuit. The suggestion invites comparison with Wagner’s project on the trajectories of modernity. With multiple modernities at the fore of Arnason’s current research agenda (Arnason, forthcoming), there is significant potential for a reconsideration of Eisenstadt’s conception of the ‘civilisation of modernity’ in light of Wagner’s and Arnason’s scholarship on social imaginaries and modernity. The principal sources of the social imaginaries field are also major theorists of politics and the political imagination. In ‘Political and Constitutional Imaginaries’, Paul Blokker supplies an extensive interpretation of the state of research into political imaginaries. Covering the breadth of the theoretical and substantive literature, Blokker’s chapter examines the existential test that democracy is undergoing in the age of corrosive neo-liberal governance and de-differentiating movements of populism. In his own argument that the

xxxii

Suzi Adams and Jeremy C. A. Smith

constitutional imaginary is a ‘constellation of ideas, fictions and myths’ of democratic sovereignty, Blokker is methodical in analysing contemporary trends. Between the modernist constitutional imaginary and the democratic constitutional imaginary, he finds a tension between evolutionary visions of the outgrowth of juridical limitations to power and the creative impulses to self-governance. In the rise of populism, Blokker sees a third emergent political imaginary, one in which the remaking of institutions at the expense of the liberal rule of law is undertaken in the name of national redemption. In different ways, Europe and the United States are hothouses for the tensions around, on one hand, competing visions of constitutional order and living democracy (particularly in Europe), and, on the other, democratic balance and the most absolute version of majoritarianism imaginable. Consideration of Europe and the United States brings us to Natalie J. Doyle’s chapter, ‘The Political Imaginary of European Hypermodernity: Marcel Gauchet and Contemporary Neo-Liberal Democracy’. In analysing Europe’s hypermodernity, she follows Gauchet’s argument that the crisis of democracy is the surface effect of a deeper manifold crisis of modernity stimulated by the globalisation of European models of social and political life. The principal ideology of European hypermodernity—and Gauchet counts the United States as a variant of this—is neo-liberalism (better conceived as neo-liberal democracy to better emphasise the imaginary dimension), which bears with it a tendency to merge democracy with a radically individualist variety of capitalism. In this context, the very collectivity of states declines in a desacralisation of authority. The crisis is experienced as depoliticisation and presentism, which allow the space for populism to flourish. Doyle draws into relief the influence of Castoriadis in Gauchet’s thinking; yet she also highlights fundamentally divergent conclusions that Gauchet reached. Furthermore, although Gauchet may have relinquished the term ‘imaginary’, the concept recurs persistently in his work. Hypermodernity itself, as Gauchet frames it, is an imaginary. It is, furthermore, the outcome of long-term dynamics (such as ‘deimperialisation’) as well as distinct ruptures (the emergence of neo-liberalism). Doyle’s erudite interpretation of Gauchet’s oeuvre for English-language readers unmistakably situates him as a thinker in the social imaginaries field. Furthermore, Doyle concludes, his framework supports the larger project of reimagining citizenship and power. Perspectives on social imaginaries help us reinterpret and transform socio-political worlds. Shifting the ground from the collective and symbolic institution of social forms to the reorientation of the singular imagination to a deeper consideration of its creative and collective aspects, and then to the pluralisation of imaginaries, the field continues to redraw, expand and problematise its boundaries. Contributors to this volume selectively highlight defining problematics—be they recent or more enduring—that mark out the topography of the field. The major disciplines—social theory, philosophy,

The Social Imaginaries Field: Overview and Introduction

xxxiii

history, political theory and sociology—as well as consideration of many of the most significant thinkers, are included. Contributions to this volume not only map the terrain but intervene and develop it further. As each responds critically to one of the questions defining the Social Imaginaries book series, each gives voice to a specific position in these complex debates. The chapters offer hermeneutical comparative analysis of theoretical frameworks, rethematise common sense in relation to the imagination, analyse imaginary approaches to discontinuities in historical and global constellations, elucidate novel and established political imaginaries, and examine Europe’s trajectory of hypermodernity. These are position-taking interventions epitomising the temper of critical debate characteristic of the field. As such, they advance the field through interrogation. NOTES 1. Modern Social Imaginaries is in essence a long essay that built on earlier work in, for example, the special issue on New Imaginaries in Public Culture in 2002 and was later incorporated into the magisterial, A Secular Age. It was thus written as an autonomous piece but forms part of his overall project on modernity and a secular age. This notwithstanding, the book version of Modern Social Imaginaries took on a life of its own and was pivotal to the growing significance of the social imaginaries field for a broader audience.

REFERENCES Abensour, Miguel. 2011. Democracy against the State: Marx and the Machiavellian Moment. Translated by Max Breckmann and Martin Breaugh. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Althusser, Louis. 1971. ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an investigation)’. In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, 121–76. New York: Monthly Review Press. Anderson, Benedict. 2006 [1983]. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso Books. Arnason, Johann P. 1989a. ‘Culture and Imaginary Significations’. Thesis Eleven 22: 25–45. Arnason, Johann P. 1989b. ‘The Imaginary Constitution of Modernity’. Revue européenne de sciences sociales 27 (86): 323–33. Arnason, Johann P. 2001. ‘Capitalism in Context: Sources, Trajectories and Alternatives’. Thesis Eleven 66: 99–125. Arnason, Johann P. 2003. Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Questions and Theoretical Traditions. Leiden: Brill. Baczko, Bronislaw. 1984. Les imaginaires sociaux: Mémoires et espoirs collectifs. Paris: Payot Press. Bottici, Chiara. 2014. Imaginal Politics: Images Beyond the Imagination and the Imaginary. New York: Colombia University Press. Browne, Craig. 2016. ‘Critiques of Identity and Permutations of the Capitalist Imaginary’. Social Imaginaries 2 (1): 95–118. Calhoun, Craig 2007. Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream. New York: Routledge. Calhoun, Craig, Dilip Gaonkar, Benjamin Lee, Charles Taylor, and Michael Warner. 2015. ‘Modern Social Imaginaries. A Conversation’. Social Imaginaries 1 (1): 189–224. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1987 [1975]. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge UK: Polity Press.

xxxiv

Suzi Adams and Jeremy C. A. Smith

Durand, Gilbert. 1992 [1969]. Les structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire. Paris: BORDAS. Durkheim, Émile. 1995. Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Translated by Karen Fields. New York: Free Press. Gatens, Moira.1996. Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality. London: Routledge. Gatens, Moira, and Genevieve Lloyd. 1999. Collective Imaginings. London: Routledge. Gauchet, Marcel. 2005. La condition politique. Paris: Gallimard. Geniusas, Saulius. 2018. ‘Productive Imagination and Cassirer-Heidegger Disputation’. In Productive Imagination: Its History, Meaning, and Significance, edited by Saulius Geniusas and Dmitri Nikulin. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Gratton, Peter, and John Panteleimon Manoussakis (eds.). 2007. Traversing the Imaginary: Richard Kearney and the Postmodern Challenge. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Kearney, Richard. 1998. Poetics of Imagining: Modern to Postmodern. New York: Fordham University Press. Lacan, Jacques. 1977. Écrits: A Selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton. Lara, María Pía. 1998. Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Polity Press. Lefort, Claude. 1985. The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism. Edited and introduced by John B. Thompson. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Lee, Benjamin, and Dilip P. Gaonkar. 2002. ‘New Imaginaries’. Public Culture 14 (1): 91–124. Lennon, Kathleen. 2004. ‘Imaginary Bodies and Worlds’. Inquiry 47 (2): 107–22. Lennon, Kathleen. 2015. Imagination and the Imaginary. London: Routledge. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1987 [1950]. Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss. Translated by Felicity Barker. London: Routledge. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1969 [1949]. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston: Beacon Press. Mauss, Marcel. 1966. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. Translated by Ian Cunnison. London: Cohen and West. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1974a. ‘From Mauss to Claude Lévi-Strauss’. In Phenomenology, Language and Sociology: Selected Essays of Merleau-Ponty, edited by John O’Neill, 111–22. London: Heinemann. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1974b. ‘Eye and Mind’. In Phenomenology, Language and Sociology: Selected essays of Merleau-Ponty, edited by John O’Neill, 280–311. London: Heinemann. Miki, Kiyoshi. 2016. ‘Myth’. Social Imaginaries 2 (1): 25–69. Richir, Marc. 1975. ‘La vision et son imaginaire (I). Fragment pour une philosophie de l’institution’. Textures 75 (10-11): 87–144. Ricoeur, Paul. 1986. Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. Edited by George Taylor. New York: Columbia University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. Forthcoming. Lectures on Imagination. Edited by George H. Taylor, Patrick Crosby, and Robert D. Sweeney. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (forthcoming). Rockhill, Gabriel. 2017. Counter-History of the Present: Untimely Interrogations into Globalization, Technology, Democracy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rundell, John. 2012. ‘Modernity, Humans and Animals—Tensions in the Field of the Technical-Industrial Imaginary’. New Formations 76: 8–20. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1940. L’imaginaire: psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination. Paris: Gallimard. Soper, Kate. 2009. ‘Unnatural Times? The Social Imaginary and the Future of Nature’. The Sociological Review 57: 222–35. Steger, Manfred. 2008. The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political Ideologies from the French Revolution to the Global War on Terror. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, Charles. 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Taylor, George H. 1986. ‘Editor’s Introduction’. In Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, by Paul Ricoeur, edited by George Taylor, ix–xxxvi. New York: Columbia University Press.

The Social Imaginaries Field: Overview and Introduction

xxxv

Taylor, George H. 2017a. ‘Delineating Ricoeur’s Concept of Utopia’. Social Imaginaries 3, 1: 41–60. Taylor, George H. 2017b. ‘On the Cusp: Ricoeur and Castoriadis at the Boundary’. In Ricoeur and Castoriadis in Discussion: On Human Creation, Historical Novelty, and the Social Imaginary, edited by Suzi Adams, 23–48. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Thompson, John B. 1990. Ideology and Modern Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Wagner Peter. 2008. Modernity as Experience and Interpretation: A New Sociology of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Wagner Peter. 2016. Progress: A Reconstruction. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Chapter One

Clarifying Social Imaginaries Castoriadis, Ricoeur and Taylor in Discussion Suzi Adams

The last two or three decades have seen the maturing of the social imaginaries field. No longer can it be considered an emergent direction of enquiry; rather, it is better characterised as a paradigm-in-the-making. The field itself remains highly heterogeneous. This is not least in part due to the interdisciplinarity of its sources—from sociology to philosophy, from anthropology to psychoanalysis, and beyond (see Adams and Smith, in this volume). This notwithstanding, the major theoretical breakthroughs that have shaped it as a recognisable field are readily identifiable. They are those by Cornelius Castoriadis, Paul Ricoeur and Charles Taylor, respectively. 1 Despite the prominence of their thought—and the significance of their overall respective contributions—they have not yet been brought into critical dialogue. The present chapter begins to fill this gap. 2 It hermeneutically reconstructs Castoriadis, Ricoeur and Taylor’s social imaginary frameworks, and then discusses some of the key issues that emerge through this critical encounter—including the problematics of creativity, action and institution. The chapter concludes with some reflections on social imaginaries as a way of articulating a post-Hegelian understanding of the objective spirit. CASTORIADIS AND SOCIAL IMAGINARY SIGNIFICATIONS Cornelius Castoriadis’s best-known work, The Imaginary Institution of Society (1987), was first published in 1975 and includes his most systematic writings on social imaginary significations. 3 His overall aim was to challenge the long-held notion that ‘the imaginary’ is distinct from ‘the real’, and to 1

2

Suzi Adams

show that it ‘institutes’ social reality as radically creative activity. However, the IIS was not his final word on social imaginaries. Indeed, his reflections on this problematic occupied three decades of his life—from the mid-1960s until his death in 1997. During this time, his understanding of them changed considerably. Three phases are discernible. 4 The first spans 1964 to 1972 and shows Castoriadis’s early grappling with the imaginary element that incorporated reflections on, for example, social doing, the symbolic and institutions from a broadly phenomenological perspective. The second phase spans 1970 to 1975. During this time, Castoriadis wrote the second part of the IIS and announced his ontological turn. 5 The final phase ranges from 1976 until his death in 1997. It is characterised less by significant changes in his overall approach and more by a rethinking of several interconnecting issues that have bearing on his social imaginary framework, such as the sacred, an incorporation of an explicit theory of power as ‘ground power’ into his understanding of institutions, and a growing recognition of art as a ‘window on the chaos’. Let us turn to the first phase (1964/1965 to 1972) of Castoriadis’s engagement with the ‘imaginary element’. This early phase is characterised by Castoriadis’s break from Marx and subsequent settling of accounts with Marxism. 6 Central to Castoriadis’s critique of Marx was the acceptance of history as the domain of meaning and social creation, which he elucidated via the imaginary element and the institution. 7 Importantly, at this time, Castoriadis included significant discussion of the intertwining of the imaginary with the symbolic, although this receded from focus after 1970. More generally, prior to his ontological turn in the early 1970s, Castoriadis’s approach can be considered broadly phenomenological. Although he was not a systematic phenomenologist, his philosophical framework at that time assumed the importance of phenomenological themes and questions. 8 Additionally, his distinction between—and interweaving of—the symbolic and the imaginary, and his unambiguous understanding of Marx’s Eleventh Thesis as ‘interpreting the world in order to change it’ (Castoriadis 1987, 164), demonstrate an explicit albeit unsystematic openness to the hermeneutic dimension of the imaginary element (and the project of autonomy), which he later repudiated (Castoriadis 1997). As part of his critical response to Marx, Castoriadis elucidates history (as the social-historical) as the domain of meaning, where his overall purpose is to argue for the imaginary institution of the real. His first step in the argument is to critique functionalism—specifically, the functionalist approaches to institutions—through consideration of the symbolic (Castoriadis 1987). Consideration of the institutional dimension is central to any understanding of society. Social institutions are real (i.e., they are actual—e.g., from marriage to buying property to legal penalties) but for Castoriadis they are irreducible to a functional element (Castoriadis 1987, 131). To discuss a func-

Clarifying Social Imaginaries

3

tion of society already presupposes the activity of the imaginary. In this vein, he argues that ‘the functionalist view can realize its programme only if it supplied itself with a criterion for the “reality” of the needs of society. Where will it find this criterion?’ (Castoriadis 1987, 116). The ‘real’ has its basis in the imaginary element of society: the real is a social-historical creation; the real is instituted. Incarnated in social imaginary significations, and embodied in social institutions, the imaginary not only gives access to ‘the real’ but creates ‘the real’ as this ‘particular reality’. Without reference to the particular imaginary as the ‘invisible unnameable’ standing behind institutions, its symbolic and functional aspects (and their interconnections) remain incomprehensible. For Castoriadis, central social imaginary significations are not primarily symbolic in the sense that they do not represent something else: it is a condition of possibility that make particular symbols, organisation patterns and representations of a given society, the ‘final articulations the society in question has imposed on the world, on itself, and on its needs’, as the ‘invisible cement holding together this endless collection of real, rational and symbolic odds and ends that constitute every society, and as the principle that selects and shapes the bits and pieces that will be accepted there’ (Castoriadis 1987, 143) (I return to the notion of central imaginary significations later). Functionality looks to an external source for its meaning; symbolism refers to something that is neither symbolic nor real/rational: in each case, this element is the social imaginary. Castoriadis turns to the second aspect of the institution—the symbolic— as the first step to critique the pretentions of functionalism (and its concomitant determinist ontology). This is the only time in his published writings that Castoriadis systematically discusses questions of the symbolic; as such, it is significant. 9 He pursues a broadly phenomenological problematic; that is, to examine the mode of being in which the institution is ‘given to us’ (Castoriadis 1987, 117); everything, indeed, that is given to us in the social-historical world ‘is inextricably tied to the symbolic’ (Castoriadis 1987, 117). The symbolic is characterised here as ‘symbolic networks’—such as religion or the legal system—within which particular symbols operate. For example, a property title symbolises the socially sanctioned ‘right’ of the owner to undertake unlimited operations in relation to the property in question (Castoriadis 1987, 117). Although institutions are irreducible to the symbolic, they exist only in the symbolic, where each institution forms its own symbolic web (Castoriadis 1987, 117). Castoriadis also wants to challenge functionalist (rationalist) views of the symbolic. To do so, he takes up the meta-institution of religion (following Durkheim) (Castoriadis 1987, 118). He contends that, although all religions incorporate ritual, the relation between the ritual and the content of the ritual is symbolic, not functional. Ritual consists in a proliferation of specific de-

4

Suzi Adams

tail; each aspect is equally as important; there is no distinction between ‘essential’ and ‘secondary’ aspects of its content: ‘Everything the Sacred takes hold of is equally sacred’ (Castoriadis 1987, 119). But interpretative lacunae remain: gaps in the network of the symbolic and functional that leave a residual meaning; the symbolic relation is not self-evident, where the symbol is neither inevitable nor haphazard (but an institution of the social-historical); and, finally, the boundaries of the symbolic (i.e., the point at which the symbolic overlaps with the functional) are not predetermined and vary according to context. Having argued at length for the centrality of the symbolic in relation to the real-rational, Castoriadis stops quite abruptly to reiterate his point that symbolic networks do not exhaust social meaning (Castoriadis 1987, 127). They in turn draw on, and are made possible by, social imaginary significations: The deep and obscure relations between the symbolic and the imaginary appear as soon as one reflects on the following fact: the imaginary has to use the symbolic not only to ‘express’ itself (this is self-evident) but to ‘exist’, to pass from the virtual to anything more than this. The most elaborate delirium, just as the most secret and vaguest phantasy, are composed of ‘images’, but these ‘images’ are there to represent something else and so have a symbolic function. But, conversely, symbolism, too presupposes an imaginary capacity. For it presupposes the capacity to see in a thing what it is not, to see it other than it is. (Castoriadis 1987, 127)

The crux of his argument in that essay was then to demonstrate that the imaginary element as the radical imaginary was the precondition of the symbolic. Thus, for example, the pay cheque symbolises the capitalist system of wage labour, but this in turn articulates the social imaginary signification of rational mastery—or, more correctly, the infinite pursuit of (pseudo)rational mastery. The symbolic and the imaginary elements are entwined and manifest this interplay through the self-institution of society—and its institutions. Each society has a particular symbolism that is grounded in the specificity of that society’s imaginary significations. Thus the imaginary element outstrips any functional component of institutions. At the heart of every social order lies an ‘imaginary’ origin; be that ‘God’, ‘Nature’ (etc.) (Castoriadis 1987, 128); that is, the invisible behind the visible: an ‘invisible unnameable’ (Castoriadis 1987, 131). Yet, what is the imaginary element? It is ‘more real than the real’; through and as which we gain access to ‘reality’. The imaginary element is ‘an original investment by society of the world and itself with meaning—meanings which are not “dictated” by real factors since it is instead this meaning that attributes to these real factors a particular importance and a particular place in the universe constituted by a given society’ (Castoriadis 1987, 128).

Clarifying Social Imaginaries

5

Castoriadis’s differentiation between the imaginary and the symbolic was distinctive for the field. Yet he continued to develop his account further. As mentioned previously, he published the IIS in 1975. The second part of this work announced his turn to ontology. 10 This second phase of his reflections on social imaginaries—1970 to 1975—is the most self-contained and the most systematic. Castoriadis sought to understand what kind of ontological framework must underpin the project of autonomy in both its collective and individual aspects. His response was an ontology of immanent self-creation (self-institution) through the social imaginary creation ex nihilo of a world of meaning that was embedded in institutional forms. Castoriadis’s turn to ontology appeared as a philosophical anthropology of the creative imagination that spanned two regions: the radical social imaginary of the social-historical and the radical imagination of the psyche. 11 Castoriadis’s ontology of creation serves as a trenchant critique of what he calls Western philosophy’s bias toward an understanding of ‘being’ as ‘being determined’. He wants to provide an alternative to ‘the history of the mainstream of philosophy as the elaboration of Reason, homologous to the positing of being as being-determined, or determinacy (Peras/Bestimmtheit)’ (Castoriadis 1993, 1). Such approaches characteristically emphasise Reason/ the rational and occlude the very possibility of creation, on the one hand, and the social-historical as the self-creating mode of being par excellence, on the other. Castoriadis’s critique of determinacy as an ontology of creation points to his distinction between ‘difference’ and ‘alterity’, on the one hand, and ‘production’ and ‘creation’, on the other. The ‘production of difference’ belongs to identity thinking and occludes creation. It implies the fabrication from something already existing—a combining of pre-existing elements. He interrogates the structuralist argument (with a particular focus on LéviStrauss’s account) as paradigmatic for this approach, which also informed his discussion with Ricoeur in the mid-1980s (Ricoeur and Castoriadis 2017). For Castoriadis, the ‘creation’ of ‘new forms’ brings about ‘alterity/otherness’; that is, the emergence of radical novelty. It recognises the human capacity to create ontological form (eidos), which undermines traditional ontologies of determinacy. Ontologies of determinacy could not grasp the radical, self-creating regions of anthropic being, in particular, the socialhistorical and the psychical, that are immanently and radically self-creating/ self-determining; that is, are not determined by an external source. An increasing emphasis on ‘signification’ as part of Castoriadis’s concerted reflections on the ‘meaning of meaning’ in the second part of the IIS was matched by a growing neglect of the symbolic element of the imaginary. Nonetheless, the ontological iteration of social imaginary significations deepened his reflections on, and the distinction between, the rational element—now designated as the ensemblistic-identitarian (or more simply, en-

6

Suzi Adams

sidic) level—from the imaginary, which is manifested via signification. Despite this, mention of the symbolic in relation to the imaginary is now altogether absent. The notion of institution is omnipresent in this ‘second attempt’ at elucidating social imaginaries but is not foregrounded in the ontological discussion as it was in the earlier period. Instead, Castoriadis develops his notion of magma that he first articulated in relation to the psyche (1984) but now extends it to the social-historical domain of social imaginary significations (as well as into regions of nature). In so doing, he emphasises the social imaginary creation of a world ex nihilo as an ontological creation (he articulated this in the earlier chapter, entitled ‘The Social-Historical’, as part of his ontology of time and creation as a critique of ontologies of determinacy endemic to Western thought). Castoriadis’s elucidation of the mode of being of social imaginary significations appears as a reflection on ‘the meaning of meaning’. Linking the creative imagination to meaning is arguably Castoriadis’s most important philosophical contribution. While for Castoriadis social imaginary significations are embedded in language (Castoriadis 1987, 345ff), they are not reducible to it, but ‘being in language is accepting to be in signification’ (Castoriadis 1987, 350). Unlike Taylor or Ricoeur, he does not pursue a linguistification of either the human condition or the imagination. He criticises conventional distinctions between, for example, proper and figurative meaning or denotation and connotation, arguing that at base they aim at the distinction between the identitary-ensemblist dimension of signification and ‘full signification’. In this way, Castoriadis writes that there is no identitary meaning; there is ‘simply an identitary use of meaning’ (Castoriadis 1987, 347, emphasis in original), ‘a point in a network of identitary markings, which is itself caught up in the magma of significations and related to the magma of what is’ (Castoriadis 1987, 348). The magma metaphor was absent from Castoriadis’s 1964/1965 articulation of the imaginary, but played an important part in the later ontology. For Castoriadis, each social-historical world is created by a magma of social imaginary significations. What is a magma? Drawing on the geological notion of a volcanic, molten unguent, magma is a non-ensemblistic mode of organisation of the social-historical (and also of the unconscious, with society itself a ‘magma of magmas’): ‘The world of significations is a magma’ (Castoriadis 1987, 243). Like the world, a magma is enigmatic, and, like social imaginary significations, can only be grasped indirectly and obliquely (Castoriadis 1987, 143). Like the world, a magma cannot be brought under a concept (Richir 1989); Castoriadis is unable to give a positive, definitive definition of the magma, and his provisional sketches revert to phenomenological precepts: ‘What we seek to understand is the mode of being of what gives itself before identitary or ensemblistic logic is imposed; what gives

Clarifying Social Imaginaries

7

itself in this way in this mode of being, we are calling a magma’ (Castoriadis 1987, 343, emphasis added). Although he had distinguished between central and secondary imaginary significations in his earlier ‘First Attempt’, he extends his elucidation of them within his ontological framework. He introduces new terms, such as Anlehnung (leaning on), to capture the creative, non-determinist interplay between secondary imaginary significations and ‘natural’ dimensions of the world (this was a changed emphasis from the ‘symbolic’ as we saw earlier), or to the proto-institutions of legein and teukhein as the ensemblistic-identitarian infrastructure of society, as well as an increasing emphasis on imaginary significations as creating figures and figuring the world, instead of creating new forms (eide). But things are altogether different at the socialhistorical level proper, for ‘society brings into being a world of significations and itself exists in reference to such a world. Correlatively, nothing can exist for society if it is not related to the world of significations’ (Castoriadis 1987, 359). The creation of a society’s world of meaning by central imaginary significations (in which Castoriadis was chiefly interested) was also a creation ex nihilo, as central imaginary significations—such as God or autonomy—were without a world referent; as such, he regarded them as totally creative, absolutely generative of a world; they have no world referent (Castoriadis 1987, 361ff). For example, ‘the word God has no referent other than the signification God, as it is posited in each case by the society in question. The “referent” which would be the individual representations of God (or of gods) is created through the creation and institution of that central imaginary signification which is God. The signification God at once creates an object of individual representations and is the central element in the organization of the world for a monotheistic society’ (Castoriadis 1987, 362, emphasis in original). Finally, a note on the problematic of action is needed. There is no doubt that Castoriadis focussed on the trans-subjective sphere of institutions to elucidate their interplay with social imaginary significations, and that he treated the interplay of social action and imaginary significations far less systematically. That being said, there is an extended discussion of political doing as praxis in the 1964/1965 section of the IIS. Castoriadis places both Marxian and Aristotelian accents on his understanding of praxis as the lucid activity that leads to the creative transformation of and in the political sphere (in the strong and explicit sense as la politique) to bring about autonomy (as direct democracy) (Castoriadis 1987, 75ff). Although theorisation of praxis, and, more broadly, the being of ‘doing’, is marginalised in his later ontology, it continues to figure intermittently in his reflections as, for example, ‘thoughtful doing’ or ‘instituting doing’. 12 It is not so much that autonomy is the means and the ends of praxis—for that would be to inscribe it within a framework of technical activity—rather it is a beginning as a project still to

8

Suzi Adams

be done (faire). He moves between different registers of the social when discussing praxis—from intersubjective action to the intentional collective action of, for example, a social movement, which in turn overlaps with the impersonal aspect of action in the trans-subjective realm as qualitative movement as social change. But the discussion of praxis is primarily in reference to the project of autonomy, not imaginary significations (although ‘autonomy’ is of course for Castoriadis one of the central imaginary significations of modernity). Castoriadis’s more general term is ‘doing’ or ‘social doing’ that incorporates the trans-subjective aspect, and although, again, it is not theorised systematically, it is clearly meant to connect to social imaginary significations. For example, he states that ‘doing posits and provides for itself something other than what simply is, and because in it dwell significations’ (Castoriadis 1987, 146, emphasis added). The ‘doing’ of a collective is, further, embodied meaning that, in its activity, ‘allows itself to be understood only as a reply to the questions that it implicitly poses itself’ (Castoriadis 1987, 147). In this context, ‘doing’ belongs to the anonymous collective as impersonal activity. This sense of doing crops up again in his later ontological elucidation, explicitly in relation to social imaginary significations. He writes, in reference to the central imaginary signification of the ‘economy’, that, all of this by no means concerns ‘disembodied’ significations’ this goes hand in hand with, and is impossible without, transformations in the activities and the values of the society in question. . . . The economic cannot be constituted and instituted as a central social signification if it is not embodied, figured, presentified, instrumented in and through actual social activities—nor can these activities become economic activities or acquire a predominately economic aspect without the emergence of the economic signification and the alteration of the entire magma of social significations which it implies and entails. (Castoriadis 1987, 363)

A final sense of doing inhabits his thought. This is the ‘doing’ of instituting society (as opposed to instituted society) and refers to historical change as the activity of the collective anonymous (i.e., impersonal and unmotivated). As I have argued elsewhere (e.g., Adams 2016), this is best understood as qualitative movement as qualitative change and, in its radicalised manifestation, as the radical creation of new historical forms. This section has provided a sketch of key aspects of Castoriadis’s articulation of social imaginary significations. It has carefully distinguished between different phases of his thought and the corresponding shifts in his social imaginary framework. Overall, Castoriadis emphasised social imaginary significations as the impersonal activity of the anonymous collective that are carried by and incarnated in institutions. Central imaginary significations create a world of meaning ex nihilo for each specific society as an

Clarifying Social Imaginaries

9

imaginary self(auto)-institution as ‘reality’ beyond the rational/ensidic layers of being. Let us turn now to consider Paul Ricoeur’s contemporaneous account of the social imaginary as ideology and utopia. PAUL RICOEUR ON THE IDEOLOGICAL AND UTOPIAN IMAGINARIES Ricoeur’s most significant breakthroughs in the development of his social imaginaries framework occurred in the mid-1970s. Unlike Castoriadis, and, as we shall see, Taylor, the social imaginary was not a central feature of Ricoeur’s overall project, and his reflections on them were limited by and large to the 1970s. 13 By the early 1970s, he had already developed a distinctive phenomenological-hermeneutic approach to the social world. For him, humanity’s grasp or experience of reality is irreducible to immediacy and transparency; it is mediated via symbols and webs of interpretation. 14 Around this time, he also rethought the scope and meaning of ‘culture’; as a result, his understanding of culture shifted from a narrow conception (as the domain of cultural works) to a broader, anthropological understanding as cultural meaning that configures social reality for particular cultures/civilisations (Adams 2015). During the same period in the early 1970s, Ricoeur published his pivotal essay, ‘The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text’ (Ricoeur 1991a [1971]), where he expanded the task of hermeneutics to include the realm of social action. Ricoeur followed Weber, whose Verstehen approach to action as meaningful, relational and interpretative (e.g., Ricoeur 1978), fitted well within Ricoeur’s own hermeneutic perspective that centred on the self- and intersubjectivity in the contexts of concrete social life. Ricoeur’s development of his social imaginary framework began first with an interest in ideology that was piqued by the Habermas-Gadamer debate, in which he made two interventions (Ricoeur 1973; 1981b). In the early 1970s, however, he was yet to explicitly link his analysis of ideology either to the work of the social imagination or to utopia. In 1973, Ricoeur encountered Jacques Ellul’s work on the mediating role of ideology (Ellul 1973), which was influential for Ricoeur’s thinking. It triggered both his interest in Karl Mannheim’s connection of ideology and utopia in a common framework (Amalric 2014), 15 as well as his awareness of the integral role that socio-cultural memory played in the ideological imaginary (I return to this point later). Concomitantly, his growing interest in the imagination and creativity was becoming apparent. In this respect, 1975 was a defining year. In addition to the publication of The Rule of Metaphor (Ricoeur 1986a [1975]), which saw him shift from a hermeneutics of the symbol to a hermeneutics of the metaphor, Ricoeur also

10

Suzi Adams

presented two courses of interrelated lectures in the fall semester at the University of Chicago: the first was Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (Ricoeur 1986b), which comprise his most systematic development of his social imaginary framework; the second was Lectures on Imagination, which dealt with various philosophies of imagination—from Kant to Husserl to Sartre, and beyond. 16 Ricoeur came to reflect on the social imaginary qua imaginary as part of his formulation of a ‘general theory of imagination’ (Ricoeur 1991b [1978], 164), which takes its cue from his theory of metaphor grounded in semantic innovation. The social imaginary is cast as ‘the touchstone’ (Ricoeur 1991b [1978], 165) of the practical domain of the imagination, where it appears as a constellation of ‘imaginative practices’ (Ricoeur 1991b [1978], 177). Drawing on Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia (Mannheim 1954 [1929]), as the only work that had hitherto combined ideology and utopia within a single, overarching framework, Ricoeur developed his account of ideology and utopia as an open dialectic of the social imaginary. He agreed with Mannheim’s insight into ideology and utopia’s shared trait of non-congruency with social reality. But where Mannheim saw this in a critical light, Ricoeur took it as a departure point for a positive programme and radicalised understanding of the social imaginary. In this vein, he tells us that ‘all the figures of noncongruence must be part of our belonging to society. My claim is that this is true to such an extent that social imagination is constitutive of social reality’ (Ricoeur 1986b, 3; Ricoeur 1976b, 177; Ricoeur 1991b [1978], 177; emphases added). With Mannheim, Ricoeur agreed that each pole of the social imaginary appears first as a deviant, pathological attitude toward reality: ideology was typically understood as dissimulation and distortion of reality by a dominant class, while utopia was cast as a—sometimes schizophrenic—escape from history and social reality. Each pole of the social imaginary is posited as ambiguous, exhibiting both ‘functional’ and ‘dysfunctional’ traits. Ricoeur will argue that these ambiguities are paradigmatic for the socio-cultural imagination (Ricoeur 1986b, 2ff), but the differences and conflicts between them are also fundamental. As we shall see, Ricoeur articulated a three-fold account of ideology as integration/identity, as legitimation and as distortion; and a three-fold account of utopia as social subversion, as the contestation of legitimacy, and finally as escapism. Furthermore, Mannheim, in line with the later Marx, contrasted ‘ideology’ to ‘science’. But this led to what Geertz has termed ‘Mannheim’s Paradox’ (Geertz 1973, 194), where the concept of ideology is swallowed by its own referent. Mannheim’s claim to the truth of ideology falls into relativism. To escape this dilemma—and to elucidate a more primordial aspect of ideology irreducible to distortion—Ricoeur problematises its premises. He argues that the opposition of ideology to science is secondary, and that a more basic opposition is visible in Marx’s earlier work, The German Ideology, between

Clarifying Social Imaginaries

11

ideology (as the irreal, the imaginary) and ‘real social life’ as praxis (Ricoeur 1986b, 9). But Ricoeur goes further: not only does he argue that the ideology/ praxis opposition is prior to the ideology/science opposition, but that the relation between the two terms—ideology and praxis—must be rethought, and that what is elementary to the ideology-praxis relation is not opposition but an internal connection (Ricoeur 1986b, 10). The social imaginary operates on ‘the most elementary level’ (Ricoeur 1991b [1978], 178). It mediates contexts of social action. This interweaving of social imaginary and action together comprise social reality. Ricoeur explicitly draws on Weber’s formulation at the beginning of Economy and Society, where he takes the most salient aspects of Weber’s account of social action as ‘meaningful behaviour’ that is ‘mutually oriented and socially integrated’ (Ricoeur 1991b [1978], 178). This leads directly into Ricoeur’s articulation of ideology in its most basic aspect as social integration and social identity. But how does he get to this point? Ricoeur takes up Marx’s early contention that praxis formed the concrete basis of human socio-political life (Ricoeur 1986b). Marx was critiquing Feuerbach’s understanding of Mind as the source of human activity, arguing instead that praxis was the basis. He thereby brought the practical, material dimension of human existence—as properly social existence—into focus, per se, and into focus as the motor of history. But where, in The German Ideology, the ‘real/material’ (as praxis) and ‘ideal/ imaginary’ (as ideology) are in opposition, Ricoeur wants to argue that the imaginary is the precondition of social action/praxis; that social action is mediated by the imaginary: How can people live these [class] conflicts—about work, property, money, and so on—if they do not already possess some symbolic systems to help them interpret the conflicts? Is not the process of interpretation so primitive that in fact it is constitutive of the dimension of praxis? If social reality did not already have a social dimension, and therefore, if ideology, in a less polemical or less negatively evaluative sense, were not constitutive of social existence but merely distorting and dissimulating, then the process of distortion could not start. The process of distortion is grafted onto a symbolic function. Only because the structure of human social life is already symbolic can it be distorted. (Ricoeur 1986b, 10)

As George H. Taylor notes in his ‘Editor’s Introduction’ to Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, ‘For Ricoeur, the problem of ideology is finally not a choice between false and true but a deliberation over the relation between representation (Vorstellung) and praxis’ (Taylor 1986, xiii). Ideology-as-integration is equated with the symbolic in toto, and Ricoeur demonstrates that the ‘real process’ of ‘real social life’ as praxis always already incorporates a symbolic aspect:

12

Suzi Adams Social action and social relationships are mediated by representations, beliefs, images. It is the mediating function of ideology to secure the dimension of meaningfulness to social action and relationships. In other words, a pre-symbolic, and therefore pre-ideological, stage of real life can nowhere be found. (Ricoeur 1978, 51)

The symbolic is not secondary but primary. Thus, the notion of ideology as an inverted image is a secondary aspect of the symbolic function. Ricoeur’s analysis culminates in a consideration of Geertz, who argues for the ‘autonomous process of symbolic formulation’ (Geertz 1973, 207; cf. Ricoeur 1986b). In Geertz, Ricoeur finds agreement that action is symbolically structured and mediated by ideology-as-integration, which constitutes—or perhaps better: institutes—social reality itself. Ideology-as-integration secures social integration not only synchronically (through contexts of action) but also temporally (Ricoeur 1986b, 211). The temporal dimension is tied, on the meta-level, to the need for any group ‘to give itself an image of itself. . . . Perhaps there is no social group without this indirect relation to itself’ (Ricoeur 1991b [1978], 178, emphasis in original). This indirect relation is fundamentally a symbolic relation as the work of the social imagination not only because social reality for Ricoeur is a symbolic reality but because of the historical distance between the founding events and the collective representation of these events to itself ‘after the period of effervescence’ has ceased. The created image that ‘represents’ society to itself is historical, which, as such, incorporates a further indirect and symbolic dimension to ideology. It also introduces the phenomenon of socio-cultural memory as core to the constitutive sense of ideology, as the ideologisation of founding events can only occur after this period of effervescence (Ricoeur 1981c, 225). 17 Ricoeur next addresses the second level of ideology as legitimation. The overall point is that ideology-as-integration tips into the problematic of domination and authority; that is, the hierarchical configuration of the sociopolitical realm and its configuring distribution of power. Ideology always incorporates a socio-political project of power, and thus also forms of domination. More specifically, this raises—first—questions of legitimation of the ideological project by and the justification of their claims by collective bodies of authority (Ricoeur 1978, 49). The negative traits of ideology (as distortion and dissimulation) start to become more apparent once this second layer of ideology is introduced. Ricoeur returns to Weber for clarification on the point of legitimation. For Weber, domination and authority (Herrschaft) emerge when the differentiation between the ‘governing’ and the ‘governed’ appears. Ricoeur argues that ‘[i]deology enters at this point, because such authority raises a claim to legitimacy, and ideology serves as the code of interpretation which secures integration by justifying the system of authority

Clarifying Social Imaginaries

13

as it is’ (Ricoeur 1978, 48, emphases in original). The governing body can enforce its order by means of force. 18 This raises—second—the question of the legitimacy of this authority. Ideology enters the fray at this moment, as it ‘serves as the code of interpretation which secures integration by justifying the system of authority as it is’ (Ricoeur 1978, 48, emphasis in original). This second aspect thus brings in the political dimension of power (as authority). It is closely bound with the constitution of a social collective through its socio-cultural memory of its founding events—and its subsequent re-enactment ideologically—as political events (e.g., wars, revolutions, declarations of independence, etc.), and thus presupposes the first dimension of ideology. The ruling body needs here to (re)present its particular interests as the general interests of the collective and for those arguments to be accepted as such (Ricoeur 1991c, 307). Ricoeur argues that in relation to a claim to legitimation by the authority of a social group and the extent of belief in that claim by the group there will be a gap, an excess. Ricoeur speaks of ‘the excess of claim comparted to belief: . . . all authority requires more than what the members may offer in terms of belief or creed’ (Ricoeur 1978, 49). Ideology acts to justify this surplus value. The ideological imaginary here acts as the ‘system of justification capable of filling up the gap of political [surplus] value’ (Ricoeur 1991c, 307). The function of legitimation and justification in turn opens onto the final layer of ideology as distortion and dissimulation. This final aspect becomes increasingly visible, and the first aspect of ideology-as-integration recedes into the background as surplus value—the excess of the claim of the ruling order over the belief of the broader political community—and their response to the ideological claim of authority needs dissimulation. No political system or claim to legitimacy—no matter how rational—is absolutely transparent or convincing and always draws on overarching configurations of social values (Ricoeur 1978). For Ricoeur, ideology-as-distortion is a more specific application of ideology-as-justification-of-legitimacy (Ricoeur 1978, 49). It is not integral to domination, in general; rather it is specific to domination by a ruling class in a context of class conflict (Ricoeur 1978, 49). New features also emerge with the third manifestation of ideology. As Ricoeur puts it: All ideas, when separated from the process of life, from the process of common work, tend to appear as an autonomous reality. . . . Then the concept of ideology gets its purely negative connotation to the extent that it describes a general device, thanks to which the process of real life is obscured and replayed by what human beings say, imagine, conceive. Ideology becomes the name given to this mistaken substitution of image for reality. (Ricoeur 1978, 50)

But as we have seen, the ‘real process’ of ‘real life’ as praxis always already incorporates a symbolic aspect. Action is always mediated by symbolic

14

Suzi Adams

webs: ‘If action is not symbolic from the very beginning, then no magic will be able to draw an illusion from an interest’ (Ricoeur 1976b, 23). Let us now turn to the utopian imaginary. The question of utopia did not occupy Ricoeur’s reflections as extensively as ideology—this is seen in, for example, the fact that, of the seventeen lectures published in Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (1986b), the first lecture was introductory, the next thirteen lectures were devoted to the problematic of ideology, and only the concluding three lectures addressed the question of utopia. This did not mean, however, that the notion of utopia was unimportant or underdeveloped in his overall framework, but rather that it reflected the situation in the 1970s, which featured important debates on ideology and ideology-critique, especially in critical theoretical approaches (broadly understood). Where Ricoeur turned primarily to sociological sources to theorise the ideological imaginary, sociology—in the narrow sense, at least—played a more muted role in his articulation of utopia. Instead, the utopian imaginary overlaps with the poetic imagination and the possibility of ‘fiction’ to reinterpret reality and create new worlds. 19 Whereas ideology is hidden—it does not know itself, and relies on a process of unmasking—utopias are explicit and self-asserted, and recognise themselves as utopia—they are as such claimable by the author: ‘We may name authors of utopias, but we are unable to ascribe ideologies to specific authors’ (Ricoeur 1976b, 24). Utopia is, of course, a literary genre. The utopian mode is ‘the imaginary project of another kind of society, of another reality, another world. Imagination is here constitutive in an inventive rather than an integrative manner’ (Ricoeur 1976b, 9, emphases added). But in creating a new social world, utopia appears as social subversion and ‘shatters’ the existing ideological order: ‘The shadow of the forces capable of shattering a given order is already the shadow of an alternative order that could be opposed to the given order. It is the function of utopia to give the force of discourse to this possibility’ (Ricoeur 1976b, 24). 20 Ricoeur locates the ambiguities of utopia within its spirit, which in turn impacts on its mode, and which parallel the ambiguities of ideology. Ricoeur’s first step is to focus on the ‘nowhere’—the extra-territoriality— of utopia. Recall that Thomas More’s Utopia was a neologism that referred ambiguously to the ‘good place’ (eutopos) that existed ‘nowhere’ (outopos). For Ricoeur, the ‘nowhere’ of utopia has a positive social function. From this ‘no place’ a gaze from a distance, exterior to the given social reality can be cast, ‘which suddenly looks strange, nothing more being taken for granted’ (Ricoeur 1976b, 25) in a quest for new varieties of ‘otherness’. In turn, this opens the horizon of possibilities beyond the instituted social order. Thus, in making the familiar strange, utopia offers a critique of concrete ideologies, and, Ricoeur argues, resolves the relativistic trap of Mannheim’s paradox (Ricoeur 1986b).

Clarifying Social Imaginaries

15

Ricoeur draws on Husserl’s notion of ‘imaginative variations’ to understand what occurs here: the utopian imaginary creatively recasts and transforms central institutions of society, such as configurations of power, the political order, the position of religion, understandings of sexuality, the family, etc., into a new—for example, the reimagining of the political order from a monarchy to a democracy or authoritarianism; the reimagining of the economic order from a market to a planned economy or to a shared economy, etc. The utopian imaginary is in this sense productive. For Ricoeur the importance of the productive—or creative—imagination in its utopian mode lies in its social aspects as constitutive of possible future worlds; it thus parallels ideology’s role in the symbolic constitution of the real. Social transformation proceeds from the ‘possible to the real, from fantasy to reality’ (Ricoeur 1976b, 25). In this, the utopian imaginary overlaps with the ‘heuristic force of fiction’ (Ricoeur 1991b [1978], 170). Ricoeur posits this capacity of fiction as an extension of the capacity of symbolic systems and the ‘practical fictions’ of ideology and utopia (Ricoeur 1991d, 116). The central point to note is that for Ricoeur fiction has a referential power to ‘remake’ the world; that is, it does not refer to reality, but creates its own world and referent (Ricoeur 1991d). As with ideology, the second layer of utopia concerns power and legitimation: ‘the problematic of power is the kernel problem of every utopia’ (Ricoeur 1976b, 25). But where ideology seeks to legitimate an institutional order of power, utopia contests its legitimacy. Taking the phenomenon of ‘surplus value’ that he established in his discussion of ideology, Ricoeur argues that the utopian imaginary exposes the implicit surplus value, challenges the ‘credibility gap’ by unmasking the cloaked deception found in every system of legitimacy, and problematises established institutions of power: this is its subversive, critical aspect. The commonality across utopian experiments, argues Ricoeur, is the exploration of various ways of exercising and distributing power in non-violent ways (Ricoeur 1976b, 26). Ricoeur turns to the final layer of the utopian imaginary that, like ideology-as-distortion, exhibits ‘pathological’ tendencies. Mirroring the ideological phenomenon, the ‘germ’ of utopia’s pathology is to be found in its overarching and most positive manifestation of the function of the ‘nowhere’. Because utopian projects proceed via a leap to ‘nowhere’, there is, argues Ricoeur, a discernible tendency to be characterised by the ‘path of escapism’ (Ricoeur 1976b, 26); that is, animated by (unrealisable) social dreams, to be aimed at an (unrealisable) ‘perfect’ society that is disjointed from sociohistorical experience and action. Traits associated with the utopian imaginary in its dysfunctional aspect include an all-or-nothing logic that excludes ‘the labour of time’; that is, a ‘futurism’ of ‘frozen models’. This layer of the utopian imaginary manifests as the complete paralysis of social action: ‘Escapism is the eclipse of praxis, the denial of the logic of action’ (Ricoeur

16

Suzi Adams

1976b, 26). Ricoeur contends further that advanced stages of pathological ‘futurism’ of utopia can appear as a nostalgic yearning for paradise lost, even a ‘regressive yearning for the maternal womb’. In this, utopia exhibits dissimulating-distorting traits with ideology: the pathological manifestations of the ideological and utopian imaginaries are connected, despite their original opposition between social integration and social subversion (Ricoeur 1976b, 26). This section has considered Paul Ricoeur’s articulation of the ideological and utopian imaginary. Where Castoriadis focussed on the institutional, trans-subjective dimension of social imaginaries, Ricoeur anchors his account in a theory of action. Where Castoriadis emphasised the imaginary element as a precondition for the symbolic, for Ricoeur, the imaginary and the symbolic are always already entwined. Now we turn to consider Charles Taylor’s approach to modern social imaginaries. Although Ricoeur and Taylor share a hermeneutic and narrative approach to the human condition, as we shall see, Taylor’s framework for understanding the social imaginary takes the argument in a different direction. CHARLES TAYLOR AND MODERN SOCIAL IMAGINARIES Of the three thinkers under consideration in this chapter, Charles Taylor’s articulation of modern social imaginaries has been arguably the most influential. His reflections on social imaginaries gathered pace some twenty years after the publication of Castoriadis’s IIS and Ricoeur’s lectures on ideology and utopia at the University of Chicago. This meant that the social imaginary landscape had changed considerably by then. Although Taylor did draw on thinkers of the social imaginary, his key intellectual sources were more tangential to the social imaginaries field as a whole. Where the philosophical problematic of the creative imagination and the sociological question of social creativity were central to Castoriadis and Ricoeur’s respective reflections on social imaginaries, these issues were less significant for Taylor. Instead, Taylor’s reflections on social imaginaries were animated in the first instance by his rethinking of modernity (and multiple modernities). Unlike Castoriadis and Ricoeur, Taylor’s approach to social imaginaries is characterised by a close collegiality and cross-fertilisation of ideas with members of the Centre for Transcultural Studies (especially Craig Calhoun, Dilip Gaonkar, Benjamin Lee and Michael Warner). From this longstanding collaboration, an overall collective approach to modern social imaginaries has been wrought, with Taylor’s work providing the ‘conceptual frame’ (Gaonkar 2002, 11; Calhoun et al 2015; Gaonkar and Lee 2002). 21 Taylor’s reflections on social imaginaries have developed over two and a half decades. Although the iterations did not differ from each other as mark-

Clarifying Social Imaginaries

17

edly as, say, Castoriadis’s did, it is possible to nonetheless identify changes in his trajectory. The notion of social imaginaries as part of a theory of modernity explicitly emerged in Taylor’s thought in the early 1990s with an essay on Habermas (Taylor 1992a) and the Tanner Lectures on ‘Modernity and The Rise of the Public Sphere’ (Taylor 1992b), and were developed in the final four essays of Philosophical Arguments (Taylor 1995a). The years 1998 and 1999 marked the shift to the problematic of (modern) social imaginaries as a question in its own right for him. Taylor gave the Gifford lectures in 1998 on ‘Living in a Secular Age’ that developed his thesis more comprehensively. In 1999, he published the first précis of his ‘modern social imaginaries’ thesis in his comments on Habermas and Hegel (Taylor 1999), had completed a draft of his ‘Modern Social Imaginaries’ essay (Calhoun 2002, 9n6; Taylor 2002), and, with his transcultural colleagues, drafted a major statement on social imaginaries which formed the basis of a successful Rockefeller Foundation Grant (Gaonkar 2002, 4–5). By 2003, his bestknown work on the social imaginary, ‘Modern Social Imaginaries’, had been published in both essay and book form (Taylor 2002; 2004), and this phase culminates in the publication of the monumental work, A Secular Age (Taylor 2007a). The most recent major iteration of social imaginaries is found in his philosophical anthropology, The Language Animal (Taylor 2016), where Taylor incorporates elucidation of the discursive dimension of social imaginaries. 22 Let us turn to consider the early phase of Taylor’s thought on social imaginaries. His first articulation of the problem is found in his Habermas essay on modernity (Taylor 1992a) and his Tanner Lectures on ‘Modernity and the Rise of the Public Sphere’ (Taylor 1992b). As seen from both these titles, the question of modernity comprises the key problematic under discussion: social imaginaries become a way for Taylor to recast modernity in a way that was compatible with his approach to other spheres of human life (such as ‘the self’). Taylor developed his approach to modernity (and multiple modernities) by drawing on another contemporaneous shift in the human sciences: the turn to culture. He presents his account as a disagreement between ‘cultural’ and ‘acultural’ approaches to modernity (partly as a critique of Habermas’s ‘acultural’ approach). Taylor draws on anthropological approaches to culture which envisages a world comprised of cultures in the plural (Taylor 1992b, 205). Modernity is understood as the rise of a new culture—even in the West—rather than as the ongoing growth of reason or as a set of social-intellectual changes—such as the rise of industrialisation— which any culture could undergo (Taylor 1992b, 206). Whether understanding modernity as a ‘loss’ or as a ‘gain’, acultural approaches interpret modernity as premised on a ‘loss of traditional beliefs and allegiances’ (Taylor 1992b, 208). For Taylor, however, this view does not consider that Western modernity might have its own positive—be that spiritual, political or mo-

18

Suzi Adams

ral—that is ‘not definable simply by the negation of what preceded it’ (Taylor 1992b, 210). What distinguishes modernity from premodernity is not explicit belief, per se, but ‘the background understanding against which our beliefs are formulated’ (Taylor 1992b, 215). In articulating his theory of modernity, which will grow into his account of modern social imaginaries, Taylor thus draws on—and further develops—his longstanding framework that posits that explicit beliefs can only be understood against the tacit background horizon that frames them. His first preliminary articulation of the social imaginary is found in the Tanner Lectures (Taylor 1992b); it is articulated as a counter-argument against the idea that ‘beliefs’ are only ‘handed down to us’. Taylor draws on Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, which can make sense of the tacit proto-knowledge that exists within a collective about how to behave, and the workings of society (Taylor 1992b, 217), and extends it to sources of the good and how they can appear in our world. He identifies three levels of understanding: explicit doctrine (which he will later replace with the term ‘theory’) of how society/the good/the cosmos work; embodied understanding, following Bourdieu’s notion of habitus; and, finally, ‘somewhere between the two’, the symbolic. It is worth quoting him in full here: I mean by this [ie, the symbolic] whatever understanding is expressed in ritual, in symbols (in the everyday sense), in works of art. What exists on this level is more explicit than mere gesture or appropriate action, because ritual and work can have a mimetic or an evocative dimension, and hence point to something which they imitate or call forth. But it is not explicit in the self-conscious way of doctrinal formulations, which can be submitted to the demands of logic, permit of a metadiscourse in which they are examined in turn, and the like. (Taylor 1992b, 218) 23

The social imaginary at this early stage is equated with the symbolic. It is ‘nourished in embodied habitus’ but ‘given expression in the symbolic’ as a ‘level of images as yet unformulated in doctrine’ (Taylor 1992b, 219). Alterations in embodied understanding, background understanding and the social imaginary bring new possibilities to belief and ‘doctrinal repertory’ within our horizon. At this point, the question of the social imaginary was subordinated to the problematic of modernity, on the one hand, and was not yet fully fleshed out and was distinguished from two further interrelated dimensions of social existence (background understanding and habitus), on the other. Taylor’s project on modernity and modern social imaginaries gathered pace in the 1990s, although it was only in the late 1990s that it began to appear as an explicit problematic. It had two aims. The first was to articulate modernity as a way of ‘understanding and mediating cultural difference’ (Taylor 1995a, xi); that is, the problematic of a plurality of modernities became a question in its own right for Taylor (Gaonkar 2002, 11). The

Clarifying Social Imaginaries

19

second aim was to carve out a place for religion—especially Christianity—in the modern, so-called secular context. As Craig Calhoun puts it, ‘We should think of secularization not as the subtraction of religion from modern life but as a transformation of how we inhabit the world that creates new opportunities as well as new challenges for lives of faith’ (Calhoun 2018, 771). 24 Increasingly, the question of ‘social imaginaries’ as ‘modern social imaginaries’ became foregrounded in Taylor’s thought. In this stage of gestation, Taylor identifies Montesquieu as an important source. He found Montesquieu amenable for understanding that ‘comparison is not giving all societies some numerical value on the same scale, comparison is finding illuminating contrasts. . . . but we still need concepts together at these important contrastive differences’. 25 Taylor drew on a diversity of intellectual sources to develop his understanding of social imaginaries during the second half of the 1990s. In this context, Castoriadis was significant (Taylor 2007b). Taylor leans on Castoriadis for the sense that the social imaginary occurs ‘as the moment when we reimagine moments of freedom, autonomy, change—when we innovate by reinterpreting’ (Taylor 2007b, 29), but ultimately Castoriadis’s framework provided a departure point for Taylor to think the social imaginary anew. So, in this vein, in contradistinction to Castoriadis, Taylor explains that ‘it is not just at the moment of innovation that the social imaginary operates, but all of the time. It is something we presuppose as agents in a social world’ (Taylor 2007b, 29–30). Now, for Castoriadis, social imaginary significations are always in play in every society throughout history, not just at the moments of innovation. But it is also true that Castoriadis focussed on instituting society rather than instituted society. This is especially the case in relation to the historical breakthroughs to autonomy, which he characterised in terms of discontinuity and rupture, exemplified with the instauration of the democracy in ancient Greece, and its re-emergence in the West signalling the onset of modernity. Taylor’s approach was focussed less on ruptures, radical social transformation (such as revolutions), and the creation of total novelty. So, in the case of Castoriadis, Taylor observes that social innovation in the way that Castoriadis means it (i.e., as the creation of new forms) will ‘probably require an important element of conscious theorizing’. 26 Taylor’s understanding of modern social imaginaries as they appear in social life is strongly demarcated from theories and theorising. He is more interested in understanding how existing practices are given new impetus and meanings against changing background horizons (I return to this later). In differentiating his own account from Castoriadis’s, Taylor turns to four key sources to develop his social imaginary framework further—Bronislaw Baczko and Benedict Anderson, on the one hand, and Pierre Bourdieu and Ludwig Wittgenstein, on the other. Taylor’s understanding of social imaginaries is configured around three intertwining aspects: social practices; shared narratives, myths and paradigm stories; and imagined communities.

20

Suzi Adams

Of these, Anderson’s notion of ‘imagined communities’ as a way of understanding the workings of nationalism in modernity (Anderson 1983; Taylor 2002; 2004) was Taylor’s conduit into the field and begins to be visible from the mid-1990s (e.g., Taylor 1995a, x). The term ‘imagined communities’ was significant for Taylor in a twofold sense. First, it points to a shared understanding that members of a particular society have of themselves that ‘links them together and gives them a sense of common agency’ (Taylor 2007b, 29). Second, this later iteration anchors the social imaginary in the new moral order of modernity—this was not the case earlier (such as in 1995) (I return to this later). More than, for example, Montesquieu’s ‘mores’ or Hegel’s ‘Objective Spirit’, for Taylor’s purposes, Anderson’s work better captured the kernel of modern nationalism in that these ‘new modern nations could only function as they did because of a strong consciousness of what they shared. But not theorised as such; but shared self-understandings were held in ‘stories, in modes of address, in common rankings of certain roles, etc. “Imagination” was an all-in term to cover all those facets’. 27 So an imagined community has a ‘particular kind of social imaginary, that is, socially shared ways in which social spaces are imagined’ (Taylor 1998, 38–39). Additionally, however, Bronislaw Baczko’s work on social imaginaries as the self-understanding of roles, social positions, representations (etc.) that makes up a socio-political collective’s identity, which includes a practical know-how of how it works, and normative expectations of how it should work, was influential (Baczko 1984). Such a view is of course sympatico for Taylor’s longstanding interest in embodied knowledge as practical know-how as a direct way of grasping the world (in contrast to a mediational approach to epistemology), but here extended into the collective dimension. Taylor does not discuss Baczko in any systematic way but does acknowledge his influence for his reflections on modern social imaginaries (Taylor 2004, 213n1). 28 But it was not just Anderson and Baczko’s reflections on imagined communities and social imaginaries that were influential for Taylor. Instead, his recognition of Anderson and Baczko’s respective versions of ‘modern social imaginaries’ was also linked to changing understandings of time and ‘the possible ways of imagining social wholes’ (Taylor 1998, 41). Anderson and Baczko both explicitly linked ‘modern social imaginaries’—beyond the particular social spheres of, for example, nation, economy or public sphere—to a specifically secular age, that is, as situated within a specifically modern, overarching temporal order rather than in a divine/eternal order of temporality. For Taylor, this new temporal order is itself a social imaginary (Taylor 1998, 39ff). 29 It brings with it a change from ‘hierarchical, mediated-access societies to horizontal, direct-access societies’ (Taylor 1998, 39). Further, this is characterised by what Anderson calls simultaneity (a term which Taylor borrows); that is, as the simultaneity of an exclusively secular time which

Clarifying Social Imaginaries

21

refers to ‘society as the whole consisting of the simultaneous happening of the myriad events that mark the lives of its members at the moment. These events are the fillers of this segment of a kind of homogeneous time’ (Taylor 1998, 42). Taylor also remarks on Baczko’s recognition of the exclusively secular spatio-temporal order of modernity and its freedom from ‘ontic dependence on religion’ (Taylor 2004, 187–88). 30 Briefly, the third and fourth sources for Taylor’s articulation of modern social imaginaries are found in the thought of Bourdieu and Wittgenstein. Building on his enduring interest in Heidegger, Wittgenstein and MerleauPonty, who share a view of the self ‘not primarily as the locus of representations for their understanding of the self as engaged in practices, as a being who acts in and on a world’ (Taylor 1995a, 170), in ‘To Follow a Rule’, Taylor elaborates on Bourdieu’s notion of habitus. Taylor stresses both the intersubjective and, most pertinently for current purposes, the social contexts beyond the face-to-face encounter that shape action and social practices. The latter depend on a shared agency and shared self-understanding (Taylor 1995a, 172), which were later to become constitutive features of modern social imaginaries. Taylor writes that: ‘These actions are constituted as such by a shared understanding among those who make up the common agent. . . . it can also come to be outside the situation of face-to-face encounter. In a different form it can also constitute a political or religious movement, whose members may be widely scattered but who are animated together by a sense of common purpose . . . as part of a “we”’ (Taylor 1995a, 172–73). 31 Embodied understanding is irreducible to the individual; it is also the ‘coagent’ of common actions. This is the sense we can give to Wittgenstein’s claim that obeying a rule is a practice. He means by this a social practice (Taylor 1995a, 173). A social practice is a custom not a causal connection; its meaning is embodied not a representation. In a forerunner of his articulation of the social imaginary, Taylor demonstrates how social practices give meaning to actions (Taylor 1995a, 174). Taylor pursues this discussion further via Bourdieu’s notion of habitus and the links between lived time and action. The rule—or social norm or meaning of the custom—‘lies essentially in the practice. The rule is what is animating the practice at any given time, and not some formulation behind it, inscribed in our thoughts or our brains’—habitus as a ‘bodily disposition which encodes a certain cultural understanding’ (or what we would call now: social imaginaries) (Taylor 1995a, 178). Still following Bourdieu, Taylor shortly thereafter links habitus and institutions ‘as two ways of objectifying past history’, which is another dimension of social practices as instituted forms of social action, a term that Taylor sometimes includes in his discussion of practices. Here it is relevant to note that, for Bourdieu, habitus can be embodied by both individuals and groups (such as classes). 32

22

Suzi Adams

At the turn of the twenty-first century, Taylor’s development of his modern social imaginaries framework was in full swing. By the time the wellknown essay and book—both entitled, ‘Modern Social Imaginaries’ (2002 and 2004, respectively)—were published, his elucidation of social imaginaries had received clearer contours and amplified scope in comparison to his earlier iteration at the time of the Tanner Lectures. 33 Modern Social Imaginaries (2004) narrates the historical process whereby new social imaginaries—as precondition and bearer of the meaning of new social practices— emerged. They are anchored in the radically new modern moral order (as articulated by Grotius and Locke), which was energised by an image of mutual benefit for participants regarded as equal (but these transformations in the social imaginary do not necessarily flow through to all parts of social life) (Taylor 2004, 144). He identifies three clusters of social practices and interconnected imaginaries that are fundamental to his understanding of the emergence of modernity. They are the public sphere as an extra-political space of free discussion in which public opinion ‘in the strong sense of the word is formed’; the economy as instituted practices of exchange that incorporate a ‘lawlike pattern’ such that society itself is seen as an economy (and thus where society becomes ‘unhooked’ from an understanding as a polity); and, finally, our self-understanding as a sovereign people, that is, popular sovereignty and the nation (especially as the nation-state) that presumes a particular kind of collective agency and self-governance (Taylor 2007b, 31ff). No longer confined to the ‘symbolic’, as was the case in the earlier Tanner Lectures, social imaginaries now seem more encompassing and to overlap with the habitus dimension that Taylor had previously kept apart, and reference to the artistic domain (as the symbolic) has been dropped (although the lines remain somewhat blurred). Importantly for Taylor, there is a double connection to the ‘social’: ‘it is the imagination of society by society’ (Taylor 2007b, 29, emphasis in original). He now sharply distinguishes between theory/ideas and the imaginary. For him, the social imaginary ‘is not a set of ideas; rather it is what enables, through making sense of, the practices of a society’ (Taylor 2002, 91). Taylor seems to be distinguishing between theory as formal philosophical frameworks—he mentions Locke, Rousseau and Marx as examples in this regard (Taylor 2007b, 29)—as theoria, and the practical imagination as the social imaginary (as did Ricoeur), which is the social dimension of the human condition as the realm of praxis: ‘Human beings operated with a social imaginary well before they ever got into the business of theorizing about themselves’ (Taylor 2007b, 29). The ‘symbolic’ level of the imaginary has expanded from the realm of art/culture (i.e., culture in a narrow sense) to culture in a broader sense, to include narratives, myths, ideologies and paradigm stories (Taylor 2007b). The social imaginary (e.g., as a prior collective ‘understanding’, ‘knowledge’, or ‘sentiment’)

Clarifying Social Imaginaries

23

points to, for example, a collective decision to form a new government through an election and the legitimation of that result through the practice. Social imaginaries seem to be more porous and expansive in this later phase of articulation, interweaving with habitus, background articulations and moral orders, but extending beyond them to the human context, more generally: The social imaginary extends beyond the immediate background understanding that makes sense of our particular practices. This is not an arbitrary extension of the concept. Just as the practice without the understanding wouldn’t make sense for us, and thus wouldn’t be possible, so this understanding supposes, if it is to make sense, a wider grasp of our whole predicament: how we stand to one another, how we got to where we are, and how we relate to other groups. This wider grasp has no clear limits. It is in fact the largely unstructured and inarticulate understanding of our whole situation. It can never be adequately expressed in the form of explicit doctrines because of its unlimited and indefinite nature. (Taylor 2007b, 31)

Social imaginaries underscore the central capacity for ‘creative reinterpretation’ of the historical past in light of a new or future project (Taylor 2007b, 30), as well as an understanding of the human condition in its collective aspect as engaged (as opposed to disengaged as characteristic of social theory building). Where theory is the provenance of a few, the social imaginary is common to large social collectives. It is not expressed in theoretical terms, but in stories, myths, ideologies and so on. Finally, the social imaginary encompasses a common understanding that enable common practices and a ‘widely shared sense of legitimacy’ and the ‘normal expectations that we have of one another, the kind of common understanding that enables us to carry out the practices that make up our social life. This incorporates some sense of how we all fit together in carrying out the common practice’ (Taylor 2007b, 30). That being said, Taylor continues to hold the view that what may start as theories can eventually imbue the whole society as a social imaginary. In this vein, he notes that the social imaginary gives meaning to the practices and vice versa: ‘it begins to define the contours of their world and can eventually come to count as the taken-for-granted shape of things, too obvious to mention’ (Taylor 2007b, 33). Finally, in this later iteration, social imaginaries overlap with moral orders, but they are not mutually reducible. A moral order, in a broad, Durkheimian sense, is rooted in a social imaginary but goes beyond it and becomes more explicit and determinate; a social imaginary includes other things besides the groundwork for a moral order. 34 Like theory or ideas, the moral order started as an idea among a small group of thinkers, but later expanded and shaped the social imaginary of larger collectives. This moral order ‘has now become so self-evident to us, we have trouble seeing it as one possible conception among others’ (Taylor 2002, 92).

24

Suzi Adams

This section has considered Taylor’s elucidation of social imaginaries. Emerging in his thought in the early 1990s as part of his efforts to rethink the plurality of modernity, his most systematic and self-contained reflections appeared in the early 2000s. Similarly to Ricoeur, Taylor anchored his account of social imaginaries in contexts of action as social practices. Unlike Castoriadis or Ricoeur, Taylor’s elucidation of social imaginaries was part of a historical account of the emergence of Western modernity. Let us turn now to bring our three thinkers into a more systematic dialogue. CLARIFYING SOCIAL IMAGINARIES What happens when we bring Castoriadis, Ricoeur and Taylor into discussion? The following is organised around two parts. The first sketches an overview of some of the key issues that emerge through the critical encounter between our three thinkers of social imaginaries, whereas the second situates social imaginaries as a way of rethinking the objective spirit. Castoriadis, Ricoeur and Taylor each articulate their social imaginary framework as an implicit cultural hermeneutic of modernity. Following Johann Arnason’s critique of Habermas (Arnason 1991; 1992), modernity is not reducible to the Enlightenment or an emphasis on reason; instead, modernity is better understood as a field of tensions partially structured by the conflicting worlds offered by romanticism and enlightenment. In turn, romanticism and enlightenment are better understood as broad cultural currents—the former characterised by an emphasis on meaning and imagination, the latter by an emphasis on reason and rationality—rather than historical epochs. The romantic emphasis on the productive/creative imagination serves as a correction to the bias of reason and rationality in understanding the human condition. As we shall see, however, each of our thinkers approach the problematic quite differently. Both Castoriadis and Ricoeur came to the social imaginary problematics through a rethinking of the philosophical problematic of the productive/creative imagination in conjunction with the ‘formidable question of creativity’ (Ricoeur 1981a, 38). Castoriadis developed a bifurcated account of the creative imagination as the radical imagination of the psyche and the radical imaginary of the social-historical, whereas Ricoeur articulated the social imaginary as the practical dimension of the imagination (although, as noted previously, the practical utopian imaginary overlaps with poetic function of the imagination as fiction in shaping reality). The question of creativity was central to each of them, but they articulated it in different ways. Castoriadis’s ontological pronouncement of human creation ex nihilo to create new forms emphasised historical novelty, discontinuity and rupture, whereas Ricoeur, as seen in their radio discussion from 1985 (Ricoeur and Castoriadis 2017),

Clarifying Social Imaginaries

25

critiques the possibility of human creation out of nothing, and insists on the hermeneutic production from something to something. Yet Castoriadis’s approach to social imaginary significations and creation incorporates an implicit hermeneutics—creation is always interpretative and interpretation is always creative (Adams 2011; Arnason 2003), and, as George Taylor argues in his essay on the Ricoeur-Castoriadis radio discussion, as evident in Ricoeur’s 1975 Lectures on Imagination (delivered in the same semester as his Lectures on Ideology and Utopia), Ricoeur’s earlier stance on creativity was much closer to Castoriadis’s than during the 1980s (Taylor 2017b; cf. Ricoeur, forthcoming). Nonetheless, it is evident that Castoriadis emphasised the discontinuity of history, whereas Ricoeur highlighted historical continuity (Ricoeur and Castoriadis 2017). This was partly because Castoriadis was interested in the project of autonomy as a particular historical possibility, and Ricoeur was more interested in philosophical anthropology (which included his social imaginary framework), which he understood in terms of the continuity of human existence (G. Taylor 1986). Castoriadis is chiefly interested in central imaginary significations—those, such as God or autonomy, that are absolutely generative and without a world referent. These imaginary significations create a world ex nihilo. Ricoeur’s approach stresses the indirect, mediating role of the imagination in creation/production (Amalric 2017). And yet there are some similarities between Castoriadis’s creation ‘out of nothing’, and Ricoeur’s articulation of the utopian imaginary’s production of new worlds as a ‘view from nowhere’: the utopian imaginary—like the role of fiction in shaping reality—has no referent in the production of new worlds. In relation to utopia, he writes: ‘The field of the possible now extends beyond the real. . . . From nowhere emerges the most formidable challenge of what is’ (Ricoeur 1991b [1978], 180). 35 Debates on the modern imagination in modernity often distinguish between the reproductive and productive aspects. 36 Ricoeur explicitly draws on these debates in articulating the ideological and utopian imaginaries, but there is inconsistency and tension. For example, in some essays, he identifies ideology with the reproductive imagination (as ‘picture’) and utopia with the productive imagination (as ‘fiction’, e.g., Ricoeur 1986b, 309–10; 1991b [1978]), but elsewhere he designates them both as reproductive imagination (Ricoeur 1984). This is not resolved by casting them as a dialectic (Ricoeur 1976b). Connected to this is the question of creativity—if the ideological imaginary is reproductive, is there a creative element to that? Ricoeur does occasionally acknowledge the creativity of ideology (e.g., 1976b, 28) but these inconsistencies point to unresolved tensions. Perhaps this is part of the overarching and unresolvable tension between ideology and utopia, as Ricoeur himself acknowledges (Ricoeur 1991b [1978]). Part of the issue is arguably that his articulation of the social imaginary framework is suspended between his two approaches to hermeneutics. Ideology emphasises the her-

26

Suzi Adams

meneutics of the symbol, whereas utopia emphasises the possibility of metaphor and innovation. Although Ricoeur has said that the move to metaphor was a way of thinking about the ‘semantic core’ of the symbol (Ricoeur 1998, 25), the two modes of hermeneutics remain irreducible, especially when it comes to modes of creativity (Ricoeur 1976a). 37 Unlike Castoriadis and Ricoeur, Taylor was not centrally preoccupied with the question of the creative imagination and creativity in relation to his social imaginary framework. These questions are certainly not absent, but their presence is more diffuse in relation to social imaginaries, per se. In that he sees the Kantian schematism at work in social imaginaries (e.g., Taylor 2003; 2007b), we can conclude that Taylor regards the imagination as productive/creative and, as a consequence and following earlier arguments that he made, as a weak transcendental (Taylor 1978–1979). Additionally, Taylor strongly differentiates social imaginaries (as they are experienced) from theory: theory is articulated and conscious, whereas the imagination is not articulated; instead, it is prereflective. 38 For Taylor, social imaginaries are the work of the collective imagination and are broadly creative in that they effect social change, but the real locus of creativity and the imagination for Taylor lies in his philosophical anthropology of language (Taylor 2016), which he extends to include works of art. 39 Whereas for Castoriadis and Ricoeur the focus on the productive/creative imagination in human life is a response to the Enlightenment overemphasis on reason, Taylor’s critique of disengaged and disembodied reason developed by way of rethinking the meaning of embodiment and engaged agency, particularly in relation to the self and epistemology, but also, as we have seen, as extended to social imaginaries. Taylor does not explicitly discuss the question of historical (dis)continuity. This is not surprising given that the philosophical question of the imagination and creativity in human practices does not drive his thought, as it did for Castoriadis and Ricoeur. In reflecting on the Ricoeur-Castoriadis radio dialogue (2017), for example, Taylor notes that: [The radio dialogue] sounded a bit at times like ships passing in the night, or a battle between ‘half-full’ and ‘half-empty’. They both accept that there is always some element of continuity, as well as novelty in new departures. So it is hard to get a clear idea of what’s at stake. Castoriadis’ major examples are: the Greek turn to rational justification— logon didonai; and then the invention of quite new modes of self-rule (example: the Greek polis, but also the Commune). And it seems that you can read these either in his way, or in Ricoeur’s. But one thing that occurred to me: these two paradigm examples of the institution of something new are not on the same footing. With rational justification, the practice gets going among a select few, and that suffices. But with new forms of self-rule, they can be launched and tried, but they are not necessarily viable. The Paris Commune is

Clarifying Social Imaginaries

27

an example. It’s unclear whether and how this experiment in popular selfgovernment would have survived if it hadn’t brutally been cut short by the troops from Versailles. Would it have turned authoritarian, as other new attempts have? Would it have broken apart from internal conflict? Certainly in cases where new forms of self-rule are tried out in new societies (representative democracy, e.g., in Asia and Africa, say), the result can be very different, and seems to depend on whether or not certain facets of the previous social imaginary can be transmuted so as to underpin the new form. But does all this support Ricoeur against Castoriadis? 40

Accepting both continuity and discontinuity in social change, and wary of over-accentuating either, Taylor’s approach emphasises instead two different paths to social change and innovation—the first begins with an elite group, often in the form of a theory or at least conscious, rational articulation/ theorisation of the issue at hand—and then expands into the wider social practices and social imaginary, whereas the second case involves the transformation of the existing social imaginary across a whole social collective in line with the new practices. More generally, Taylor’s approach to modernity as a secular age posits that ‘“imagining anew” takes off from existing practices, and gives them a new twist, a new ethic, a new background understanding’ rather than a focus on ‘revolution, as often conceived on the Left. In the case of Jacobins and Bolsheviks, we have new imaginings which are unconnected to the existing range of practices and folkways, and thus require heavy use of force, which brings about great suffering and no gain in freedom’. 41 Here there is a rejection of radical social rupture and transformation as revolution for which Castoriadis advocated (but not in the Jacobin or Bolshevik sense) (Castoriadis 1990), but also to the ‘pathological’ level of the utopian imaginary in Ricoeur’s sense. The interplay of the ideological and utopian imaginary in Ricoeur’s framework bears some family resemblances to Castoriadis’s articulation of society as instituted and instituting. 42 But, perhaps in line with their respective emphasis on historical continuity and discontinuity, Castoriadis emphasised instituting society, whereas Ricoeur’s most systematic reflections, as we have seen, lay with the ideological imaginary. Unlike Castoriadis and Ricoeur, Taylor does not incorporate a bifurcated understanding of the social imaginary along the lines of instituted and instituting. Taylor’s approach to social change is distinctive in that he posits a continuity of social practices, but change is driven by alteration in the background understanding and social imaginary which then lend the practices different meanings, and world disclosure, such that the social world itself is transformed and qualitatively ‘new’ practices emerge. Regarding the question of the social imaginary qua imaginary, Castoriadis’s early distinction between the imaginary and the symbolic is unique in the field. For him, the imaginary element is a precondition of—and distinct

28

Suzi Adams

from—the symbolic. (As we have seen, his later work dispenses with this distinction altogether.) But Castoriadis’s symbolic is primarily located in institutions, not in narratives or action. 43 For Ricoeur and Taylor, social imaginaries—or the imagination—always incorporate a hermeneutic element. The imaginary is symbolic. For Ricoeur, this is elucidated via symbols, metaphor, myths and narrative in both its ideological and utopian incarnation. For Taylor, too, it is articulated via myths, legends, ‘paradigm stories, images and ideologies that we carry around with us’ (Taylor 2007b, 30). For both Ricoeur and Taylor, the social imaginary (specifically, for Ricoeur, the ideological imaginary) features as a social backdrop. For Taylor, the strong distinction between theory and imaginary means that the imaginary is never fully articulated, whereas, similarly for Ricoeur, the ideological imaginary as the symbolic constitution of the social world stands behind us: we think with rather than about ideology. Although there is an overarching commonality with Ricoeur and Taylor in that they both stress narrative and language to collective identity formation, there are significant differences in their approaches, which are beyond the scope of the present chapter to pursue. But we can observe that whereas Ricoeur developed what we might call the linguistification of the imagination, the imagination has not yet featured in a central way in Taylor’s philosophy of language. What is clear is that for both Taylor and Ricoeur, in contradistinction to Castoriadis, social imaginary meaning is located in and carried by social action. Taylor emphasises social practices, and this, too, can be seen in Ricoeur’s understanding of ideology. Ricoeur’s theorisation of action in connection to utopia is less systematic, although obviously utopian projects are premised on the interweaving of imaginary and action in the same way as is ideology. Importantly, where Castoriadis locates meaning in the imaginary element, qua imaginary (carried by institutions, to be sure, but anchored in the imaginary nonetheless), for Taylor and Ricoeur, meaning in the practical sphere is situated in contexts of action in interplay with social imaginaries (as forms of discourse), but Taylor often links social practices to institutions, and, as we shall see in the following, even in Ricoeur’s early thought there is an opening to this sphere of life beyond Weberian action. Importantly, both Taylor and Ricoeur pursue their most systematic reflections on ‘the meaning of meaning’ as a philosophy of language, which in both cases includes—in different ways—social imaginaries as a form of discourse, whereas for Castoriadis, language does not have primacy over the imaginary, and the social imaginary creates a world as a world of meaning each time. Castoriadis, Ricoeur and Taylor’s respective engagement with the world problematic draws on phenomenological resources, although clearly in different ways and to different extents. As such, they each understand the human condition as always already in-the-world. In Merleau-Ponty’s words, ‘because we are in in-the-world, we are condemned to meaning’ (Merleau-

Clarifying Social Imaginaries

29

Ponty 2002, ixx). In this way, reflections on the world problematic are central to ‘the meaning of meaning’. A closer look at the context of MerleauPonty’s reflections reveal that the sociality of being-in-the-world is socialhistorical. 44 Being-in-the-world also highlights the world as an overarching horizon. What this means is that meaning is decentred from the constructivism of anthropos: when the world problematic is taken on board, meaning cannot be reduced to a socio-centric—or, more broadly, anthropocentric— constructivist perspective. As Merleau-Ponty showed in the ‘Preface’ to the Phenomenology of Perception, meaning is not only social but social-historical, and history is the domain of qualitative change. Thus ‘the meaning of meaning’ is configured by its sociality, its world relation, and qualitative historical change as the movement of social doing (in all its registers). Castoriadis’s reflections on the social imaginary during his first phase (1964/1965 to 1972) were broadly phenomenological. But while he emphasised the sociality of meaning, and, more than any other thinker, gave an indepth articulation of the social-historical region of being, his engagement with the phenomenological problematic of the world was not at the forefront of his thought. His earlier thought gave due account to the human condition in-the-world—and, concomitantly, its phenomenological and hermeneutic dimensions—and this was incorporated into his theory of meaning. 45 But his turn to ontology and radicalisation of creation to ex nihilo in the early 1970s was accompanied by a parallel ontologisation of the world, which, in turn, meant that his articulation implicitly veered toward an explication of closed cultural worlds, such that he could no longer account for the world as an overarching horizon of the human condition relation of ‘the meaning of meaning’. 46 In this Castoriadis rejects the Sinnfähigkeit of the world. Of the three thinkers, Ricoeur’s work is clearly the most phenomenological (in the restricted sense). Like Merleau-Ponty and Jan Patočka, Ricoeur’s hermeneutic-phenomenology is characterised by a critical engagement with both Husserl and Heidegger. If the world as a phenomenological problematic was not perhaps as front and centre for him as it was for Merleau-Ponty and Patočka, hermeneutic reconstruction would nevertheless reveal a rich vein of reflection and innovation. That said, Ricoeur’s hermeneutical articulation of the world-disclosing power of text (and discourse) is highly significant. In the Lectures on Ideology of Utopia, the phenomenological context of the world question is not made explicit. But in a deeply thoughtful review of Nelson Goodman’s Ways of World-Making, 47 we gain a greater insight to Ricoeur’s approach. Here, he critiques the overly constructionist notion of ‘making’ in Goodman’s ‘world-making’ and instead (drawing on Merleau-Ponty) offers an account of world-rendering in an open dialectic with world-making (Ricoeur 1991e, 211) but still upholds the experiential dimension of the world as an horizon (in contradistinction to a phenomenon). In a beautiful passage, he argues that:

30

Suzi Adams I think it is possible to escape this alternative choice. Contrary to the first alternative, the world may be more than each version without being apart from it. It is the very experience of making that yields that of discovering. And discovering is to confront the opacity of the world. The world is includedexcluded as the horizon of each intentional aiming. It is not something to which versions refer, but that out of which, or against the background of which, versions refer. (Ricoeur 1991e, 213)

The phenomenological problematic of the world has been of enduring concern for Charles Taylor. Drawing chiefly on Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein, the world features as a tacit background for Taylor, as a social repertory against which practices derive their meaning (e.g., Taylor 1995b). Although Taylor has characterised anthropos as a self-interpreting animal it is clear from his reflections that anthropos is also a world-interpreting animal, and that the world discloses itself as an overarching, transobjective horizon of meaning. This is evident, for example, in his discussion of Heidegger’s Lichtung: ‘Lichtung comes about through being-in-the-world— which the Platonic view failed to acknowledge; but it is not simply an inner capacity of humans. Coming to recognise this is part of a transformed stance toward the world in which the will to power would no longer be central. The principal failing in the human-centred accounts of Lichtung is that they cannot do justice to the ways in which, in articulating the world, we are responding to something that is not us’ (Taylor 1995b, 77ff). Additionally, more than Ricoeur and Castoriadis, Taylor emphasises the concrete historical unfolding/articulation of the world horizon that is evident not only in his very explication of ‘modern social imaginaries’ but also in his broader hermeneutic of modernity (as mentioned previously). In this vein, for example, he observes that modernity features ‘a flattened world, where the horizons of meaning become fainter, the ideal of self-determining freedom comes to exercise a more powerful attraction’ (Taylor 1991, 69). As we have seen, both Ricoeur and Taylor anchor social imaginaries squarely in forms of social doing, whereas Castoriadis emphasises the interplay between imaginary significations and institutions. Curiously, both Ricoeur and Taylor pay more attention to ‘instituted’ forms of social doing, as social practices (Taylor) or as part of the ideological imaginary (Ricoeur). In each case, it is the productivity of the imagination that spurs social change: for Taylor, changes in the social imaginary transform existing social practices, whereas for Ricoeur, the utopian imaginary (as the practical dimension of the productive imagination) reveals new worlds. As we have seen, Castoriadis’s understanding of social imaginaries incorporates a dimension of social doing, but this was not approached systematically. Political social doing, as praxis, is understood as part of the project of autonomy, whereas embodied social activity—such as the economic activity mentioned previously—incorporates both engaged agency (as with Taylor) but also an impersonal aspect

Clarifying Social Imaginaries

31

(I return to this later): both these aspects come close to the notion of social practices in Taylor’s sense. Taylor also incorporates an awareness of the trans-subjective field of activity (e.g., Taylor 1995b), but this is not systematically incorporated into his articulation of social imaginaries. Interestingly, whereas for Taylor the changes in social imaginaries transform existing social practices, for Castoriadis there is mutual transformation in both imaginaries and practices. For Castoriadis, Ricoeur and Taylor, society can be understood as a political institution. Yet Ricoeur is the only theorist to explicitly include the phenomenon of power into his account of social imaginaries. For him, both ideology and utopia are projects of power: ideology seeks to consolidate and reproduce power, utopia contests and subverts the existing order of power (Ricoeur 1976b). That being said, Ricoeur does not develop a systematic theory of power qua power. Instead, he reflects on it via Weberian notions of authority and legitimation. Where ideology legitimates a project of power, utopia contests its legitimacy and authority. Castoriadis did not explicitly include a theory of power as part of his reflections (in his first two phases) on social imaginary significations, but he did develop a distinctive theory of the ‘ground power’ of institutions (Castoriadis 1991) in the final period of his reflections on social imaginaries. 48 Taylor has not expounded a theory of power, but occasional comments would seem to indicate a sympathy for Arendt’s notion of power that is less to do with coercion and more as ‘as the way in which, in a self-governing society, everybody as it were increases power because they have more ability to act collectively’ (Beaulieu and Taylor 2005, 116). Finally, different registers of ‘the social’ underpin each of the social imaginary frameworks under discussion. For Castoriadis, imaginary significations are part of the social-historical. As such, they are trans-subjective and impersonal: this is the domain of what he calls the anonymous collective. 49 Habermas has criticised Castoriadis for losing the subject in the ‘hurly burly’ of the anonymous collective (Habermas 1987), but this is to misunderstand the trans-subjective domain in Castoriadis’s sense. It does not drown subjectivity—or the acting, thinking, creative subject. Instead, it forms its precondition. When Castoriadis discusses praxis (in his preontological work), there is both a collective and intersubjective level of sociality involved. 50 That being said, Castoriadis’s marginalisation of ‘doing’ in relation to social imaginaries in the most systematic phase of his thought, while simultaneously emphasising the interrelation of institutions and the social imaginary, prioritises the macro-impersonal dimension of social life. Ricoeur’s focus on the practical domain as the region of social action in the Weberian sense of intersubjective interaction is at the heart of his social imaginary framework. Ricoeur highlights the social as intersubjective. He explicitly wants to focus on the concrete nature of humans in their sociality and ‘actuality of the life-process’

32

Suzi Adams

(Ricoeur 1976b, 18) as a way to avoid the anonymity of structures (both understood in sociological and structuralist contexts here) that he sees as dehumanising. In conversation with George Taylor (in preparation for the publication of the Lectures on Ideology and Utopia), Ricoeur articulated the social imaginary as the interplay of the cultural, social and political imagination, and there is a clear inclusion of the institutional level. In this vein, Ricoeur advises that the social imagination has more to do with the roles ascribed to us within institutions, whereas the cultural involves the production of works of intellectual life. The social seems to arise from the difference in various languages—and surely in French— between the social and the political. The political focuses on the institution, of the constitutional, the sharing of power, and so on, whereas the social encompasses the different roles ascribed to us by varying institutions. The cultural, on the other hand, has more to do with the medium of language and the creation of ideas. (Ricoeur 1986b, 323n1)

Further, George Taylor, in writing on Ricoeur’s later work on ‘just institutions’, notes that there is an underlying concept of institution—in Montesquieu’s sense of a ‘bond of common mores’—in Ricoeur’s thought (Ricoeur, cited in Taylor 2014, 574). Further, Taylor argues that this sense of institution and institutionalisation (as a dynamic process) is more akin to a positive sense of objectification rather than to alienation from, and reification of, anonymous structures. Although Ricoeur’s reflections on ‘just institutions’ appears in his later work, and is thus beyond the scope of the present chapter, George Taylor reconstructs the presence of ‘objectification’ in the Lectures on Ideology and Utopia and other contemporaneous works (Taylor 2014, 576ff). Of interest here is George Taylor’s link between the function of social memory in ideology (discussed previously) to ‘perpetuate the initial energy beyond the period of effervescence’ (Ricoeur 1981c, 225) with institutions (Taylor 2014, 577) and the form of sociality that that entails. Like MerleauPonty, Ricoeur would want to retain an intersubjective aspect to institutions, but forms of objectification clearly overlap with the trans-subjective in Castoriadis’s sense. Objectification in this sense is of course a rethinking of Hegel’s objective spirit (I return to this later). Finally, Charles Taylor’s articulation of social imaginaries focusses on the engaged agency of the collective ‘we’ that is irreducible to an individual. It seems to move between intersubjective and collective registers. This is highlighted further by the emphasis on social practices as the carriers and bearers of social imaginaries, although he also acknowledges that some social imaginaries—such as ‘the market economy’—are more impersonal and objective, but he does not specify the relation between the two kinds of sociality. In bringing Castoriadis, Ricoeur and Taylor into a preliminary discussion, a range of family resemblances in relation to their respective social imagi-

Clarifying Social Imaginaries

33

nary frameworks, but also divergences, have begun to become more visible. Where the question of social creativity and the creative/productive imagination animate Ricoeur and Castoriadis’s approaches, the imagination is perhaps undertheorised in Taylor’s account. Castoriadis distinguished between the imaginary and the symbolic and put social imaginary signification as embodied by institutions at the forefront of his reflections on meaning, whereas Taylor and Ricoeur embrace an understanding of the imaginary as intrinsically symbolic and anchor social imaginary meaning in contexts of social doing. Taylor’s response to the phenomenological problematic of the world is central to his articulation of social imaginaries, whereas it was not an explicit question for Ricoeur, although its presence imbues the entirety of his reflections. Castoriadis’s shift from a broadly phenomenological to ontological approach saw a corresponding truncating of the world problematic, and this led to a perspective that was overly constructivist. Although Castoriadis emphasised institutions, and Ricoeur and Taylor highlighted contexts of social action, closer inspection reveals bridges between their various accounts of institutions and doing. Although power is central to understanding social life, only Ricoeur explicitly understood social imaginaries as the interplay of culture and power. There is agreement among Taylor, Castoriadis and Ricoeur that social imaginaries presuppose the creativity of society, and that historical social change is also creative, but the best way to articulate that creativity remains disputed. Finally, each account emphasised different registers of the social—from intersubjective, to collective intentionality, to the impersonality of the anonymous-collective—yet bridges to different levels of sociality can also be discerned in their work. For each thinker, social imaginaries encompass the domain of the social world anchored in institutions and social action. We turn now to consider whether social imaginaries can offer a pathway to rethink the objective spirit anew. In retrospect, 1975 was a watershed year for the imagination and social imaginaries. Castoriadis published the IIS, and Ricoeur published The Rule of Metaphor (Ricoeur 1986a [1975]) and presented his lectures on ideology and utopia, as well as those on the imagination. But what about Taylor? As we know, Taylor had not at that point begun to reflect on social imaginaries. But in 1975 he published his highly influential book, Hegel. I would like to suggest that a bridge can be built here, and that the social imaginaries current of thought—as heterogeneous as it is—can be characterised as a post-Hegelian approach to the objective spirit. Although the objective spirit was important to Hegel’s earlier Phenomenology of Spirit, it matured as a category in his later, more systematic work. It refers to the Sittlichkeit—the customs, norms and values—of a particular society. More comprehensively, it refers to the domain of the social, in toto. For present purposes, this can be understood as the realm of institutions (not just subjects) as more or less enduring social

34

Suzi Adams

forms, both in the broad sense, as the ‘life forms’ of a society or civilisation, and, in a narrower sense, as collectively instituted meaning as social imaginaries, which interface with institutions in varieties of social doing. Vincent Descombes offers one of the most interesting recent reformulations of the objective spirit. He argues that the concept of objective spirit has most value when distanced from varieties of psychologism that formed part of the Enlightenment legacy, which holds that thought is the activity of a singular subject. 51 Descombes instead identifies a ‘whole family of sociological conceptions of spirit’ (Descombes 1994, 97) that range from Montesquieu’s ‘the spirit of the laws’ to Durkheim’s ‘collective consciousness’, from Geertz’s anthropological approach to ‘culture’ to Wittgenstein’s ‘forms of life’, and Lévi-Strauss’s ‘symbolic systems’. Although in agreement with Descombes’s overall argument, the present chapter diverges from his notion of ‘institutions thinking’ and the pursuit of properly intellectual phenomena for analysis. In reference to Taylor’s work on Hegel (1975), Descombes acknowledges that ‘thinking’ could also be broadened to ‘meaning’. In this vein, he writes that ‘meaning is not locked up within individuals’ inner realm; public and collective forms of existence and action are its natural element. It is a philosophy of objective spirit redefined’ (Descombes 1994, 98). Unfortunately, he does not pursue this line of thought systematically further. One way to do so, is to articulate social imaginaries as a radicalised version of Durkheim’s collective representations (see Adams and Smith, in this volume) which links them to the objective spirit. Here it is important to recognise the shift that Durkheim makes from ‘collective consciousness’ to ‘collective representations’; this shift takes the emphasis away from understanding of ‘the mind/spirit’ and is more amenable to rethinking the objective spirit through institutions, social doing and meaning via social imaginaries; that is, in and as the social realm proper. In this way, the notion of collective representations—which are linked to the creativity of society in Durkheim’s thought—can be understood as a precursor to social imaginaries. Social imaginary significations are to be understood as the most fundamental expression of the objective spirit. Castoriadis says as much (in his early thought). He argues that the imaginary element, as the mode of being of the social-historical, is an original investment by society of the world and itself with meaning— meanings which are not ‘dictated’ by real factors since it is instead this meaning that attributes to these real factors a particular importance and a particular place in the universe constituted by a given society—a meaning that can be recognized in both the content and the style of its life (and which is not so far removed from what Hegel called ‘the spirit of a people’)? (Castoriadis 1987, 128) 52

Clarifying Social Imaginaries

35

Let us note briefly that this reference to the objective spirit as a way of patterning the world in and as history is also key to understanding the imaginary element in Castoriadis’s sense, as well as being compatible with Taylor and Ricoeur’s approach to social imaginaries as social doing and institutions. But language, too, is an institution, if not, as for Ricoeur, the institution of institutions (Oliver Abel, cited in Taylor 2014, 575). As we have noted, the social imaginary frameworks under discussion emphasise different registers of sociality. What kind of sociality does the objective spirit refer to? In a later essay, ‘The Problem of Collective Identity: The Instituting We and the Instituted We’, Descombes (2011) takes Hegel’s question—‘Who is to frame the constitution?’ (Descombes 2011, 374)—to argue for the primacy of the impersonal objective spirit over an atomistic understanding of the social as the basis of collective identity: a people in the sense of a nation is already a constituted entity, even if it is not yet a constitutional state in the modern sense of a nation possessing a written constitution. Members of a nation already have their own politeia insofar as they form a political community endowed with the means to express a common or general will. (Descombes 2011, 375)

Descombes identifies two kinds of sociality, the intersubjective, interactionist Weberian approach, which assumes that sociality begins with the ‘intrusion’ of a second person’ (2011, 375–76). However, following Hegel, a plurality of individual subjects, even in interaction, ‘is not enough to yield the social life of a people (in the sense of a Volk)’ (Descombes 2011, 376). A moral unity is lacking. Drawing on Taylor, Descombes argues for an understanding of the connection between political constitution and a collective as expressive. Noting the ‘principle of embodiment’ that Taylor invokes, Descombes explains: ‘And it is very much to the point to observe here with Taylor that this activity of articulating our meanings “takes place not only in concepts and symbols, but also in common institutions and practices”’ (Descombes, 2011, 376, citing Taylor 1985, 87). 53 Thus, a group’s collective identity includes a common will, which requires the ‘expressive resources to manifest such a will’ (Descombes 2011, 377). Therefore, a response to Hegel’s question can only be given by reference to a collective already with a constitution. But Descombes asks: How can the constitution be already there before having been brought into existence? (Descombes 2011, 377). He argues that Hegel’s solution to the paradox of a simultaneous status of immanence and transcendence—that is by positing a Volksgeist for every Volk— articulates the social preconditions for the political institutions of a nation, on the one hand, and draws on a broader understanding of ‘state’ and ‘constitution’ as a ‘moral unity’ that underpin the collective expression of will, on the other (Descombes 2011, 379). Descombes stresses that the Volksgeist should

36

Suzi Adams

not be understood as a ‘superagent’ (Descombes 2011, 380), and he turns to Montesquieu’s articulation of Volksgeist that underpins an holistic account of society where it is ‘impossible to identify the group independently of its institutions, or the political institutions of a nation independently of the totality of its customs and established ways of acting’ (Descombes 2011, 380). One of the strengths of Montesquieu’s approach is his identification of the meaning of institutions as a common ‘intention’ or ‘spirit’ (Descombes 2011, 382). These social norms have not been legislated into existence, rather ‘have been brought into existence in an impersonal way’ (Descombes 2011, 382, emphasis in original). Montesquieu’s impersonalist approach acknowledges the precedence of general institutions, such as customs and rituals, over precise institutions, such as laws enacted by a legislator. Or, drawing on Hegelian language, the impersonal, objective spirit has priority over the subjective spirit (Descombes 2011, 383). Descombes then goes on to consider the question of collective intentionality with ‘several individuals acting together’ (Descombes 2011, 383). In this vein, he considers John Searle’s personalist approach, which argues that institutions are reproduced through ongoing activity, as a priority of the act over the object, that is that institutions are not material objects, rather they are dependent on their existence ‘upon the personal commitment of the users’ (Descombes 2011, 384). Descombes argues that Searle, in The Construction of Social Reality, presents a scheme for the creation of institutions that now recognise acts over objects. As such, the account is personalist, that is, the creation of institutions is explained in terms of ‘personal powers’ (Descombes 2011, 385). So the users of an institution ‘are the real holders of the instituting power’ as they collectively agree to renew the commitment of the institution in using it. But what is the identity of this ‘collective we’ (Descombes 2011, 385)? Searle understands the collective acceptance of a rule as a variety of ‘collective intentionality’, which Descombes further distinguishes here between a ‘distributive we’ (of atomistic sociality) and a holistic ‘collective we’. The latter is required ‘as soon as we mean the context of our action to be social in the moral or institutional sense’ (Descombes 2011, 386). The question then becomes: ‘How can we conceive a collective subject as being an instituting subject, a subject exercising instituting powers?’ (Descombes 2011, 386, emphasis in original). Descombes argues that the ‘instituting we’ is inclusive rather than exclusive (Descombes 2011, 387), but no matter how inclusive, it does not include future users, although ‘we are also speaking for ourselves in the sense of expressing in advance our future acts of acceptance and commitment, acts that are still to be performed by us. . . . In order to commit ourselves as future users of the institution, we have to rely on the fact that we are provided with an instituting power by the intuitional context of our customs’ (Descombes 2011, 388, emphasis in original). But this would not be possible, argues Descombes, without already having under-

Clarifying Social Imaginaries

37

stood ourselves to be instituted as ‘we’ (Descombes 2011, 388), that is, the impersonal sociality of the objective spirit is still granted primacy over the subjective spirit. However, Descombes’s ‘collective we’ errs on the side of intersubjectivity, that is, with subjective spirit. As we have seen from the earlier reconstruction of social imaginary frameworks, however, another register of the social is apparent; this would be the ‘instituting collective’—such as that found in social movements—which sits between the impersonal trans-subjective and the intentional intersubjective and includes aspects of both. But the hermeneutic turn evident both in the social imaginary frameworks under discussion, and by extension, post-Hegelian concepts of spirit, means that the frontiers between subject, objective and absolute spirit become more porous and flexible. Meaning itself is underdetermined, not yet a ‘thing’. Collective intentionality (as the instituting collective, to be distinguished from the impersonal anonymous collective of the social-historical and instituting society) expands the sphere of the subjective spirit, but it draws on the impersonal aspect—the collective anonymous, in Castoriadis’s terms—which is moored in the objective spirit, and, finally, in absolute spirit, as the transobjective horizon of world-articulating imaginary significations. The theorisation of social imaginaries by Castoriadis, Taylor and Ricoeur carves out a new approach to the objective spirit. But was this backed up by a rethinking of subjective spirit and absolute spirit? In all three cases, a rethinking of the subjective spirit is central to their respective endeavours. It is noteworthy that, in so doing, both Castoriadis and Ricoeur deemed it necessary to engage with Freud and psychoanalysis. 54 There is arguably neither systematic nor direct engagement with the notion of absolute spirit in their work. This notwithstanding, the problematic of the world horizon—inconclusive in all three cases but always present—opens onto the absolute spirit. IN LIEU OF A CONCLUSION This chapter has sought to clarify the meaning and scope of social imaginaries in a provisional way in the work of Castoriadis, Ricoeur and Taylor. Both Castoriadis and Ricoeur came to social imaginaries as a way of rethinking the imagination and creativity, whereas Taylor came to social imaginaries as a way to understand the plurality of modernity. The argument developed in the chapter encountered limitations of scope: neither the latter stages of Castoriadis and Taylor’s reflections on social imaginaries, nor Taylor and Ricoeur’s particular philosophy of language as the fullness of their individual responses to the ‘meaning of meaning’ and the human condition, nor the question of religion (especially important for Taylor and Ricoeur but also in a negative way for Castoriadis), nor the question of modernity could be

38

Suzi Adams

considered. The chapter demonstrated that Castoriadis’s elucidation of social imaginary significations as the simultaneous creation of a world ex nihilo is embodied in institutions from which society is understood as a self-instituting imaginary institution. Of the three thinkers, Ricoeur’s elucidation of the social imaginary as ideology and utopia drew the most systematically on sociological sources and was grounded in a theory of social action. Taylor’s approach emphasised the opposition between theory and imagination, where the collective imagination as social imaginaries changes the background meanings of the world, which in turn transforms social practices. In bringing Castoriadis, Ricoeur and Taylor into dialogue, implicit openings toward shared problematics were identified—such as the interface between institutions and social doing—as well as divergent approaches to, for example, the ‘meaning of meaning’. The chapter concluded by arguing that social imaginaries offer a productive way for articulating a post-Hegelian approach to the objective spirit. As such, social imaginary frameworks provide the basis for a multi-faceted social theory, as well as insights into the human condition in its collective dimension. Finally, in the porosity of social imaginaries, and of meaning as ‘underdetermined’ that must necessarily involve a plurality of interpretations, it can sometimes seem that social imaginary frameworks may still give the impression of modernity—and more broadly, societies—as overly homogenised or integrated. Intra- and intercultural differentiation and contestation remains a key part of the story, and the inherently rebellious nature of the imagination will always irrupt in social life. Acknowledgment: I would like to thank Johann Arnason, Craig Calhoun, Charles Taylor and George Taylor for their generous responses to the various questions that I raised with them while writing this chapter. NOTES 1. Claude Lefort could arguably also be included here, but he focussed on the symbolic rather than the imaginary, and on ‘political imaginaries’ rather than ‘social imaginaries’. As such, consideration of his work is beyond the scope of this chapter. 2. An emerging literature that includes comparative discussion of social imaginaries in the key thinkers is emerging. For example, for a discussion of Taylor and Castoriadis, see Smith (2010); for a discussion of Ricoeur and Castoriadis, see Michel (2015) and Adams (2017). The present chapter forms preparatory research for a planned book-length work on the social imaginary frameworks in Castoriadis, Ricoeur and Taylor. 3. Hereafter referred to as the IIS. The IIS is a heterogeneous text. The first part was first published in 1964/1965 in Socialisme ou Barbarie, and the second part was written from 1970 to 1974. 4. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to do justice to all three phases and so limits itself to consideration of the first two phases. All three phases of Castoriadis’s elucidation of social imaginary significations, and their ensuring implications for his theoretical framework, comprise the focus of my forthcoming monograph, entitled Castoriadis and the Imaginary Element (with Rowman & Littlefield International).

Clarifying Social Imaginaries

39

5. This second period overlaps with the earlier phase, as, between 1970 and 1972, Castoriadis published some significant essays that remained within the phenomenological rather than ontological orbit of his reflections (see Adams 2018). 6. See Arnason (2014) for a more detailed discussion. 7. It also included a radical rethinking of psychoanalysis and was articulated as the radical imagination of/as the psyche (for a detailed discussion, see Adams 2011 and Klooger 2009) This aspect is less important to understanding his account of social imaginary significations and will not detain us here. 8. Part of this discussion on Castoriadis draws on my essay on Castoriadis, Merleau-Ponty, and Phenomenology (Adams 2018). 9. A second discussion of the elemental intertwining of the imaginary and the symbolic by Castoriadis also has recently emerged (Castoriadis 2015). It was written in 1968. Characteristic of Castoriadis’s thought at the time was the dual emphasis not only on (imaginary) signification but also on ‘doing’, and in this essay, he extends his analysis to the symbolisation of language. The essay is an extract from his unfinished work, The Imaginary Element, and was posthumously discovered and published. 10. The 1975 section of the IIS consists of four chapters. As I have argued elsewhere (Adams 2011), the first focusses on an ontology of the social-historical, time and creation; the second on epistemology and a critique of elementary reason as the proto-institutions of legein and teukhein; the third as a philosophical anthropology via a rethinking of Freud on the psyche as radical imagination; and the final chapter includes an implicit hermeneutics within his ontology of social imaginary significations. 11. Castoriadis criticised the opposition between ‘society’ and the ‘individual’, arguing that the individual is a fragment of the social institution. He posited instead an opposition between the social-historical and the psyche. 12. The being of ‘doing’ survives in a severely truncated form in his ontology as the protoinstitution of teukhein: ‘assembling-adjusting-fabricating-constructing’ (Castoriadis 1987, 260). For a more detailed discussion of legein and teukhein, see Adams (2011) and Klooger (2014). 13. There are scattered references to ideology in his later work, but often to critique its effects, and his interest in the utopian imaginary seemed to be carried forward in his reflections on the importance of fiction in shaping new worlds which is as much a part of the poetic as the practical imagination. 14. This was beginning to shift, however, to a rethinking of hermeneutics as semantic innovation via metaphor rather than a hermeneutics of symbol, as announced with the publication of The Rule of Metaphor in 1975 (Ricoeur 1986a [1975]). 15. Jean-Luc Amalric (2014), after research in Ricoeur’s personal library and archives, argues that Ricoeur’s encounter with Mannheim occurred after his engagement with Jacques Ellul’s work on the mediating aspect of ideology (Ellul 1973), and, indeed, that Ellul’s work sparked Ricoeur’s interest in Mannheim. It was only after Ricoeur was acquainted with Ellul that the mediating role of ideology and social memory was theorised by Ricoeur; the earlier essays on ideology did not include it. 16. The lectures on ideology and utopia were not published until around a decade later after they were first presented (Ricoeur 1986b). For an excellent discussion of these lectures and their place within Ricoeur’s oeuvre, see George Taylor (1986). The lectures on imagination have not yet been published, although they will be published soon (Ricoeur, forthcoming). Ricoeur had a longstanding interest in the imagination, although it is only relatively recently that it has come to be identified as central to his intellectual trajectory (see for example, Amalric 2013). See Foessel (2014) for a very interesting discussion of Ricoeur’s articulation of the social imaginary in relation to his ‘Poetics of the Will’. 17. The mediating aspect of ideology in relation to a collective’s social memory of founding events started to appear in his thought after his discovery of Ellul’s work. 18. It is interesting to note that Ricoeur does not ever speak of the state in this context. 19. Ricoeur generally used the term ‘redescribing reality’ but in his intellectual autobiography he has also referred to it as ‘re-interpreting reality’, which of course holds the possibility of creative renewal as a creative interpretation.

40

Suzi Adams

20. For an excellent discussion of the shattering effect of utopia, see George Taylor (2017a). 21. See also Calhoun (1991). 22. A companion volume, Poetics, is forthcoming (Taylor, forthcoming). It is beyond the scope of the present chapter to include discussion of A Secular Age (2007a) or The Language Animal (2016). 23. His later iterations of social imaginaries do not explicitly include the artistic sphere. It will thus be interesting to see how social imaginaries are incorporated into his framework in his forthcoming book on post-Romantic poetics (Taylor, forthcoming). 24. Calhoun’s essay on Taylor and the social imaginary (2000) was the first to incorporate discussion of Taylor’s take on this problematic and was published before Taylor’s best-known work on modern social imaginaries appeared in the early 2000s. See also Browne (2006) and Abbey (2006) for further discussions of Taylor and social imaginaries. 25. Personal correspondence, 24 August 2018. Cited with permission. 26. Personal correspondence, 24 August 2018. Cited with permission. 27. Personal correspondence, 24 August 2018. Cited with permission. 28. For a detailed discussion of Bazcko’s importance for Taylor, see Abbey (2006). 29. Taylor has been explicit about this point already in, for example, the 1992 Tanner Lectures. 30. The root of this idea for the secular age was raised in the Tanner Lectures; that is, the difference between secular and eternal/transcendent/divine times, and that the former characterises modernity as the age of profane time (Taylor 1992b, 239). 31. An understanding of the supra-individual aspect of action/practice for the constitution of social reality predates this phase of articulating his social imaginary framework. For example, it is evident in his earlier work on Hegel. 32. There is an overlap between habitus and social imaginary practices which Taylor does not always keep distinct. 33. In part this responds to some criticisms of Sources of the Self which argued that Taylor’s account of the emergence of the modern self relied too heavily on philosophical accounts. 34. See Calhoun (1991) for further discussion of Durkheim’s moral sociology as a source for Taylor. 35. This line of argument is in tension with Ricoeur’s understanding that the utopian imaginary also produces ‘imaginative variations’ in the Husserlian sense. 36. For the most recent research debates on the productive/creative imagination, see Krummel (in this volume), Geniusas (2017) and Geniusas and Nikulin (2017). 37. Seminars delivered in 1973 on ‘Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning’ which were later expanded into the 1976 publication. 38. For Taylor, ‘articulation’ is generally understood to include reason. In The Language Animal, he uses the term ‘articulation’ to also mean ‘the imposition of form’, which could conceivably also include the activity of the imagination, especially in relation to the schematism. 39. Post-Romantic poetics is the subject of Taylor’s forthcoming book (forthcoming). 40. Email from Charles Taylor to Johann Arnason, 22 August 2015. Cited with permission. 41. Personal email correspondence, 24 August, 2018. Cited with permission. 42. George Taylor notes in his ‘Editor’s Introduction’ to the Lectures on Ideology and Utopia that ‘the Utopian quality of the imagination moves us from the instituted to the instituting’ (Taylor 1986, xxx). 43. Arguably ‘ritual’, which Castoriadis discusses in relation to the symbolic, centrally involves action, although it is also arguably better understood as a social practice. I return to this point. 44. For a more detailed discussion of the context of Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on meaning in the “Preface” to the Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty 2002), see Adams (2018). 45. For a more detailed discussion of Castoriadis and the world problematic in relation to the imaginary element, phenomenology and Merleau-Ponty, see Adams (2018). 46. Castoriadis did not ever fully exorcise the phenomenological problematic of the world from his thought; it remains in traces.

Clarifying Social Imaginaries

41

47. As Ricoeur wrote the review in the 1970s, it falls within the scope of the present chapter. 48. It is beyond the scope of the chapter to discuss Castoriadis’s third period of reflections on social imaginary significations and institutions. 49. For a discussion of the trans-subjective dimension of society, see Adams (2018). 50. For further discussion, see Straume (2012). 51. Descombes’s essay was written as part of a collection of essays on Taylor’s work (Tully 1994). Taylor, in his response, supports Descombes’s overall approach: ‘I think he is getting a hold on some of the deep assumptions which have bedeviled discussion of the whole issue of “objective spirit”, and in this way helping us to get beyond certain confusions which have kept us from finding the right categories to talk of social life’ (Taylor 1994, 236). It is important to note that Descombes’s essay, and Taylor’s response, were written before social imaginaries became an explicit thematic for Taylor. 52. For present purposes, following Habermas, the notions of objective spirit and Volksgeist can be used interchangeably (Habermas 1999). 53. It is interesting—and somewhat curious—to note that despite Descombes’s longstanding engagement with issues around, for example, collective identity, objective spirit, institutions and collective representations, as well as with the three thinkers under discussion here, he has not yet articulated his position in relation to the social imaginaries field. 54. Castoriadis’s engagement with psychoanalysis and Freud comprised a deep rethinking of basic concepts. It is debatable to what extent his systematic interpretation of Freud was then integrated into later turns in his work.

REFERENCE Abbey, Ruth. 2006. ‘Back to Baczko’. European Journal of Political Theory 5 (3): 355–64. Adams, Suzi. 2011. Castoriadis’s Ontology: Being and Creation. New York: Fordham University Press. Adams, Suzi. 2015. ‘On Ricœur’s Shift from a Hermeneutics of Culture to a Cultural Hermeneutics’. Études Ricoeuriennes/Ricoeur Studies 6 (2): 130–53. Adams, Suzi. 2016. ‘On the Significance of the Ancient Greek “Polis” for Patočka and Castoriadis: Philosophy, Politics, History’. In Thinking After Europe: Jan Patočka and Politics, edited by Francesco Tava and Darian Meacham, 217–36. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Adams, Suzi, ed. 2017. Ricoeur and Castoriadis in Discussion: On Human Creation, Historical Novelty, and the Social Imaginary. London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield International. Adams, Suzi. 2018. ‘On Castoriadis and the Social Imaginary Institution of the Real: Hermeneutic-Phenomenological Affinities and Critiques via His Dialogue with Merleau-Ponty’. In Stretching the Limits of the Productive Imagination: Studies in Kantianism, Phenomenology, and Hermeneutics, edited by Saulius Geniusas, 163–86. London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield International. Amalric, Jean-Luc. 2013. Paul Ricoeur, l’Imagination Vive: Une genèse de la philosophie ricœurienne de l’imagination. Paris: Éditions Hermann. Amalric, Jean-Luc. 2014. “Événement, idéologie et utopie.” Études Ricoeuriennes / Ricoeur Studies 5 (2): 9–22. Amalric, Jean-Luc. 2017. ‘Ricoeur and Castoriadis: The Productive Imagination between Mediation and Origin’. In Ricoeur and Castoriadis in Discussion: On Human Creation, Historical Novelty, and the Social Imaginary, edited by Suzi Adams, 77–110. London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield International. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso Books. Arnason, Johann P. 1991. ‘Modernity as a Project and as a Field of Tension’. In Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action, edited by Axel Honneth and Hans Joas, 181–213. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Arnason, Johann P. 1992. ‘World Interpretations and Mutual Understanding’. In CulturalPolitical Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment, edited by Axel Honneth,

42

Suzi Adams

Thomas McCarthy, Claus Offe, and Albrecht Wellmer, 247–68. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Arnason, Johann P. 2003. Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Questions and Theoretical Traditions. Leiden: Brill. Arnason, Johann P. 2014. ‘Social Imaginary Significations’. In Cornelius Castoriadis: Key Concepts, edited by Suzi Adams, 23–42. London: Bloomsbury. Baczko, Bronislaw. 1984. Les imaginaires sociaux: Mémoires et espoirs collectifs. Paris: Payot. Beaulieu, Alain, and Charles Taylor. 2005. ‘A Conversation with Charles Taylor’. Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy (Revue Canadienne de Philosophie Continentale 9 (1): 115–27. Browne, Craig. 2006. ‘A Moral Order of Mutual Benefit’. Thesis Eleven 86 (1): 114–25. Calhoun, Craig. 1991. ‘Morality, Identity, and Historical Explanation: Charles Taylor on the Sources of the Self’. Sociological Theory 9 (2): 232–63. Calhoun, Craig. 2000. ‘Charles Taylor on Identity and the Social Imaginary’. Cahiers du PÉ Q 19: 2–9. Calhoun, Craig. 2018. ‘Thinking Better of Ourselves’. Philosophy and Social Criticism 44 (7): 771–72. Calhoun, Craig, Dilip Gaonkar, Benjamin Lee, Charles Taylor, and Michael Warner. 2015. ‘Modern Social Imaginaries: A Conversation’. Social Imaginaries 1 (1): 189–224. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1984. ‘Epilegomena to a Theory of the Soul which has been presented as a Science’. In Crossroads in the Labyrinth, translated by Kate Soper and Martin H. Ryle, 3–45. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1987 [1975]. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1990. ‘Does the Idea of Revolution Still Make Sense?’ Thesis Eleven 26 (1): 123–38. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1991. ‘Power, Politics, Autonomy’. In Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, edited by David Ames Curtis, 143–74. New York: Oxford University Press. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1993. ‘Merleau-Ponty and the Weight of the Ontological Tradition’. Thesis Eleven 36(1): 1–36. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1997. ‘Done and to Be Done’. In The Castoriadis Reader, edited and translated by David Ames Curtis, 361–416. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 2015. ‘The Imaginary as Such’. Translated by Johann P. Arnason. Social Imaginaries 1 (1): 59–69. Descombes, Vincent. 1994. ‘Is There an Objective Spirit?’ In Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism: The Philosophy of Charles Taylor in Question, edited by James Tully, translated by Daniel Weinstock, 96–120. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Descombes, Vincent. 2011. ‘The Problem of Collective Identity: The Instituting We and the Instituted We’. In Recognition and Social Ontology, edited by Heikki Ikaheimo and Arto Laitinen, 371–90. Leiden: Brill. Ellul, Jacques. 1973. ‘Le rôle médiateur de l’idéologie’. In Démythisation et idéologie: actes du colloque organisé par le Centre international d’études humanistes et par l’Institut d’études philosophiques de Rome, edited by Enrico Castelli, 335–54. Paris: Aubier. Foessel, Michaël. 2014. ‘Action, Norms and Critique: Paul Ricoeur and the Power of the Imaginary’. Philosophy Today 58 (4): 513–25. Gaonkar, Dilip P. 2002. ‘Toward New Imaginaries: An Introduction’. Edited by Dilip P. Gaonkar and Benjamin Lee. New Imaginaries, special issue of Public Culture 14 (1): 1–19. Gaonkar, Dilip P., and Benjamin Lee (eds.). 2002. New Imaginaries, special issue of Public Culture 14: 1. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Geniusas, Saulius (ed.). 2017. Stretching the Limits of Productive Imagination: Studies in Kantianism, Phenomenology and Hermeneutics. London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield International. Geniusas, Saulius, and Dmitri Nikulin (eds.). 2017. Productive Imagination: Its History, Meaning and Significance. London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield International.

Clarifying Social Imaginaries

43

Habermas, Jürgen. 1987. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Translated by Frederick G. Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1999. ‘From Kant to Hegel and Back Again—The Move Towards Decentralization’. European Journal of Philosophy 7 (2): 129–57. Klooger, Jeff. 2009. Castoriadis: Psyche, Society, Autonomy. Leiden: Brill. Klooger, Jeff. 2014. ‘Legein and Teukhein’. In Cornelius Castoriadis: Key Concepts, edited by Suzi Adams, 117–26. London: Bloomsbury. Mannheim, Karl. 1954 [1929]. Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. New York and London: Harcourt, Brace, Routledge and Kegan Paul. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2002 [1945]. The Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London and New York: Routledge. Michel, Johann. 2015. Ricoeur and the Post-structuralists: Bourdieu, Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Castoriadis. Translated by Scott Davidson. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Richir, Marc. 1989. ‘Nous sommes au monde’. Le Temps de la réflexion 10: 237–58. Ricoeur, Paul. 1973. ‘Ethics and Culture: Habermas and Gadamer in Dialogue’. Philosophy Today 17 (2): 153–65. Ricoeur, Paul. 1976a. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth: TCU Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1976b. ‘Ideology and Utopia as Cultural Imagination’. Philosophic Exchange 7 (1): 17–28. Ricoeur, Paul. 1978. ‘Can There be a Scientific Concept of Ideology?’ In Phenomenology and The Social Science: A Dialogue, edited by Joseph Bien, 44–59. Dordrecht: Springer. Ricoeur, Paul. 1981a. ‘A Response by Paul Ricoeur’. In Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation, edited by John B. Thompson, 32–40. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1981b. ‘Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology’. In Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation, edited by John B. Thompson, 63–100. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1981c. ‘Science and Ideology.’ In Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation, edited by John B. Thompson, 222–46. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1984. ‘L’idéologie et l’utopie: deux expressions de l’imaginaire social’. Autres Temps 2: 53–64. Ricoeur, Paul. 1986a [1975]. The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language. Translated by Robert Czerny, Kathleen McLaughlin, and John Costello. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Ricoeur, Paul. 1986b. Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. Edited by George H. Taylor. New York: Columbia University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1991a [1971]. ‘The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text’. In From Text to Action. Essays in Hermeneutics 2, translated by Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson, 144–67. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1991b [1978]. ‘Imagination in Discourse and in Action’. In From Text to Action. Essays in Hermeneutics 2, translated by Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson, 168–87. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1991c. ‘Ideology and Utopia’. In From Text to Action. Essays in Hermeneutics 2, translated by Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson, 308–24. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1991d. ‘The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality’. In A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination, edited by Mario J. Valdés, 117–36. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1991e. ‘Review of Nelson Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking’. In A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination, edited by Mario J. Valdés, 200–15. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1998. Critique and Conviction: Conversations with François Azouvi and Marc de Launay. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

44

Suzi Adams

Ricoeur, Paul. Forthcoming. Lectures on Imagination. Edited by George H. Taylor and JeanLuc Amalric. Chicago: Chicago University Press (forthcoming). Ricoeur, Paul, and Castoriadis, Cornelius. 2017. ‘Dialogue on History and the Social Imaginary’. In Ricoeur and Castoriadis in Discussion: On Human Creation, Historical Novelty, and the Social Imaginary, edited by Suzi Adams, 1–22. London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield International. Smith, Karl. 2010. Meaning, Subjectivity, Society: Making Sense of Modernity. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Straume, Ingerid S. 2012. ‘A Common World? Arendt, Castoriadis and Political Creation’. European Journal of Social Theory 15 (3): 367–83. Taylor, Charles. 1978–1979. ‘The Validity of Transcendental Arguments’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 79: 151–65. Taylor, Charles. 1985. ‘Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind’. In Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers I, 77–96. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press Taylor, Charles. 1991. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Taylor, Charles. 1992a. ‘Inwardness and the Culture of Modernity’. In Philosophical Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment, edited by Axel Honneth, Thomas McCarthy, Claus Offe, and Albrecht Wellmer, 88–110. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Taylor, Charles. 1992b. ‘Modernity and the Rise of the Public Sphere’. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values 14: 203–60. Taylor, Charles. 1994. ‘Reply and Re-articulation’. In Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism: The Philosophy of Charles Taylor in Question, edited by James Tully and Daniel M. Weinstock, 213–57. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, Charles. 1995a. Philosophical Arguments. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Taylor, Charles. 1995b. ‘Lichtung or Lebensform: Parallels between Heidegger and Wittgenstein’. In Philosophical Arguments, 61–78. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Taylor, Charles. 1998. ‘Modes of Secularism’. In Secularism and Its Critics, edited by Rajeev Bhargava, 31–53. Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press. Taylor, Charles. 1999. ‘Comment on Jürgen Habermas “From Kant to Hegel and Back Again”’. European Journal of Philosophy 7 (2): 158–63. Taylor, Charles. 2002. ‘Modern Social Imaginaries’. Edited by Dilip P. Gaonkar and Benjamin Lee. New Imaginaries, special issue of Public Culture 14 (1): 91–124. Taylor, Charles. 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press. Taylor, Charles. 2007a. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Taylor, Charles. 2007b. ‘On Social Imaginaries’. In Traversing the Imaginary: Richard Kearney and the Postmodern Challenge, edited by Peter Gratton and John Panteleimon Manoussakis, 29–47. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Taylor, Charles. 2016. The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Taylor, Charles. Forthcoming. Poetics. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Taylor, George H. 1986. ‘Editor’s Introduction’. In Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, by Paul Ricoeur, edited by George H. Taylor, ix–xxxvi. New York: Columbia University Press. Taylor, George H. 2014. ‘Ricoeur and Just Institutions’. Philosophy Today 58 (4): 571–89. Taylor, George H. 2017a. ‘Delineating Ricoeur’s Concept of Utopia’. Social Imaginaries 3 (1): 41–60. Taylor, George H. 2017b. ‘On the Cusp: Ricoeur and Castoriadis at the Boundary’. In Ricoeur and Castoriadis in Discussion: On Human Creation, Historical Novelty, and the Social Imaginary, edited by Suzi Adams, 23–48. London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Tully, James (ed.). 1994. Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism: The Philosophy of Charles Taylor in Question. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Chapter Two

Rethinking the History of the Productive Imagination in Relation to Common Sense John W. M. Krummel

The imagination—Einbildung—as its German etymology makes clear is the faculty of formation (Bildung). The Bild that is formed means not simply ‘image’ but also ‘form’. Moreover, the forms/images it constructs have collective or communal significance; their formation is social and world-forming. Hence it shapes our human co-being-in-the-world. The imagination therefore plays a significant role in our interaction with the world, both in its creativity and in its relation to a communal sensibility, a ‘common sense’ or sensus communis. This recognition, however, has a long and precarious history in Western philosophy. In modernity it is Immanuel Kant who developed an understanding of the productive role of the imagination in positive terms, which then in post-Kantian philosophy unfolds further in communal terms as ontological and semantic. This chapter seeks to unfold the history of the concept of the productive or creative imagination while also tracing its relation to the concept of common sense. In doing so I wish to underscore the ontological function of the imagination in world-formation and at the same time point to its ties to the social community, hence our collective being-inthe-world. In both concepts of the imagination and common sense, in this regard, we find a kind of duplicity involving a tension and interplay between opposing tendencies—constructing and deconstructing, conservative and critical, congealing and loosening, closing and opening of the world-horizon. We are imagining beings. We imagine the past as well as the future to make sense of the present. For example, some U.S. nationals imagine about the original significance of their Constitution, some Japanese imagine about the undying line of emperors extending back to the age of the gods, Jews 45

46

John W. M. Krummel

imagine about the Kingdom of Israel or the Covenant made with God, Nazis imagine about the bloodline of the Aryan race, and so on. And some of us imagine about olam haba, the new Heaven and Earth that is to come, or a classless Communist society, the realisation of the American dream, and so on. We also imagine the Other in order to make sense of ourselves: the Orient, Communists, Muslims, terrorists, gaijin (foreigners), Mexicans, gringos, etc. This act of imagination is creative in that it gives shape to the world. It allows us to experience the world in a certain way through the images or forms (Bilder) it sets up, whereby the present and the absent are woven together with significance or meaning. Hence the imagination is also the source of value and meaning, which prereflectively help to colour the world we experience. In this way it constructs the reality of the world we collectively experience. The result is normative and binding, yet also open to critique and revision. This way of understanding the imagination is certainly distinct from another also popular conception within academia, that of Jacques Lacan, for whom the imaginary is the domain of illusion and misrepresentation that needs to be subjected to the symbolic order of language and signs so that we may take part in the intersubjective social domain. Yet Lacan seems to ignore the ontologically constitutive nature of the imagination whereby the collective world takes shape and of which the symbolic order is derivative (Lennon 2015, 54). It is this collective ontology of the imagination that connects it intimately to the concept of common sense that has its own parallel intellectual history alongside the concept of the imagination. This notion of common sense, at certain times in its history, has been intimately connected with the imagination, at times even appearing almost identical in significance with it. In the history of both concepts—imagination and common sense—we also notice a certain duplicity. The constructive side of the imagination works along its deconstructive aspect that can critique existing imaginaries or images to imagine, construct, better or alternative ones. In self-reflection it can open up its imaginaries to critique. On the other hand, it can also have a self-congealing aspect that seeks to preserve its constructions, its forms, its images and the reigning imaginary. As the faculty of formation that constructs images or forms constitutive of the collective reality of the world, in phenomenological terms we might say that it shapes the horizon of meaning, of phenomena. As formative, it closes and opens, builds and tears down, constructs and destructs, that horizon. It can become stagnant but can also be flexible and open to change. This two-fold nature of the imagination parallels the duplicitous meaning of common sense—common sense in its vulgar significance of the habitual or customary and common sense as a critical and prudential faculty, the sensus communis recognised by the Renaissance humanists and Kant in the third Critique. The Japanese theorist Nakamura Yūjirō (中村雄二朗), in examining the history of the notion of common

Rethinking the History of the Productive Imagination

47

sense, has noticed this duplicity. But he suggests that in developing his theory of common sense, he has inherited the legacy of the ‘logic of imagination’ (kōsōryoku no ronri 構想力の論理) developed by his predecessor and Kyoto School philosopher Miki Kiyoshi (三木清). Taking this as a clue, I want to explore this relationship between imagination and common sense with a focus on the duplicitous nature of each faculty. This connection between the ontological function of the productive imagination and the common sense that constitutes our collective being-in-the-world is implicitly assumed, perhaps unintentionally, by a number of thinkers. Kant’s Gemeinsinn (common sense) from the third Critique provides the bridge here, whereas the root of this connection might be traced back to Aristotle’s koine aisthēsis (κοινή αἴσθησις ). For both Aristotle and Kant, there is an intimate relationship between the imagination and common sense, though the significance of common sense has altered historically from the time of Aristotle to that of Kant. After Kant, that connection is implicit, though remains undeveloped, in Hannah Arendt’s writings and then in the more recent theories in the twentieth century of the social imaginary and social imagination. I am here thinking of thinkers, such as Paul Ricoeur and Cornelius Castoriadis, who appear to have recognised, each in different ways, the two opposing tendencies in creative tension belonging to the imagination that is comparable to that of common sense. We shall follow this history, starting with Aristotle, for whom the imagination was closely connected to a certain understanding of common sense (koine aisthēsis), through Kant’s epistemology in his first Critique—when its productive function becomes positively evaluated—and his aesthetics in the third Critique—where it is intimately related to, but also in tension with, another understanding of common sense (Gemeinsinn)—and on to a series of later post-Kantians. This connection between common sense and imagination that begins with Aristotle has been implicit for most of the history of Western philosophy but has remained unexplicated. The contemporary notion of the social imaginary and social imagination, for example, in Castoriadis, recalls that connection along with their common duplicity. The duplicity is found— in distinct ways—in Castoriadis’s notion of the social imaginary as instituted and instituting, its institution of society as heteronomous or autonomous, closed or open (Adams 2007, 85–86); or in Ricoeur’s sense of the social imagination as ideological or utopian. In the meantime, earlier post-Kantians like Martin Heidegger had ontologised the significance of the productive imagination beyond the epistemic sphere of the individual knower to underscore its importance in the unfolding of the world, in forming its picture or Welt-Bild. In Japan, under the influence of Heidegger’s Kant-reading, Miki Kiyoshi developed that ontology further by underscoring its social significance comparable to how Castoriadis and Ricoeur will develop the social imagination. All of these thinkers recognise the dynamic nature of the imagi-

48

John W. M. Krummel

nation in its ongoing constitution of the world of collective significance, which in ways distinct to each thinker involves the creative interplay between opposing tendencies. To trace this history of the two concepts, we begin with Aristotle. IMAGINATION AND COMMON SENSE IN ARISTOTLE The intimate connection between common sense and the imagination can be traced to Aristotle. And although what Aristotle called ‘common sense’ (koinē aisthēsis) seems far in meaning from what later thinkers will come to mean by it, there is a historical connection between the Aristotelian and Renaissance and modern senses of the term. The imagination (phantasia; φαντασία) in Aristotle’s On the Soul Book III, throughout chapter 3 and also chapters 7 to 9 (431b2–432a17) and other works like On Memory and Reminiscence (449b30–450a13), in its relation to sensation, is passive (pathos). And closely connected to this mediation of the imagination by the senses is common sense as the synthesising sense that gathers and arranges, coordinates and integrates, the five senses. This allows the imagination to work upon the gathered sensory data to produce mental images (phantasma) with which the mind can think even in the absence of the sensory object (Aristotle 1941, 586–89, 594–96, 608). 1 In thus founding memory and recollection with its mental images, imagination conversely informs common sense as well, for our memories and stored images form and shape our present perceptions. The sensory mediation and synthesis through common sense thus allow the imagination to escape the full constraint of the senses, making it potentially deviant but this deviance is also productive—a deviation that will lead later thinkers like René Descartes to devalue the imagination along with common sense (sens commun) (Nakamura 1979, 178–79, 228), but which will also lead Kant and post-Kantians to recognise the productivity and creativity of the imagination. But already even prior to Kant, we notice in Aristotle the recognition of a certain productivity in the reciprocal relationship between imagination and common sense. The two work closely together to produce meaningfully formed images. IMAGINATION AS PRODUCTIVE IN KANT’S FIRST CRITIQUE As alluded to previously, Kant rediscovered the productive function of the imagination that had been disparaged by Descartes and raised its status as a primary faculty in his epistemology. Kant, starting with his first Critique, the Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernuft) (Kant 1965; 1993), 2 recognised that not only is the imagination responsible for the creation of fiction, but it is necessary for our cognitive experiences of the world. Its

Rethinking the History of the Productive Imagination

49

productive function is not to be devalued but rather is something positive and necessary. And in a sense we might say that with Kant the imagination— Einbildungskraft—takes over the synthetic function that was attributed by Aristotle to common sense. In the first (A) edition of the first Critique (from 1781), Kant characterises the imagination as an a priori faculty of synthesis (A118, A120) and emphasises its synthetic activities in apprehension, reproduction and recognition, each subject to time as the formal condition of inner sense (A99). This edition characterises the imagination thus involved in the three-fold synthesis as one of the original sources of all experience that itself cannot ‘be derived from any other faculty of the mind’ (A94). Its a priori transcendental synthesis is antecedent to all experience, ‘conditioning the very possibility of all experience’ (A101). And moreover, this ‘necessary unity of the pure (productive) synthesis of the imagination is, prior to apperception, the ground of the possibility of all knowledge, especially of experience’ (A118). On this basis perception is always structured by the imagination and the imagination in turn is ‘encapsulated within the framework of perception’ (Taylor 2006, 94). 3 The second (B) edition (from 1787), on the other hand, puts greater emphasis on the unity of apperception. But even here Kant makes the suggestion that the imagination is ‘the common, but to us unknown, root’ from which spring sensibility and understanding (A15/B29, B863), and he attributes the a priori synthesis of the sensible manifold to the productive imagination as distinguished from the merely empirical reproductive imagination (B152). In relation to this, Kant provides another definition of the imagination as ‘the faculty to represent in intuition an object not itself present’ (B151). This can refer to the reproduction of the image of what one has seen. But it can also refer to its productive aspect if what is produced is something one has not perceived. The process of the schematism in the second edition underscores this a priori formative feature that delineates a general figure without delimiting it to the determinate image presented by a particular experience (e.g., of a specific dog or a triangular shape) to represent instead that which is not itself present, not an image but rather the schema (e.g., of ‘dog’ or ‘triangle’). Here what one sees is the concrete mass of sense-data, but not the schema of the abstract ‘dog’ itself which the imagination produces. As a ‘third thing’ homogeneous with the sensory appearance and the conceptual category, the transcendental schema (A138/B177) is a ‘figurative synthesis’ (B151) that enables conceptual categories to be applied to spatio-temporal appearances. Thus mediating sensibility and understanding, intuitions and concepts, the sensible and the logical, it enables the recognition of a concrete particular with the concept of an abstract universal. In other words, through it we can detect a unity within a manifold, a unity conforming to the rule provided by the concept. And on this basis we can relate the concrete particular to a linguistic signifier as xyz (e.g., a dog or a triangle).

50

John W. M. Krummel

The imagination through this process of the schematism, weaving the present together with what is past and the projected future and the spatial elsewhere or other and making the concrete identifiable and thus communicable, shapes our spatio-temporal world of experience. 4 As Arendt noticed, communication presupposes the schematism: ‘This schematic shape is in the back of the minds of many different people. . . . All single agreements or disagreements presuppose that we are talking about the same thing—that we, who are many, agree, come together, on something that is one and the same for all of us’ (Arendt 1992, 83). This commonality that grounds communication also grounds cognition. Certainly the way we perceive and experience the world cannot be isolated from the social context to which we belong. But Kant himself mysteriously describes this work of the schematism as ‘an art concealed in the depths of the human soul, whose real modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover, and to have open to our gaze’ (A141/B180–81). In his epistemology Kant did not address its rootedness in the social. Moreover, Kant in the second edition—as famously noted by Heidegger but also others like Castoriadis—appears to retreat from that primacy of this ‘power of the imagination, a blind but indispensable function of the soul, without which we should have no knowledge whatsoever’ (A78/B103), and relegates it to a more secondary status, submerging it under the dictates of reason. That is, while he stresses its synthesising powers, it is constrained by the conceptual categories in the process of cognition. Kant does not further pursue the ‘common, but to us unknown root’ of the faculties (A15/B29) (Heidegger 1951, 41; 1990, 24–25) with its potentially unbounded creativity which may entail uncertainties. While the ‘third thing’ homogeneous with category and appearance is identified with the transcendental schema (A138/ B177), the schema remains a mystery, ‘an art concealed in the depths of the human soul’ (A141/B180–81). Dissatisfied with Kant’s account, Ricoeur, for example, will later refer to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s starting point of ‘seeing as’ as the common root—understood in terms of discourse, whether in terms of metaphor or narrative, that assumes a prefigured but refigurable semantic field, wherein we are already located (Ricoeur 1974, 132; 1994, 122; Taylor 2018). 5 For Heidegger this would be our being-(t)here (Dasein) where we are always already constituted by the horizon of time. Both readings may point to a social dimension of the always already implicitly assumed in the prioritisation of the imagination. Kant’s third Critique does, however, provide an account of the productive imagination as operating without conceptual determination, though within the aesthetic domain, whereby the schematism appears to function under the guise of the aesthetic function of the example and exemplary validity. And it is here that the imagination’s connection to common sense re-emerges in the history of philosophy. Its connection with the social is here implied as well. But before looking into the third

Rethinking the History of the Productive Imagination

51

Critique and the imagination’s reconnection to common sense, let us explore some of the post-Kantian readings of Kantian imagination as the root that may imply the social dimension. IMAGINATION AS PRIMARY AND WORLD-FORMING IN HEIDEGGER AND POST-HEIDEGGERIANS Heidegger in his famous Kant-reading of the late 1920s (Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason or Phänomenologische Interpretation von Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft of 1927–1928, and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics or Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik of 1929) focusses on the first edition of the first Critique, noting where Kant allows for the possibility of a ‘common, but to us unknown root’ (A15/B29) from which spring sensibility and understanding (Heidegger 1951, 41; 1990, 24–25). He takes the imagination to be that root of the faculties constitutive of our being-in-the-world, an understanding which, however, Kant had himself abandoned in his second edition (Heidegger 1951, 153; 1990, 115). Heidegger connects this understanding to his own fundamental ontology by taking the root to be indicative of human finitude. He does this by focussing on the schematism’s time-formation and taking it to be grounded in our existential relationship to temporality (Zeitlichkeit) that constitutes the horizon of our worldly comportment. That is to say that our cognitive concerns are tacitly guided by our existential concerns, ultimately by our being-toward-death. The latter, in its world-forming (weltbildend), guides our projection of a world-Bild as the contextual horizon or ‘pre-form/view’ (Vor-Bild) in light of which things can manifest and be meaningful (Heidegger 1951, 97ff; 1976, 158; 1990, 70ff; 1998, 122–23). The assumption is that the imagination, identified with this ontological opening of the world, is the originary unity out of which the separate faculties of the subject, its spontaneity and its receptivity, sprout. Thus Heidegger explains in his On the Essence of Ground (Vom Wesen des Grundes) of 1929 that the world-Bild is projected in advance to make all comportment to, and presencing of, beings possible. Without referring to the imagination, this latter work appears to make an implicit connection between imagination as Einbildung and the Bild of the world. But the projection is related to the existential structure of man’s being-(t)here (Dasein), transcendence as finite. What is certain then is that Heidegger in these works moves in a direction opposite to that of the German idealists after Kant, from Fichte to Schelling, who developed the imagination as transcending finitude (Arnason 1994, 161). In some of his later works, Heidegger ontologically broadens the imagination further as no longer a faculty of human subjectivity that projects, but instead the poiēsis of being, in its unconcealment-concealment, that unfolds

52

John W. M. Krummel

the world preobjectively for human existence. For example, in Contributions to Philosophy (Beiträge zur Philosophie) of the mid- to late 1930s, he states the imagination [Einbildung] is ‘event [Ereignis] itself, . . . as the occurrence of the clearing [Lichtung] itself’ (Heidegger 1989a, 312; 1999, 219). And during the 1950s he speaks of imagings or imaginings—Ein-Bildungen (‘informations’)—as the poietic occurrence of being that brings to humankind the measure of dwelling and to which poetry responds (Heidegger 1971, 225–26; 2000, 204–05). In these works the imagination is the ontological ‘forming-in’ (ein-bilden) in the configurings of unconcealing-concealing. On the other hand in other works of the 1930s such as ‘The Age of the World Picture’ (Die Zeit des Weltbildes) and ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ (Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes) (Heidegger 1950, 1–74, 75–113; 1971, 15–87; 1977, 115–54; 2002, 1–56, 57–86) as well as in the Nietzsche lectures, 6 the imagination’s formation of the world in modernity—Einbildung here reduced to imaginatio, phantasieren—is seen as the modern subject’s objectification of being, reducing the totality of beings to mere image (Bild) in the sense of a representation, parallel to its subjective self-deification of consciousness (Heidegger 1950, 92, 106; 2002, 69, 80). But even so, imagination as reduced to representation in modernity still assumes and points to its abyssal root in poiēsis extending beyond, and in excess to, the human capacity of formation and in relation to which humanity is contingent. An ambiguity lies in exactly where the imagination stands in relation to its ontological roots in the spacing of being. Contemporaneous to Heidegger, on the other side of the Atlantic, the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey also conceived of the imagination in his A Common Faith as a faculty that provides a picture of the whole—the world. It does so by projecting ideals and values, offering possibilities and motivations for thought and action (Dewey 1934, 33, 41, 43, 48, 49, 50, 52). The significance of this notion of a world-Bild constructed by the imagination continued to be recognised by several later thinkers influenced by Heidegger, such as Eugen Fink with his understanding of Bild as a window whose opening looks out into the immensity of reality, and Hans-Georg Gadamer who recognised how Bilder can expand our otherwise impoverished vision of the world (Gadamer 1994, 134–44; Fink 1966). Drawing on the phenomenological tradition, Jean-Paul Sartre also recognised the importance of the imagination. For him the imagination freely projects possibilities to shape how we experience the world while simultaneously negating the real in the given world of perception, thereby attaching an irreal meaning to the real (Sartre 2004, 183, 188; Lennon 2015, 37–38, 43, 44). Undeniably this constitution of the form or picture (Bild) of the world would have to be collective. Ricoeur recognised this and makes it explicit in developing the imagination as a social imagination, of which we will discuss later. Arendt also draws on the Heideggerian reading of Kantian imagination as primary in

Rethinking the History of the Productive Imagination

53

making possible cognition, perception, communication and action in its shaping of the world of social significance for human being-(t)here. Yet, even though Heidegger recognised the ontological primacy of the imagination in its formation of the world-Bild, or in its clearing of a space for human dwelling, he never fully explicated the social significance this might entail. Another thinker who was influenced by Heidegger’s Kant-reading but developed it in more concrete social terms is the Japanese philosopher Miki Kiyoshi. Miki, from the late 1930s to the early 1940s until his death in prison, develops Heidegger’s notion of an ontological imagination in terms of what he calls kōsōryoku (構想力), the power of creative imagination lying in the depths of human nature (Miki 1967a, 477) and constitutive of the social world. Like Heidegger, Miki in his Logic of Imagination (Kōsōryoku no ronri 『構想力の論理』) of 1939–1940 recognised the ontological importance of the imagination’s synthetic function in Kant’s first Critique that brings together sensibility and understanding on the basis of being their originary root (Miki 1967b, 5). He took the imagination’s creation of images to involve the dialectical unity of pathos—emotion, passion or impulse—and logos—the intellectual element—and as culminating in the production (poiēsis) of ‘forms/images’ (keizō 形像), taking on the meaning of both Greek eidos and German Bild of ‘form’ and ‘image’ (Miki 1967a, 473; 1967b, 4, 46). He took the schemata (zushiki 図式) produced by the imagination’s schematism as rules indicative of the scope or range for the production of such images to mediate sensibility and understanding. But Miki expands the significance of the imagination beyond Heidegger’s Kant-reading by explicating its activity as productive of images in the sense of images embodied in forms, an embodiment that explicitly involves the practical and historical dimensions. As media of such forms, Miki discusses myth, institutions and technics, all of which undergo change through history and human action. The imagination thus expresses the human impulse to act and produce by inventing, constructing and altering reality, working upon objects, transforming them and giving them new form (katachi 形) (Miki 1967b, 7). Thereby it transforms the natural environment into culture to constitute the very reality of the world wherein we dwell. Human history involves such trans-formations of forms in what Miki designates the ‘logic of forms’ (katachi no ronri 形の論理) rooted in the imagination (Miki 1967b, 6). Such activity of the imagination that constructs the world is necessarily a collective endeavour. Through technics (gijitsu 技術) it overcomes our alienation from the natural environment and in turn establishes institutions (seido 制度)—‘language, custom, morality, law, politics, art, and so on’—to set up our socio-cultural environment (Miki 1967b, 102; 1968, 248). The institutional forms, once established, eventually become conventional and become traditions to possess normativity (Akamatsu 1994, 262–65; Tanaka 2000, 203–04). Despite

54

John W. M. Krummel

being ‘fictions’, they thus become the ‘real’. In this respect, the imagination gives birth to the very reality of the social world wherein we live—a reality that is also ‘working adaptations’ (sagyōteki tekiō 作業的適応) (Miki 1967b, 41, 159) to constitute a world of transforming forms (Miki 1967b, 7). Some have noticed here a similarity between Miki’s logic of imagination and Ernst Cassirer’s productive imagination in its activity of producing symbolic forms. 7 And perhaps significantly Miki, when discussing Kant’s Anthropology—which we shall discuss later—states that what Kant calls Sinn or ‘sense’ (meaning), even when understood as ‘common sense’ (Gemeinsinn), would be unthinkable without the imagination (Kant, 1974, 46; Miki 1967b, 331). 8 What we find in these previously mentioned post-Heideggerian thinkers is that the imagination is the capacity to make images, pictures, forms, constructions (Bilder) not simply for cognition but also in shaping the world with its socio-cultural significance (Sinn). Its significance and operations are collective, involving the community. More recently, Benedict Anderson has discussed how communal identities are built from the imagination and that nations are themselves imagined communities though constitutive of the real (Anderson 1983; Gellner 1983). A community of people together imagine the nation to which they see themselves as belonging. They become attached to the inventions of their imagination. The imagined community inspires love and even self-sacrifice, to the point of death. And they can inspire hatred of imagined others (Lennon 2015, 73). Imagination in this regard can be regarded as social, as a social imagination with a social imaginary as discussed by Ricoeur and Castoriadis, among others. But as Nakamura notices this world-constitutive imagination can be related to the notion of common sense, with which it has been historically connected from the time of Aristotle. This connection between the productive imagination and common sense was assumed by Kant himself in his third Critique. Looking into this connection in the third Critique will help us to unfold the social implications of Kantian imagination. COMMON SENSE AND ITS CONNECTION TO THE IMAGINATION BEFORE, IN, AND AFTER KANT As stated, Heidegger never fully explicated the social significance of the imagination qua root of the faculties in unfolding the world. For this he could have turned his attention to Kant’s third Critique, The Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft), that further unfolds the primacy of imagination recognised in the first Critique. The social dimension becomes evident in the imagination’s reconnection in the third Critique to the notion of common sense (Gemeinsinn). But before looking into this connection in Kant, it would help to understand how this concept of common sense developed after

Rethinking the History of the Productive Imagination

55

Aristotle and leading up to Kant. After Aristotle, from the period of the Roman classics up to that of Renaissance humanism, the meaning of common sense with its synthetic function transitions to encompass a social, including a prudential significance. Nakamura traces common sense’s social significance to the humanist lineage stemming from the Roman classics, including Cicero (Nakamura 1979, 7, 152–53). Taking Aristotle’s koinē aisthēsis, translated into Latin as sensus communis, Cicero altered its meaning from the integration of the five senses to the faculty of sound judgment common to a people. He understood this to encompass the meanings of ceaseless inquiry, open debate, the value of probability, consensus among a people, and a rhetorical form of knowledge that deals with concrete practice (Nakamura 1979, 240–41, 288–89). Giambattista Vico much later inherits this concept of sensus communis from Cicero and develops it as the criterion of practical judgment over which a community is in consensus and also advocates the rhetorical form of knowledge as its correlate. According to Gadamer, sensus communis in the humanist tradition is the ‘sense that founds community . . . the concrete universality represented by the community of a group, a nation, or the whole human race’ (Gadamer 1994, 21) and provides the will to live together according to its guidance. This was the Renaissance humanist understanding of sensus communis as a form of republican virtue that Kant then inherits and develops as a reflective form of judgment aligned with taste (Geschmack) in his third Critique (in §40 ‘Taste as a kind of sensus communis’). And in his third Critique it works in close conjunction with the imagination. What was circumscribed within cognitive bounds in the first Critique is given a looser rein in 1787 in the Critique of Judgment within the realm of aesthetics (Kant 1952; 2005). 9 In this third Critique, Kant demonstrates how the imagination, through both aesthetic judgment along with aesthetic production, schematises without concepts in the mode of an aesthetic example or model. Judgment here is in response to the productive capacity of genius (Genie)—also attributable to the imagination—to create unseen new forms and thus reorder reality in art works (CJ §§46–47, 49). In his 1798 book Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht), derived from lectures dating back to his precritical years, Kant proposes the essential characteristic of genius (Genie) to be originality (A§6) (Kant 1974a, 19), which include ‘non-imitative production’ (A §30) (Kant 1974a, 48) and discovering what cannot be taught or learned. And in the third Critique he describes that originality as ‘the talent for producing that for which no definite rule can be given’ (CJ §46). Exceeding the bounds of conceptuality, the aesthetic product of genius cannot be fully translated into language or symbols and induces in its audience an experience that likewise exceeds linguistic and conceptual boundaries. It communicates something for which no concept can be adequate and which thus no language

56

John W. M. Krummel

can completely express (CJ §49). The ‘aesthetic ideas’ presented by the products of genius are said to be produced by, and provokes in others, a certain harmony between the faculties. This experience of beauty thus provoked is an experience of harmony between the sensible as presented and apprehended by the imagination and the understanding but without any conceptual predetermination of that experience (CJ §§9, 35). 10 If, indeed, the imagination is the root of the faculties as suggested by the first Critique, it makes sense that it can give rise to such harmony, especially as the third Critique seems to suggest the imagination’s schematism is what allows for an interplay between the faculties—sensibility, understanding and reason (CJ §9). A union is accomplished by the imagination through non-conceptual schematisation between the manifold of sense, with its immediate feelings of pleasure or displeasure, and the understanding—a union very different in kind from the union accomplished in cognition (Lyotard 1994, 100). In this experience of harmony, aesthetic judgment—akin to how the schematism works in cognitive experience—recognises a beautiful form that is a unity within the sensible manifold, an identity within a multiplicity of sense data. Judgment here is the activity of discovering a universality in the particular (Lyotard 1994, 2). 11 A judgment is made concerning an object in its particularity, discovering within it some general or universal aspect, but without recourse to an a priori conceptual rule. And in turn the judgment must assume, or be related to, some communal significance, making it possible. Although the discussion here is confined to the aesthetic, a significant number of post-Kantians, including Arendt, Castoriadis, Jean-François Lyotard and John Rundell, thus notice here its ethico-political implications. The creative originality of genius, alone in its abundance, is lawless and without discipline. Aesthetic judgment that recognises the product of genius as beautiful, irrespective of interest (CJ §5 ‘Definition of the Beautiful’), is related to what Kant calls taste. Taste in its assumption of ‘universal approval’ (CJ §50) is what provides discipline and guidance for genius. Kant defines taste as ‘the faculty of judging of that which makes universally communicable, without the mediation of a concept, our feeling in a given representation’ (CJ §40). By bringing genius to order, taste makes its ideas communicable, agreeable and capable of being followed by others (CJ §50) (Arendt 1992, 62, 63). Its recognition of beauty provides a kind of universality, albeit a subjective one, a potential ‘general validity’ (Gemeingültigkeit) (CJ §8), to a judgment that otherwise would be relegated to singularity and contingency in the face of the product of genius (Lyotard 1994, 1, 16). Because of the singularity of its occurrence, the beauty of an object cannot be anticipated, conceptually predetermined. But its judgment as such (as beautiful), demanding universal communicability—a claim that the felt happiness of the beautiful be accessible to others, that others ought to feel the same when presented with the same (CJ §22)—presents it as an example of a universal rule even if

Rethinking the History of the Productive Imagination

57

the rule cannot be formulated (CJ §18). It takes the beautiful object as an individual exhibition (Darstellung) of the ‘ideal of the beautiful’ (CJ §17), an example that ‘imputes’ a general validity (Gemeingültigkeit), ‘promises’ a community of taste (Lyotard 1994, 16). As stated, this presentation of an example—the object’s form—is the work of the imagination’s schematism in the realm of aesthetics. In cognition, such forms must be in accord with the categories of the understanding. In aesthetics (as noted in the third Critique), such forms, while preconceptual, must be recognisable by others (Lennon 2015, 27). If the imagination’s schematism allowed for the cognition and its communication in the first Critique, in the third Critique it is responsible for the role of the example and exemplary validity presented by the individual case (Arendt 1992, 76–77; Nedimović 2007, 158). If in genius the imagination presents that which exceeds literal language and hence cannot be conceptually understood, taught or learned, in taste it estimates what genius has thus presented, detects in it something intelligible, and makes it communicable. Taste recognises an example while assuming it is recognised by others. The judgment of taste thus also presents itself as an example of a judgment of common sense that would ground its exemplary validity (CJ §22). In this way taste adjusts the otherwise lawless freedom of genius for the understanding (Arendt 1992, 62). Genius is legitimised when its product—extralinguistic and extra-conceptual forms—is recognised by taste as exemplary for others and thus becomes communicable (CJ §46). In simpler terms, genius invents and taste institutes. The creativity of genius, in its excess, is in a sense fettered by taste as the discriminating and discerning activity of ‘a mind . . . trained and cultivated’ so as to recognise beauty (Arendt 1954, 219; Beiner 1992, 104). 12 And this is where the link to common sense comes in. The demand for universal validity made by taste is Kant’s version of the sensus communis, that is, common sense (Gemeinsinn). He explains this to be a public sense (CJ §§20–22, 40), whereby subjective feelings are accountable to, subject to, the critical evaluation of others, in regard to the appropriateness of their assessment of forms. Kant thus also defines sensus communis as a ‘communal sense’ (gemeinschaftlichen Sinnes). Or more precisely, common sense— as the communicable disposition to feel a certain way, normatively felt as what one ought to feel—grounds or justifies, legitimates, the judgment of taste claiming exemplary validity with its demand for universality (CJ §22) (Lyotard 1994, 199–200, 204). Kant can thus deduce from taste, a ‘common’ sense as such (CJ §20) (Lyotard 1994, 84). In its appeal to ‘everyone’ for validity, taking account of other human beings and their taste, comparing one’s own judgment with the possible judgment of others, sensus communis is thus distinct from a sensus privatus (Kant 1974a, 88; Arendt 1992, 71, 72). Arendt adds to this that sensus communis thus fits us into a community, for one judges always as a member of a community, guided by common sense as

58

John W. M. Krummel

the standard, making possible its communication (Arendt 1992, 67, 69, 70, 72, 75). It is presupposed as a ‘universal voice’ (allgemeine Stimme) (CJ §8), determining our disposition or mood (Stimmung) in a common destination (Bestimmung) (Lyotard 1988, 11–13; 1994, 17–18, 200–01). But on the other hand this ‘universal voice’ entails an ‘enlarged mentality’ freed from one’s own private interests that can judge a present situation by imagining the perspective of others, ‘thinking in place of everyone else’ (CJ §40), taking their possible judgments into account so that one can judge as a member of this community and claim their assent (Arendt 1954, 241–42; 1992, 42–43, 67; 2003, 139–40). 13 The universality of this subjective universal (or general) validity (Gemeingültigkeit), as distinguished from objective universal validity (Allgemeingültigkeit), implies this sense of community (Gemeinschaft)—a spontaneous community of feelings, practices, mores, a sense that is common (gemein). The universality assumed here is preconceptual, and reason can have no interest in it. Common sense cannot compel universal validity like logic but only appeals to judging persons as members of the public realm (CJ §40). Rather than logical reasoning, this brings into play what Aristotle had called phronēsis that orients one within a common world—a world shared with others—whereby the world is rendered intelligible and meaningful (Arendt 1954, 221; Beiner 1992, 104–05). What is interesting, however, is that Arendt, while noticing the change in the meaning of the term, reconnects this Kantian notion of common sense with the original Aristotelian notion of koinē aisthēsis by understanding the gathering of the five senses in the Aristotelian notion to signify the adaptation of the senses to the world common to everyone, fitting the sense-data into the reality of the common world (Arendt 1998, 208–09, 283, 283n44; Nakamura 1979, 151). Kant provides criteria for this positive account of common sense operative as a public sphere encompassing critical reflection: 1) the maxim of enlightenment: to think for oneself; 2) the maxim of enlarged mentality: to think from the standpoint of others beyond the parameters of one’s perspective; and 3) the maxim of consistency: to think consistently while combining the first two capacities (CJ §40). 14 The second criterion, also alluded to in the previous paragraph, is the accomplishment of the imagination to imagine others, those who are absent and how things would look from these other perspectives (Arendt 1992, 42–43; 2003, 139–40; Beiner 1992, 100). The two faculties of imagination and common sense are therefore closely linked and work together in judgment (Nedimović 2007, 157), ‘a critical faculty, which in its reflective act takes into account, in thought (a priori), the mode of representation of everyone else, in order, as it were, to weigh its judgment with the collective reason of humanity’. This is done by ‘comparing our judgment with the possible rather than actual judgment of others’ (CJ §40) (Lyotard 1994, 219). We are also told that common sense is the effect (Wir-

Rethinking the History of the Productive Imagination

59

kung) arising from the free play of the faculties—the harmonious accord of imagination and understanding (CJ §§9, 20–21). And this common sense arising from the proper correspondence of the faculties is necessary for the very communicability of cognition itself (CJ §21) (Lyotard 1988, 11–12; 1994, 200–02). In this way we see the imagination in Kant reconnecting with the notion of common sense. Its meaning, however, is somewhat distinct from what Aristotle originally meant by koinē aisthēsis. For after the development of the humanist notion of common sense, ‘common’ no longer refers to the gathering of distinct empirical senses but to a communal discernment of what makes sense. The act of judgment is thus inherently social in its reference to a shared world. The judgment of taste as legitimised by common sense opens us to the world, disclosing a certain aspect of it from a certain angle, a world shared with others and that later thinkers will call the social imaginary. It decides ‘how this world, independent of its utility and our vital interests in it, is to look and sound, what men will see and . . . hear in it . . . [it] judges the world in its appearance’ (Arendt 1954, 222). Arendt points out that taste in its assumption of a common sense not only decides how the world is to look with its judgments but also is a principle of belonging that decides who belongs together in that world: ‘taste is the political capacity that truly humanizes the beautiful and creates a culture’ (Arendt 1954, 224). It also implies a commitment to communicate one’s judgment to others with a view to persuading them. It implies a search for acknowledgment from others within a shared world. Judgment thus presupposes the presence of others (Arendt 1992, 74). In this way common sense also implies in turn the imagination that situates one in the presence of absent others, to live in a shared world as ‘citizens of the world’ (Kant 1974, 4). If imagination via taste presupposes common sense for communicability and its appeal to a community, common sense as enlarged mentality, based on taste, in turn requires the imagination—its capacity to schematise or exemplify an idea that permits communication and its capacity to imagine absent others. In taste, imagination and common sense presuppose one another and seem to work together almost indistinguishably. Common sense—Gemeinsinn, gemeinschaftlicher Sinn, sensus communis—in this sense as ‘enlightened, critical, and public’ is thus distinguished from the ‘vulgar’ sense of common sense or gemeinen Menschenverstand (Arendt 1992, 70–72). And as we have noted, even while Kant confines this critical common sense to aesthetic taste, it implicitly possesses socio-political significance stemming from its Roman roots and recognised by a number of post-Kantians. Gadamer, for example, claims that Kant had ‘depoliticized’ the idea of sensus communis and ‘aestheticized’ the faculty of taste that previously was understood as a social-moral faculty (Beiner 1992, 136; Gadamer 1994, 27, 32, 34–35). Parallel to Gadamer’s claim, Arendt interprets

60

John W. M. Krummel

what in the realm of aesthetics is called taste to be conscience in the practical and moral realm (Arendt 1992, 4). Nor can we ignore the imagination’s role in the social-ethical-political implications of common sense. For example, the capacity to freely affirm or deny existence, to agree or disagree with how things are, to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the given (Arendt 1972, 5–6), is connected to the ability to imagine. In imagining an other situation, it can create a ‘break with reality’ (Nedimović 2007, 167), thus leading to political action. Now the socio-political implications of common sense as such extends, however, to both its vulgar sense and critical sense. For one judges as a member of a specific community. Arendt noticed that judgments can often turn into fixed habits of thought, ossified rules or ‘conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct’ (Arendt 1971, 418), preventing us from opening ourselves to the full richness phenomena. The acuteness or dullness of our judgments will have practical consequences. Entrenched moral habits ossified into inflexible general precepts need to be loosened by critical thinking that clears an open space for moral or aesthetic discernment (Arendt 1971, 418; Beiner 1992, 111–12). And for such critical judgment, Arendt turned to Kant’s analysis of taste with its connection to the critical notion of common sense that looks for intersubjective agreement and shared judgment, requiring the imagination of others. Nedimović, for example, points to this duplicitous sense of common sense when she states that on the one hand it means the sense constituted by our socialisation of being among others and their positions, but that on the other hand it means we are not only amalgams of socialised positions but that we actively seek to bring the perspectives of others into our judging process (Nedimović 2007, 145). Contemporary Japanese philosopher Nakamura Yūjirō in his analysis of common sense also pointed to its duplicitous nature that on the one hand can congeal to close the horizon of one’s own community or, on the other hand, in self-critique, can open up the horizon to consider alternatives beyond that horizon. Nakamura has developed his philosophy of common sense (kyōtsū kankaku 共通感覚), through the 1970s, culminating in his On Common Sense (Kyōtsū kankaku ron 『共通感覚論』) that he associates with Kyoto School philosopher Miki Kiyoshi’s concept of the imagination, while also referring to Aristotle’s koinē aisthēsis, Vico’s sensus communis, and Kant’s Gemeinsinn. Nakamura begins with the point that human beings exist always within a meaningful framework of social relationships (Nakamura 1979, 1–4). The world as such provides the context wherein perceptions are meaningful—an intersubjective horizon of experience that is the working of common sense. Common sense often has the meaning of a sense or understanding that people possess in common within a society, based on what has become self-evident within that society’s common semantic field (Nakamura 1979, 5, 7, 280). Nakamura calls common sense in that significance, jōshiki (常識), from which he distinguishes the original Aristotelian notion of common sense, he

Rethinking the History of the Productive Imagination

61

calls kyōtsū kankaku, that gathers and arranges, coordinates and integrates, the senses (Nakamura 1979, 7). But Nakamura points out that Aristotle’s synthetic notion does tie into the notion of common sense in its social significance in that, as Arendt noticed, the gathering of the senses also adapts them to the common world. Moreover, reminding us of the intimate relationship in Aristotle between koinē aisthēsis and phantasia, Nakamura associates common sense that shapes our being-in-the-world with the formative capacity of the imagination in Kant and Miki. It is no accident that Nakamura, with his philosophy of common sense, sees himself as standing in the same current of the awareness of issues as Miki (Nakamura 2001, 58). However, in this capacity, common sense has a duplicitous nature that we noted earlier. On the one hand it can become socially habituated—as mere jōshiki in the sense of social convention—so that its selective shaping of perception becomes congealed to block our view of the not-so obvious or self-evident (Nakamura 1979, 28–29). When social habituation becomes so fixed to the extent that it obstructs our ability to deal with the abundant diversity and alterations of reality, we need to pay close attention to how common sense shapes our perceptions and forms our world-Bild in order to rearrange and reactivate the senses (Nakamura 1979, 30, 188, 280). Common sense thus can also function as a critical faculty with the capacity for self-reflection and change. In its ideal latter function, common sense ought to be able to respond spontaneously to the ever-changing concrete demands of reality, relative to time and place, epoch and society. For this Nakamura re-associates common sense with the ‘rhetorical form of knowledge’, advocated by Cicero and Vico and involving concrete practice, prudence, contextual awareness, recognition of possibilities and so on. It allows for practical decisions within specific communal contexts. Nakamura in turn relates this to the contextualising interrelationships of body, language and place. In such ways Nakamura counters Kant’s ‘depoliticization’ and ‘aestheticization’ of sensus communis noticed by Gadamer and attempts to retrieve its Roman-rooted ethical and political connotations. But I think in this retrieval we cannot forget the productive function of the imagination in its forming of the world-horizon and our cobeing-in-the-world. Whereas Nakamura assumes this connection with the creative imagination in Miki, he does not fully explicate it. Thus we now turn to the thinkers who have developed the imagination more explicitly in its social significance in terms of the social imagination and the social imaginary. SOCIAL IMAGINATION AND SOCIAL IMAGINARY The connection of the imagination to common sense—the two working together almost indistinguishably in Kant—brings out its social significance.

62

John W. M. Krummel

The notion of a creative or productive imagination that is explicitly social is one that becomes worked out during the second half of the twentieth century, most notably by two Francophone philosophers, Paul Ricoeur and Cornelius Castoriadis, in terms of the social imagination and/or the social imaginary. The imagination for these thinkers explicitly constructs the world as a network of meaning for human co-being. It is almost as if the notion of common sense had been unconsciously assimilated into the notion of the imagination. Ricoeur develops his understanding of the imagination in a variety of ways in different works. In his early more phenomenological works, such as Freedom and Nature (Le Volontaire et l’involontaire) and Fallible Man (L’Homme faillible) (Ricoeur, 1966; 1986a), he takes the imagination in its ‘poetic’ function to be inseparable from the practice of being-human in that it orients us to thus manifest externally and concretely in human action. Later as he makes his hermeneutical turn toward language in works such as The Rule of Metaphor (La métaphore vive) of the 1970s, Ricoeur comes to understand the imagination to be an ‘indispensable agent in the creation of meaning’ through metaphor which ties together imagery and meaning in the use of language (Kearney 1998, 142; Ricoeur 1975, 211). The productive imagination, as opposed to reproductive, is responsible for the act of metaphor that, as a verbal icon, contributes to the ways in which we perceive by providing a preconceptual pattern—despite the literal senselessness of its expression— for ‘grasping identity within differences’, ‘the same in spite of, and through, the different’, an ‘insight into the mixture of “like” and “unlike” proper to similarity’, thereby making sense, akin to the Kantian schema (Ricoeur 1975, 189, 190, 197, 199, 296–97; 1979, 154–55). Metaphor qua icon, akin to the schema, links the logical and the sensible, thought and visual, by allowing something to be ‘seen as’ (Ricoeur 1975, 61, 213). Ricoeur thus brings back the Kantian notion of the schematism but as one of ‘metaphoric attribution’ (Ricoeur 1975, 199, 208). 15 In his three-volume Time and Narrative (Temps et Récit) the narrative with its plot has the same function as metaphor but on a wider scale that unfolds through time, bringing into view a semantic coherence in the organisation of events—circumstances, characters, episodes and so on—schematising its significance (Ricoeur 1984, ix–x, 68). Ricoeur goes on to develop this understanding of the schematism as having ‘the characteristics of a tradition’ and thus culturally bound and ‘constituted within a history’—an ‘interplay of innovation and sedimentation’ (Ricoeur 1984, 68). The tradition’s paradigms are the material for the imagination to play with. Its schematism is thus socio-cultural and historical. The imagination inherits but also creates ‘cultural patterns’ and ‘provide[s] templates’ for the sociocultural formation of reality (Ricoeur 1986b, 12). Narrative and texts through such schematisms serve to open up the world as a set of references. The text that is embedded and constructed from out of that world (and history) in turn recreates and reconstitutes the world. Ricoeur calls this process

Rethinking the History of the Productive Imagination

63

refiguration and hints that this act of figuration in metaphor and in narration, in its ‘interplay of identity and difference’, may be the common root of intuition and concept assumed in imagination’s mediation of the two (Ricoeur 1975, 199; 1984, 80–81; Taylor 2018). For figuration assumes the field of the ‘always already’ whereby reality is already ordered for the productive imagination. What makes our actions meaningful for any narrative is their implicit articulation always already by ‘signs, rules, and norms’, the social and historical contextual field of symbolic systems, a ‘network of intersignifications constitutive of the semantics of action’: ‘Human action . . . is already presignified by all the modes of its symbolic articulation’ that give actions ‘form, order, and direction to life’ (Ricoeur 1984, 57–58, 81; 1991b, 150; Taylor 2018). Actions are meaningful within a context that can be read like a text (Ricoeur 1984, 58). That (con)text is the ‘primary imaginary structure of our being in the world’, ‘constitutive of our relation to the world’ (Ricoeur 1986b, 145). We are situated within the contextual world of symbolic mediation. It is the social imagination that as such is ‘constitutive of social reality’ (Ricoeur 1986b, 3). Ricoeur, moreover, tells us that this assumption of a social context wherein actions have meaning allows for empathy (Einfühlung), that is to imagine oneself in the place of others who think and experience as oneself. Imagination here functions analogously to how it works in the schematism for objective experience (Ricoeur 1994, 128). This is also reminiscent to how common sense with its ‘expanded mentality’ functions in Kant, whereby one can imagine oneself in the place of others to make judgments. Ricoeur delves further into the cultural and social function of the productive imagination in other works, such as his lectures on ideology and utopia, subsequently published as Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. In these Lectures he discusses how the imagination in this social capacity can play a conservative role as well as a critical role and how the dialectic between the two tendencies serves to make and remake the social world. It can be constructive or destructive, confirming or contesting the present (Ricoeur 1986b, 3). He explicates the two fundamental poles in terms of ideology and utopia as both imaginative endeavours or practices (pratiques imaginatives) of the social imagination (l’imaginaire social). Each practice can turn pathological as well as make positive contributions to one’s relationship to others (Ricoeur 1994, 129). Ideology, on the one hand, exemplifying reproductive imagination, re-enacts the contextual platform of social practices, preserving order through integration or identity. Utopia, on the other hand, exemplifying productive imagination, imagines another social reality, contesting, critiquing or disrupting the given one and opening the possibility of breaking through the old to produce the new (Lafuente 2006, 202; Ricoeur 1986b, 3; Taylor 1986, xxviii, xxxii–xxxv). Ideology works for social integration. It works to legitimise, consolidate and reinforce a given system of authority.

64

John W. M. Krummel

Utopia functions as social subversion. It helps us to radically rethink and challenge the given social institutions (Ricoeur 1994, 132, 133). But in its attempt to integrate and legitimise, ideology can also disguise or conceal. And in its attempt to delegitimise or contest, utopia can also be escapist, fanciful and schizophrenic (Ricoeur 1986b, 302, 310; Taylor 2006, 99–100). Each thus has a healthy and constitutive as well as a pathological and distortive side in their symbolic mediation of reality (Ricoeur 1994, 133, 134). The two are integrally connected to the symbolic systems that mediate and structure human action (Ricoeur 1976, 21). Like the production of forms that are institutions in Miki, the imagination as social for Ricoeur unfolds a ‘complex cultural symbolic framework’ for our practical life, on the one hand elaborating symbols, myths, metaphors, narratives, etc., that give meaning to the world and to history, and on the other hand guiding and orienting human beings within their life-world (Lafuente 2006, 197, 217). The social imaginary (imaginaire social) in this context is the ensemble of meaningful discourses, bounded by ideology and utopia, mediating human activity and lived social reality (Ricoeur 1991b, 470, 475). Furthermore the dialectic between the two poles means that this ensemble is never static. It remains unceasingly dynamic in dialectical tension between the given world, its maintenance or remaking, and the possibility of a newly constituted world. Castoriadis in a variety of works, but first and foremost in The Imaginary Institution of Society (L’Institution imaginaire de la société) of 1975, also thematises the imagination’s activity in its social significance, especially in its capacity as a vis formandi (as he termed it in his later works), a formative force underlying our experiences and activities. He uses the term ‘creative imagination’ as an umbrella term to encompass the meaning of the more specific radical imagination of the individual psyche on the one hand and the radical imaginary of the social-historical (as social imaginary significations) on the other. While the former becomes socialised under the latter, it is also the case that the two are always in tension. Whether psychic or social, the imagination/imaginary here as radical—in its etymological significance of radix, ‘root’—is the spontaneous elementary creative force or vis formandi that creates ex nihilo figures, forms, images, meanings or significations, institutions, worlds (Castoriadis 1987, 127, 388n25; 2007, 73). It creates ‘reality’ for us (Castoriadis 1994, 138). Through the imagination we create and organise our own world (Eigenwelt), which is ‘socio-historical’, and which in turn serves to filter, form, organise the external ‘shocks’ of the world, ‘in-forming’ X into ‘something’ (Adams 2007, 84; 2011, 5; Castoriadis 1989, 13; 1994, 143; 1997, 181). In this capacity, Castoriadis, without denying the existence of the imagination of the individual psyche, broadens the imagination beyond its psychic-somatic confines to the socio-historical or social instituting imaginary as constituting our collective sense of identity and relationship to the world.

Rethinking the History of the Productive Imagination

65

The images imagination thus creates are figures or forms—forms of being, which can be language, institutions, laws, norms, customs, values, morality, sensibility, art and so on (Castoriadis 1987, 237–38, 369; 1994, 140; 2007, 73). These forms answer the fundamental questions about our identity, origin, place, purpose, needs, relationships to the world and so on (Castoriadis 1987, 146–47). In making this connection between image and form, Castoriadis is recognising the same etymological significance Miki noted of the German Bild (and Einbildung) despite the shortcoming of the term (Adams 2011, 219; Castoriadis 1994, 138). And as in Ricoeur, the imagination’s formations for Castoriadis provides society with an orientation, a Stimmung or mood (Castoriadis 1987, 150; 1994, 152). They ‘construct (organize, articulate, vest with meaning) the world of the society considered’ (Castoriadis 1991, 42). These forms as institutions collectively embody, manifest and shape social imaginaries that bestow meaning upon the world—the meaning of one’s life and death, of existence, the ways of one’s society, and of the universe as a whole (Castoriadis 1994, 150). And through their functioning, institutions constitute the ‘real’ in the world of meaning—the significations that define the ‘social-historical field’ of the world (Castoriadis 1987, 160–61; 1994, 138–39). Institutions of meaning as social imaginary significations (Castoriadis 1994, 146) are imaginary forms of meaning belonging to a human community and that collectively define its reality. They form a complex semantic web-like network with internal unity and cohesion (Castoriadis 1997, 117). Thus contrary to Lacan’s notion of the imaginary where it is distinguished from the symbolic, the imaginary for Castoriadis is not necessarily distorting or illusory but instead constitutes the semantic or symbolic reality of our social world (Lennon 2015, 76). And like the products of genius in Kant’s third Critique recognised by common sense, the instituted forms of the social imaginary are legitimated through recognition of their meaningfulness by others. 16 The radical imagination for Castoriadis is individual and social. On the social-historical level it is instituting and instituted, formed and forming, whereby its forms are more or less stabilised but can also change (Lennon 2015, 78). The permanent incommensurability between the psyche and society, with their respective radical imaginaries, means that meaning as instituted or embodied by the institutions of the instituting social imaginary is in principle open. While it can congeal to close in on itself, it can be also reopened to question. The creativity of the imagination can always interrogate and deconstruct, rather than simply accept, the given. In other words, it can re-form its social institutions. The imaginaries on the one hand become manifest in the already instituted society that conditions our experiencing of the world, but on the other hand manifest in society as instituting in the sense that they can also actively transform the world of experience. In this way the

66

John W. M. Krummel

forms—institutions and significations—of the social imaginary, as instituted and instituting, unfold through, in, and as history. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in his later works (in particular, his course notes and unfinished manuscripts), published as Institution and Passivity (L’Institution-La Passivité) and The Visible and the Invisible (Le Visible et l’invisible), also recognised a comparable passive-active, instituted-instituting process of meaning constitution that makes up the cultural milieu or field of the world that he called the Stiftung (institution) of being, of which both the subject’s observation and the body’s embodied activity are aspects (Merleau-Ponty 2010, 6). In relation to this he understood the imagination as coconstitutive of patterns of perception and that the content of significations are crystallisations of the imaginary or symbolic matrices (Arnason 1994, 169; Merleau-Pontty 1968, 169). The imaginary as such is co-constitutive of the cultural world—a field upon or within which senses, significations, are inscribed (Arnason 1994, 169; Merleau-Ponty 1968, 267). The implication is that the imagination behind this field would be a social one. An additional thinker who has developed a comparable understanding of the social imaginary, most recently, is Charles Taylor. For Taylor in his Modern Social Imaginaries, the social imaginary is a kind of ‘background’ or ‘framework’ with a ‘constitutive function’, informing all thought and action, so that it ‘enables, through making sense of, the practices of a society’ (Taylor 2004, 2, 25). 17 He defines it as the ways people collectively and pretheoretically imagine their social existence or life—their social surroundings often carried in images, stories, legends; how they fit together with others, how things go on between them, the expectations normally met, and the deeper norms underlying these expectations (Taylor 2004, 23, 50). It is our ‘implicit grasp of social space’ enabling us to get around a familiar environment and our implicit grasp of ‘the common repertory’ enabling us to function without a theoretical overview (Taylor 2004, 25–26). This understanding—which I think points back to the duplicitous nature of common sense as both Gemeinsinn and gemeinen Menschenverstand in Kant or kyōtsū kankaku and jōshiki in Nakamura—is both factual and normative, involving the sense of how things usually go but also how they ought to go, a sense of moral order, presupposing a wider grasp of what makes our norms realisable, images through which we understand our lives and histories, our communal origins, how we relate to each other and others beyond our group (Taylor 2004, 24, 25, 28). As such it is constitutive of the world wherein we live. All of these twentieth- and twenty-first-century notions of the imagination (or imaginary) in its collective or social function seem to point back to the intimacy noted earlier between the imagination and common sense. But Taylor does not explicate that noted duplicity between the factual and the normative and their possible tension that may unfold or account for the dynamism of social imaginaries to the same extent Castoriadis or Ricoeur does—wheth-

Rethinking the History of the Productive Imagination

67

er in terms of the relationship between instituted and instituting imaginaries or the heteronomous and autonomous imagination for Castoriadis or in terms of ideological and utopian imagination for Ricoeur—and this is also an important aspect of common sense in its critical ability (kyōtsū kankaku) to loosen the hold of the reigning common sense qua social habit (jōshiki) as noted by Nakamura. DUPLICITY OF COMMON SENSE AND (SOCIAL) IMAGINATION: CLOSURE AND OPENNESS VIS-À-VIS THE WORLD-HORIZON All of these thinkers we have examined provide a positive understanding of the imagination as constitutive of our shared world and co-being-in-theworld. But they also recognised that the imagination as such can tend towards repetition to reconstitute and maintain the status quo—what Ricoeur called ideology. Yet it can manifest its critical function as well that subversively imagines other alternatives—what Ricoeur called utopia. Here we can recall how common sense that functions as a critical faculty on the one hand—Gemeinsinn or kyōtsū kankaku—was distinguished from its other more vulgar sense, signifying social habit—gemeinen Menschenverstand or jōshiki. These two senses of common sense seem to parallel, even if loosely, the two tendencies of the social imagination/imaginary. Imagination seems operative behind both opposing senses of common sense. This makes both imaginaries and common sense historical. The universalising demand of taste in Kant assumes an orientating value horizon that, despite its transcendentality, is also contingent, that is historical. Ricoeur underscores the historicity of the symbolic framework and Castoriadis recognised imaginary significations as historical creations. They are specific to a particular community and have to do with one’s implacement within that communal context. Hence the continual danger of ossification or habituation of common sense as recognised by both Arendt and Nakamura that ignores the richness of the alterations and diversity of phenomena (Arendt 1971, 418). We might add here there is a creative tension between those two poles that unfolds the divergent forms, significations, and imaginaries in time. Heidegger in the 1930s (in ‘The Age of the World Picture’, ‘Origin of the Work of Art’, and his Nietzsche lectures), also implicitly recognised the ossification of the imagination’s capacity of world-formation when its formations become mere objectifications or representations conditioned by the subject’s will-to-power running rampant in the age of modernity. As such the imagination for Heidegger serves to conceal being, rather than unconceal its poiēsis in history. The imagination in his ‘Age of the World Picture’ thus becomes a mere station in the ‘history of the forgetfulness of being’ as it functions to reduce being and world to nothing but mere image (Bild), the

68

John W. M. Krummel

anthropomorphic projection of humankind (Heidegger 1950, 92–92; 2002, 69–70): ‘Man as representing subject . . . fantasizes [phantasiert], i.e., he moves in imaginatio insofar as his representing imagines beings as the objective in the world as image/picture [Bild]’ (Heidegger 1950, 106; 2002, 80). Bild in this significance serves to conceal being in its alterity and alterations. But the imagination here is reductively conceived as an all-too-human faculty that, by implication, is contingent to, derivative of, imagination in its broader ontological significance as poiēsis that Heidegger speaks of in his Contributions to Philosophy, ‘Poetically Man Dwells’ (dichterisch wohnet der Mensch), and ‘Language’ (Die Sprache)—the unfolding of the otherthan-self. The imagination for Heidegger is thus duplicitous as well: on the one hand he reduces it to the faculty of the representing and objectifying subject that has come to dominate the epoch of modernity, and on the other hand he understands it in its broader ontological sense as the clearing-opening poiēsis of being. 18 While Heidegger’s concern here is not explicitly focussed on the social constitution of the social-cultural world, the duplicity of the imagination in its historicity as manifesting opposing tendencies toward ossification and fluidity, closure and openness, are still apparent. Akin to common sense’s involvement of an expanded mentality that can imagine beyond the given horizon, Ricoeur similarly recognises how the utopian imagination might serve to break through the ossified structures of ideology. The imagination’s schematism is constituted within a history, giving it the characteristic of a tradition. And a tradition is a living transmission of innovation always capable of being reactivated by returning to its creative moments. It involves the tension between innovation and sedimentation, an interplay between the two poles of ‘servile application and calculated deviation’ (Ricoeur 1984, 68, 69). Thereby the symbolism of action can also be resymbolised and desymbolised, traditionalised and subverted by its historicity (Ricoeur 1984, 83) in the constitution, deconstitution and reconstitution of meaning. The poiēsis of emplotment thus not only makes the world but remakes the world. The mediation of fiction can act as a new mythos that creatively reconstructs reality (Ricoeur 1974, 139–40). This discussion of the schematism of emplotment as a living historical tradition of paradigms in Time and Narrative is paralleled in other works by his division of social imagination into ideology and utopia. Akin to how in Kant the creativity of genius in conjunction with taste grounded in common sense gives rise to exemplary validity, the metaphorical redescription of the real and narrative refiguration of experience as the reconstitution of meaning in Ricoeur also has moral and political implications in augmenting or expanding the field of praxis. By serving as a model, poetic fiction can ‘effect the metamorphosis of reality’ (Ricoeur 1974, 140–41). Utopia is thus a form of the productive imagination, which in distinction from the reproductive imagination referring to a pre-existing reference, creates a new previously non-existent reference.

Rethinking the History of the Productive Imagination

69

But even ideologies can do this, to remake social reality in its attempt to conserve and legitimate the existing status quo. Utopia is a fiction with the power to reshape reality and challenge the given (Ricoeur 1974, 123; 1984, 79; 1994, 124, 133–34). The productive imagination as such for Ricoeur can transform not only our experience of the world in redescribing it but also the world itself; in projecting new possibilities, it can remake reality (Ricoeur 1978, 154). If ideologies attempt to legitimate the status quo, utopian thought imagines an alternate world beyond that status quo that can guide political action, to subvert and reconstruct the socio-cultural world, to flee the world but also to reshape it (Geniusas 2015). Despite our contingent being-in-theworld then, we are not imprisoned within but can shatter through contemporary social and political structures. As in Ricoeur’s utopia and Kant’s common sense as enlarged mentality, the imagination for Castoriadis can also break through closure and open the possibility of new models to replace old ones, thereby reconstituting the world and one’s co-being in it. Castoriadis recognises how human activities can introduce into instituted imaginary significations ‘infinitesimal alterations’ that escape calculation and prediction allowing for the alterities and alterations of the socio-historical as ‘unceasing and essentially undetermined (social-historical and psychical) creation of figures/forms/images’ (Castoriadis 1987, 3). This allows for an indeterminacy in the world’s constitution but also permits change. The world is always open to alternative ways of being imagined and hence of being constituted. Because the radical imagination permits creativity, novelty and breaks, what it institutes is never stabilised. As the social-historical, the radical imaginary deploying itself is both instituted and instituting (Castoriadis 1991, 143). On the one hand the given structures of society have been instituted, but on the other hand there is an ongoing instituting of new structures. The already instituted imaginaries are not necessarily fixed or stable in meaning but are open to re-signification, deconstruction and reconstruction, for the institution of alternative imaginaries (Lennon 2015, 138). As noted earlier, Merleau-Ponty also recognised this creative tension between the instituted and instituting, passive and active, aspects in the institution (Stiftung) of being but which for Merleau-Ponty importantly involves not only the socio-cultural historical field but also material nature, as well as one’s body, to yield the world’s meaning and constitute its structure. For Castoriadis society involves this unity and tension between the instituted and instituting (Lennon 2015, 78). In this regard, Castoriadis distinguishes heteronomous societies where there is predominantly a closure of instituted meaning to solve questions of legitimacy, and autonomous societies that are open in that critical reflection can lead to new possibilities altering the entire socio-historical field with new institutions (Lennon 2015, 87). In the latter, imagination exercises its autonomous capacity not only in escaping ‘external and somatic determinations’ but also in questioning and

70

John W. M. Krummel

disengaging itself from its own creations, allowing itself to knowingly recreate its own reality (Rundell 1994, 8). This also entails a recognition of the self-creation of one’s world to allow for the ‘rupture of closure’ (Adams 2007, 85). Imagination in these various conceptions, with its enlarged mentality, can be a catalyst for change. If imagination is what allows us to engage a voice that ‘speaks from another place than our own’—as Anthony Appiah suggests in Cosmopolitanism (Appiah 2006, 85)—the imagination as what constructs the world-horizon can also open up possibilities of further horizons beyond the familiar world. While constructing and conserving the horizon, it can also critique and deconstruct it, to open up further horizons and institute new institutions. The social creative imagination as such can be said to manifest ‘the mysterious interplay of natura naturans and natura naturata’ (Adams 2007, 89n11; Roberts 1994, 177). The issue here is openness and closure, the loosening or congealing of the horizon, and the tension between the two tendencies—whether construed in terms of ideology versus utopia or heteronomy versus autonomy or in terms of common sense qua social convention versus common sense qua enlarged mentality—within the socialhistorical field of the always-already that allows for habituation as well as critique, the constitution, reconstitution and deconstitution of its world-horizon. The duplicity of the imagination here thus roughly parallels the two senses of common sense that Kant distinguished as Gemeinsinn and gemeinen Menschenverstand, common sense as a critical faculty and common sense in the vulgar sense. This is certainly not to deny the differences between these thinkers’ conceptions of the imagination or common sense. But they do all recognise, in their distinct ways, an important facet of our human co-being-in-the-world that involves this creative tension and interplay between the opposing tendencies of closure and openness vis-à-vis the worldhorizon. CONCLUSION This duplicity of the social imagination toward closure and openness, reconstruction and deconstruction, may loosely be seen as a development of its duplicity vis-à-vis truth in terms of illumination and deception found in Plato’s Sophist according to which imagination as ‘likeness-making’ (eikastiké téchnē; ὲκαστικὴ τέχνη) produces an accurate image by following the proportions of the original, whereas imagination as ‘semblance-making’ (phantastiké téchnē; φανταστική τέχνη) produces only a semblance (Sallis 2000, 46–47). The former serves to reveal the original, whereas the latter serves to conceal it. But long after Aristotle’s juxtaposition of common sense and imagination and after Kant’s conception of a synthetic productive imagina-

Rethinking the History of the Productive Imagination

71

tion, by mid-twentieth century truth can no longer be conceived simply in terms of an accurate reproduction of, or correspondence to, an original. It is social-historically contextual and the distinction can no longer be construed as that between accurate and inaccurate reproduction but rather must be taken as the distinction between what is semantically viable within a context and what is not so viable. This in turn involves our ongoing negotiations with the alterations and alterities of phenomena—hence Heidegger’s identification of ‘truth’ as ‘unconcealment’ (aletheia; ὰλήθεια)—the ongoing unfolding of being through our co-being-in-the-world. The social significance of meaning, despite temporality, cannot be ignored here. The imagination as the faculty of formation forms the world of collective significance and consequently our being-in-the-world, it shapes the horizon of phenomena and meaning. In this capacity, it closes and opens, builds and tears down, constructs and destructs, can become stagnant but also critical. And in the concept of common sense that has been intimately related to the imagination at different times in the intellectual history of the West, we recognise a parallel duplicity in the ways it has been construed as mere social convention or habit on the one hand and as the critical faculty of expanded mentality on the other hand. The imagination and common sense, together with their duplicities, thus belong together in meaning. We see their joining in significance implicitly in the recent developments of the imagination as explicitly social, thus as constitutive of a common sense. NOTES 1. In On Memory and Reminsicence in Aristotle (1941) phantasia is translated as ‘presentation’ rather than ‘imagination’ while it is rendered as ‘imagination’ in On the Soul. Also see On Dreams chapter 2 (459b6–8, 460b1–9) in Aristotle 1941, 620 and 621. Also see Nakamura 1979, 217–18, 228, 229. 2. Numbers followed by A in parentheses refer to pagination from the German original of the first edition and those followed by B refer to pagination from the second edition. Both A and B paginations are noted in the margins in the German and English editions. 3. Here Taylor is quoting Ricoeur’s unpublished 1975 ‘Lectures on the Imagination’, 5:10. 4. This is how Lennon characterises the imagination’s activity (Lennon 2015, 2). 5. Ricoeur 1994 also appears in Ricoeur 1991a, 168–87. Ricoeur 1974 also appears in Ricoeur 1991b, 117–36. George Taylor also discussed this in G. Taylor 2018. In this paper he also refers to Ricoeur’s yet-to-be published Lectures on the Imagination. 6. This lecture forms a part of Heidegger 1989b and of Die Wille zur Macht als Erkenntnis in Heidegger 1961. The English translation is The Will to Power as Knowledge in Nietzsche Volume III: The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics included in Heidegger 1991. 7. For example, in a paper (‘Miki Kiyoshi on the Logic of Imagination’ given by Saulius Geniusas at the International Association of Japanese Philosophy First Annual Conference: International Conference on Japanese Philosophy, Opening up Japanese Philosophy: The Kyoto School and After Fukuoka, held 7–9 October 2016 at Kyushu University Nishijin Plaza, Fukuoka City, Japan. 8. Miki here cites Kant’s Anthropology (Anthropologie).

72

John W. M. Krummel

9. Citations from the Critique of Judgment will be made parenthetically and identified by CJ followed by the section number. Citations from Anthropology will be identified by A followed by the section number. 10. Thus in §30 of the Anthropology Kant adds the condition that imagination is genius only when it ‘harmonizes with concepts’ (Kant 1974a, 48). 11. And this recognition of form is what distinguishes the experience of beauty from the experience of the sublime which appears formless. 12. These notions of originality and exemplarity of genius have been developed in the domains of politics and legislation by Castoriadis, Lyotard and Arendt in various works. 13. In Arendt 1954 and 1992 she unfolds its political implications. 14. See also Kant 1974b, 63. 15. While in the case of Kant, the schema allows us to see, for example, this particular fourlegged moving thing ‘as a dog’, for Ricoeur metaphor allows us to see, for example, old age as the close of the day, time as a beggar, nature as a temple, and so on (Ricoeur 1994, 122). 16. Castoriadis notices a useful analogy in the creativity of the imagination in Kant’s third Critique (Adams 2007, 89n11). 17. See also C. Taylor 2007, 387, where he speaks of ‘frameworks’ and ‘complex environing backgrounds of our thought and action’. 18. Heidegger’s understanding of the imagination is quite complex and for a fuller exposition of his multifarious discussions of the concept, see Krummel 2007, 261–77.

REFERENCES Adams, Suzi. 2007. ‘Castoriadis and Autopoiesis’. Thesis Eleven 88: 76–91. Adams, Suzi. 2011. Castoriadis’s Ontology: Being and Creation. New York: Fordham University Press. Akamatsu, Tsunehiro. 1994. Miki Kiyoshi: tetsugakuteki shisaku no kiseki [Miki Kiyoshi: The Traces of Philosophical Speculation]. Kyoto: Mineruva shobō. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2006. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Arendt, Hannah. 1954. Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Viking Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1971. ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’. Social Research 38: 417–46. Arendt, Hannah. 1972. Crises of the Republic. New York: Harcourt Brace. Arendt, Hannah. 1992. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Arendt, Hannah. 2003. Responsibility and Judgment. New York: Schocken Books. Aristotle. 1941. The Basic Works of Aristotle. Edited by Richard McKeon. New York: Random House. Arnason, Johann P. 1994. ‘Reason, Imagination, Interpretation’. In Rethinking Imagination: Culture and Creativity, edited by Gillian Robinson and John Rundell, 155–70. London: Routledge. Beiner, Ronald. 1992. ‘Hannah Arendt on Judging.’ In Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Philosophy, 89–156. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1987. Imaginary Institution of Society. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1989. ‘The State of the Subject Today’. Thesis Eleven 24: 5–43. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1991. Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy. Edited by David Ames Curtis. New York: Oxford University Press. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1994. ‘Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary’. In Rethinking Imagination: Culture and Creativity, edited by Gillian Robinson and John Rundell, 136–54. London: Routledge.

Rethinking the History of the Productive Imagination

73

Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1997. World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination. Translated by David Ames Curtis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 2007. Figures of the Thinkable. Translated by Helen Arnold. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Dewey, John. 1934. A Common Faith. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Fink, Eugen. 1966. Studien zur Phänomenologie 1930–1939. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1994. Truth and Method. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum. Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Geniusas, Saulius. 2015. ‘Between Phenomenology and Hermeneutics: Paul Ricoeur’s Philosophy of Imagination.’ Human Studies 38 (2): 223–41. Heidegger, Martin. 1950. Holzwege. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann. Heidegger, Martin. 1951. Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann. Heidegger, Martin. 1961. Nietzsche Erster Band. Pfullingen: Neske. Heidegger, Martin. 1971. Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper & Row. Heidegger, Martin. 1976. Gesamtausgabe I. Abteilung: Veröffentlichte Schriften 1910–1976 Band 9: Wegmarken. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann. Heidegger, Martin. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York: Harper & Row. Heidegger, Martin. 1989a. Gesamtausgabe Band 65: Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis). Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann. Heidegger, Martin. 1989b. Nietzsches Lehre vom Willen zur Macht als Erkenntnis. Frankfurt: Klostermann. Heidegger, Martin. 1990. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Translated by Richard Taft. Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1991. Nietzsche Volume III and IV. San Francisco, CA: Harper. Heidegger, Martin. 1998. Pathmarks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1999. Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning). Translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 2000. Gesamtausgabe Band 7: Vorträge und Aufsätze. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann. Heidegger, Martin. 2002. Off the Beaten Track. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1952. The Critique of Judgement. Translated by James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1965. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1974. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Translated by Mary J. Gregor. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Kant, Immanuel. 1974b. Logic. Translated by Robert S. Hartman and Wolfgang Schwarz. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill. Kant, Immanuel. 1993. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag. Kant, Immanuel. 2005. Critique of Judgment. Translated by J. H. Bernard. Mineola, NY: Dover Pub. Kearney, Richard. 1998. Poetics of Imagining: Modern to Post-Modern. New York: Fordham University Press. Krummel, John. 2007. ‘Representation and Poiesis: The Imagination in the Later Heidegger’. Philosophy Today 51 (3): 261–77. Lafuente, María Avelina Cecilia. 2006. ‘Social Imagination and History in Paul Ricoeur’. Analecta Husserliana XC: 195–222. Lennon, Kathleen. 2015. Imagination and the Imaginary. London: Routledge. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1988. ‘Sensus communis’. Paragraph 11 (1): 1–23. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1994. Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime. Translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

74

John W. M. Krummel

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible, Followed by Working Notes. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2010. Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France (1954–1955). Translated by Leonard Lawlor and Heath Massey. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Miki, Kiyoshi. 1967a. Bungeiteki ningengaku [“Literary Anthropology”]. In Miki Kiyoshi zenshū dai jūichi maki [Collected Works of Miki Kiyoshi Volume 11]. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 464–78. Miki, Kiyoshi. 1967b. Miki Kiyoshi zenshū dai hachi maki: Kōsōryoku no ronri [Collected Works of Miki Kiyoshi volume 8: Logic of imagination]. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Miki, Kiyoshi. 1968. Miki Kiyoshi zenshū dai jūhachi maki [Collected Works of Miki Kiyoshi volume 18]. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Nakamura, Yūjirō. 1979. Kyōtsū kankaku ron: Chi no kumikae no tame ni [On Common Sense: For the Rearrangement of Knowledge]. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Nakamura, Yūjirō. 2001. Nishida Kitarō II. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Nedimović, Svjetlana. 2007. Being to the World: An Inquiry into Philosophical Implications of Hannah Arendt’s Political Thought (Doctoral dissertation). Florence: European University Institute. Ricoeur, Paul. 1966. Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary. Translated by Erazim V. Kohák. Chicago: Northwestern University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1974. ‘The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality’. Man and World: An International Philosophical Review 12 (2): 123–41. Ricoeur, Paul. 1975. The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language. Translated by Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1976. Philosophical Hermeneutics and Theological Hermeneutics: Ideology, Utopia, and Faith: Protocol of the Seventeenth Colloquy, 4 November 1975. Berkeley, CA: Center for Hermeneutical Studies in Hellenistic and Modern Culture. Ricoeur, Paul. 1978. ‘The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling’. Critical Inquiry 5 (1): 143–59. Ricoeur, Paul. 1979. ‘The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling’. In On Metaphor, edited by Sheldon Sacks, 141–57. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1984. Time and Narrative, Volume 1. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1986a. Fallible Man: Philosophy of the Will. Translated by Charles Kelbley. New York: Fordham University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1986b. Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. Edited by George H. Taylor. New York: Columbia University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1991a. From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1991b. A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination. Edited by Mario J. Valdés. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1994. ‘Imagination in Discourse and Action’. In Rethinking Imagination: Culture and Creativity, edited by Gillian Robinson and John Rundell, 118–35. London: Routledge. Roberts, David. 1994. ‘Epilogue: Sublime Theories: Reason and Imagination in Modernity’. In Rethinking Imagination: Culture and Creativity, edited by Gillian Robinson and John Rundell, 171–85. London: Routledge. Rundell, John. 1994. ‘Introduction’. In Rethinking Imagination: Culture and Creativity, edited by Gillian Robinson and John Rundell, 1–11. London: Routledge. Sallis, John. 2000. Force of the Imagination: The Sense of the Elemental. Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2004. The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination. Translated by Jonathan Webber. London: Routledge.

Rethinking the History of the Productive Imagination

75

Tanaka, Kyūbun. 2000. Nihon no ‘tetsugaku’ o yomitoku: ‘Mu’ no jidai o ikinukutame ni [Reading the ‘Philosophy’ of Japan to Survive the Epoch of ‘Nothingness’]. Tokyo: Chikuma shobō. Taylor, Charles. 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press. Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Taylor, George. 1986. ‘Editor’s Introduction’. In Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, edited by George H. Taylor, ix–xxxvi. New York: Columbia University Press. Taylor, George H. 2006. ‘Ricoeur’s Philosophy of Imagination’. Journal of French Philosophy 16 (1&2): 93–104. Taylor, George. 2018. ‘The Deeper Significance of Ricoeur’s Philosophy of Productive Imagination: The Role of Figuration’. In Productive Imagination: Its History, Meaning, and Significance, edited by Saulius Geniusas and Dmitri Nikulin. London: Rowman & Littlefield International.

Chapter Three

History, Civilisations, Imaginaries Jeremy C. A. Smith

Problems of continuity and discontinuity in history have long preoccupied the interdisciplinary projects of scholars in the human sciences. From traditions of functionalist analysis and modernisation studies to currents of postfunctionalist comparative research, comparative and historical sociologists, in particular, have foregrounded such problems in both their conceptual apparatus and their empirical investigations. Since the 1980s, comparativists have variously debated questions of historicity in the fields of civilisational analysis and regional studies, and in the sub-disciplines of world history and comparative and historical sociology. One distinctive aspect of the new phase of theorisation and analytical research has been the manner in which comparativists have drawn on a broad-ranging reconsideration of classical sources of theory in doing so. They have capitalised on the post-functionalist turn to generate the conditions in which connections between the fields of civilisational analysis and social imaginaries can take place and, indeed, have done so. This chapter re-examines the question of historical discontinuity with two specific foci. The first focus fixes on perspectives on social imaginaries developed by Castoriadis (highlighting also his dialogue with Ricoeur) and Charles Taylor. The interpretation of Castoriadis in the following stresses his elucidation of the social-historical as a complex image of creation. In considering his critique of ideal typology and his approach to a pluralist understanding of historic constellations, I assess the suitability of Castoriadis’s conception of the social-historical to the comparativist enterprise. While there are tensions and incomplete aspects of his work, his framework is a register of key problems and key concepts, and it incites further development of his insightful propositions. Turning to Taylor, the argument shifts to a different angle on plurality in the constitution of modernity. Taylor’s short 77

78

Jeremy C. A. Smith

book on Western modernity is multi-dimensional in its cast of modern social imaginaries (Taylor 2004). I argue that Taylor bears a two-fold appreciation of pluralism throughout his elaboration of modernity’s imaginaries, alluding to a multiplicity and a multiplication of constellations, which he senses but does not explore. Taylor’s intuition is a good point to move to the second focus: a critical examination of approaches in civilisational analysis across a host of historical constellations and multiple modernities. 1 Eisenstadt is essential in this. His magisterial comparative historical sociology dives into the exploration of multiple constellations at the point where Taylor hesitates. My argument evaluates the well-known results of his research programme into multiple modernities and Axial civilisations, but it also investigates various formulations of continuity and discontinuity across the span of his civilisational analysis. There is a finding that there are gaps in explanation of the links between different moments of historical rupture, resulting in the impression that Eisenstadt’s historical sociology suffers from unjustified vision of continuity and a conception of civilisation that inhibits investigation of a host of neglected constellations. When it comes to the latter, theories of intercivilisational encounters advocated by Benjamin Nelson and Johann Arnason sketch encouraging alternatives. Benjamin Nelson was a pioneer of contemporary civilisational analysis. His meticulous elucidation of the structures of consciousness in the history of science and rationality casts civilisations as multi-valent complexes. Diverse ecologies maintain their multiplicity—contra theories of convergence and globalisation—whereas structures of existence, experience and expression order the predilection of civilisations to encounters with other constellations. The greatest illustration of his framework is the historical rupture of Late Medieval Europe, an undetected juncture of Axial discontinuity in his view. Yet a methodology of constructing ideal types still limits his entire appreciation of the engagement of Western, Byzantine and Islamicate civilisations. Arnason’s reconstruction of intercivilisational encounters in their regional contexts circumvents this very problem. Critically applying Castoriadis’s notions of the imaginary institution and the social-historical, Arnason investigates the ‘creative transformation’ of historical constellations and multiple modernities without resort to ungrounded ideal types. Instead, he applies the imaginary significations of wealth, power and meaning to gain comparative purchase on historical questions. I assess Arnason’s project and suggest that the elucidation of diversity can go even further. Indeed, I point out, there are suggestions of greater diversification in the directions Arnason is sketching out for his ongoing work. In a final move, the chapter proffers suggestions about inclusion of indigenous civilisations and modernities in the range of constellations and historicities that civilisational analysis ought to grapple with in considering historical transformations.

History, Civilisations, Imaginaries

79

Castoriadis’s turn to ontology entailed a deep contemplation of questions of creation and transformation (Adams 2011; Castoriadis 1987). After his break with Marxism, Castoriadis theorised social change, in juxtaposition to evolutionary and functionalist theories of history, as novel creation. Since creation is a ceaseless process of transformation, the site of its occurrence would seem obviously to be history. However, Castoriadis’s provocative insight is to posit society as the simultaneous site of the interminable emergence of the new. To be exact, at a transitional stage of his thought (Adams 2011, 58), Castoriadis expressly situates creation in the social-historical, taking conventionally separated concepts of society and history together and interrogating them from a wholly novel philosophical angle (1987, 170). Thus, in place of the main currents of inherited thought in the Western tradition (physicalist and logicist in Castoriadis’s terms), which frame variety as a limited range of types of more-or-less identical sets of institutions—in other words, a singular notion of ‘society’—Castoriadis emphasises discontinuity in history and an indefinite variety of social formations and constellations. His novel approach stresses the otherness of societies created in history, thereby aiming to stress a diverse span of forms of social life. Castoriadis’s alternative is to understand societies as wholly and collectively created. Castoriadis’s definition of the social-historical pithily captures this sense of collective institution, as well as the overarching tension of continuity and discontinuity characteristic of all societies: The social-historical is the anonymous collective whole, the impersonal-human element that fills every given social formation but also engulfs it, setting each society in the midst of others, inscribing them all within a continuity in which those who are no longer, those who are elsewhere and even those yet to be born are in a certain sense present. It is, on the one hand, given structures, ‘materialized’ institutions and works, whether these be material or not; and, on the other hand, that which structures, institutes, materializes. In short, it is the union and the tension of instituting society and of instituted society, of history made and of history in the making. (Castoriadis 1987, 108)

In this passage, Castoriadis posits social continuity—instituted by the anonymous collective beyond existing networks of social relations—and historical discontinuity as simultaneously embodied in the social-historical. The socialhistorical always brings the presence (or the continuity) of the anonymous collective to every moment of social existence, as well as encompassing the continual alteration of instituting society (Mouzakitis 2014). Castoriadis argues that there is thus an otherness in ‘the union and the tension of instituting society and of instituted society’. The created world is not unprecedented but instituted always with contingent excess of meaning. Both continuity and historical discontinuity are indispensable, due to the engulfing nature of social-historical experience. Castoriadis thus articulates a complex image of

80

Jeremy C. A. Smith

creation in this passage of The Imaginary Institution of Society, one in which we find continuity and discontinuity unifying, but unifying ‘in tension’. In some parts of his work, however, an even stronger sense of rupture inhabits his thinking. His formulation of ‘creation ex nihilo’ expresses this sense of definitive breach. In response to critics, he later revised the phrase as creation ex nihilo, but not in nihilo or cum nihilo. 2 The shift does little to provide clarity to the notion of ex nihilo, and something of the sophistication of the manner in which Castoriadis elsewhere unpacks his nuanced notion of the social-historical is lost. I favour the more complex and widely applicable sense of the past instituted in the present (to use a phrase reminiscent of the craft of history) that the social-historical forms in Castoriadis’s thinking. When it comes to the latter, history is nothing less than ‘the emergence of radical otherness . . . manifested by the existence of history in toto as well as by the appearance of new societies’ (Castoriadis 1987, 184–85). The socialhistorical is the ever-present anthropological condition of human existence in its vast continuum of original forms. Believing this about the social-historical, Castoriadis counts time, true time, as the being of otherness, as radical self-creation (Castoriadis 1987, 186). Time instituted as temporality is fundamentally a human creation based on a condition of radical indeterminacy (Castoriadis 1987, 187–95, 209–15; 1991, 34–35). For this reason, he distinguishes time from space because of its auto-alteration; time does not occur in space, as it seems to when considered within the confines of inherited thought. Rather, time is the flow of creation in history. In one part of his thinking, he elaborates time as socially made temporality, indeed as indefinitely variable temporalities, due to the otherness and novelty flowing through it (Castoriadis 1987, 204–06). His elucidation of creation in time evokes also an image of societies instituted in history as extraordinarily diverse, each instituting historically and culturally specific historicities. His provocation to comparativists in the disciplines of sociology, history and anthropology is to treat ‘society’ and ‘the social’ as radically fluid in the same manner that he has treated history and the historical. Otherness characterises the wholeness of discernibly coherent social formations (1987, 45–48, 170; 1991, 84; see also Adams 2011, 32–33). In arguing thus, Castoriadis affirms discontinuity in history between different societies, noting all the while zones of contact and synchronic connections between them. It is a logical step to shift from Castoriadis’s allusions of a plurality of historicities to his critique of ideal typology. The latter constrains the scope of comparative inquiry. In his general evaluation of Weber’s historical sociology, Castoriadis pinpoints a difficulty in reconciling reductionist conceptions of rationality with the complete cultural worlds in which rationalities obtain meaning. Notwithstanding Weber’s relativising sensitivity to multiple cultural worlds (see Arnason 1989a, 32–32)—a sensitivity which has made him a source of inspiration for the study of civilisations in the sociological

History, Civilisations, Imaginaries

81

tradition—his ideal types prove inadequate to the whole coherence in which discrete formations are engulfed. The categories subject to comparison (the city, market, bureaucracies and so forth) do not, in themselves, do justice to the ‘social-historical world (a)s a world of effective and immanent meaning’ (Castoriadis 1991, 70). It is difficult to elucidate and adequately explore the phenomena that the categories invoke in isolation from the social imaginary significations that engulf them and give them historicity. They are only heuristically ‘designated’ by ideal types, when the task is ‘to think of a mode of being belonging to this world—to these worlds—of significations in its specificity and its originality’ (Castoriadis 1987, 369). Castoriadis’s step here leads him to assert what Weber incompletely brings forth: the imaginary gives vitality to richly diverse fields of instituted and instituting societies and varieties of meaning. Castoriadis’s whole approach then is quite amenable to elucidation of multiple constellations and multiple historicities. Castoriadis bases his critique of ideal typology on an ontology of being-in-time, which logically leads to the conclusion that the social-historical is astonishingly variable. In turn, the critique of ideal typology nourishes his keen appreciation of multiplicity. Read as a reference point for historical sociology, Castoriadis’s ontology of the social-historical comes across as a radically pluralist angle from which to rethink the creation of historical constellations, the deep diversity of the so-called global age (and the deep diversity of the constellations that prefigured it), and the indeterminacy of potential futures. Do we then have in Castoriadis’s elucidation of the imaginary institution and the social-historical a more fruitful framework for comparison of diverse constellations? Deliberation on the question begins with notes on two tensions in his work. First, by focussing on the ontology of creation, Castoriadis ends up exaggerating the novelty of historical processes of transformation. He neglects the interpretive dimension and does not fully realise the contexts in which creation occurs (Arnason 1989a). As mentioned, two positions on historical continuities and discontinuities stand unreconciled. Castoriadis’s formulation ‘creation ex nihilo’ emphasises historical discontinuity, as well as discontinuity between historical constellations. His qualification ‘not in nihilo or cum nihilo’ helps clarify his later and more developed position. Yet the matter is unresolved and his position remains susceptible to the hermeneutical claim that the social-historical at all times exists in situated worlds of meaning. 3 Being situated in existing worlds of meaning, the social-historical must entail continuities, even while the discontinuous and novel creation of social form emerges uninterruptedly. The second tension arguably results from two lacunae in his vast oeuvre. Despite an emphatic and well-argued orientation to the social-historical, Castoriadis did not back his deliberations with systematic consideration of theories of history (Adams 2011, 34). Nor did he pursue a research programme in

82

Jeremy C. A. Smith

comparison of social formations and large constellations. He did not prioritise comparative empirical investigation into intercultural connections or indeed intercivilisational encounters, such as we see in civilisational analysis, particularly in the work of Arnason, Saïd Arjomand (2014) or, in international relations, Peter Katzenstein (2010). While he was well aware of the highly variable range of constellations of the social-historical, his own work would have been more compelling if he had more direct contact with the historical, comparative and empirical elaboration occurring in the historical sciences and in the multi-disciplinary field of civilisational analysis. Since both theories of history and a programme of research into civilisational forms were absent from Castoriadis’s work, we are left with the conclusion that his elucidation of the social-historical must be considered provisional, heuristic and subject to further development. In the next two steps, I address, first, the initial tension around the question of creation and then, second, move to a more extensive meditation on historicity and civilisations, via a discussion of civilisational analysis. Castoriadis’s encounter with Paul Ricoeur in a 1985 radio dialogue brought the status and viability of his notion of creation ex nihilo under scrutiny. In reading the dialogue, observers could not fail to detect divergent views on creation and production and reproduction in history, despite the mutual interest of the two interlocutors in the problematic of social imaginaries (Ricoeur and Castoriadis 2017). Ricoeur differs sharply on the nature of social and historical change. Change occurs in ‘a dialectic of innovation and sedimentation’ (Ricoeur and Castoriadis 2017, 6), which impels the reconfiguration of prior configurations. Castoriadis meets him part way on this point but wishes to emphasise ‘discontinuity on the level of sense’, or the level of interpretation of the social-historical (Ricoeur and Castoriadis 2017, 7). Lines of continuity are always present in ‘existence’, or in the processes of rupture and reproduction. Likewise, Ricoeur and Castoriadis seem unreconciled over the future. For Castoriadis, the future is a ‘creation of new potentials’ (Ricoeur and Castoriadis 2017, 11) against the backdrop of the encompassing socialhistorical. Ricoeur rejects this in favour of a conception of the future grounded in historicity: through a retroactive recovery of human legacies, societies create something new (Ricoeur and Castoriadis 2017, 12). He cannot come at Castoriadis’s proposition around the absolute ruptures of the future, just as he could not concede ruptures in the past. They appear at odds on questions of historicity. To be sure, the juxtapositions apparent in the dialogue are amenable to productive interpretation (see Adams 2017; Taylor 2017). They move closer to consideration of one another’s position in the interlocutory mode of the interview, in a manner adaptable to fruitful re-elaboration. Without diminishing other differences between the two, Castoriadis’s position on creation, when formulated as creation ex nihilo, seems to produce the greatest differ-

History, Civilisations, Imaginaries

83

ence. Arguably, the formulation is not characteristic of his overall understanding of the imaginary institution (Arnason 2017, 59–61). Moreover, the formulation does not hinder his ontology of creation when he is most clearly applying it to actual formations, or when his notion of creation is put forth as ‘contextual’ in Arnason’s terms (Arnason 2017). When he casts his ontology in terms of the instituting and instituted imaginaries—arguably at the most definitive part of his work, which also includes his elaboration of the socialhistorical—his theory of creation assumes a greater resemblance to Ricoeur’s dialectic of innovation and sedimentation, varying mainly in emphasis. Understood thus, Castoriadis’s ontology looks more amenable to a comparative historical-sociological application and to theoretical reconstruction. We can now read the dialogue as an exchange in which some clarification of positions takes place. Castoriadis modifies his strong sense of discontinuity and explores examples to illustrate points of productive contact with Ricoeur (Castoriadis and Ricoeur 2017, 7–8, 14–16). Castoriadis and Ricoeur are principal thinkers for the paradigm of social imaginaries. Their work marks out the field with philosophical reference points. Charles Taylor is a third reference point. His writings on social imaginaries turn our attention to the issue of historical constellations and the constitution of modernity (Taylor 2004). At the same time, his theory of social imaginaries provokes questions about plurality, which he explicitly and purposefully leaves for others to address. Make no mistake: he favours the multiple modernities approach led by Eisenstadt. However, what he brings is a distinct contribution to the field in elucidating the social imaginary from the vantage point of Western modernity. In his efforts to explicate the ways that Westerners make sense of their particular social existence and their practices, he seems to owe more to Benedict Anderson as to Castoriadis. Nonetheless, his theory resembles Castoriadis’s elucidation in that it displaces idealism in referring to ‘ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit in with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie those expectations’ (Taylor 2004, 23). Social practices and agency, in turn, ground these expectations. Social imaginaries invoke background meaning, which for Castoriadis and Taylor are the most relevant dimensions of social existence (Adams and Arnason 2017, 160–61; Arnason 2017). Furthermore, Taylor conceives modern society as collectively instituted, just as much as Durkheim or Castoriadis, or indeed the comparative civilisational analysts discussed here. Castoriadis suggests that societal collectivities create the distinctions, categories and ways of thinking that seek to categorise units and the differences between those units. Taylor, too, sees the imaginary in this way, as a collective order able to ‘grasp society as objectified, as a set of processes, detached from any agential perspectives’ (Taylor 2004, 163). However, for Taylor modern social imaginaries create a tension between the

84

Jeremy C. A. Smith

collective political potential for reimagination of new kinds of social order and an extra-political set of processes, or even forces, to which we are subject, ‘a terrain to be mapped, synoptically represented, analysed . . . from the outside by enlightened administrators’ (Taylor 2004, 164). The two sides to modern social imaginaries are inseparable in coexistent tension. Castoriadis and Taylor have a kindred understanding of bureaucratic rationality as tendencies of modernity. The mechanistic conception of economic life found in the ‘invisible hand’ metaphor is a good illustration of extra-political yet rational forces at work in the institution of modern society. Set against other social imaginaries—the public sphere and the sovereignty of the political— ‘the market’ seems to negate the political imagination of the common good (Taylor 2004, 76–79). Empowered collective agency is trapped in a clash with the atomistic imagination of market-based modernity. This, for Taylor, is a crucial insight into the Western constellation. Western modernity is pluralist within. Taylor elucidates two kinds of plurality. First, modernity is multi-dimensional. It entails a moral rupture with the past, differentiation of the economy (as externalised system), development of a public sphere, and constitution of popular sovereignty (as the signification of a new political order). Second, a persistent pluralism distinguishes modernity from prior formations. The discursive terrain is diverse and the social imaginaries framing popular and intuitive understanding of social life legitimates that diversity. Class, gender and racial conflicts are normal within certain parameters, particularly in the United States in which the revolution constituted the most far-reaching instantiation of sovereignty (Taylor 2004, 111–13, 125–30). Of course, the parameters can be narrow, as Taylor readily recognises in his discussion of patriarchal power and the apparent universality of principles of equality. Yet the persistence of implicit ideals of pluralism brings challenges to the deepest institutions of power. New doctrines and practices eventually engender mutations of existing arrangements. Important moments of discontinuity thus punctuate change (Taylor 2004, 105–07). In this respect, Taylor singles out the Western constellation as a conception of moral order from which stems objective notions and categories of sovereignty, democratic politics and market economies. Acknowledging all along that there may be other modernities, he leaves an open invitation to discern and explore non-Western constellations (see, for example, Wagner 2014; 2015). It is therefore not a huge step to think of many civilisations as distinguished by many social imaginaries, and, in fact, this is Taylor’s hunch (2004, 195–96). His purpose in Modern Social Imaginaries is to focus the minds of readers on ‘what is common among the different paths of contemporary modernization’, all the while accepting the reasons why others may provincialise Europe (2004, 196). In exploring Castoriadis’s position, the encounter between Ricoeur and Castoriadis, and Taylor’s theory of Western social imaginaries, I have pre-

History, Civilisations, Imaginaries

85

pared the way for a pressing question: how might conceptions of social imaginaries and sense of discontinuity reverberate in the scholarship of civilisations and modernity? To address that, I turn next to the main scholarship of civilisational analysis in order to see how perspectives on historical and contemporary civilisations incorporate insights on continuity and discontinuity and plurality in the organisation of social life from the field of social imaginaries. EISENSTADT’S PROGRAMME OF COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF CIVILISATIONS AND MULTIPLE MODERNITIES If Taylor left the theorisation of other modernities to others, Eisenstadt felt no such hesitation. His turn to the comparative sociology of civilisations in the early 1980s would lead logically to his famous articulation of multiple modernities. Overall, the turn was definitive and paradigmatic for Eisenstadt. From that point on, he endeavoured to structure a comprehensive research programme around a developing theory of the civilisational dimension and analyses of transformation, conflict and revolution in social formations. His macrosociological and mesosociological analyses of China, India, Japan, Jewish civilisation, the United States, the multi-civilisational world region of the Americas and Islamicate civilisation trace the origins of the social and political order to its source: the premises of Axial civilisations. The ambition of this particular form of contemporary civilisational analysis lies in the boldly made connections Eisenstadt draws between, first, the ontological and epistemological breakthroughs of the Axial Age and, second, the dynamics of modernity and the generation of multiple modernities. While his form of civilisational analysis does not explicitly incorporate a theory of creation of the kind Castoriadis produced, his theorisation and substantive analyses of civilisations and multiple modernities does consider problems of continuity and discontinuity in a manner that solicits comparison with Castoriadis. Furthermore, he casts the ontological or cosmological dimension of social life as an imaginary of a sort. Indeed, there is a highly productive phase spanning the turn of the millennium in which occasional references to the imaginaire pepper his articulation of civilisation as an analytic. His clearest responses to questions of historicity crystallise in dialogue with critics and critiques during this phase (in which he also demonstrates some familiarity with Castoriadis’s work). It is, furthermore, hard to believe that the clarity of his consideration of the discontinuous dynamics of formations of modernity bear little relationship to the extensive substantive researches on civilisations that he authored and led. In short, I suggest that his elaboration of the ontological horizons of civilisations and modernity connects with social imaginaries.

86

Jeremy C. A. Smith

I move next to test the connection with social imaginaries via an examination of 1) Eisenstadt’s conceptual development of ‘civilisation’ and multiple modernities, 2) the theory and historical sociology of Axial civilisations and their momentous ruptures, and 3) historicity in the discontinuities of civilisations in modernity. Eisenstadt’s creative interpretation of classical sources is central to his conception of historical transformation, multiple modernities and civilisations. Eisenstadt encountered several informative peers among the world’s leading social scientists during the course of his seven-decade career. Although he engaged and absorbed major ideas in these encounters, it was Weber’s social theory that he could conduct ongoing dialogue with. Weber’s influence as a comparativist gave Eisenstadt’s sociology its vital cast as a comparative historical sociology. His interpretation of Weber’s comparative historical sociology of religious ethics initiated a new path in contemporary civilisational analysis and a turn to a more radical sense of multiplicity (Spohn 2011, 287). Seen from this angle, Weber’s comparative sociology of world religions and civilisations serves as a basis for elucidation of the cosmological tensions of Axial civilisations. Eisenstadt chooses to resist the temptation to search for other civilisational equivalents of the Protestant ethic as a source of differentiation of civilisations, electing instead to follow Weber’s more pluralistic comparative sociology of religious ethics in examining historical constellations (Arnason 2003, 86–87; Eisenstadt 2002, 649, 676–77). In making this choice, Eisenstadt is able to sketch a non-Eurocentric comparative agenda focussed on civilisations as complexes of symbolic order, structures and ideology, on the one hand, and intracivilisational conflict characterised by heterodox movements, on the other (Eisenstadt 2002, 407–08). Eisenstadt identifies in Weber’s comparative historical sociology the element of revolution, which involves ‘order-maintaining versus order-transforming dimensions of culture’ analogous to the general relationship of culture and institutional patterns (Eisenstadt 2002, 537). Such an approach would have overtones of a general theory of civilisations, if not for the fact that, as far as Eisenstadt is concerned, the symbolic construction of culture and the patterns of conflict and protest vary too greatly for anything other than a comparative framework to be the basis for analysis (Eisenstadt 2002, 636–37). 4 Eisenstadt’s comparative analysis therefore depends on a notion of civilisations as comprised of the social and cultural premises of discernible orders. Within state formation, the civilisational premises structure conflict, but conflicts around ideological interpretations of those premises also shape and transform civilisational premises. Are the civilisational premises so central to Eisenstadt’s notion of civilisation analogous to Castoriadis’s instituted and instituting imaginaries? For Eisenstadt, the civilisational premises institute the environment in which a plurality of agency, ideology, religion, interpretation, reproduction and trans-

History, Civilisations, Imaginaries

87

formation are possible, and indeed create a broad horizon of potential. However, something is missing. As Arnason argues, in respect of the advances in research on the Axial Age, a more nuanced range of categories at an ontological level is warranted, given the manner in which historians have revised the historical record of early civilisations. Not only is culture, in Eisenstadt’s terms, order maintaining and order transforming, it also has an ‘ordertranscending potential’ and ‘order-questioning capacities’ (Arnason 2003, 258). Arnason’s additional categories are more evident in some civilisations than others. Potential for transcendence of the existing order rests deeply in the instituting imaginary. When it comes to order-questioning capacities, they too are potentials of the historic Axial imaginaries, partly realised in subsequent philosophical and religious traditions (that Eisenstadt would term heterodox). Framing core cultural components in the terms of the imaginary, as Arnason does in his own historicising revision of the conception of the Axial Age (Arnason 2014a), allows for a more radical understanding of the relationship between culture, reflexivity, creativity and power in the ruptures of the Axial era. 5 Whereas the insights suggested in this nuanced notion of culture are implicit in Eisenstadt’s examination of Axial civilisations, they do not translate fully into categories in his overall sociology. There is, in this respect, a distinction between his conception of the civilisation premises of different social orders and the social imaginaries paradigm. Eisenstadt’s theorisation of culture and power does not bring into the frame the contingent transformative potential of the instituting imaginary conspicuous in major historical ruptures. It is in his conception of the ontological dimension that the distinction is evident. This has implication for the rest of his comparative historical sociology, which are touched on in the discussion of multiple modernities later. Eisenstadt’s notion of civilisation posits three levels. First is the ontological. Eisenstadt’s interpretation of Weber influences his notion of civilisation as ‘the combination of ontological or cosmological visions (visions of transmundane and mundane reality) with the definition, construction, and regulation of the major arenas of social life and interaction’ (Eisenstadt 2002, 34). One side of the formulation stresses the creation of a social order (of collective identities, economic life, daily life and the institutions of state) in which there is a tempo of order-transformation specific to the overall figuration of arenas of social life. On the other side of the formulation, renovation of instituted formations hinges on the continuous reinterpretation of a civilisation’s ontological premises. As an analytic, this conception of civilisation relativises the relationship of structure and culture by displacing the strong sense of determinism found in functionalist social theories (Arnason 2003, 234). The two sides are interrelated, but highly contingent and context-dependent. Being interrelated, both sides infuse the creation and reproduction of a civilisation as a complex or constellation, which is a second institutional

88

Jeremy C. A. Smith

level. With this conception, Eisenstadt seeks to avoid a general theory. Nonetheless, his theory retains general transinstitutional arenas as common components of all civilisations (see Eisenstadt 2002, 78–86). Civilisations encompass collective identities and memories as well as producing deep sentiments of the sacred. In diverse figurations, agency, the division of labour and conflict all structure the social order(s) incorporated in a civilisational constellation. Furthermore, all societies contain latent potentialities for conflict, which the right conditions can activate. At the institutional level, distinct polities and empires generate centres and peripheries with varying avenues of access to the centre. Elite formation is often as important as the structuring conflict of classes. Competing doctrines and the protest of the minority intelligentsia are transposed across a coalescing movement. Often religious in character, a coalescing movement will produce heterodoxy and have a generalised impact on the centre. In turn, patterns of protest and social conflict condition potential for intercivilisational engagement, international conflict, which is a third relational level. To the extent that Eisenstadt conceives civilisations as complexes rather than more-or-less closed entities, he also perceives intercivilisational encounters as formative forces influencing the dynamics of continuity and discontinuity. Note, however, that the overall status of intercivilisational encounters in his contemporary civilisational analysis remains questionable. Others have accorded it more prominence and consequently have given more attention to interstate and interregional aspects of civilisations. These three levels are the components of a model of civilisational complex. Along with a ‘consciousness’ of civilisation, the first civilisational complexes emerged in the Axial Age. Though prior formations were harbingers of the major civilisations, it was Axial breakthroughs that were decisive, as far as Eisenstadt is concerned. Emerging in numerous world zones, the crystallisation of philosophical, religious and scientific reflexivity occurring between the sixth century BCE and the first century CE was unparalleled. The inauguration of new ontological visions ruptured existing cosmological unities encompassed by archaic civilisations. Across numerous civilisational centres, its visionaries restructured myth itself (Joas 2012). According to Eisenstadt, new ideologies and new ideological elites had great and greater magnitude for interpretation, debate and revision of the major assumptions of social life. If the right set of institutional conditions prevailed—and the institutional ecologies of different societies varied widely from one civilisation to another—then the magnitude for critical interrogation of many aspects of life, the non-human world and the cosmos could be far-reaching. Not only could nature, divinity and the cosmos be put into question, so also could the social and political order. As a higher transcendental plane of existence was differentiated from mundane world order, most civilisations therefore fostered a new ontological basis for conflict.

History, Civilisations, Imaginaries

89

For Eisenstadt, this was a multi-civilisational and world historical rupture matched only by the later emergence of modernity and multiple modernities, and it formed a basis in most civilisations for patterns of conflict and new developmental logics and paths. The radical differentiation of a transcendental order variously distinguished transcendence itself as an object of reflection in Axial civilisations. It was the counter-world to the mundane world, which could act as a utopian supra-mundane vision of transformation (compare with Arnason 2012a, 354–55). In this respect, the Axial Age encoded civilisations with built-in potential for waves of reordering. However, developmental paths set out of Axial civilisations also meant that the epistemological and institutional breakthroughs of this era resulted in continuities also. As well as longer-term developmental trajectories, new forms of collective memory ensured a consciousness of continuity of culture and knowledge itself. Eisenstadt’s contemporary civilisational analysis uniquely positions the Axial Age as an era in which a great eruption of creativity founded the premises for important continuities. On the ontological side, the broad cultural visions of the world variously allowed, indeed structured, competing ideological interpretations, which stimulated transformative dynamics. Yet the cultural premises of Axial civilisations also framed the terms of collective memory and forms of historicity. Institutionally, the concretisation of contingent tendencies according to specific historical experiences provides for both continuity and transformative protest, conflict and potentially revolution. However, the concretisation of contingent tendencies can establish developmental logics capable of a level of reproduction high enough to ensure durability in a civilisational path. Eisenstadt not only advocated the Axial Age hypothesis; he led an international programme in historical-sociological research with interested comparativists. A great deal of productive research occurred, particularly around critics who also debated the religiosity of transcendence in the Axial Age. 6 The programme included critical reception of Eisenstadt’s basic propositions, including around four questions of continuity and rupture (Arnason, Armando and George 2006; Arnason, Eisenstadt and Wittrock 2005; Bellah and Joas 2012). The first question is how discontinuous were the intellectual and religious innovations of Axial Greece, China, India, Iran and ancient Israel? Research from different disciplines in the human sciences reveals higher levels of reflexivity and historicity in archaic civilisations than previously believed (Arnason, Eisenstadt and Wittrock 2005; Arnason 2014a, 184–89). An image of a continuum of creativity and intracivilisational and intercivilisational inputs leading to creation of a higher order of intellectual and religious capacity, accompanied by more-or-less differentiated institutional complexes, might serve as a tempered model of discontinuity across multiple constellations. But, as Arnason argues, the social order did not change nearly as greatly as the cultural horizons of the Age, casting some

90

Jeremy C. A. Smith

empirical doubt over the degree of disjuncture in social and political conditions (Arnason 2003, 166–71). There are diverse patterns to ontological conceptions of civilisations, but also more of a continuum with preceding archaic constellations than the categories of axiality seem to admit. Moreover, each of the major archaic civilisations are marked by particular historicities and specific cultural, political and economic inventions, suggesting a more differentiated world of civilisational constellations (Arnason 2005, 29). The second question has to do with the other side of the Axial period. Were the breakthroughs so specific to Antiquity? Originally, Eisenstadt described the crystallisation of Christianity and Islam as post-Axial ‘secondary breakthroughs’. He retired that notion after feedback demonstrated how inadequately it categorised the impact of Christianity and the expansion of Islamicate civilisation (Arnason, Armando and George 2006; Arnason, Eisenstadt and Wittrock 2005). But this casts doubt also on the original periodisation, which relates both world-historical developments to ones of ‘Late Antiquity’. The notion of secondary breakthroughs suggests continuous re-elaboration of original Axial ruptures and a routinisation of cultural practices. Yet there are, in fact, important innovations and indeed decisive ones relating to the institutional apparatus of imperial power (see Arnason 2003, 171–72). These are innovations in connection with social imaginaries. The civilisational formations of Late Antiquity are too distinct from their predecessors to be included on this basis, even though they are connected to the cultural, religious and social worlds in which the ontological ruptures were forged. Out of the debate came a consensus around a Eurasian longue duree signifying longterm continuity punctuated by many breaks and fractures within an Annalesstyle periodisation of parallel temporalities (Arnason and Wittrock 2004). The shift could accommodate a diversity of civilisational constellations and regional contexts, while also respecting the originality of the Axial syndrome. Posed in these terms, a third question of discontinuity arises. What about the sources of the European Renaissance? Renaissance trends emerged earlier, in fact. The High Medieval period is demonstrably an era of vital cultural, philosophical and religious creativity, on one hand, and institutional outgrowth and diversification of interregional connections across Eurasia, on the other hand (Arnason, Armando and George 2006; Arnason and Wittrock 2004). As Nelson argues, a genealogy of European modernity needs to identify the intercivilisational encounters of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as a starting point (Nelson, 2012; cf. Tiryakian 2005). A strong case can also be made if one takes the Islamicate civilisation as the focal point. The growth of interregional links across the Islamic world and other civilisations in AfroEurasia stimulated transcultural hybridisation (Rahimi 2006). Discussion of the significance of this period resumes in the following in direct relation to Nelson’s contribution.

History, Civilisations, Imaginaries

91

Eisenstadt’s own solution to the issues raised in the three questions of historicity was to turn to a typology of core Axial features as a basis for comparison of different constellations. In choosing this course, Eisenstadt retreats further from the proper problems of continuity and discontinuity essential to historical sociology. He opts instead for comparison of the components and processes of civilisational complexes, sometimes assessing them synchronically, but often diachronically. This in no way suggests that Eisenstadt’s sociology of Axiality is completely decontextualised, far from it. However, it assumes the appearance and, at times, the manner of a general social theory, precisely the problem that Arnason so earnestly urges against (Arnason 2014a, 198–200). This leads to a final question. How to relate axiality to modernity? For Eisenstadt, modernity and the generation of multiple modernities was possible because of the ontological premises of Axial Age civilisations. In turn, modernity brought challenges to those very premises. In his account, he registers the manner in which modern consciousness of continuity and higher orders of reflexivity developed unequally and in diverse patterns (Eisenstadt 2002, 462–85). Of all the Axial civilisations, it was Europe that produced an especial historicity and from that the first and foundational cultural programme of modernity. A heightened reflexivity distinguished the confrontation between Europe’s social imaginaries and other civilisations, which occurred in multiple and serial encounters. Notwithstanding this Europe-centred focus—not to be confused with Eurocentrism—Eisenstadt’s picture of Axial civilisations is distinctly pluralist (see Ben-Rafael and Sternberg 2005). His accounts include discussion of the capacities of Indian, Chinese and Greek civilisations (in particular) to generate intercivilisational encounters of enduring significance. Indeed, from the outset, the accent falls on diachronic development and multiple trajectories: No one homogenous world history emerged nor were the different types of civilizations similar or convergent. Rather, there emerged a multiplicity of different, divergent, yet continuously mutually impinging world civilisations, each attempting to reconstruct the world in its own mode, according to its basic premises, and attempting either to absorb the others or consciously to segregate themselves from them. (Eisenstadt 2002, 214)

World histories are indeed many. When it comes to an account of modernity and the creation of multiple modernities, Eisenstadt identifies Europe’s civilisational ecology of social and economic institutions, pluralistic polities and ontological orientations as the first constellation to produce modernity, and to do so with an acute awareness of historical novelty and discontinuity. The latter stands out in the so-called Great Revolutions, in which dissent and protest converted themselves into movements capable of reconstructing the central structure and premises of society (Eisenstadt 2006). The Great Revo-

92

Jeremy C. A. Smith

lutions were, unmistakably, a historical rupture. By privileging the Great Revolutions, Eisenstadt is able to elevate the crystallisation of modernity, and its relativisation through the pluralisation of multiple modernities, to the status of a civilisation of modernity. Notwithstanding his elaboration of an extensive argument on modernity’s revolutions, he was never able to convincingly clarify how the civilisation of modernity is linked to Axial civilisations, to premodern ruptures, or to longterm civilisational trajectories, except to identify the impact that axiality had on the transformational potential of the European constellation. It is reasonable to conclude, as Arnason does, that the civilisation of modernity is both greater than civilisations, and therefore to varying degrees subsumes them within a supracivilisational pattern and less than civilisations insomuch as modernity draws on the cultural lineages of longstanding civilisations (Arnason 2003, 40–42, 172–74). There can be no doubt that Eisenstadt’s perspective represents a distinctly pluralist picture of the twentieth-century landscape of civilisations, multiple modernities, globalising tendencies and multilateral institutions and states. 7 It is an unfinished outline for what other social scientists more simplistically call the global age. Yet we are left asking whether the crystallisation of modernity is a process resulting from the Axial trajectory of Europe (and therefore more of a ‘cultural programme’) or whether it is an altogether original rupture transcending European origins to form a supracivilisational, multi-dimensional constellation highly visible by the end of the twentieth century. From Eisenstadt, we receive no definitive answer. The research programme on early modernities organised by Eisenstadt and Wolfgang Schluchter opened an interesting direction that could have bridged the explanatory gaps between the account of modernity and Axial civilisations (Eisenstadt and Schluchter 1998). However, others have taken that agenda forward (Arnason and Wittrock 2004), and it is difficult to discern how research on early modernities has positively influenced Eisenstadt. If the situation had been different, Eisenstadt’s work on modernity might have conclusions that are more definitive on questions of historical disjuncture and continuity. As things stand, the hypothesis of a civilisation of modernity that expands Axial reflexivity, agency and autonomy is at risk, as Wolfgang Knöbl argues, of reliance on ‘an overly continuous account of human history’ (Knöbl 2006, 220). 8 Too much of the discontinuous character of modernity is missing; the programme excludes organised violence, intracivilisational and interstate conflict, warfare and the growth of military power, especially in the historical rupture inaugurated by the impact of Western colonialism (Knöbl 2006, 221). To be sure, social conflict, revolutionary violence and totalitarian repression and de-differentiation are not suppressed themes; they are extremely prominent. However, Eisenstadt’s civilisational analysis neglects the international arena of state rivalries, inter-imperial conflict and

History, Civilisations, Imaginaries

93

geopolitical contexts of warfare, the very domains his perspective needs, if it is to give a more rounded vision of the civilisation of modernity. What remains is the issue of Eisenstadt’s encounter with social imaginaries. His passing references to Castoriadis and the imaginaire appear in publications of the last full decade of his life (Delanty and Eisenstadt 2004, 395; Eisenstadt 2001, 28; 2002, 45, 56, 98, 493). The phrase ‘social imaginaries’ stands out in essays in International Sociology and Thesis Eleven, where Eisenstadt places emphasis on two points central to the social imaginaries framework. First is the wholeness of the imaginary in which the social arenas of agency and conflict are engulfed, as well as the cultural and political premises of multi-societal civilisations. For Eisenstadt, the wholeness is the civilisational dimension of modernity. In a second point, he is at pains to emphasise the openness and radical indeterminacy of the institutional creations produced by agency and interaction. The emphasis relates to the distance he wishes to put between himself and traditional metanarratives of modernisation: Today I see modernity as a distinct civilization, which has been characterized by a special imaginaire in connection with which special institutional programmes have developed out of a combination of continuity and discontinuity with the Axial civilizations. It is continuous with the Axial civilizations in the sense that many of the tensions of the Axial Age programmes have been taken over in modernity, but the crucial difference is, while in the different Axial civilizations, there was a basic acceptance of some kind of the centrality of transcendental order or orders; in modernity there is a combination of orientation to a transcendental order and doubts about the validity of the transcendental orientation itself, which gives rise to what Claude Lefort calls—and I like very much this phrase—‘the loss of markers of certainty’. (Delanty and Eisenstadt 2004, 395)

Eisenstadt tries to address the continuities of Axial civilisations and multiple modernities here. Whereas the association of modernity with horizons of uncertainty is uncontroversial, there is still ambiguity in his characterisation of the creation of imaginary significations of autonomy. 9 It is difficult to see how he can reconcile the emphasis on radical indeterminacy and contingency—which emerges in the phase in which Castoriadis is an influence on his thinking—with the comparative historical sociology, in which autonomy is ultimately and foundationally anchored in the historic ruptures of the Axial Age. To my mind, Eisenstadt’s contemporary civilisational analysis foregoes two elements of a different response to questions of historical transformation. First, the historical range of formations is not as wide as it should be. This is due to his conception of civilisation, which limits his scope to the major Eurasian constellations. In this respect, Eisenstadt’s paradigm finds itself

94

Jeremy C. A. Smith

particularly tested in his essay on the multi-civilisational zone of the Americas (Eisenstadt 2002, 701–22). The second element is the impact of the intercivilisational and intercultural encounters, which are relatively marginal to his overall comparative historical sociology. Yet, by any measure, these must be central to the categorisation of civilisations qua constellations. As these are the specialist domain of Nelson and Arnason, it is to their work that I turn. NELSON: ONTOLOGIES AND ENCOUNTERS Nelson amplified a second current of Weberian sociology in his conception of civilisations, one that emphasised structures of consciousness and intercivilisational encounters (Nelson 1981, 67–79). Spurning general and conventional definitions of civilisation, Nelson proffers a notion of culturally constituted ‘complexes’ or ‘paradigmatic cultural patterns’ (Nelson 1981, 83). For Nelson, diverse geometries sustain the multiplicity of large multi-societal groupings. Durkheim and Mauss’s conceptual work of the early twentieth century directly inspires his understanding of large-scale formations. Civilisations are ‘arrangements of coordinates defining cultural ontologies, epistemologies, and logics; directive systems, dramatic designs, and socio-political frameworks; and technologies of different sorts—symbolic as well as material’ (Nelson 1981, 92). He merges Weber’s typology of rationality and Durkheim’s concept of collective consciousness in his schema of civilisations as ‘cultural patterns’ and ‘cues’. 10 As complexes enveloping multiple societies in cultural ontologies, civilisations institute ecologies of social life, specifically the structures of existence, of experience and of expression (Nelson 1981, 231). Together, the three structures amount to the ‘structures of consciousness’ that, in turn, order the predilection of civilisations to engage other societies and constellations. With this approach, Nelson avoids the pitfalls of totalising systems thinking (Nielsen 2004, 120). Although he speaks of culture ‘directing’ and ‘designing’ the institution of societies, he envisages this as a broad and loose frame for social action and creative interpretation (Arnason 2003, 148–50). Going from the general to the concrete, Nelson’s studies of specific structures of consciousness constitute historical phenomenologies of experience (Nielson 2004, 122). Clearly, he intends to posit civilisational complexes loosely and suggestively as an analytic for case-specific investigations. With this looser conceptual schema and an image of civilisational plurality, he can direct attention to the diverse patterns and patterning of modernity and he does so some years ahead of Eisenstadt’s comparable turn away from the convergence theories of the sociology of modernisation. He is like Eisenstadt

History, Civilisations, Imaginaries

95

in elucidating an alternative Weberian perspective. Yet his Weberianism is less burdened by a prescriptive conceptual apparatus. Nelson’s principal advance is the formulation of ‘intercivilizational encounters’, a phrase he was the first to use with a conceptual connotation (see Arnason 2003, 140–42). He defines encounters as deep engagement of associated multi-societal complexes, which are distinguished either by universalistic categories of knowledge and moral judgement (entailing also dialectical logic) or by sacro-magical communal identities (Nelson 1981, 101). The most significant encounters are those that stimulate transformative dynamics in the structures of consciousness. Nelson’s name for this process seems familiar in the wake of the civilisational research by Eisenstadt and others. Like the later Eisenstadt, he identifies the outstanding breakthroughs with Axial shifts. Unlike Eisenstadt’s network, Nelson situates the key moment of axiality with a much later age, twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe—an Axial shift that generated cultural settings that prefigured the scientific revolution (Nelson 1981, 8–9, 98–101). Furthermore, he associates axiality in that particular constellation of encounters with a problematisation of ‘invidious dualisms’, rather than the enhancement of dualistic visions of the world. In place of the separation of two planes of existence, Nelson substitutes a greater approximation of religious visions and worldly problems in his definition of Axial shift, putting his theorisation of the ontological character of axiality at odds with analysts of Antique axiality. His argument that the twelfth- and thirteenth-century achievements of the movements of rational theology were the defining ontological feature of an Axial turn is extremely interesting from the point of view of a civilisational approach to early modernity. 11 However, it also has implications for a general understanding of trends of world historical significance. Having elucidated the Late Medieval juncture of intercivilisational encounters as an Axial moment, he then locates his analysis of the most discontinuous phases of European civilisation in this historical period. Through such ‘civil wars of consciousness’, Europe underwent a more thorough, albeit fragile rationalisation of faith, a transformation in metaphysics, such that the very settings of logic and morality were altered. By comparison, civilisational developments in China impelled a segmented and reversible rationalisation of some arenas, but no comprehensive development of the cognitive settings and autonomous environment of disputation capable of a revolution in science. Meanwhile in Islamicate civilisation, ruling theological elites contained the forces of rationalism and the faith structures of consciousness that rationalism might have promoted. Nelson’s understanding of history is emphatic in considering these civilisational complexes and the distinction of the European constellation: only Europe achieved a scientific revolution, and it did so through extensive and dense Late Medieval inputs from other civilisations and from

96

Jeremy C. A. Smith

intracivilisational recovery of earlier Greco-Roman traditions of philosophy and science. Notwithstanding Nelson’s neglect of several ancient civilisational traditions of the Near East and Hellenic Mediterranean that influenced the GrecoRoman configuration and later Byzantine contributions to the Late Medieval context (Arnason 2003, 144–45), his analysis paints a picture of a highly novel historical juncture. That momentous intercivilisational encounters underpinned by a density of cultural contacts and an intensity of disputation were a feature of a western fringe of Eurasia seems beyond doubt, once we date early modernity from the twelfth century. In my view, there is significant continuity in the intensification and outgrowth of contacts and deeper impulses of connection across the historical period that Nelson designates as one of critical junctures (Smith 2017, 48–49, 75–77). Recognising lines of continuity helps clarify the points of rupture in which Nelson perceives qualitative shifts in the structures of consciousness. Nelson’s version of contemporary civilisational analysis is indicative of different potential directions for historical-sociological research into specific formations and their patterns of historicity. His own case study research on Late Medieval Europe’s encounters with Byzantine and Islamic sources dramatically shifts the Axial point of historical discontinuity forward from the first millennium BCE into the early second millennium CE, while simultaneously enlarging the historical epoch of modernity and re-periodising its principal turning points. Nelson’s historical sociology foreshadowed later research that threw into doubt preconceptions about the early modernities of different constellations in multiple connected zones of Eurasia (Arnason and Wittrock 2004). Though sketchy, his approach indicates potential programmatic directions. His original contribution to research into patterns of historicity was to link civilisational analysis to structures of consciousness. Durkheimian in inspiration, his approach to the structures of consciousness alludes to the imaginary dimension, especially when he focusses on the uneven and partial creation of rationality in early modernity through intercivilisational encounters. This promising approach soon runs up against its own limitations. Nelson developed a more extensive portrait of Western rationality, religion, theology and science out of Weber’s very partial comparative historical sociology. Yet a problem remains. Despite a commitment to a pluralist and particularistic conception of civilisation (as opposed to a general social theory of a Parsonian character) and to a historical sociology of intercivilisational encounters, Nelson’s version of civilisational analysis is constrained by the centrality of typology to its procedure, specifically the types of consciousness. Isolating components of faith, religion and theology for comparative purposes ‘too easily becomes a study of “success” and (especially) the “failure” of civilisations in the gestation of particular cultural forms (for example, modern science) abstracted from universal history. It

History, Civilisations, Imaginaries

97

obscures a more central question: what structures, histories, and experiences did actually occur in different civilizations’ (Nielson 2004, 123–24). Nielson’s point alludes to a more radically pluralist version of civilisational analysis, in other words, taking Nelson further. However, to proceed to such a position necessitates a shift to a social imaginaries framework, which would be, indeed, an extension of Nelson’s own gesture to social imaginaries. The next step toward a perspective in the cast of social imaginaries involves Arnason’s creative social theory. CREATION AND CONSTELLATIONS IN ARNASON’S SOCIAL THEORY When it comes to the study of civilisations, few living scholars have achieved the scope of historical-sociological analysis that Arnason has. Like Eisenstadt, Arnason is able to command the respect of a significant number of specialists and organise large-scale collaborative projects with multiple contributors. However, Arnason’s contemporary civilisational analysis diverges from Eisenstadt’s on key points. In particular, Arnason’s characterisation of civilisational constellations is more nuanced and more oriented toward context-dependent instantiations of social imaginaries. His conception of civilisations incorporates regionally specific histories more effectively. At the same time, he supplements historical sensibility with a more theorised elucidation of social imaginaries. Furthermore, in the tracks of Nelson, his emphasis on intercivilisational encounters affords his approach greater purchase on the multiplicity of constellations. This chapter features three salient themes of his overall work. First, a consistent image of creation, heritage and change courses through his writings on civilisations. Second, his contemporary civilisational analysis is multi-dimensional and profoundly pluralistic. He distinguishes his approach in a field of classical and contemporary perspectives by means of a unique characterisation of social imaginaries and civilisational constellations. Third, Arnason’s demarcation of the field throws into relief productive problematics in present scholarship, earlier themes of past analysis, and future directions and challenges. In his theory of creation, Arnason’s notion of ‘creative transformation of earlier cultural visions’ signals both affiliation with Castoriadis’s theory and a point of departure from it (Arnason 1989b, 337). This is an early summation of the crystallisation of modernity. At this point in his thinking, he singled out two major sets of social imaginary significations of modernity: modern capitalism and the project of autonomy. Seen by Arnason from the vantage point of meta-social patterns of creation, Castoriadis’s emphasis on ex nihilo institution of cultural, economic and political patterns does not

98

Jeremy C. A. Smith

capture the contribution of pre-existing ideological interpretations and traditions to the institution of modernity. Contrary to Castoriadis’s own concern with social-historical creation, the ontology of ex nihilo institutions suppresses ‘the background and context of creativity, more precisely their interpretive relationship to something other than themselves’ (Arnason 1989a, 40). It is difficult to see how one could conduct historical sociology without resorting to revision of Castoriadis’s formulation and amplification of his stronger theme of social-historical creation in the tension between the instituted and instituting imaginary. 12 How, then, is one to understand modernity? Arnason points out that the questioning capacity of modernity is situated as much in the ‘space for structured conflicts of interpretation’ formed in dialogue with interpretive traditions as it is in the future-oriented project of autonomy (Arnason 1989b, 337). He thus presents an interpretive account of creation in which the inherited cultural order is subject to the creative horizon of modernity. As interpretive conflict is integral to modernity, there is then a structural place in the constitution of modernity for the historical agency of the makers of history and interpreters of the past. From this point in the trajectory of Arnason’s social theory, his conception of creation incorporates Castoriadis’s theorisation of meaning but frames a distinct notion of culture—one heavily influenced by Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, as well as Castoriadis’s appreciation of the plurality of cultural constellations. Arnason supplements the notion of creative transformation with the historical-anthropological conception of culture as ‘cultural articulation of the world’ (Arnason 1989a; see also Adams 2011, 114–17). With this, Arnason is able to posit a notion of culture qua broad problematic, rather than one in which culture is a tightly coherent whole. With an emphasis on culture as a vital creative component of social formations, Arnason fashions a notion of imaginary better equipped for the task of understanding the regional contexts of historical constellations than Castoriadis’s ontology of creation is. At the same time, the accent of Arnason’s interpretive notion of culture falls on the collectivity of world-interpretation, in place of the individualism implicit in the interpretive subject at the heart of traditional phenomenology. Distinct from ideology and the institutional dimensions of creative transformation, culture is an articulation of the meaning and signification of the world and a framing of capacities to question and transcend a given order (Arnason 2003, 212–13). Capacities such as these coalesce in excess of instituted ideologies. At the same time, the preinstituted world-as-a-horizon and the civilisational heritage of regional worlds furnish context to capacities to question and transcend a given order. With a conception of cultural legacy as practices of interpretation, Arnason is better able to accommodate a greater focus on identity of civilisations within the cultural articulation of regional contexts than Castoriadis is. Two regional constellations illustrate Arnason’s reformulation of creation. Chi-

History, Civilisations, Imaginaries

99

nese civilisation differentiated itself regionally. At the same time, China emanated Sinic influence in East Asia, exercising cultural influence in processes of creative transformation in Korea and Japan. Often considered the most continuous of civilisations, China is notable for two phases of departure from its historical trajectory: the so-called Warring States period and the Song dynasty era of the eleventh and twelfth centuries (Arnason 2003, 306–07). Seen from the vantage point of a regional history, however, patterns of social-historical institution look markedly discontinuous. Debates among historians and political economists suggest that assumptions of Confucian continuity are highly problematic, based on both new interpretations and new evidence. Examination of phases of accelerated transformation reveals multidimensional patterns varying too widely between China, Japan and Korea to presume continuous cultural determinants (Arnason 2003, 15–17). The larger modern East Asian complex is a product of multiple Confucian inputs, as well as economic impulses and patterns of state formation (Arnason 2002a, 145–47). The intrusion of Western imperial powers into Asia and the consequent confrontation with Western modernity brought new intercivilisational encounters that linear narratives of historical modernisation are unable to explain. Arnason sees potential in multi-dimensional approaches to re-interpret patterns of neo-Confucian norms and the complex combination of cultural and economic discontinuities and continuities in developmental models of East Asian capitalism (Arnason 2002a). Uneven combinations of continuity and discontinuity are also associated with the European constellation before the ascendancy of the West. There is a coalescing consensus in comparative and economic branches of history that rigorous dating would put the West’s lead as emerging in the early nineteenth century. However, Arnason dates the coalescence of early Western modernity much earlier. Indeed, following Nelson, Arnason pinpoints the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as a key period of theological, philosophical and scientific efflorescence. Again, regional contexts matter. The interregional encounters between formations within greater Eurasia are the macro-regional stimuli of early European modernity (Arnason 2003, 352–54; Arnason and Wittrock 2004). Looking beyond Europe to other civilisational bases, combined patterns of continuity and breach are many and varied, so much so that the designation of ‘early modernities’ seems fitting for these multiple interacting constellations. For Arnason, macro-regional patterns involve interconnection between civilisations and the outgrowth of different forces at different times, with Western expansion toward the end of this phase being the most decisive for the creation of modernity sui generis. I cannot take up specifics raised for debate by Arnason’s perspective here. However, his method is evident in both illustrations. He demonstrates creative transformation at work through comparing regional constellations in processes of sustained change over longer periods. Arnason’s sense of move-

100

Jeremy C. A. Smith

ment in history derives from his conception of civilisations as constellations. For Arnason, ‘civilizations appear as emergent overall patterns (to call them totalities implies a one-sided emphasis on closure) which shape the texture of social life and the course of historical events on a large scale and over a long span of time’ (Arnason 2003, 59). The openness evident in this quote alludes to his multi-dimensional and pluralistic vision of civilisational constellations, the second theme in this current section. From the outset of Arnason’s journey into civilisational analysis, Nelson’s model of intercivilisational encounters has informed his construct of a social-historical constellation. 13 The ‘combination of internal trends and interactions with the external arena’ co-institute civilisations (Arnason 1989a, 35). At the same time, the history of the origins of civilisations is subject to ongoing revision, especially in the scholarship on the Axial Age (Arnason 2007). Arnason assesses continuities and turning points historically and empirically on a case-by-case basis, with one eye on the cultural, economic and political domains of the formations in question, and another eye on the orientation of large-scale constellations to intercivilisational encounters. Through an analysis of the three domains in his major work, Arnason uniquely recasts each as meaning, wealth and power (Arnason 2003, 4–5, 195–280). In the particular way he acknowledges his debt to Castoriadis, he signals an affiliation with the social imaginaries framework. Whereas wealth and power are foundational to Arnason’s unique conception of civilisations qua constellations, my analysis turns to meaning in order to foreground the place and interrelation of the three domains in his understanding of history and historicity. As noted, Arnason casts culture as a broad problematic. As such, culture provides pointers to interpretive conflicts and visions of the social and economic order. Benjamin Schwarz and Nelson are the closest guides in this instance, rather than Eisenstadt. Arnason is set up for a post-Weberian rendition of meaning within civilisational constellations, but—again, emphasising Castoriadis—connected to the creation of power and its institutions (Arnason 2003, 242–47). His analysis of meaning, wealth and power as domains of creative transformation does not treat each as separate, but rather indefinitely interwoven: ‘the concept of imaginary signification helps to underline the irreducibility of these contexts’ (Arnason 2003, 242). As much as his notion of civilisational constellation can more readily accommodate diverse patterns of historical continuity and disjuncture, it can also incorporate divergent historicities based on the structuring potential of interpretation in the domain of meaning. Working at the interstices of sociology, philosophy and history, Arnason has produced a highly pluralist version of contemporary civilisational analysis (Adams and Arnason 2017). Yet the elucidation of diversity could go even further, a matter I turn to next. The final of the three themes is Arna-

History, Civilisations, Imaginaries

101

son’s demarcation of productive and unresolved problematics in the field of civilisational analysis. The neo-Weberian identification of an affinity between the world religions and geographically cast constellations gives historical sociology good analytical purchase on the definition of regions as accumulated historical experiences, rather than spatial entities as such (Arnason 2007). Yet this serves to beg more questions about the character of subregions, or regions within macro-regions (such as Eurasia). Two civilisations come to mind. Islam represents, at most, a ‘multi-regional civilization’ (Arnason, Salvatore and Stauth 2006). East Asia’s civilisational foundation is undoubtedly Sinic, but debate continues about its civilisational trajectories and composition. In all, the concept of ‘region’ must remain indefinitely open, and it is, in this respect, a central problematic of the paradigms of civilisational analysis and social imaginaries as a whole. The ongoing problematisation of ‘regions’ and ‘regionality’ relates to the reconceptualisation of modernity as a world historical rupture (Arnason 1989b; see also Arjomand 2014). On this specific problem, multiple modernities has been Eisenstadt’s approach. There are other versions of the plurality of modernity, which all entail a global geography of regions (Costa et al. 2006; Gaonkar 1999). Three points distinguish Arnason’s account (Arnason 2002b). First, he emphasises global and historical contexts in which different configurations of modernity crystallise. On this basis, it becomes possible to understand more clearly the background of interconnections between emergent non-Western modernities and Western modernity, which Arnason takes as the most dynamic source of modernising innovations. Second, he posits coeval kinds of modernity, which are sometimes alternative modernities (e.g., communist modernity as an integrating, but rival version), as supplements to geographical constellations. Third, he stresses a common modern world as a worldwide background to unfolding regional formations. This ‘unity in diversity’ is a reminder of the connectedness of modernities and figuration of a common human condition, which persists alongside conflict, rivalry and divergence (Arnason 2002b, 149). The common modern world has a specific historicity, that is, a shared understanding of the temporal condition of modernity as an institutional and cultural break with the past (Arnason 2002b, 151). Seen as an intervention in an expanding debate over the character and plurality of modernity, Arnason’s perspective is a reassertion of the importance of differentiation of constellations within the context of macro-regional and interregional linkages, rather than the divergence and separation of modernities expressed in Eisenstadt’s version of multiple modernities. Although Arnason writes little about ‘intercivilizational encounters’ in the essay on the multiplication of modernity, the relational dimension of civilisations clearly informs his reconstruction of the processes of multiplication. I argue that this seems to be one of the most prominent points of distinction of his perspective

102

Jeremy C. A. Smith

from others in the field and suggests a forthcoming research path (see Arnason 2019). The prior analysis notes that there are three domains to Arnason’s multidimensional notion of constellation: the imaginary significations of wealth, power and meaning. Arguably, Arnason has set the sacred—or rather the ‘religio-political nexus’—as a fourth domain at the intersection of religion, power and politics in his more recent work (Arnason 2014b). Arnason reconceptualises Eisenstadt’s sociology of world religions and incorporates anthropological insights from the French Durkheimians, in order to elucidate the sacred at the level of the imaginary. From there, he analyses the emergence of power, politics, sovereignty and democracy. Power, politics and the religious imaginary come together in Arnason’s reassessment of archaic and Axial Age civilisations, which is also a reassessment of the formative crystallisation of civilisations as complex and institutionally differentiated constellations. In this stage of his thinking, Arnason restores an anthropological dimension to the sociology of civilisations by situating the religio-political nexus in his account of the social-historical creation of civilisational constellations (Arnason 2014b, 23). However, this is by no means complete and remains as an ongoing problematic for development in the wider paradigm. All this suggests the indispensability of historical perspectives to an adequate understanding of the imaginary dimension of civilisations. In addition to the importance of historical perspectives, Arnason argues for ongoing interdisciplinary research involving an array of specialists from across the human sciences (Arnason 2007). He concentrates on an interplay of philosophy, sociology and history in order to formulate with clarity major questions emerging out of the confrontation of perspectives on social imaginaries and research into civilisations. He touches on questions of power, religion, history, tradition and historicity in multiple settings. History has grown in importance in researching multi-societal constellations, ‘it all comes back to history—more precisely, a comparative history of socio-cultural patterns and their impact on the human condition’ (Adams and Arnason 2017, 188). However, there is the other pressing issue of inquiry that has demanded Arnason’s attention. The increasing entry of religion into politics at a fundamental level toward the end of the twentieth century has enhanced his strong interest in the religio-political nexus (Adams and Arnason 2017, 183). While this is a major topic of public debate, civilisational analysis brings a distinctive emphasis on very long-term histories. Arnason highlights four areas of research and re-elaboration: a review of archaeology and anthropology, reconsideration of formative developments in the Axial Age, re-examination of trends in secularisation, and, most importantly, a refashioning of Castoriadis’s theory of power and politics (Adams and Arnason 2017, 185–86; Arnason 2014b; see also Arnason and Hann 2018). The religio-political nexus as a domain is abundant with varieties of historicity. Arnason posits the imagi-

History, Civilisations, Imaginaries

103

nary institution of the sacred as a source of creation for a variety of societies. The instantiation of imaginary significations of the sacred and of implicit power (as Castoriadis poses it) follows different paths of discontinuity. With this innovation, Arnason brings to the scholarship of religion and politics a perspective on the imaginary to add to the corpus of Marcel Gauchet, Hans Blumenberg, Maurice Godelier, Lévi-Strauss, Clastres, Durkheim, Mauss and Weber. His slant on the imaginary represents a lively counter-point to the emphasis on ontological continuities one finds in Eisenstadt’s research on civilisational origins. At the same point, Arnason has an alternative to perspectives in international relations on civilisations and world politics concerned with issues in religion and politics, but constrained by shorter visions of history issuing from their own postmodernist premises (Hall and Jackson 2007). When Arnason’s perspective is the starting point, the question of how discontinuous historical and global constellations are over long periods of time remains open to proper historical and empirical investigation. The self-limited and provisional character of Arnason’s theory and analytical framework leaves his agenda open to the further incorporation of other configurations of history and historicity. By making the plurality that Castoriadis foregrounds central to his own historicisation of the imaginary institution, Arnason takes steps beyond Castoriadis. He arrives at the following position, which is also an ongoing guide to his historical sociology of civilisation. Social imaginaries demarcate the inclinations and limits to encounters between civilisations and thereby create connections between varieties of social-historical experience. Intercivilisational encounters framed by social imaginaries should therefore be at the core of inquiry. I have elsewhere theorised connectivity including intercivilisational encounters as intercivilisational engagement (Smith 2017). Though space to rehearse that argument is limited here, two points are directly relevant. First, the notion of intercivilisational engagement underscores the degree of migratory exchange and flow, economic contacts, cultural interaction and political transactions between cultures, societies and empires. As the human sciences revise prior assumptions about the isolation of a host of premodern societies and cultures from each other, a clearer picture of more routine contact and interaction is emerging. For multi-societal civilisations, diverse patterns of porosity and closure mark capacities for interconnection, while often influencing historical continuities and discontinuities also. Although not a neglected subject in civilisational analysis, there is ample scope for further case study and comparative research on the impact of intercivilisational encounters on pre-existing patterns of historicity. Second, varieties of historicity and temporality are operative in the manifold creation of different cultures, societies and multi-societal regional constellations. There is all-round agreement on this point in the comparative analyses of Arnason, Eisenstadt, Nelson and Taylor. Castoriadis pointedly

104

Jeremy C. A. Smith

foregrounds this when he expressly argues that so-called historical societies engender historicity (Castoriadis 1987, 185). In doing so, he forcefully disavows the presumption that premodern societies are static. All bear diverse temporalities; in other words, tempos of self-alteration operate across all forms of social life. His point can be easily articulated in the language of civilisational analysis: we can render it to say that multiple civilisations produce many temporalities, whether they be civilisations of the Axial Age, archaic civilisations, the many civilisations of what Eisenstadt calls the civilisation of modernity, or indeed the civilisations known today as indigenous or First Nations societies. When it comes to the latter, there is enough evidence of thick and more substantial links between indigenous civilisations, both outside of colonial subjugation (and often prior to it), and in the era of nation-states (see Rundell 2004; Singh 2018). The record varies across regional and historical cases. In brief, there are two generalisations to take from existing research. First, indigenous cultures exhibit specific modes of historicity in myth and memory. They ontologically ground a relation of past and present that is distinct from the imperial powers and nation-states that colonise their worlds. Australia’s modernity illustrates well how regionally and historically specific such a constellation of myth and memory can be (Rundell 2004; Smith 2017, 147–50). Australia’s First Nations bear a collective memory grounded in a deep temporality of the Dreamtime, in which myth marks out lasting relationships to land, waterways and seas. The First Nations Dreamtime that has survived the disordering violence of colonisation contrasts with a short, twocentury Euro-Australian memory founded on British myths of settlement of an empty land. The Dreamtime invokes a past of world origins yet is a guide to the present and future. Second, as the evidence of connectivity and multiplicity of creation becomes more compelling, the case to incorporate indigenous civilisations in the constellational variety of modes of social organisation starts to look stronger. The construction of indigenous modernities within modern nation-states and regional zones is an especially neglected theme (Rundell 2004). With a reconstruction of the conceptual basis of the field, civilisational analysis could become a paradigm better equipped to recognise the civilisational imaginaries and properties of indigenous constellations. This is an outstanding task for the field, particularly given the historical association of images and discourse of civilisation with projects of colonialism. CONCLUSION I began this chapter with Castoriadis’s theory of the imaginary institution of society, reflecting on it as a way of understanding historic constellations that

History, Civilisations, Imaginaries

105

are formed, and still-forming, in more-or-less discontinuous patterns of history or, in Castoriadis’s terms, the social-historical. His image of the socialhistorical invokes the presence of the anonymous collective as a condition of any social organisation and all forms of transformation. There is deep diversity in the range of constellations of signified meaning and forms of historicity created in world history. Nevertheless, Castoriadis’s approach dramatises discontinuity in creation (the dialogue with Ricoeur highlights how dramatic his position is). A working familiarity with comparative historical and historical sociological inquiry would strengthen the influence from empirical and historical research on his framework. The synopsis of Taylor’s theory of modern social imaginaries provides an alternative approach, one that illustrates the value of a conception of the imaginary enriched by comparative insights, even though he leaves nonWestern constellations for others to consider. Furthermore, the results of comparative civilisational analysis suggest some gaps that the connection of theory with archaeology, history, philology and anthropology could fill. 14 Equipped with tools of comparative research and engaged in dialogue with specialists, civilisational scholars have highlighted the weight of intercivilisational encounters. Eisenstadt’s specific version of civilisational analysis uniquely articulates the distinctive ontological, social and political patterns of Axial Age civilisations. Yet many questions remain, particularly around the degree of discontinuities between different formations. How the premises of the Axial Age continue into multiple modernities is one remaining controversy. Eisenstadt’s provision of the thought-provoking idea of the civilisation of modernity did not lead to articulation of a convincing explanation of links between Axial sources and the emergence of multiple modernities. Like Castoriadis, Eisenstadt did not give much consideration to theories of history. Furthermore, with greater focus on intercivilisational encounters—particularly during the phase in which he explicitly engaged the imaginary dimension—he may have left a more formed conception of the civilisation of modernity. We find such a focus in Nelson’s conceptualisation of intercivilisational encounters. He provocatively frames the Axial character of Europe’s encounters with other civilisations as a phase of early modernity, rather than a distant Antiquity. Nelson constructed his historical sociology in a Durkheimian vein, and so his analysis of early modern rational structures of consciousness invokes the imaginary dimension. Yet his preference for a Weberian typology of consciousness remains a constraint, closing off the possibility of his work contributing to an early work in the field of social imaginaries. Notwithstanding his original legacy of a vibrant conception of intercivilisational encounters, Nelson’s framework does no more than gesture to social imaginaries. At this point, my argument turns to Arnason. Over three decades, Arnason has constructed the version of civilisational analysis that most produc-

106

Jeremy C. A. Smith

tively conceptualises social imaginaries in the context of large-scale constellations. As his theoretical framework is purposefully designed for adaptation to regional contexts (and their imaginary significations of wealth, culture and power, as well as their generation of the religio-political nexus), he avoids the difficulties of a general theory of civilisational evolution. Arnason powerfully emphasises the imaginary dimension of constellations in his work on regional contexts and intercivilisational encounters. In particular, his elaboration of the imaginary dimension of the religio-political nexus introduces into scholarly debates on religion a perspective on the historically, regionally and culturally specific character of diverse constellations. As a final point, I argue that the problematic of intercivilisational encounters—particularly as Arnason has developed it—has thrown into relief patterns of underlying connection between large-scale formations. Moreover, though Arnason’s interest is in the most momentous of connections between different formations (qua intercivilisational encounters), his work particularly draws attention to the imaginary dimension of encounters, in other words the predisposition of civilisations to sustained and transformational connection with other constellations. We can conclude from this that there is room for further inquiry within civilisational analysis into the impact of intercivilisational encounters on patterns of historicity in the major historical civilisations. Importantly, there is ample room for further development of conceptions of the imaginary dimension of civilisations. Furthermore, the transformations evident in the manifold emergence of ‘the civilization of modernity’ remain underdeveloped, as others have observed of Eisenstadt’s articulation of that evocative yet insufficient concept. One theme is the new connections constructed in world’s constellations of modernity, in which we can, and should, include the survival, reconstruction and mobilisation of indigenous varieties of historicity. In other words, modernity seems to be the most challenging problem for civilisational analysis, and yet also the most urgent. Connections with the field of social imaginaries are the most promising means with which to address this problem—that is also a problem of the continuities and discontinuities of constellations. NOTES 1. I do not explore Peter Wagner’s treatment of plurality and modernity here. However, see Wagner (2014; 2015) and volume 4:1 of Social Imaginaries. 2. The key to Castoriadis’s position lies in his consistent invocation that creation of the social does not originate with external factors, but is still conditioned by them. For a counterpoint that compares Castoriadis’s handling of the problem with Ricoeur’s, see Taylor (2017, 40–44) and Adams (2011, 117–20, 128–30). 3. See references to Taylor and Adams in note 2. For a hermeneutical reconstruction of Castoriadis’s theory of creation, see Arnason (1989a, 38–42). 4. See Eisenstadt’s critical reading of Weber’s Religion in China in his larger analysis of Chinese civilisation and modernity in ‘This-worldly Transcendentalism and the Structuring of

History, Civilisations, Imaginaries

107

the World: Weber’s “Religion of China” and the Format of Chinese History and Civilization’ (Eisenstadt 2002, 281–303). The essay by Weber is a weak product of an otherwise paradigmatic oeuvre, which is continuously relevant to contemporary historical sociology. See also Arnason’s treatment of Weber’s sociology of Eastern religions and civilisations (2003, 232–35). 5. Arnason’s position becomes sharper with time and deeper consideration. See Arnason (2005; 2012a; 2014a). 6. For divergent and competing perspectives, see the essays by Jose Casanova, Robert Bellah, Hans Joas and Charles Taylor in Bellah and Joas 2012. 7. See Sachsenmaier, Riedel and Eisenstadt (2001) for consideration of these areas of the civilisation of modernity. 8. See also Eisenstadt’s remarks in Delanty and Eisenstadt (2004, 394). 9. The ambiguous status of the civilisation of modernity does little to assist him in this (Arnason 2003, 324–25). 10. Nielsen perceives a more pronounced Durkheimian influence in Nelson’s creative work and less of the fingerprints of Weber’s comparative historical sociology of world religions (Nielsen 2004, 123), whereas in Arnason’s view, it is the imprint of Weber’s theory and comparative history of rationality and culture which is the most visible (Arnason 2003, 140–41). 11. See Arnason (2003, 154–55). Arnason suggests that it can be seen as ‘one of the exits from dualism’ (Arnason 2003, 153). 12. See Arnason’s endorsement of the notion of the social-historical, ‘I would of course add that I fully accept Castoriadis’s argument about the social-historical. You need to have the two things together; history is the history of societies. And societies are historical. No quarrel with Castoriadis on this level’ (Adams and Arnason 2017, 167). 13. Arnason’s interest in civilisation began in the 1970s, when he first encountered Nelson. See Adams and Arnason (2017, 2). 14. On the latter, see Arnason and Hann (2018).

REFERENCES Adams, Suzi. 2011. Castoriadis’s Ontology: Being and Creation. New York: Fordham University Press. Adams, Suzi. 2017. ‘Castoriadis and Ricoeur on the Hermeneutical Spiral and the Meaning of History: Creation, Interpretation, Critique’. In Ricoeur and Castoriadis in Discussion: On Human Creation, Historical Novelty, and the Social Imaginary, edited by Suzi Adams and translated by Scott Davidson, 111–37. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Adams, Suzi, and Johann P. Arnason. 2017. ‘Sociology, Philosophy, History: A Dialogue’. Social Imaginaries 3 (2): 151–90. Arjomand, Saïd (ed.). 2014. Social Theory and Regional Studies in the Global Age. New York: SUNY Press. Arnason, Johann P. 1989a. ‘Culture and Imaginary Significations’. Thesis Eleven 22: 25–45. Arnason, Johann P. 1989b. ‘The Imaginary Constitution of Modernity’. Revue européenne de sciences sociales 27 (86): 323–37. Arnason, Johann P. 2002a. ‘East Asian Approaches: Region, History and Civilization’. In The Peripheral Centre, 24–40. Melbourne: TransPacific Press. Arnason, Johann P. 2002b. ‘The Multiplication of Modernity’. In Identity, Culture and Globalization, edited by Eliezer Ben-Rafael and Yitzak Sternberg, 131–59. Leiden: Brill. Arnason, Johann P. 2003. Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Questions and Theoretical Traditions. Leiden: Brill. Arnason, Johann P. 2005. ‘The Axial Age and its Interpreters: Reopening a Debate’. In Axial Civilizations and World History, edited by Johann P. Arnason, S. N. Eisenstadt, and Bjorn Wittrock, 19–49. Leiden: Brill.

108

Jeremy C. A. Smith

Arnason, Johann P. 2007. ‘Civilizational Analysis: A Paradigm in the Making in World Civilizations’. In Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), edited by R. Holton, developed under the Auspices of the UNESCO. Oxford, UK: Eolss Publishers. Arnason, Johann P. 2012a. ‘Rehistoricizing the Axial Age’. In The Axial Age and its Consequences, edited by Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas, 337–65. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press. Arnason, Johann P. 2012b. ‘Castoriadis as a Civilizational Analyst: Sense and Non-Sense in Ancient Greece’. European Journal of Social Theory 15 (3): 295–311. Arnason, Johann P. 2014a. ‘Historicizing Axial Civilizations’. In Social Theory and Regional Studies in the Global Age, edited by Saïd A. Arjomand, 179–201. New York: SUNY Press. Arnason, Johann P. 2014b. ‘The Religio-Political Nexus: Historical and Comparative Reflections’. In Religion and Politics: European and Global Perspectives, edited by Johann P. Arnason and Ireneusz Pawel Karolewski, 8–36. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Arnason, Johann P. 2017. ‘Castoriadis and Ricoeur on Meaning and History: Contrasts and Convergences’. In Ricoeur and Castoriadis in Discussion: On Human Creation, Historical Novelty, and the Social Imaginary, edited by Suzi Adams and translated by Scott Davidson, 49–75. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Arnason, Johann P. 2019. Theorizing Multiple Modernities: The Unity and Diversity of a New Civilization. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Arnason, Johann P., and Bjorn Wittrock (eds.). 2004. Eurasian Transformations, Tenth to Thirteenth Centuries: Crystallizations, Divergences, Renaissances. Leiden: Brill. Arnason, Johann P., S. N. Eisenstadt and Bjorn Wittrock (eds.). 2005. Axial Civilizations and World History. Leiden: Brill. Arnason, Johann P., Armando Salvatore and Georg Stauth (eds.). 2006. Islam in Process: Historical and Civilizational Perspectives. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Arnason, Johann P., and Chris Hann (eds.). 2018. Anthropology and Civilizational Analysis: Eurasian Explorations. New York: SUNY Press. Bellah, Robert N., and Hans Joas (eds.). 2012. The Axial Age and its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press. Ben-Rafael, Eliezer, and Yitsak Sternberg (eds.). 2005. Comparing Modernities: Pluralism Versus Homogeneity. Essays in Homage to Shmuel N. Eisenstadt. Leiden: Brill. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1987. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1991. Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Costa, S., J. M. Domingues, W. Knöbl and J. P. da Silva (eds.). 2006. The Plurality of Modernity: Decentring Sociology. Mering: Rainer Hampp Verlag. Delanty, Gerard, and S. N. Eisenstadt. 2004. ‘An Interview with S. N. Eisenstadt: Pluralism and the Multiple Forms of Modernity’. European Journal of Social Theory 7 (3): 391–404. Delanty, Gerard, and S. N. Eisenstadt. 2001. ‘Some Observations on Multiple Modernities’. In Reflections on Multiple Modernities: European, Chinese, and Other Interpretations, edited by Dominic Sachsenmaier, Jens Riedel and S. N. Eisenstadt, 27–41. Leiden: Brill. Delanty, Gerard, and S. N. Eisenstadt. 2002. Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities: A Collection of Essays by S. N. Eisenstadt. Two volumes. London: Brill. Delanty, Gerard, and S. N. Eisenstadt. 2006. The Great Revolutions and the Civilizations of Modernity. Leiden: Brill. Eisenstadt, S. N. 2001. ‘Civilizations’. In International Encyclopaedia of Social and Behavioural Science, edited by Neil J. Smelser and P. B. Balters, 1915–21. Oxford: Elsevier. Eisenstadt, S. N. 2002. Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities. Leiden: Brill. Eisenstadt, S. N. 2006. The Great Revolutions and the Civilizations of Modernity. Leiden: Brill. Eisenstadt, S. N., and Wolfgang Schluchter. 1998. ‘Introduction: Paths to Early Modernities— A Comparative View’. Daedalus 127 (3): 1–18. Gaonkar, Dilip P. 1999. ‘On Alternative Modernities’. Public Culture 11 (1): 1–18. Hall, Martin, and Patrick T. Jackson. 2007. Civilizational Identity: The Production and Reproduction of ‘Civilizations’ in International Relations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

History, Civilisations, Imaginaries

109

Joas, Hans. 2012. ‘The Axial Debate as Religious Discourse’. In The Axial Age and its Consequences, edited by Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas, 9–29. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press. Katzenstein, Peter J. (ed.). 2010. Civilizations in World Politics: Plural and Pluralist Perspectives. London and New York: Routledge. Knöbl, Wolfgang. 2006. ‘Multiple Modernities and Political Sociology’. In The Plurality of Modernity: Decentring Sociology, edited by Sérgio Costa, Jose Maurício Domingues, Wolfgang Knöbl and Josué P. da Silva, 215–27. Mering: Rainer Hampp Verlag. Knöbl, Wolfgang. 2011. ‘Contingency and Modernity in the Thought of J. P. Arnason’. European Journal of Sociology 14 (1): 9–22. Mouzakitis, Angelos. 2014. ‘Social-Historical’. In Cornelius Castoriadis: Key Concepts, edited by Suzi Adams, 89–100. London: Bloomsbury. Nelson, Benjamin. 1981. On the Roads to Modernity: Conscience, Science and Civilizations. Selected Writings by Benjamin Nelson, edited by Toby Huff. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield. Nelson, Benjamin. 2012. On the Roads to Modernity: Conscience, Science and Civilizations. Selected Writings by Benjamin Nelson, edited by Toby Huff. Revised edtion. Plymouth: Lexington Books. Nielsen, D. 2004. ‘Rationalization, Transformations of Consciousness and Intercivilizational Encounters’. In Rethinking Civilizational Analysis, edited by Saïd A. Arjomand and Edward A. Tiryakian, 119-131. London: Sage. Rahimi, Barak. 2006. ‘The Middle Period: Islamic Axiality in the Age of Afro-Eurasian Transcultural Hybridity’. In Islam in Process: Historical and Civilizational Perspectives, edited by Johann P. Arnason, Armando Salvatore and Georg Stauth, 48–67. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Ricoeur, Paul, and Cornelius Castoriadis. 2017. ‘Dialogue on History and the Social Imaginary’. In Ricoeur and Castoriadis in Discussion: On Human Creation, Historical Novelty, and the Social Imaginary, edited by Suzi Adams and translated by Scott Davidson, 3–20. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Rundell, John. 2004. ‘From Indigenous Civilization to Indigenous Modernities’. In Rethinking Civilizational Analysis, edited by Saïd A. Arjomand and Edward A. Tiryakian, 201–16. London: Sage. Sachsenmaier, Dominic, Jens Riedel and S. N. Eisenstadt. 2001. Reflections on Multiple Modernities: European, Chinese, and Other Interpretations. Leiden: Brill. Singh, Priti. 2018. ‘Global Configurations of Indigenous Identities, Movements and Pathways’. Thesis Eleven 145: 53–66. Smith, Jeremy C. A. 2017. Debating Civilisations: Interrogating Civilisational Analysis in a Global Age. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Spohn, Willfried. 2011. ‘World History, Civilizational Analysis and Historical Sociology: Interpretations of Non-Western Civilizations in the Work of Johann Arnason’. European Journal of Sociology 14 (1): 23–39. Taylor, Charles. 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press. Taylor, George H. 2017. ‘On the Cusp: Ricoeur and Castoriadis at the Boundary’. In Ricoeur and Castoriadis in Discussion: On Human Creation, Historical Novelty, and the Social Imaginary, edited by Suzi Adams, 23–48. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Tiryakian, Edward A. 2005. ‘Comparative Analysis of the Civilization of Modernity: 1203 and 2003’. In Comparing Modernities: Pluralism Versus Homogeneity. Essays in Homage to Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, edited by Eliezer Ben-Rafael and Yitzak Sternberg, 287–308. Leiden: Brill. Wagner, Peter. 2014. ‘World Sociology Beyond the Fragments: Oblivion and Advance in the Comparative Analysis of Modernities’. In Social Theory and Regional Studies in the Global Age, edited by Saïd Arjomand, 293–311. New York: SUNY Press. Wagner, Peter. 2015. ‘Interpreting the Present: A Research Programme’. Social Imaginaries 1 (1): 105–34.

Chapter Four

Political and Constitutional Imaginaries Paul Blokker

In current times, established or taken-for-granted notions of the political, most evidently so regarding representative democracy, the rule of law and constitutionalism, are being put to an existential test. The longue durée of modern democracy—as deeply tied up with the nation-state, distinctive understandings of liberal and representative politics and legal-constitutional arrangements—seems to have arrived at a turning point. This turning point calls for a profound analysis, which is able to identify fields of tensions and important shifts in meaning with regard to constitutional democracy as a political regime. It is suggested and elaborated in this chapter that such an indepth analysis ought to be based on a historical perspective grounded in the idea of social imaginaries and, more specifically, political imaginaries. The latter could be clarified through, inter alia, Claude Lefort’s distinction between le politique and la politique, where the latter could be related to the predominant mode of instituted politics in society, whereas the former relates to the imaginary, that is, the constituting, symbolic and meaning-providing background to the identification and understandings of politics in society and, therefore, to ‘visible’, formal politics as such. Strictly tied up with the emergence of the political imaginary of modern democracy are constitutional imaginaries, in particular a dual imaginary of order and self-government, central to the political edifice of constitutional democracy. It will be argued that the modern constitutional imaginary is grounded in contradictory representations of what constitutes society. Whereas the ‘formatting’ of society by means of an emphasis on the orderly function, as exemplified by liberal constitutionalism, has been historically predominant, its insistence on the autonomous, hierarchical and technocratic nature of the 111

112

Paul Blokker

legal-constitutional is in some ways in strong tension with the political imaginary of autonomy. The latter informs a range of competing constitutional imaginaries, including populist but equally radical-democratic ones. The populist imaginary has resurged strongly in democratic politics in recent times, and an analysis of its main components allows for a deeper understanding of the tensions and paradoxes afflicting liberal, constitutional democracy as an idea as well as practice of government. The chapter will, in a first step, elaborate the notion of political imaginaries. Second, it will explore in an in-depth manner the idea of constitutional imaginaries, in particular by elaborating the dual nature of such imaginaries, related to both the ideas of order and stability and to the ideas of autonomy and self-government. In a third step, the chapter will discuss contemporary shifts in (the hold of) political and constitutional imaginaries, engaging in particular with what could be identified as a ‘populist imaginary’ of constitutionalism. POLITICAL IMAGINARIES The notion of political imaginary 1 draws attention to the historical and contextual nature of political phenomena and to their sui generis nature under conditions of modernity. It points to the fundamental embeddedness of the political in social life as well as to its roots in imaginary configurations of meaning. As perhaps most forcefully argued by Cornelius Castoriadis: Each society creates its own forms. These forms in turn bring into being a world in which this society inscribes itself and gives itself a place. It is by means of them that society constitutes a system of norms, institutions in the broadest sense of the term, values, orientations, and goals of collective life, as well as of individual life. At their core are to be found in each instance social imaginary significations, which also are created by each society and which are embodied in its institutions. (Castoriadis 1993, 102)

The notion of political imaginary further draws attention to the fact that political meaning is essentially social and not reducible to individual meaning-giving. In Castoriadis’s terms, ‘[w]e cannot conceive such creation as the work of one or a few individuals who might be designated by name, but only as that of the collective-anonymous imaginary, of the instituting imaginary, to which, in this regard, we will give the name “instituting power”. Such power can never be rendered fully explicit’ (Castoriadis 1993, 103). In a slightly different approach, that to be found in Sheldon Wolin’s work, the ‘political imaginary’ becomes of relevance when it ‘gains a hold on ruling groups and becomes staple of the general culture, and when the political actors and even the citizens become habituated to that imaginary, identify

Political and Constitutional Imaginaries

113

with it’ (Wolin 2008, 17–18). A political imaginary appears to ‘join power, fantasy, and unreality’ and ‘involves going beyond and challenging current capabilities, inhibitions, and constraints regarding power and its proper limits and improper uses. It envisions an organisation of resources, ideal as well as material, in which a potential attributed to them becomes a challenge to realize it’ (Wolin 2008, 38). More than the instituted, taken-for-granted nature of political imaginaries, Wolin stresses here political imaginaries’ mobilising power and the capacity to capture people’s imagination. Studies that draw on this notion thus demarcate themselves from both Marxism and Liberalism, which they critique for failing to appreciate the fact that societies are always acts of political creation, an act which becomes selfreflexive in democracy, and that political institutions are not reducible to expressions of economic or political interest constellations. Political imaginaries also critique narrow understandings of politics, as in realism or proceduralism, as reducible to a singular rationality and political technique. The emphasis on the imaginary dimension puts into relief the complex relation between reflective, fictive and instrumental dimensions of politics. In an important work on democratic imaginaries, Yaron Ezrahi argues that: [p]olitical imaginaries, for our purpose, refers to fictions, metaphors, ideas, images, or conceptions that acquire the power to regulate and shape political behavior and institutions in a particular society. The power of some such political fictions to become politically productive by generating performative scripts that orient behaviour and pattern institutions is grounded, among other things, in their apparent congruence with aspects of political and social experience and expectations, their compatibility with norms that appear to legitimate their power, and their (unphilosophical) tolerance for inconsistencies. (Ezrahi 2012, 3)

Political imaginaries ought to be understood as ‘configurations of meaning irreducible to empirical or rational foundations’ and as distinctive imaginaries which relate to ‘institutions with the explicit power to impose rules’ (Arnason 2013, 28). In Castoriadis’s words, [h]uman history—therefore also the various forms of society we have known in history—is in its essence defined by imaginary creation. In this context, ‘imaginary’ obviously does not signify the ‘fictive’, the ‘illusory’, the ‘spectacular’, but rather the positing of new forms. This positing is not determined, but rather determining; it is an unmotivated positing that no causal, functional, or even rational explanation can account for. (Castoriadis 1993, 102)

As such, political imaginaries point to historical innovation and the distinctive political patterning of historical political communities, brought about by specific imaginary significations, informing notions of unity and visions of transformation of such communities (Arnason 2013, 28).

114

Paul Blokker

Castoriadis’s notions of the social instituting and instituted imaginaries become important here, and draw attention to a specific political meaning (i.e., the fundamentally social, symbolic creation of historical societies). Castoriadis’s notions have a certain affinity with what Paul Ricoeur understood by utopia and ideology (Ricoeur 1976). 2 In Ricoeur’s terms—which go to the heart of the political dimension of social imaginaries 3—the institution of particular societies entails the articulation and development of an ideological justification of its structures, which attempt to lift the ideological justifications to the level of generality, in the claim that the instituted societal structures are corresponding and promoting the common good, rather than particular interests. Such justifications can, however, always be unsettled by reference to utopias, which invoke ‘an alternative order that could be opposed to the given order’ (Ricoeur 1976, 24). Indeed, [t]he utopian mode is to the existence of society what invention is to scientific knowledge. The utopian mode may be defined as the imaginary project of another kind of society, of another reality, another world. Imagination is here constitutive in an inventive rather than an integrative manner. (Ricoeur 1976, 24)

As we will see in the following, the appreciation of the historicity of democracy, potential shifts in imaginaries, interpretative work by human agents and the creative opening of new alleys of societal institutionalisation form crucial dimensions of the ideas of political imaginaries and, in a related manner, of constitutional imaginaries. In recent times, one can witness a certain upsurge in scholarly interest in the notion of political imaginaries, as attested by the works of Adams, Smith and Straume (2012); Domingues (2016); Straume and Humphrey (2010); Frank (2015); Grant (2014); Ezrahi (2012); Olson (2016); Smith (2012); and Wolin (2008). Many of such works offer reflections on the predicament of, and deep tensions in, our contemporary democratic societies by elaborating on the imaginary dimensions of democratic collectivities. By way of example, in Sheldon Wolin’s work, Wolin refers to the ‘power imaginary’ and the ‘constitutional imaginary’ to identify two significant ways of relating to and justifying power in the American context: The constitutional imaginary prescribes the means by which power is legitimated, accountable, and constrained (e.g., popular elections, legal authorization). It emphasizes stability and limits. A constitution partakes of the imaginary because it is wholly dependent on what public officials, politicians in power, and, lastly, citizens conceive it to be, such that there is a reasonable continuity between the original formulations and the present interpretations. The power imaginary seeks constantly to expand present capabilities. Hobbes, the theorist par excellence of the power imaginary and a favorite among neocons, had envisioned a dynamic rooted in human nature and driven by a

Political and Constitutional Imaginaries

115

‘restless’ quest for ‘power after power’ that ‘ceaseth only in death’. But, according to Hobbes, unlike the individual whose power drives cease with death, a society can avoid collective mortality by rationalizing the quest for power and giving it a political form. (Wolin 2008, 39)

As Wolin argues, ‘[t]he main problem is that the pursuit of the power imaginary may undermine or override the boundaries mandated in the constitutional imaginary’ (Wolin 2008, 19), indicating structural tensions within the imaginary foundations of the American democratic polity. 4 In Yaron Ezrahi’s extensive work on democratic imaginaries, there is an equally strong call for a recuperation of the imagination as a highly significant analytical and practical dimension of politics: ‘the imagination is probably the most neglected form of power in the field of modern political science, and, in particular, in political theory’ (Ezrahi 2012, 7; Domingues 2016). He continues, ‘[i]t is because the political imagination is indispensable to the creation of the political order while also inherently dangerous to its very stability that it constantly problematizes the political’ (Ezrahi 2012, 7). Ezrahi is particularly interested in the ‘narrow equation of the imaginary with the illusionary or the fictive associated with the Enlightenment’s ideological tendency to separate science from religion, reason from the human body and emotions, and politics from arts’ and hence he argues that ‘[i]t is precisely this dualism, this coexistence of the real and the illusionary in the imaginary, that has empowered the imagination to become, in many respects, the hidden shaper of politics’ (Ezrahi 2012, 7). A further dimension to political imaginaries is how it tends to put emphasis on taken-for-granted everyday forms of knowledge. This is clearly also the upshot in Charles Taylor’s work on social imaginaries. Taylor understands social imaginaries as about the ‘way people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notion and images that underlie these expectations’ (Taylor 2004, 23). For Taylor, crucial dimensions include the ‘way ordinary people “imagine” their social surroundings’, and also the idea that a social imaginary is ‘that common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy’ (Taylor 2004, 23). In the recent work of other scholars, such an understanding of social imaginaries has been given a more explicit political twist, for instance in the idea of ‘folk imaginaries’ (Olson 2016) or ‘popular political imaginaries’ (Ezrahi 2012). From a historical perspective, Ezrahi suggests to explore which political imaginaries, in terms of ‘what people imagine and how they evolve their individual and collective forms of life’, are most likely to create conflict and antagonism and which are more congenial to freedom, tolerance and equality (Ezrahi 2012, 300). In distinctive ways, Ezrahi calls for a more reflective, conscious and critical

116

Paul Blokker

attitude toward available political imaginaries, in which other forms of knowledge than official legal texts and facts play an important role in constructing the political (Ezrahi 2012, 300–01). In Kevin Olson’s work on ‘imagined sovereignties’ (Olson 2016), the main thrust is to critically assess the modern imaginary of popular sovereignty and to scrutinise what he calls ‘folk foundationalism’. What is important here is that Olson both recognises the deeply built-in forms of knowledge that are part of modern societies’ common sense, not least in the form of people’s power, and the potential dangers that stem from the incapacity to critically scrutinise such ‘naturalized’ forms of knowledge. This is, for instance, also a prominent dimension of current debates on populism (Olson 2016, 3; the relation between populism and constitutional democracy will be further discussed at the end of this chapter). The notion of social imaginaries has become particularly widely known through Charles Taylor’s Modern Social Imaginaries, already mentioned, in which Taylor understands social imaginaries as forms of meaning-making that are deeply tied up, and ultimately allow for, everyday practice (Taylor 2004). Whereas Taylor prominently explores distinctive social imaginaries that are widely understood as the basis of the modern understanding of democratic politics, such as those of popular sovereignty, self-government, as well as those of constitutional bills and rights, it can be argued that much recent critical theoretical work on political imaginaries has found its most prominent inspiration in the work of two other thinkers, that is, Claude Lefort and Cornelius Castoriadis (cf. Adams, Smith and Straume 2012; Domingues 2016; Ezrahi 2012; Olson 2016). Both have been seminal with regard to the further theorisation of the idea of political imaginaries and the development of critical dimensions that allow for distinguishing between autonomous and heteronomous societies (Castoriadis) or democratic and totalitarian ones (Lefort). Both Lefort and Castoriadis emphasised the historical mode of social life that underpins modern democracy in its understanding of and relation to what they define as the political (Breckman 2013; Doyle 2003; 2011; Thompson 1982). Castoriadis and Lefort make a key distinction between the political, as an attribute of all societies, and politics. The latter is an innovation explicitly linked to modernity for Lefort, whereas for Castoriadis the flourishing of politics in modernity consists of a reactivation of the ancient Greek discovery of politics as collective autonomy. Both Castoriadis and Lefort stress that plurality and historical variance are at the heart of the democratic condition. They differ, however, in how they define the political and by extension on how they interpret modern politics. For Castoriadis, the political (le politique) is a dimension of any society’s self-institution that takes the form of explicit power, of forms of authority that are ‘capable of formulating sanctionable injunctions’, that is, judicial and governmental power (Castoriadis 1991, 156; 1993, 103; 1997, 1–2).

Political and Constitutional Imaginaries

117

For Lefort, drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, the notion of the political incorporates that of symbolic representation: power is always power of representation and the political is actually what allows society to institute itself by providing it with a ‘form’ that allows it to become aware of itself. Lefort (1988) expresses this idea of the political as a society’s ‘mise en sens’ (the structuring of meaning, in others words the creation of its imaginary identity), which consists of both a ‘mise en forme’ (the creation of a specific form given to human coexistence, the creation of a ‘regime’) and a ‘mise en scène’ (staging, in the sense of theatrical representation). For Lefort, to understand a society is then to understand it in terms of its own definition of power, as the specific symbolical response by human beings, given in different historical contexts, to the problem of their coexistence. For Lefort, the political is thus at the heart of a society’s very being. Politics, on the other hand, concerns the relationship which a society entertains to the power structures it has established (Lefort 1988). Although all human societies display this political dimension, the political is not institutionalised in the same way, whereas politics manifests itself in different ways and in various arenas depending on historical and societal contexts (cf. Smith 2012). In Lefort’s terms, modern politics—or policy—refers to explicit political activity or the struggle for public power in society, which takes on a specific guise in modern democracies. Politics as a delineated sphere or set of activities has been historically instituted as a result of a fundamental shift in the social imaginary of modern societies. Castoriadis’s view, on the other hand, is more radical and normative. For him, politics is not about formal, instituted political power and governing techniques, but quite the opposite; it concerns the ‘project of an autonomous society’ (Castoriadis 1997, 5). For Castoriadis, politics exists only when it is self-reflexive, when it includes active societal engagement, and concerns the common good. Castoriadis puts democratic politics in strong contrast to ‘heteronomous society’, a type of society which ‘covers almost all of human history, and in which the ‘institution of society takes place within a closure of meaning’ (Castoriadis 1997, 4). Politics, in Castoriadis’s view, can be defined as: explicit and lucid activity that concerns the instauration of desirable institutions and democracy as the regime of explicit and lucid self-institution, as far as is possible, of the social institutions that depend on explicit collective activity. (Castoriadis 1997, 4)

For Castoriadis, the project of autonomy consists of the dual institution of politics, as an explicit form of social self-institution, and philosophy, as a form of collective self-reflection (cf. Adams 2014, 232–58). Democratic politics then clearly goes beyond merely elections and voting and necessarily

118

Paul Blokker

includes a more intensive form of citizen engagement. Castoriadis’s insights are important, in that politics is too often understood as a self-evident, naturalised or reified phenomenon, undergirded by self-explanatory, universalistic principles, such as representation, majority rule, equality, etc. (cf. Rosanvallon 2009). Lefort, in contrast, argues that the distinct modern understanding of politics is historically institutionalised, but has remained blind to its own historicity. This blindness was a result of the way ideology replaced religion in the definition of society’s identity and erected transcendent principles supposedly emanating from the natural world itself (Lefort 1986). In contrast with the discourse of political ‘science’, which is concerned with the surface mechanics of politics, Lefort’s approach establishes that the more general (and prior) political and historical constitution of modern democracy—its specificity as a political regime, the principles on which it is based, and the distinct meaning of the relegation of politics to a confined societal sub-sphere—ought to constitute the fundamental object of reflection. It draws attention to the obscured divisions in modern societies as well as to the tendency to leave the general principles of politics untouched by critical reflection: The fact that something like politics should have been circumscribed within social life at a given time has in itself a political meaning, and a meaning which is not particular, but general. This even raises the question of the constitution of social space, of the form of society, of the essence of what was once termed the ‘city’. The political is thus revealed, not in what we call political activity, but in the double movement whereby the mode of institution of society appears and is obscured. It appears in the sense that the process whereby society is ordered and unified across the divisions becomes visible. It is obscured in the sense that the locus of politics (the locus in which parties compete and in which a general agency of power takes shape and is reproduced) becomes defined as particular, while the principle that generates the overall configuration is concealed. (Lefort 1988, 11)

This ‘principle’ that Lefort alludes to and which, as seen previously, he defines as a process of symbolisation ultimately originates in the social imaginary. In this regard, it is useful to return to Castoriadis in that it is in his work we find more explicit reflections on the relation between the political and imagination, although his work is not without conceptual tensions in this regard (cf. Karagiannis and Wagner 2012). In Castoriadis’s understanding of politics, that is, politics as the possibility of society to act upon itself, reflexive political engagement emerges only in two precise historical instances, in ancient Greece and in modernity. It is only in these historical contexts of autonomous societies that a more radical imaginary and connected forms of social doing are able to emerge in society and to inform the political. Such a radical imagination entails an explicit engagement with the uncertainty and

Political and Constitutional Imaginaries

119

indeterminate nature of human society, and the fragility of its institutions, which resists closed views of the human world’s reliance on an otherworldly dimension. Thus, under circumstances of democracy, a special relation between politics and the imagination can be identified, which consists of ‘struggles over the collective outcome of imagination’ (Karagiannis and Wagner 2012, 14). In a way similar to Lefort’s insistence on the dangers of closure, whose radical reappearance in modern form he identified in totalitarianism (Lefort 1986, 273–91), Castoriadis’s view is critical of (rationalistic) attempts to diminish the (radical) political imagination by means of an insistence on the institutionalisation of an ideal order or political arrangement framed by universalism. He strongly criticises the reduction of democracy to mere ‘procedures’, rather than also including a substantive dimension (Castoriadis 1997, 1). A procedural, or what could be called an institutional, understanding of democracy, which emphasises its tangible, visible dimensions, is nowadays often based on notions of human and fundamental rights, the rule of law, divisions of power and more in general, the idea of constitutionalism. In contrast, the notion of ‘political imaginary’ emphasises the significance of imagination in maintaining the existing democratic order, but even more so in re-invigorating it, and the crucial role of creativity in the latter. In sum, whereas the idea of the political imaginaries of democracy has gained some currency in recent times, it requires further extensive reflection and exploration as a research programme in its own right. Such a programme has not yet become part of much of political philosophy and political science. In Castoriadis’s and Lefort’s engagement with the democratic imaginary, distinctive dimensions come to the fore that tend to be overlooked in rationalistic and institutionalist approaches to democracy. The latter promote a closure of reflection by pursuing the quest for an ‘ideal’ good order. The modern democratic imaginary is, however, ultimately grounded in an internal view of justification, or, in other words, the democratic order can only be justified by means of reference to society and social relations itself, not by reference to extra-societal markers such as religion, nature or, for that matter, universal reason. This means, first, that democracy entails a highly uncertain and indeterminate political form, which is open to critique and reimagination, and, second, that it is ultimately impossible to find a durable solution to the political question with which all human societies are confronted. There is, at its basis, an irreducible tension between the instituted reality of society and the world as an overarching horizon (which can only ever be partially grasped in, by, and as institutions). Castoriadis terms this the interplay between kosmos and chaos. Less explored by Castoriadis himself, but of great importance for the analysis of political imaginaries, is the acknowledgement of agon or political struggle in which various political imaginaries are contested, on the one hand, and the changing nature of democratic societies over

120

Paul Blokker

time, on the other (cf. Blokker 2010b; Eisenstadt 1999; Ezrahi 2012; Lamont and Thévenot 2000). One upshot of such a view is that democratic societies, and their key political and juridical institutions, are understood as less robust, less cohesive and less self-evident than much of sociological and political-theoretical work takes them to be, as well as being inherently conflictual and grounded in a variety of social meanings. This also means that such a view recognises how various political imaginaries may underpin distinctive types of democracy and may shift and change over time. A key dimension of shifting imaginaries in contemporary democracies regards that of what I will elaborate below as ‘constitutional imaginaries’ (cf. Angeli 2017). It can be argued that in particular since the Second World War, a distinctive constitutional imaginary constellation has taken hold, in which democratic regimes are perceived as principally grounded in non-political, juridical institutions, such as written constitutions and apex courts, which have the double nature of ‘taming’ political passion and excessive power aspirations and of protecting individuals from the abuse of political power. While this imaginary construct has had a remarkable success, as not least attested by the prominence of constitutional dimensions in the remarkable political transformations of post-communist societies in Central and Eastern Europe, in the early twenty-first century, such a success seems to be rapidly diminishing. In the following, the notion of constitutional imaginaries, as a specific form of politico-juridical imaginary, will be elaborated and in the following section, counter-imaginaries to the prominent liberal constitutional one will be discussed. CONSTITUTIONAL IMAGINARIES 5 Constitutional imaginaries form a particularly significant sub-species of political imaginaries. The latter can be understood as distinctive imaginaries which relate to ‘institutions with the explicit power to impose rules’ (Arnason 2014, 28). Recently, there has been much interest in the notion of constitutional imagination and constitutional imaginary (Angeli 2017; Blokker 2017; Loughlin 2015; Oklopcic 2018; Přibáň 2018). For Martin Loughlin, ‘constitutional imagination refers to the manner in which constitutions can harness the power of narrative, symbol, ritual and myth to project an account of political existence in ways that shape—and re-shape—political reality’ (Loughlin 2015, 3). In a related manner, a modern constitutional imaginary can be seen as a distinctive constellation of ideas, fictions and myths that allows people to identify themselves as the authors of their own foundational rules, to perceive the sources of ultimate constitutional authority, and to understand themselves as subjects of constitutional government (Oklopcic 2018, 13). As also argued by Jiri Přibáň,

Political and Constitutional Imaginaries

121

The transformation of political power into constitutional authority became a familiar story of the rise of modern democratic constitutionalism which further nurtured the constitutional imaginary of the self-ruled and self-governing polity constituted by a legal document incorporating its common political values, principles and ideals. (Přibáň 2018, S31)

Clearly, the notion of constitution invokes a constitutive, productive and potentially creative dimension and relates to the particularly powerful modern social imaginary of constituent power. One specifically forceful dimension of the modern constitutional imaginary is that of Foundation or, as Jason Frank has related to it in his discussion of the American Revolution, that of the Great Lawgiver (Frank 2014). Frank, drawing on Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution, paints a persuasive picture of how American society is based on a collective foundation through the imaginary of the Great Lawgiver as the people. The complex foundational or constitutive imaginary creates a constitutional authority that is at once grounded in the political act of the Founders, in the rationalised explanation of the act through the Federalist Papers, and in the abstract notion of popular sovereignty (Frank 2014, 7–8). The symbolical and mythical dimension of constitutions is frequently attributed to an overall constitutional, ‘fictional’ narrative that underpins and supports the written document. Such a narrative is often seen to be explicitly articulated in preambles, which express the foundational goals and contextual reasons of why new constitutions are adopted (e.g., related to independence, self-government, liberty, the overcoming of suffering). As such, the ‘fictional narrative’ that sustains formal constitutions is a significant dimension of constitutional imaginaries (Fontaine 2016), as it is deeply related to the foundational and self-governing ideas that are at the basis of constitutions. As Fontaine argues, the purpose of a fictional narrative is to render realistic precisely that which is unknown, along with the supposedly proper way of interpreting reality. Recording matters in writing is therefore a way to try to compensate for a lack of knowledge. How can we be sure that the people are sovereign? How can we be absolutely certain that the nation is ‘great’? (Fontaine 2016, 4, emphasis in original)

But by focussing exclusively on narrative as the main dimension of constitutional imaginaries, there is a significant risk of underappreciating the equally crucial role of the imaginary in the actual written constitutional norms and rules. Such norms and rules are often equally grounded in ‘fictional concepts’ that relate directly to reality, but at the same time reinvent that reality. The example provided by Fontaine is telling: the constitution states that the territory is indivisible (as, for instance, explicitly stated in the first article of the Romanian Constitution of 1991), a statement which both in-

122

Paul Blokker

vokes a reality, but at the same time expresses a fictional concept not reducible to mere, observable facts (Fontaine 2016, 4). Modern constitutions are to be taken as collective constructs of meaning, that provide concepts, categories and taken-for-granted assumptions that allow social actors both to engage with the world as well as to criticise the existing social and political institutions. Such insights are important, not least because in contemporary legal and political-scientific debates, the cultural, symbolic and imagined dimensions of constitutions are frequently overlooked or even denied. In a telling manner, much of political science tends to understand constitutions in a reified manner, as if constitutions are natural, really existing phenomena that can be analysed by studying external features and structures only (Scheppele 2017). In a well-known book by Elkins, Ginsburg and Melton (2009), for instance, the emphasis is on the endurance of constitutional structures, measured on the basis of case-study and statistical evidence, drawing on a ‘data set [that] records a large set of characteristics of each and every constitution written since 1789’ (Elkins, Ginsburg and Melton 2009, 9). Legal approaches, rather, tend often to focus on the interpretation of constitutional norms by legal actors alone, following an internalistic legal rationality only open to legal interpreters, and without engaging with larger society (Scheppele 2017). In contrast, a key question is how constitutions are perceived as real by a range of legal, political and social actors, even if not necessarily in the same manner. Indeed, we have to understand the ‘social constitution of the legal constitution’ (Scheppele 2004; 2017). As Kim Lane Scheppele aptly puts it in her recent call for a phenomenological sociology of constitutions: In general, constitutional studies have taken the view of a constitution as a text or as a set of visible and functioning institutions. [Phenomenological Sociology] focuses our attention on the way that people experience constitutional life. It also examines the way that constitutional knowledge comes to be developed, shared and passed on as the result of social interaction, through institutions, across history and as sedimented fact that becomes part of the taken-forgranted world. A [Phenomenological Sociology] perspective on constitutionalism focuses on the ways that constitutional ideas are generated and naturalized. It offers us a way to link the ideas of the law with the social action carried out within those ideas. (Scheppele 2017)

Constitutional experience consists of an ongoing process of imagining and performing the constitutional—through fictions, metaphors, images and conceptions—and in this depends on political imaginaries that shape and limit views of the possible, but that equally provide the basis for reimagining the constitutional order (cf. Ezrahi 2012). As attested by Ezrahi:

Political and Constitutional Imaginaries

123

Like the interpretation of a musical work, the interpretation of a written democratic constitution is often contested, and its performance is often dominated by practices that carry it far beyond (or below) the initial vision. The history of modern politics is full of examples of great yet unperformed written democratic constitutions used as a cover for authoritarian politics. Democracy is a particular kind of political order that requires the invention and embodiment of correspondingly particular types of agents (such as citizens and public opinion), procedures, and institutions (such as elections, judicial processes, parliamentary debates, and a free press). Moreover, these agents, institutions, and procedures must be reasonably co-performed in order for a regime to exist as a democracy. (Ezrahi 2012, 1–2)

The dimension of Verstehen—of the experienced taken-for-grantedness (or not) of constitutions—relates to both instrumental and value-rational dimensions, in that both are ultimately (re-)constructed in social action through interpretative engagement. In this, in constitutional experience it is not so much about a choice between the rational and the irrational, or ‘between fictive or real political grounds’, as it is ‘one between alternative realityproducing fictions, between types of regulative political imaginaries’ (Ezrahi 2012, 4). The taken-for-grantedness of constitutions reminds us of Charles Taylor’s understanding of social imaginaries as latent background knowledge, but it can equally, in a more critical way, be related to Lefort’s understanding of the political as both the explicit institutionalisation of social space and as the covering up or concealment of the original division which is at the basis of any modern society (Lefort 1986, 197; Lindahl 1998; Marchart 2007, 101). Drawing on this view, modern constitutions can be seen as explicit institutional and symbolic means to institute power and society, whereas at the same time it should be acknowledged that constitutions are historical products and outcomes of specific interpretations of modernity. Historicity and partiality are however concealed, drawing on, as I will argue later, following Castoriadis, distinctive interpretations of the key imaginary significations of mastery and autonomy, denying the constitution’s imagined, historical and situated nature. Specific interpretative choices, instituted in existing arrangements, however re-appear when we carefully examine what Lefort refers to as ‘ideology’, or the ‘discursive actualization of the imaginary dimensions’ (Marchart 2007, 101, emphasis in the original): ‘the examination of ideology confronts us with the determination of a type of society in which a specific regime of the imaginary can be identified’ (Lefort 1986, 197). An emphasis on the imaginary, ideology and experience draws attention to how constitutional orders are always already embedded in a distinctive societal context, and how constitutional orders are hence differently, ‘ideologically’ imagined (Loughlin 2015). One set of tensions concerns the encounter between abstract, universalistic or cosmopolitan ideologies and inter-

124

Paul Blokker

nally produced, societal understandings of constitutions, as ideologies of the particular, and as intrinsic parts of social practice and meaning (this seems to me of continuous relevance also in our age of ‘world constitutionalism’ see Ackerman 1997; Somek 2014; see also Natalie Doyle’s contribution to this volume). The instituting of constitutional orders sees the development of a constitutional identity over time, a process that can be understood as the crystallisation of historically situated understandings and set of justifications for the constitution as a mode of constituting society. Such identities are always temporary in that they consist of elements that simultaneously provide for order, on the basis of a consensus on shared norms and principles, but they can equally become the basis of constitutional conflict, critique and calls for (radical) change. Thus, on the one hand, constitutional identities display an integrative force that provides a political community with selfunderstanding, but at the same time constitutionalism—as a language of power and rights in need of justification—provides tools for the contestation of that very same order (cf. Lefort 1988; Rosenfeld 2009, 51; cf. Nash 2014, 353). A sociological or phenomenological perspective on constitutionalism (as recently suggested by Scheppele 2017) dovetails with Lefort’s insight that society can never be fully united around a representation of its unity, even if this is what modern constitutions set out to achieve. Constitutionalism, far from being an achieved instituted reality, is then part of a continuous quest for certainty, which can, however, never be fully obtained and includes major moments of crisis and the ‘putting to the test’ of foundational orders; a condition that seems to be particularly pregnant in contemporary times. It can be argued that the self-representation of society through its constitution is losing its hold in quite a number of significant cases. 6 This brings us back to Lefort’s emphasis on the symbolic institution of democracy, that is, that the objective, instituted form of political life depends on the sense that actors make of it (Ingram 2006, 36). Constitutional ‘ideologies’ in Lefort’s sense can be understood as attempts to make sense of instituted constitutional democracy. Loughlin usefully relates this insight to the distinction between ideology and utopia made by Ricoeur. The ideological is hence about existing variations in the interpretation of constitutional order, whereas utopia highlights the ‘contingency of the existing order by offering a vision of what might be’ (Loughlin 2015, 13). As also argued previously, constitutions are hence both vehicles of stability and order, and of the re-shaping and reimagining of existing societal constellations. Loughlin talks in this about ‘ideology as technique of integration and utopia primarily as technique of subversion’ (Loughlin 2015, 13). Two crucial ideas of Castoriadis’s become relevant here. First of all, his distinction between instituted and instituting imaginaries, and, secondly, the identification of two central cultural orientations or social imaginary significations: rational mastery and autonomy (Arnason

Political and Constitutional Imaginaries

125

1989; Castoriadis 1987; Wagner 1994). Whereas the former has been mostly related to the cultural project of economic modernity or capitalism (but can equally be related to visions of social and political engineering more generally, and to the prominence of instrumental rationality in modernity), the latter is often seen as the key orientation of political modernity or democracy. Modern constitutions can, in this, be shown to be grounded in (shifting) imaginary constructs that relate to both imaginary significations of mastery and self-rule. The Dual Constitutional Imaginary In terms of the imaginary constitution of constitutionalism—a prominent dimension of modern democracies but little discussed in terms of imaginaries 7—constitutions and constitutionalism as a politico-cultural project refer to the dual imaginary signification in complex ways. The dual imaginary informs the way in which constitutions are constructed by constitutional interpreters, and specific interpretations, which prioritise different objectives and limitations, function as an ‘implicit map of the constitutional space’ (Perju 2010, 344). To the extent that constitutionalism is seen as a precondition for democratic regimes, it relates to the institutionalisation of the imaginary signification of collective autonomy and the ‘explicit self-constitution of society’ (Arnason 1989, 330). In the Sieyèsian reading, the constitutional order is the institutionalised result of the exercise of constituent power, the latter being the expression of a radical pursuit of autonomy. But constitutionalism can be equally related to the imaginary signification of rational mastery, in its ‘reduction of the world to an object of control’ (Arnason 1989, 329). The exploration of a dual imaginary dimension to constitutions reveals that the inherent tension between mastery and autonomy, which is at the heart of constitutions, needs further reflection. This tension, often related to as the ‘paradox of constituent power’ (Corrias 2016; Loughlin and Walker 2007), cannot be theorised away, as attempted in theories of the incomplete nature of modernity, in which the emergence of visible instances of this tension are understood as ‘corrigible deviations’ to an otherwise completable path of modernity (Habermas 1992; cf. Arnason 1989, 326). 8 In more explicit terms, the notion of a social imaginary in relation to constitutionalism emphasises, first, the role of collectively instituted meaning and its intercultural variations in grounding constitutionalism. In this, imaginaries impose a form onto the world, while at the same time giving access to it (Arnason 1990, 28). Second, the imaginary constitution of constitutions draws attention to forms of social creativity and to constitutional interpretation as a potentially creative force. Third, the notion provides a corrective to a onesided focus on ‘reason’ and emphasises different constitutional rationalities

126

Paul Blokker

(cf. Blokker 2010a). The idea of social imaginary displays a certain tension with functionalist accounts, in that it argues that functions are ultimately grounded in the historical, symbolically constructed world views that are at the basis of the constitution of society (Arnason 2014; see also Scheppele 2017). On this view, constitutions are not entirely reducible to rational and/or functional orders. Rather, the imaginary significations that inform modern constitutional orders always contain an ‘interpretive surplus’, which is inter alia reflected in specific, local constitutional narratives that attempt to impose coherence onto society. More importantly, however, this surplus draws attention to the fact that constitutions cannot be reduced to institutions that respond to universalistically understood societal needs and structural demands. The self-constitution of society entails the invention, definition and interpretation of its needs (cf. Arnason 1990, 28–29). The notion of constitutional imaginary emphasises therefore the role of meaning in modern constitutionalism, in addition to but also in the very definition of the functional determinations of constitutions. The dualistic imaginary dimension of constitutions is of great significance for two further reasons, both of which result from the inability of much of the legal and political-scientific study of constitutionalism to grasp the sociopolitical dimension of constitutions. One key dimension of constitutions is the dimension of conflict and difference: that is, the struggle over the meaning of constitutionalism within particular societies and increasingly also beyond societies, and the significant variations of constitutional trajectories that result from such conflicts. A second dimension is that of the changes in the comprehension of constitutionalism that occur in the current ‘constitutional age’ (Loughlin 2015, 2), which are exemplified by a great uncertainty over what constitutionalism means, and are equally reflected in a wide variety of theories of constitutionalism beyond the state. In the current period of constitutional flux, the contested nature of constitutions becomes evident in the interaction between a range of constitutional actors (Blokker 2017). Equally, scholarly interpretative and imaginative capacities are put to the test in tracing as well as understanding ongoing processes of constitutional metamorphosis. It becomes crucial to explore the relation between constitutionalism—or perceptions of the role and significance of constitutions in society—and a distinctive political and social imaginary horizon. Two historically central imaginaries can be identified within the modern (Western) constitutional horizon (Blokker 2017; Brunkhorst 2014; Koskenniemi 2007; Möllers 2010). I will call these two imaginaries the modernist constitutional imaginary (which has largely prevailed, even if in different guises, since the end of the eighteenth century) and the democratic constitutional imaginary (cf. Arnason 1990, 39). The imaginaries are understood here as historically predominant constellations of meaning that—in a variety of ways—have instituted

Political and Constitutional Imaginaries

127

the indeterminate imaginary significations of mastery and autonomy in distinctive constitutional orders. 9 What is significant is that the two constitutional imaginaries invoke a contrasting understanding of the modern polity, but remain partial visions, emphasising either preservation or innovation, and are of equal significance for the viability and legitimacy of modern constitutional orders in a democratic sense (Möllers 2010, 177). A first, historically predominant, modernist constitutional imaginary can be related to a view of constitutionalism as the Enlightenment ‘belief that political institutions obtain legitimacy if they enshrine constitutional laws translating abstract notions of justice and personal dignity into legal and normative constraints for the use of public and private power’ (Thornhill 2011, 173–83). The modernist imaginary understands constitutions as devices of order and stability that tame the human propensity to violence and unreason. Rather than promoting a radical break with the preceding societal order, the modernist imaginary endorses the idea of a gradual limitation of political power by legal means, so as to create a system of limitations to sovereign power (Möllers 2010, 174). The idea tends to be an evolutionary one, in the sense of a continuous constitutionalisation of the polity, and it displays a distinctive emphasis on the rule of law, juridification and the orderly limitation of power. Modernist constitutionalism is hence not necessarily about democracy, understood as popular self-rule and empowerment (Möllers 2010, 176). It is rather about the preservation, stabilisation and careful management of an existing order, by means of a closed, independently operating legal system (Brunkhorst 2014). This idea of a modernist constitutional imaginary is not unlike Hauke Brunkhorst’s notion—in itself based on Martti Koskenniemi’s work—of a ‘managerial constitutional mindset’. Mindsets, in my view, include both normative and practical dimensions, and in the managerial understanding of constitutions this means that it aims at the preservation of constitutional achievements. It is typically a technical mindset of experts and technocrats (Brunkhorst 2014, 46–48), and relates to the ‘rule of law’, ‘judicial review’ and ‘possessive individualism’ (Brunkhorst 2016, 682). The second, historically clearly subordinate or marginalised imaginary that nevertheless has played a prominent role in constitutional politics and constitutionalism in distinct periods and events, is the democratic constitutional imaginary. This imaginary finds (theoretical) reflection in the thinking of scholars such as Hannah Arendt, Sheldon Wolin, Cornelius Castoriadis, or, recently, Hauke Brunkhorst. It can equally be found in reflections more closely related to (constitutional) practice, such as those of Thomas Jefferson, as well as in forms of dissent, as in the anti-foundationalist observations of Vaclav Havel, or in constitutional ‘anti-politics’, as for instance has emerged in recent years in Iceland (see Bergsson and Blokker 2013; Urbinati 2014).

128

Paul Blokker

The democratic constitutional imaginary understands constitutions as creative devices that push forward human liberty. The emphasis in the democratic, revolutionary understanding is the foundation of an entirely new order on the basis of emancipatory principles, such as equality, freedom and selfrule. The constitutional order is understood as demanding justification in the exercise of public power (Möllers 2010, 171), linking public power to intrasocietal legitimation. The democratic imaginary is, in this, closely related to the idea of a democratic pouvoir constituant, which perceives the constitution as a ‘founding act of the people’ (Möllers 2010, 171). The democratic imaginary finds its most distinctive expression in the idea of self-determination and self-government. Hauke Brunkhorst’s notion of ‘Kantian constitutional mindset’ is in some sense overlapping with my idea of democratic imaginary, as it is equally closely related to autonomy, self-determination and universal rights. In Brunkhorst’s Kantian mindset, constitutional imagination is not just about ‘the rule of law—but the emancipation from any law that is not the law to which we have given our consent’ (Brunkhorst 2014, 47, emphasis in the original). In this mindset, the rule of law is understood as merely a managerial technique and can only be fully justified if expanded by ‘common legislative procedures’ (Brunkhorst 2014, 47). The Kantian mindset is closely related to the ‘normative language of a constitutional revolution, the pouvoir constituant, and the rhetoric of radical change’ (Brunkhorst 2016, 682). CONTEMPORARY SHIFTS: LEGAL SCEPTICISM AND POPULIST CONSTITUTIONALISM In an age of intensified internationalisation and globalisation (including the emergence of transnational manifestations of constitutional law), as well as the fragmentation and polarisation of nationally based political communities, the linkage between the democratic imaginary and a practical commitment to (collective) autonomy seems to have become less and less self-evident. If, as argued among others by Christoph Möllers (2010, 177), an ‘adequate functioning’ of constitutional democracy would need both the modernist and the democratic, or managerial and Kantian, dimensions, it may be argued that constitutional democracy in many (Western) societies has seen, at least since 1945, and perhaps even since the advent of modern constitutionalism as such, an increased predominance of the juridical, rule of law dimension, at the expense of the democratic, self-governing one. The observation of such an unbalanced nature to modern constitutional democracy might be crucial for an analysis of the state of democracy in current times. Castoriadis, for one, already labelled contemporary ‘advanced democracies’ as ‘liberal oligarchies’ some decades ago (Castoriadis 1991, 231). Also Ezrahi signals the

Political and Constitutional Imaginaries

129

erosion of the collective political imaginaries of modern constitutional democracy (Ezrahi 2012, 8), whereas Wolin is particularly concerned with the submission of democratic power to corporate power and the infiltration into politics of the market logic, in what he calls ‘managed democracy’ (Wolin 2008). For others, the imaginary signification of autonomy that has lost its hold in contemporary democracies leads to a possible ‘lack of political imagination’ (Karagiannis and Wagner 2012, 26), and appears increasingly displaced by attempts to achieve some form of closure. Attempts to achieve such closure take the forms of imaginaries of technological or technocratic mastery (technocratic/elite rule), of cultural unity (populism) and/or depoliticised or ‘natural’ universal principles (human rights). Such imaginaries of closure and depoliticisation form partially a reaction to the uncertainties that spring from what could be called societal acceleration or ‘high-speed society’ (Rosa and Scheuermann 2009). In particular in relation to dynamics of globalisation and interdependence, modern societies are increasingly subject to phenomena of change, leading to increased perceptions of uncertainty and exposure to risk. Riccardo Prandini has defined social acceleration as an ‘increase in the decay rates of the reliability of experiences and expectations, and by the contraction of time spans definable as the present’ (Prandini 2013, 733). Societal acceleration can be understood as consisting of technological acceleration and innovation, social change or transformation, as well as a heightened tempo of everyday life (Scheuerman 2002: 353). This multi-faceted acceleration is significant from a modern constitutional point of view, in that not merely its groundings in the imaginary of collective autonomy are threatened, but also those that find their moorings in the ideas of the orderliness and intelligibility of the world. The idea that constitutional law is to be understood as consisting of solid, stable and endurable institutional configurations is contrasted and, in some cases, even displaced by alternative, popular political imaginaries (Ezrahi 2012). The fragility that many a constitutional order and norm show in contemporary times indicates the crucial insight that constitutional-democratic orders are or ought to be deeply imbued in social relations and the collective imagination in order to contribute to holding society together (cf. Scheppele 2017; Taylor 2004). Various forms of acceleration in society are producing major effects on the constitutional imaginary of order, stability and certainty, indicating forms of disconnect between formal, legal institutions and wider society, and widespread sensations of powerlessness and exclusion. As Loughlin and Dobner have argued with regard to constitutionalism as an imaginary of order, stability, and self-government, it is ironic to observe that the heydays of modern constitutionalism seem to be accompanied by the erosion of just such an imaginary:

130

Paul Blokker [T]his period of maturation of constitutionalism coincides with the erosion of some of the basic conditions on which those achievements have rested. Foremost amongst these conditions are those of statehood and a concept of democracy generated from the claim that ‘we the people’ are the authorising agents of the constitutional scheme. Constitutionalism is increasingly being challenged by political realities that effect multiple transgressions of the notion of democratic statehood. It is in this sense that constitutionalism can be understood to be entering a twilight zone. (Dobner and Loughlin 2007, xi)

The loss of purchase of the constitutional imaginaries of self-government and order is clearly not unrelated to the affront of neo-liberalism as a radical form of capitalist modernity (see Natalie Doyle’s chapter in this volume). The neo-liberal form of capitalism, as it has emerged from the 1970s onwards, can be linked to a radically individualised notion of autonomy and self-realisation (cf. Boltanski and Chiapello 2005), and to technocratic forms of governance (Mańko 2017), which in themselves contribute to the depoliticisation of the public realm, not least in terms of civic engagement and social solidarity. The explicit posture of some form of interrelationship between political modernity in its democratic form and economic modernity in its capitalist form makes the contemporary predicament more intelligible: the decline of democracy is also a consequence of the emergence of the idea of radical market society and its radicalisation of individualism. But it equally strongly suggests a political basis of capitalism, that is, the idea that the economy is always in some way politically constituted (as Joerges, Stråth and Wagner [2005] have it, we should understand the ‘economy as a polity’). Regarding the dominance—and resilience—of contemporary neo-liberal capitalism, it is then possible to argue that there is both a relative lack of political imagination (in terms of the articulation of alternatives) and a closure of the economic imaginary in the form of depoliticisation, meaning the active denial of the need for a political, public discussion of the means and ends of the market economy (cf. Blokker 2014; Straume and Humphrey 2010). Democratic politics in current times appears then to be torn between technocratic, expert approaches, often focussing on economic and technological progress, on the one hand, and populist approaches, frequently focussing on the retrieval of some idea of self-government and collective self-representation, on the other (Bickerton and Accetti 2017). The former, in constitutional terms, shows a significant continuity with a modernist, legalistic and managerial approach to democracy (cf. Tully 2008), grounded in ideas of ‘social engineering’, ‘scientific management’, and expert knowledge (Mańko 2017; for a discussion of the post-war European constitutional order, see Brunkhorst 2016). The technocratic approach, according to some observers, has been an essential part of post–Second World War constitutionalism and its centrality to understandings of constitutionalism has intensified from the

Political and Constitutional Imaginaries

131

1970s and 1980s onwards. The populist understanding of politics, on the other, has emerged in a more visible manner in recent times, not least in the wake of the 2007/2008 global financial crisis, and appears to be grounded in a specific interpretation to the democratic imaginary of constitutionalism. In the final part of the chapter, it is this populist approach to constitutionalism, as a significant challenge to the democratic project of constitutionalism, I will engage with. I will elaborate on some of the key dimensions of what could be labelled the ‘populist imaginary’, not least because it appears a forceful, novel way of understanding politics in many twenty-first-century democracies and a signifier of some of the key fields of tension in liberal, constitutional democracy. The Populist Imaginary A discussion of populism in the context of constitutional imaginaries is of clear significance. One of the main threats to modern constitutional democracy appears to be exactly coming from the recent resurgence of a populist approach to politics, not least becoming visible in recent instances of populists in government (as in the cases of, for instance, Hungary, Poland, Italy and the United States). Such populist governments are often eager to engage with constitutional reform and change from a ‘revolutionary’ perspective, heavily drawing on ideas of constituent power (cf. Corrias 2016). As Andrew Arato aptly notes, in fact, it is ‘logical for populist governments to reach for the constituent power, and try to produce new documentary constitutions’ (Arato 2017). And Chambers further argues, contemporary populism has often progressed and gained ground through embracing and claiming ownership over national constitutions. Thus, constitutional reform has been the preferred means to consolidate the central authoritarian power in Hungary, Poland, Turkey and Venezuela. European and American populist movements have adopted a similar rhetoric even if they have not had a similar institutional success. (Chambers 2018, 370)

In this, populism can be understood as both a rejection of the liberal understanding of constitutionalism (grounded in particular in the modernist imaginary) and as a political force of competition regarding the meaning, justification and realisation of constitutional democracy (Urbinati 2014). Populist engagement with constitutionalism is not least about an attempt to displace taken-for-granted meanings of what constitutions are and offers in this a form of ‘counter-constitutionalism’ (Scheppele 2017). Whereas populism, in its different guises, tends to consist of a rejection of legal or liberal constitutionalism, it has a claim to a different understanding, which purports to more intensely realise basic ingredients of democracy, in particular popular sovereignty and majority rule. 10 I suggest that an under-

132

Paul Blokker

standing of the populist position toward liberal constitutionalism needs to depart from its situation vis-à-vis the aforementioned two main constitutional imaginaries in modernity (i.e., the modernist imaginary and the democratic imaginary). A key question is hence how to fit the populist engagement with constitutionalism into the dual constitutional traditions of modernity. A further important question is to what extent the emergence of a populist imaginary can be identified. Populist constitutionalism seems a rejection of the modern, legal and technocratic understanding of constitutionalism and to constitute some kind of variant of the democratic understanding. The relation between populism and constitutionalism might be understood by reference to predominantly the democratic imaginary, even if with important differences and distortions, as populism strongly rejects the modernist, rule-of-law tradition and prioritises popular sovereignty. 11 Populism rejects the emphasis on the limitation of political power through legal norms and the subjection of power to higher norms as in legal constitutionalism, whereas it promotes a constitutional order that puts popular sovereignty and constituent power upfront. It denounces the rule of law and the constitutional state as vehicles that promote the interests of minorities (elites) against the well-being of the people and claims to build a new constitutional order that will promote the common good against partial interests. Constituent Power As Luigi Corrias has explored recently, a key dimension in populist constitutionalism is that of constituent power. Whereas the modernist constitutional imaginary is about the preservation, stabilisation, careful management of an existing order and the self-limitation of political power, the populist imaginary rejects any constraints on popular power and radicalises the idea of the popular authorship of laws (which contrasts the grounding of law in an otherworldly, religious dimension or in a dimension of enlightened public reason, and rather prioritises the popular will in any circumstance). In populism, the risk of a closure of meaning that is present in the modernist imaginary (in terms of a claim of incontestability of modernist constitutional design and understandings of the rule of law) is contrasted with an equally present risk of closure of meaning in the populist interpretation of the democratic imaginary (in which the unitary, popular will becomes incontestable and the only true source of meaning). The populist radicalisation of the idea of constituent power can be understood as a specific version of the revolutionary or democratic understanding of constitutionalism, in which the ‘constituent power of the people is (almost) absolute and can be exercised directly in the polity’ (Corrias 2016, 16). One of the great dangers of the populist understanding of constituent power is that it tends to construct the ‘people’—as the origin of this power—in a unitary, non-pluralist, non-social,

Political and Constitutional Imaginaries

133

and exclusionary manner, and, in this, as tending to fully fill up the empty space of symbolic power, a crucial dimension of democracy as conceptualised by Claude Lefort (cf. Arato 2016, 269–70). If a key ambition of modern constitutionalism is to keep the space of power empty, populism has a strong tendency to significantly diminish this ambition, not least by instituting a strong type of populist leadership that actualises the abstract idea of the will of the people or the ‘People-As-One’ in a populist programme of governance. Majoritarianism Populists imagine political power in a distinctive manner, that is, as the expression of the will of a cohesive majority. Political government hence means to govern in the name of an abstract majority that corresponds to the distinctive, imagined features of a pure people. As many observers have argued, following Lefort, for populists the people must be created or ‘regenerated’ (cf. Arato 2016; Müller 2014). As Jan-Werner Müller puts it: Populism, then, is not about a particular social base or a particular set of emotions or particular policies; rather, it is a particular moralistic imagination of politics, a way of perceiving the political world which opposes a morally pure and fully unified, but ultimately fictional, people to small minorities who are put outside the authentic people. In other words, the people are not really what prima facie appear as the people in its empirical entirety; rather, as Claude Lefort put it, first ‘the people must be extracted from within the people’. (Müller 2014, 485)

Populism in power consists then of a political project that follows this pure image of the people and therefore wants to radically change the rules of the game, so as to correct alleged past wrongdoings to the authentic people and to realise a more intimate relation between political institutions and larger society (which de facto often means an attempt to fuse the populist party and state institutions). The liberal-constitutional understanding of parliamentary politics and representation and its ‘fabricated’, political understanding of the majority is rejected. The populist claim is that it leads to a fragmentation of society and a loss of social unity. In this, populists approach the majority as a durable and pre-political entity, and equate it with a material, social unity, which in right-wing, conservative populism takes the form of the nation (Blokker 2005). This is in sharp contrast to the liberal understanding of the political majority in procedural terms. In liberalism, the majority is a constructed and always again reconstructed set of political forces, which represents social interests. Populists deny conflict within society or they understand conflict as an inherently problematic phenomenon, rather than as a legitimate expression of different viewpoints and interests.

134

Paul Blokker

Whereas populists critique and reject the liberal-proceduralist understanding of the majority, this does not mean they can do without elections, as Carlos de la Torre has astutely observed. Indeed, a main distinguishing feature between populism, on the one hand, and fascism and authoritarianism, on the other, is the populist insistence on elections as a mechanism for realising popular sovereignty. It can in this be argued that populists, as mentioned, attempt to symbolically occupy the empty place of power in the name of the people, but they do not try to obliterate it, as in totalitarianism (de la Torre 2016, 133). From this it follows that the ‘populist imaginary lies between democracy and totalitarianism’ (de la Torre 2016, 133). But the relation between populism and electoral democracy does not mean that populism is merely a symptom within existing liberal, representative institutional landscapes. Rather, populists actively attempt to recreate the institutions according to the populist imaginary. The populist, pars-pro-toto understanding of the majority—not as politically or procedurally constructed, but rather as socially given—results in a denial of the distinction between ordinary politics (in which conflicts between different social forces play out) and foundational or constitutional politics (in which the rules of the game are fixed). As the only subject that deserves representation is a unified people, which is equated with the majority, there is no need for a higher law that mediates between and integrates different social forces that compete for political power. Rather, the populist mission becomes one of more thoroughly and extensively inscribing the people’s standing, values and necessities in the constitution. In this, there is a tendency to ‘embed’ the populist party itself into the state institutions, by means of entrenching the political power of the populists, in the name of its promotion of the ‘real people’, and against divisive forces. It should be further stressed that the constitutional project of populists is not merely about entrenching political power and changing the rules of the game, but there is equally an attempt to mobilise the constitution around a specific socio-political bloc (Müller 2016). This harks back to Arato’s idea of the populist regeneration of the people. In constitutional terms, it includes a cultural-symbolic reshaping of the constitution. Legal Resentment The populist attitude to constitutions, and to law in general, is a critical attitude that I label legal scepticism or ‘legal resentment’ (Blokker 2019). This stance entails a critical, emotional stance toward liberal and legal constitutionalism, and the latter’s alleged juridification, depoliticisation and rationalisation of society, which is ultimately grounded in the modernist imaginary of mastery, rational order and certainty (Blokker 2013). This attitude appears to be related to a historically available critique, as for instance to be found in the works of Carl Schmitt, his distinctive understanding of the constitution,

Political and Constitutional Imaginaries

135

and his critique of liberal constitutionalism and its conception of the rule of law (Böckenförde 1997, 5). Legal resentment comes forth out of a distinctive populist reading of liberal constitutionalism. The populist approach regards liberal constitutionalism as both a mindset and a practice. The latter could be aptly described as the post–Second World War ‘default design choice for political systems across Europe and North America’, in the form of a constitutionalism that ‘typically hinges on a written constitution that includes an enumeration of individual rights, the existence of rights-based judicial review, a heightened threshold for constitutional amendment, a commitment to periodic democratic elections, and a commitment to the rule of law’ (Ginsburg, Huq and Versteeg 2018, 239). 12 The populist attitude toward the post–Second World War practice and justification of liberal constitutionalism and the rule of law is one of scepticism and is in some ways comparable to what Hirschman has referred to as the ‘perversity thesis’ (Hirschman 1991), that is, the idea that the liberal project achieves the opposite of what it promises. Rather than leading to a free society for all, the rule of law and liberal constitutionalism result in the dominance of distinctive groups in society and their ‘oppressive’ cosmopolitan, (neo-)liberal, individualist culture, to the detriment of large parts of society, understood as the ‘ordinary people’ with their local culture and mores. Populists of different ideological outlook (right-wing, left-wing) share this critical, resentful attitude toward the liberal understanding and justification of the rule of law. In my exploration of the relation between populism and constitutionalism, I point to a number of dimensions that clarify the populists’ critical attitude toward the liberal understanding of the law (see Blokker 2019). A first dimension is a critical evaluation of the idea of the law as non-political and neutral. Leaning on the modernist constitutional imaginary, the post-1945 modern constitutional orders imagined order to be created through solid, independent constitutional institutions, such as apex courts and entrenched constitutional rights. In the imagination of the promoters of this modern project, 13 the potentially violent consequences of irrational, passionate politics can be tamed by means of a carefully designed constitutional framework, grounded in universalistic, rational principles. This move—normally understood as a key underpinning of constitutionalism—separates subjective, ideological politics from what is held to be the non-ideological, objective rules and procedures of constitutionalism. What is critical in the populist view is that this move is exposed as a form of imagination in its own right, and hence it cannot be claimed to be non-social and non-ideological of origin. Populists—much like Carl Schmitt—criticise this move of a strong separation between law, on the one hand, and politics and morality on the other, in liberal constitutionalism. The populist understanding of the law denies the idea of a closed, self-sufficient and self-referential legal system,

136

Paul Blokker

which imagines its own functioning through the specialist language of law. Populism emphasises instead the always already political and hence partisan nature of the law (this could be understood as ultimately a critical, sociological move, exposing the historical, societal origins of the law). In the populist view, the law becomes inseparable from extra-legal sources, such as political power and the societal community, and is in this re-politicised. A second dimension is the evaluation of the locus of sovereignty in the populist narrative. In liberal understandings of democracy, sovereignty is related to the state, and sovereignty is located in the legal system, and ultimately in the constitution. The extraordinary, constituent power that emerges in the founding moment of liberal orders (at least, as imagined in the archetypal experiences of the American and French Revolutions, cf. Taylor 2004), in which the popular will manifests itself, is channelled into the ordinary political and legal institutions of constitutional democracy. In contrast, populists clearly perceive this normalising of extraordinary power as problematic and reclaim popular sovereignty by situating sovereignty squarely in the ‘nation’ or the People. In this, popular sovereignty and constituent capacity re-emerge in the populist political programme. Populists want to retrieve political sovereignty, and in order to do so, need to overcome the restrictions and limitations that the imaginary of the rule of law puts onto liberal political institutions and political forces, and institute popular sovereignty in a different way, allegedly bringing about ‘real’ popular sovereignty. The ‘divided’ sovereignty of liberalism, in the sense of a division of powers between state institutions, is in this rejected, whereas a re-centralisation and re-politicisation of sovereignty is pursued, which purportedly results in actualisation of popular sovereignty. Third, populists criticise the liberal understanding of the rule of law for its emphasis on individualism rather than collectivism, and hence its eroding effect on unity. The liberal rule of law erodes the collective, because it divides the polity (in its emphasis on political competition, different interests to be safeguarded and individual rights), it weakens its decision-making powers (through a hierarchy of legal rules and constraints), and through its opening up of the polity to international influence (e.g., through its universalistic rationality and design, and its disregard for local mores). Liberal individualism promotes a view of a pluralistic, ‘civic’ demos as the basis of the democratic polity, which is rejected by populists, in order to be replaced by a collectivist view which emphasises the belonging of the individual to a homogeneous community of either the ethnos or of the ‘ordinary people’ (cf. Thio 2012). Constraints and rights become in some ways superfluous, as the law, as an expression of the populist rulers, is always already promoting the best interests of those belonging to the nation. The liberal idea of the law can, in this, be understood as an obstacle to achieve individual freedom, as freedom is understood by populists as only possible as a collective endeavour.

Political and Constitutional Imaginaries

137

The populist imaginary of constitutionalism is hinging clearly on the democratic constitutional imaginary, in its promotion of collective emancipation and self-government. But the way in which the populist imaginary informs constitutional practice and justification shows that it takes a one-sided and exclusionary, rather than an inclusionary and emancipatory, view toward constitutional democracy. By comparison, a radical left-wing, democratic approach to constitutionalism equally rejects the preceding order, or the existing order or status quo it agitates against, and wants to create a polity anew, eschewing any of the existing traditions. But democratic constitutionalism puts the rights of any individual and the idea of equality centre stage, against the corrupting and unequal implications of established traditions based on status and privilege (see Möllers 2010; cf. Chambers 2018). In this, democratic constitutionalism targets liberal constitutionalism as potentially leading to inequality, as in the lack of possibilities for popular engagement with constitutional politics and norms, and in the emphasis on elitist, higher public reason (Colón-Ríos 2012; Tully 2008). Populist constitutionalism shares this thrust toward denouncing elite rule as detrimental to the common good, as potentially favouring partial interests, and as separating the instituted political world from wider societally held social imaginaries. It equally denounces the professed neutrality and rationality of the law as potentially resulting in inequality and exclusion. But where the thrust in democratic constitutionalism is the widening and deepening of possibilities of de facto citizen engagement with constitutional politics and norms, in populist constitutionalism the actual engagement of (different groups of) citizens in society is substituted for by the idea of a united people, mobilised and represented by the populist leader. The main culprit is identified in corrupt elite rule, which simply needs to be replaced by government for the people, but not necessarily by the people. Populism therefore, at least in part, criticises liberal constitutionalism on similar grounds as democratic constitutionalism, but its alternative constitutional solution, ‘counter-constitution’ (Scheppele 2004; 2017), or ‘constitutional counter-revolution’ (Halmai 2017), is highly different from the democratic and democratising idea. Populist constitutionalism rejects the existing order because of its inequalities and injustices, as in democratic constitutionalism, but it often does so with the aim to restore (an ideal of) a preceding, historical or cultural order. But one can equally identify a messianic, redemptive dimension, which is future-oriented in that it aims at realising a pure, non-corrupted polity in the future (in the Polish case, e.g., in the form of a ‘Fourth Republic’). Populism understands liberal democracy and the rule of law as a historical interruption and aberration. It rejects the idea of the legalconstitutional order because, according to populists, it produces or favours inequalities (e.g., between the haves and have-nots, between cosmopolitans and locals, or between foreigners and nationals), as well as, more important-

138

Paul Blokker

ly, because it leads to the erosion of the historical nation. The hierarchy of the legal-constitutional order is not to be replaced by an inclusive, more universalistic order, but rather by a return to, or realisation of, the past, that is, of a traditional order, based on ‘natural’ hierarchies related to ethnicity, family and tradition. Wolin’s power imaginary also seems of some relevance here, in that populists claim a heroic mission against (age-old) enemies of the people, presented in Manichean manner, thereby ‘justifying a greater claim on society’s resources, sacrifices by society’s members, and challenges to the safeguards prescribed in the constitutional imaginary [the rule of law, division of powers, and so on]’ (Wolin 2008, 39). CONCLUDING REMARKS The chapter has discussed political and constitutional imaginaries in the context of the paradigm-in-the-making of social imaginaries. The notion of political imaginaries is of great potential in its questioning of taken-for-granted understandings of politics and democracy, in both theory and practice, and in putting the distinction between politics, as a formalised and instituted practice of rule-making and governing, and the political, as the embedment of such practices in a wider constituting, symbolic and meaning-giving background, at the heart of a critical examination of modern democratic society. Such a distinction is crucial, because—in a historical-sociological manner— it permits us to reflect on the historicity and context-bound advancement of democratic societies, and on our imaginative capacities to grasp such societies. It draws attention to how democracy does not merely consist in the ordered management of a plurality of socio-economic interests or how its predicament does not merely relate to the soundness of its institutional architecture. The notion of the political imaginary triggers a sensibility as to how ideas, images, metaphors, symbols and conceptions constitute political power and deeply informs our ability to take a step back from every day, relatively uncritical conceptions of what the manifestations, social purpose and potentialities of the political and political power are. The chapter further extensively engaged with a closely related notion, that of constitutional imaginary, which has in recent years become part of prominent debate in political and constitutional theory. At least since the French and American Revolutions, constitutions and constitutionalism have come to play a crucial role in how political society is perceived and realised in practice. A predominant understanding of modern constitutionalism perceives constitutions as a key vehicle in organising and pacifying democratic societies, and in rendering such societies viable communities. What is frequently overlooked, however, is that this ‘constitutional imaginary’ (Wolin 2008) or ‘modernist imaginary’ is not the only lens through which democracies are

Political and Constitutional Imaginaries

139

perceived. Constitutions are equally and fundamentally grounded in ideas of collective autonomy or self-government (i.e., in a democratic imaginary) and, in this, retain within themselves a tension that may threaten the basis of constitutionalism at any time. From a perspective of constitutional imaginaries, constitutions ought to be understood as much more fragile, open to contestation, and in need of a much higher level of societal identification and adherence, than often presumed by constitutional ‘engineers’ as well as by political actors in general. The dual nature of the constitutional imaginary comes through in its instituted as well as instituting potentials. Or to put it in the words of Paul Ricoeur, constitutions are grounded in ideology, but can always be confronted by utopia (cf. Loughlin 2015). These insights were taken up in the last part of the chapter, in which the possible erosion of, and shifts in, the political and constitutional imaginaries that hold together our modern democracies are discussed. Attention is particularly paid to what has become a veritable craze around the notion of populism, which despite its vagueness and oversymbolisation, is shown to be relevant for an understanding of the state of modern, constitutional democracies. The ‘populist imaginary’ can be fruitfully related to contemporary forms of ‘counter-constitutionalism’, which, so I argued in this chapter, bring out the significant tensions that are inherent in the constitutional imaginary construct that took hold of the Western world since the post–Second World War period, but it can be equally used to show the worrying implications of the populist imagination of political power. NOTES 1. This section draws in part on, and expands, the section on political imaginary in the collective essay ‘Social Imaginaries in Debate’, originally co-authored with Natalie Doyle, which appeared in Social Imaginaries (2015), 1:1. 2. Even if important differences should be acknowledged at the same time, not least with regard to the possibility of a radical break with history and the production of radically new meanings, see the preface by Johann Michel (Michel 2017: xliii–xlvi). 3. A key matter is, according to Ricoeur, ‘the relation between a claim to legitimacy and a belief in legitimacy, a claim raised by the authority, and a belief conceded by individuals’ (Ricoeur 1976, 21). 4. Paul W. Kahn reads recent American politics in a slightly different manner. For him, American politics is grounded in a civil religion which combines the two ideas of the rule of law and popular sovereignty (this is not unlike a distinction I will make later regarding constitutional imaginaries): ‘The American civil religion combined two distinct ideas: popular sovereignty and the rule of law. The manner of that union gave Americans a distinct way of imagining themselves. They imagined law—particularly the Constitution—as the product of their own authorship. The people gave the law to themselves. Apart from revolution, the sovereign people can do just one thing: author law’ (Kahn 2017). According to Kahn, in the polarised American society of today, these two ideas have become disjointed. 5. This section draws in part on, and expands, ‘The Imaginary Constitution of Constitutions’, Social Imaginaries 3:1. 6. In Europe, rather dramatic examples are Hungary and Poland. A further pertinent, even if highly complex, example is the post-Brexit United Kingdom, which faces urgent constitu-

140

Paul Blokker

tional pressures, not least in the forms of, on the one hand, internal fragmentation, in particular due to a pressure for Scottish independence, and, on the other, the desire of political classes to retreat from the European constitutional order, and hence the need to redefine the United Kingdom’s constitutional identity. 7. But see Angeli (2017); Ezrahi (2012); Gibbs (2010); Oklopcic (2018); Olson (2016); Perju (2010); Torres and Guinier (2012). 8. In this regard, Habermas’s notion of ‘constitutional patriotism’, which purportedly is about the social relations in which legal constitutions are embedded, is closely related to the ‘modernist constitutional imaginary’ that I briefly identify later, in its emphasis on rationality, formal norms, procedures and rights, and does not give social creativity and the collective production of meaning their due (see, in particular, Calhoun 2002). 9. For the notion of social imaginary significations, see Castoriadis 1987 [1975]. 10. The thrust of my argument is not unlike that of Jan-Werner Müller in claiming that populists are not against institutions per se, but rather attempt to institutionalise their own populist political programme. Cf. Müller (2018). I believe I differ from Müller in my acknowledgement of structural deficiencies in liberal constitutionalism, which in a distinct manner are taken up by populists. 11. Luigi Corrias, 2016, ‘Populism in a Constitutional Key: Constituent Power, Popular Sovereignty and Constitutional Identity’, European Constitutional Law Review 12 (1): 6. As Neil Walker states (Walker 2019), a significant dimension of populism as a strain of our political and constitutional imaginary, and of our scholarly preoccupation with it, ‘have to do with the relationship to an underlying tension within modern constitutionalism’. 12. Loughlin interestingly, and rightly, notes that in the last decades of the twentieth century, even the Left lost its distrust of constitutionalism (Loughlin 2015, 2). 13. In Europe, for instance, the emergence of liberal constitutional imaginary was importantly related to the emergence of domestic (constitutional courts) as well as international juridical institutions, such as the European Court of Human Rights and later the European Court of Justice and the Venice Commission or European Commission for Democracy Through Law (sic).

REFERENCES Ackerman, Bruce. 1997. ‘The Rise of World Constitutionalism’. Virginia Law Review 83 (4): 771–97. Adams, Suzi. 2014. ‘Autonomy’. In Cornelius Castoriadis: Key Concepts, edited by Suzi Adams. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Adams, Suzi (ed.). 2017. Ricoeur and Castoriadis in Discussion: On Human Creation, Historical Novelty, and the Social Imaginary. Series: Social Imaginaries, Volume 1. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield International. Adams, Suzi, Jeremy C. A. Smith and Ingerid Straume. 2012. ‘Political Imaginaries in Question’. Critical Horizons 13 (1): 5–11. Adams, Suzi, Paul Blokker, Natalie J. Doyle, John W. M. Krummel and Jeremy C. A. Smith. 2015. ‘Social Imaginaries in Debate’. Social Imaginaries 1 (1): 15–52. Angeli, Oliviero. 2017. ‘Global Constitutionalism and Constitutional Imagination’. Global Constitutionalism 6 (3): 359–76. Arato, Andrew. 2016. Post Sovereign Constitutional Making: Learning and Legitimacy. New York: Oxford University Press. Arato, Andrew. 2017. ‘How We Got Here? Transition Failures, Their Causes, and the Populist Interest in the Constitution’. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3116219. Arnason, Johann P. 1989. ‘The Imaginary Constitution of Modernity’. Travaux de Sciences Sociales: 323–338. Arnason, Johann P. 1990. ‘Culture and Imaginary Significations’. Thesis Eleven 221: 25–45. Arnason, Johann P. 2013. ‘Exploring the Greek Needle’s Eye: Civilizational and Political Transformations’. In The Greek Polis and the Invention of Democracy: A Politico-Cultural

Political and Constitutional Imaginaries

141

Transformation and Its Interpretations, edited by Johann P. Arnason, Kurt A. Raaflaub and Peter Wagner, Volume 25, 21–46. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Arnason, Johann P. 2014. ‘Social Imaginary Significations’. In Cornelius Castoriadis: Key Concepts, edited by Suzi Adams. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Bergsson, Baldvin, and Paul Blokker. 2013. ‘The Constitutional Experiment in Iceland’. In Verfassunggebung konsolidierten Demokratien: Neubeginn oder Verfall eines politischen Systems, edited by Ellen Bos and Kalman Pocza. Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlag. Bickerton, Christopher, and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti. 2017. ‘Populism and Technocracy’. In The Oxford Handbook of Populism, edited by Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo and Pierre Ostiguy. New York: Oxford Handbooks. Blokker, Paul. 2005. ‘Populist Nationalism, Anti-Europeanism, Postnationalism, and the EastWest Distinction’. German Law Journal 6: 371. Blokker, Paul. 2010a. ‘Democratic Ethics, Constitutional Dimensions, and Constitutionalisms’. In East-Central Europe after Transition: Towards a New Socio-Legal Semantics, edited by Wojciech Sadurski and Alberto Febbrajo. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Blokker, Paul. 2010b. Multiple Democracies in Europe: Political Culture in New Member States. London and New York: Routledge. Blokker, Paul. 2013. New Democracies in Crisis? A Comparative Constitutional Study of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. London and New York: Routledge. Blokker, Paul. 2014. ‘The European Crisis and a Political Critique of Capitalism’. European Journal of Social Theory 17 (3): 258–74. Blokker, Paul. 2017. ‘The Imaginary Constitution of Constitutions’. Social Imaginaries 3: 1. Blokker, Paul. 2019. ‘Populism as a Constitutional Project’. International Journal of Constitutional Law 17 (3): 536–53. Böckenförde, Ernst-Wolfgang. 1997. ‘The Concept of the Political: A Key to Understanding Carl Schmitt’s Constitutional Theory’. Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 10 (1): 5–19. Boltanski, Luc, and Eve Chiapello. 2005. The New Spirit of Capitalism, translated by Gregory Elliott. London: Verso. Breckman, Warren. 2013. Adventures of the Symbolic. New York: Columbia University Press. Brunkhorst, Hauke. 2014. Critical Theory of Legal Revolutions: Evolutionary Perspectives. London: Bloomsbury. Brunkhorst, Hauke. 2016. ‘Constituent Power and Constitutionalization in Europe’. International Journal of Constitutional Law 14 (3): 680–96. Calhoun, Craig J. 2002. ‘Imagining Solidarity: Cosmopolitanism, Constitutional Patriotism, and the Public Sphere’. Public Culture 14 (1): 147–71. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1987 [1975]. The Imaginary Institution of Society, translated by Kathleen Blamey. Cambridge, UK: MIT Press. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1991. Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, edited by David Ames Curtis. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1993. ‘The Greek and the Modern Political Imaginary’. Salmagundi 100: 102–29. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1994. ‘Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary’. In Rethinking Imagination: Culture and Creativity, edited by Gillian Robinson and John F. Rundell, 136–54. London and New York: Routledge. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1997. ‘Democracy as Procedure and Democracy as Regime’. Constellations 4 (1): 1–18. Chambers, Simone. 2018. ‘Afterword: Populist Constitutionalism v. Deliberative Constitutionalism’. In The Cambridge Handbook of Deliberative Constitutionalism, edited by Ron Levy, Hoi Kong, Graeme Orr and Jeff King, 370–71. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Colón-Ríos, Joel I. 2012. Weak Constitutionalism: Democratic Legitimacy and the Question of Constituent Power. London and New York: Routledge. Corrias, Luigi. 2016. ‘Populism in a Constitutional Key: Constituent Power, Popular Sovereignty and Constitutional Identity’. European Constitutional Law Review 12 (1): 6–26.

142

Paul Blokker

De la Torre, Carlos. 2016. ‘Populism and the Politics of the Extraordinary in Latin America’. Journal of Political Ideologies 21 (2): 121–39. Dobner, P., and M. Loughlin (eds.). 2007. The Twilight of Constitutionalism? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Domingues, José Maurício. 2016. ‘The Imaginary and Politics in Modernity: The Trajectory of Peronism’. Thesis Eleven 133 (1): 19–37. Dowdle, Michael W., and Michael A. Wilkinson. 2017. ‘On the Limits of Constitutional Liberalism: In Search of a Constitutional Reflexivity’. In Constitutionalism Beyond Liberalism, edited by Michael W. Dowdle and Michael A. Wilkinson, 17–37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Doyle, Natalie. 2003. ‘Democracy as Socio-Cultural Project of Individual and Collective Sovereignty: Claude Lefort, Marcel Gauchet and the French Debate on Modern Autonomy’. Thesis Eleven 75 (1): 69–95. Doyle, Natalie. 2011. ‘Rediscovering Political Sovereignty: The Rebirth of French Political Philosophy’. In The Handbook of Contemporary Social and Political Theory, edited by Gerard Delanty and Stephen P. Turner, 87–98. New York: Routledge. Doyle, Natalie. 2013. ‘Autonomy and Modern Liberal Democracy: From Castoriadis to Gauchet’. European Journal of Social Theory 15 (3): 1–18. Eisenstadt, S. N. 1999. Paradoxes of Democracy: Fragility, Continuity, and Change. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Elkins, Zachary, Tim Ginsburg and James Melton 2009. The Endurance of National Constitutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ezrahi, Yaron. 2012. Imagined Democracies: Necessary Political Fictions. New York: Cambridge University Press. Fontaine, Lauréline. 2016. ‘The Constitutional Imaginary versus the Fiction of Constitutional Law’. Jurisprudence, Revue Critique 2 (published in French). Frank, Jason. 2014. Publius and Political Imagination. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Frank, Jason. 2015. ‘Democratic Imagination at the Brink’. Polity 47 (4): 566–75. Gauchet, Marcel. 2015. ‘Democracy: From One Crisis to Another’. Translated by Natalie J. Doyle. Social Imaginaries 1 (1): 163–88. Gibbs, Nathan. 2010. ‘European Constitutionalism and the Modern Social Imaginary’. Law and Critique 212: 147–62. Ginsburg, Tom, Aziz Z. Huq and Mila Versteeg. 2018. ‘The Coming Demise of Liberal Constitutionalism’. University of Chicago Law Review 85: 239. Grant, John. 2014. ‘On the Critique of Political Imaginaries’. European Journal of Political Theory 13 (4): 408–26. Habermas, Jürgen. 1992. Faktizität und geltung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Halmai, Gábor. 2017. ‘The Rise and Fall of Constitutionalism in Hungary’. In Constitutional Acceleration within the European Union and Beyond, edited by Paul Blokker. New York: Routledge. Hirschman, Albert O. 1991. The Rhetoric of Reaction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ingram, James D. 2006. ‘The Politics of Claude Lefort’s Political: Between Liberalism and Radical Democracy’. Thesis Eleven 87 (1): 33–50. Joerges, Christian, Bo Stråth and Peter Wagner (eds.). 2005. The Economy as a Polity: The Political Constitution of Contemporary Capitalism. London: UCL Press. Kahn, Paul W. 2017. ‘America’s Divided Political Imaginary’. Series: Public Imagination, Vol. 10 (55). http://www.21global.ucsb.edu/global-e/august-2017/america%E2%80% 99s-divided-political-imaginary. Karagiannis, Nathalie, and Peter Wagner. 2012. ‘Imagination and Tragic Democracy’. Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory 13 (1): 12–28. Koskenniemi, M. 2007. ‘Constitutionalism as Mindset: Reflections on Kantian Themes about International Law and Globalization’. Theoretical Inquiries in Law 8 (1): 9–36. Lamont, Michèle, and Laurent Thévenot. 2000. Rethinking Comparative Cultural Sociology: Repertoires of Evaluation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Political and Constitutional Imaginaries

143

Lefort, Claude. 1978 [1953]. ‘Société “sans histoire” et historicité’. In Les Formes de l’histoire. Gallimard, Paris. Lefort, Claude. 1986. The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism. Edited by David Thompson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lefort, Claude. 1988. Democracy and Political Theory. Translated by David Macey. Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press in association with Basil Blackwell. Lindahl, Hans. 1998. ‘Democracy and the Symbolic Constitution of Society’. Ratio Juris 11 (1): 12–37. Loughlin, Martin. 2015. ‘The Constitutional Imagination’. The Modern Law Review 78 (1): 1–25. Loughlin, Martin, and Neil Walker. 2007. The Paradox of Constitutionalism: Constituent Power and Constitutional Form. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mańko, Rafał. 2017. ‘Symbolic Violence in Technocratic Law and Attempts at Its Overcoming: Politicisation through Humanization?’ Studia Erasmiana Vratislaviensia 11: 31–64. Marchart, Oliver. 2007. Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Michel, Johann. 2017. ‘Preface to the French Edition’. In Ricoeur and Castoriadis in Discussion: On Human Creation, Historical Novelty, and the Social Imaginary, edited by Suzi Adams, xliii–xlvi. London: Rowman & Littlefield International. Möllers, Christoph. 2010. ‘Pouvoir Constituant—Constitution—Constitutionalisation’. Principles of European Constitutional Law, edited by Armin von Bogdandy and Jürgen Bast. London: Hart. Müller, Jan-Werner. 2014. ‘“The People Must be Extracted from Within the People”: Reflections on Populism’. Constellations 21 (4): 483–93. Müller, Jan-Werner. 2016. What Is Populism? Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Müller, Jan-Werner. 2018. ‘Populism and Constitutionalism’. In The Oxford Handbook of Populism, edited by Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo and Pierre Ostiguy. New York: Oxford Handbooks. Nash, Kate. 2014. ‘The Promise of Pragmatic Sociology, Human Rights, and the State’. In The Spirit of Luc Boltanski: Essays on the Pragmatic Sociology of Critique, edited by Simon Susen and Bryan S. Turner, 351–67. London: Anthem Press. Oklopcic, Zoran. 2018. Beyond the People: Social Imaginary and Constituent Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Olson, Kevin. 2016. Imagined Sovereignties: The Power of the People and Other Myths of the Modern Age. New York: Cambridge University Press. Perju, Vlad. 2010. ‘Cosmopolitanism and Constitutional Self-Government’. International Journal of Constitutional Law 83: 326–53. Prandini, R. 2013. ‘The Future of Societal Constitutionalism in the Age of Acceleration’. Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 202: 731–76. Přibáň, Jiří. 2018. ‘Constitutional Imaginaries and Legitimation: On Potentia, Potestas, and Auctoritas in Societal Constitutionalism’. Journal of Law and Society 45: S30–S51. Ricoeur, Paul. 1976. ‘Ideology and Utopia as Cultural Imagination’. Philosophic Exchange 7 (1): 5. Ricoeur, Paul. 1994. ‘Imagination in Discourse and Action’. In Rethinking Imagination: Culture and Creativity, edited by Gillian Robinson and John Rundell, 118–35. London: Routledge. Rosa, Hartmut, and William E. Scheuerman (eds.). 2009. High-Speed Society: Social Acceleration, Power, and Modernity. University Park: Pennsylvania State Press. Rosanvallon, Pierre. 2009. ‘Democratic Universalism as a Historical Problem’. Constellations 16 (4): 539–49. Rosenfeld, Michel. 2009. The Identity of the Constitutional Subject: Selfhood, Citizenship, Culture, and Community. London: Routledge. Scheppele, Kim Lane. 2004. ‘Counter-Constitutions: Narrating the Nation in Post-Soviet Hungary’. Paper given at George Washington University, Washington, DC, 2 April. Scheppele, Kim Lane. 2017. ‘The Social Lives of Constitutions’. In Sociological Constitutionalism, edited by Paul Blokker and Chris Thornhill. New York: Cambridge University Press.

144

Paul Blokker

Scheuerman, William E. 2002. ‘Constitutionalism in an Age of Speed’. Constitutional Commentary 19: 359–60. Smith, Jeremy. 2012. ‘Revolutionary Doctrines and Political Imaginaries: American Modernities in the Republican Age’. Critical Horizons 13 (1): 52–73. Somek, Alexander. 2014. The Cosmopolitan Constitution. New York: Oxford University Press. Straume, Ingerid S., and J. F. Humphrey (eds.). 2010. Depoliticization: The Political Imaginary of Global Capitalism. Ahrus: Nordic Summer University Press. Taylor, Charles. 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Thio, Li-Ann. 2012. ‘Constitutionalism in Illiberal Polities’. In The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Constitutional Law, edited by Michel Rosenfeld and András Sajó, 133–52. New York: Oxford University Press. Thompson, John B. 1982. ‘Ideology and the Social Imaginary’. Theory and Society 11 (5): 659–81. Thornhill, Chris. 2011. A Sociology of Constitutions: Constitutions and State Legitimacy in Historical-Sociological Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Torres, Gerald, and Lani Guinier. 2012. ‘The Constitutional Imaginary: Just Stories about We the People’. Maryland Law Review 71 (4): 1052. Tully, James. 2007. ‘A New Kind of Europe? Democratic Integration in the European Union’. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 10 (1): 71–86. Tully, James. 2008. Public Philosophy in a New Key. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Urbinati, Nadia. 2014. Democracy Disfigured. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wagner, Peter. 1994. A Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline. London: Routledge. Walker, Neil. 2019. ‘Populism and Constitutional Tension’. International Journal of Constitutional Law 17 (2): 515–35. Wolin, Sheldon. 2008. Democracy Inc.: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Chapter Five

The Political Imaginary of European Hypermodernity Marcel Gauchet and Contemporary Neo-Liberal Democracy Natalie J. Doyle

European liberal democracy, a societal form inspired by an imaginary of individual autonomy, is experiencing a many-sided crisis. The economic disturbance triggered by the global financial crisis of 2007/2008 is destabilising the party-political systems successfully established after World War II. 1 On an empirical level, the crisis of European democratic politics can simply be explained with reference to the disastrous social consequences of the policy of public austerity imposed across the European Union by the countries of Northern Europe (first and foremost Germany) to control the problem of sovereign debt engendered by the dysfunctionalities of the European monetary system (Stiglitz 2016). The established party systems are now challenged by a populist and neo-nationalist sentiment that questions the forms of inter-state cooperation that were first promoted in the 1950s, then pushed forward from the 1980s onwards. This form of cooperation was legitimised by the notion of a common ‘European’ identity of which the euro became the symbol. The crisis can then also be interpreted as the manifestation of a rebirth of old international tensions among European countries, of a kind of atavistic nationalism, which the creation of the European Union was presumably not successful in erasing. The work of the French philosopher Marcel Gauchet, 2 however, suggests that these tensions and the resurgence of nationalist sentiment only constitute epiphenomena: they are but symptoms of a much more profound societal and cultural crisis. This crisis possesses a complex genealogy, one that involves 145

146

Natalie J. Doyle

factors operating at the symbolic level of social life. Within the political framework of the nation-state, this symbolic level concerns the self-understanding of societies but also their interaction with the outside world. The crisis is then also linked to the new mode of international relations that is taking shape because of a new wave of capitalist globalisation. This new form of globalisation was engendered by the spread of European modernity in its scientific and technological dimension—especially in its North American variant—but it is now challenging most profoundly the self-understanding of European societies, if only through the economic and cultural competition it has engendered. Behind this civilisational challenge hides in fact a second pyrrhic victory of European modernity: the planetary acceptance of the political form of the nation-state and, with it, a vast movement of deimperialisation of the world that is also profoundly destabilising for European societies. This interaction between the inside and the outside world has become central to a new form of radicalised modernity and the advent of a new political ideology that has become dominant and has shaped a new understanding of democracy: neo-liberalism. THE DESACRALISATION OF EUROPEAN CULTURE AND THE PARALLEL WITH THE 1930S Internally, the contemporary crisis of European democracy has been triggered by the transition of contemporary European societies to a completely new mode of social cohesion, no longer predicated on the subservience of individuals to explicit and commanding forms of collective authority. In brief, it is the product of their having reached a stage of complete detraditionalisation, which Gauchet’s work has analysed, now for over three decades, as the destruction of the political function of the sacred. In the terms of this theory, which posits that modernity is the product of a process of desacralisation, tradition is only one aspect of what Gauchet calls ‘religion’: the word designates a heteronomous mode of socialisation, which draws on the presumed existence of a supernatural sacred dimension to define the collective order, in its various aspects. In Gauchet’s theorisation, tradition— the debt to a foundational past and the obedience to the framework of meaning it defines—is associated with four other phenomena: first, a type of power that replicates the authority of the sacred and which Gauchet calls domination; second, a mode of social relationships predicated on ontological inequality which establishes bonds of mutual interdependence—in other words hierarchy; third, a specific kind of relationship between the collective whole and the individuals predicated on the subordination of the parts to the whole or incorporation 3; and finally, an ideal of universal power originally conceived as binding the human world to the divine and imposing on the

The Political Imaginary of European Hypermodernity

147

state an objective of expansion, imperialism (Gauchet 2007, 53–55; 2015a, 64–65). Gauchet’s history of European liberal democracy posits that its establishment involved a long process of disengagement from the heteronomous mode of socialisation, spearheaded by the liberal revolution of the late eighteenth century, which asserted the autonomy of civil society from the state’s domination and its historical creativity, while loosening the bonds which established the domination of the collective body over its individual members (Gauchet 2007a). This process of disengagement saw a period of regression during the 1930s with the appearance of totalitarian ideologies (Gauchet 2010), which reacted against the crisis of liberalism of the late nineteenth century (Gauchet 2007b). This crisis was first and foremost a crisis of governability, that appeared when the belief in the capacity of civil society to generate its own political cohesion though its autonomous socio-historical creativity was revealed to be illusory by the appearance of deep class tensions, fuelled by the strong, systematised form of capitalism empowered by the rise to ideological dominance of liberalism (Gauchet 2007b, 57–100). At the turn of the twentieth century, social life was not totally desacralised, religion retaining its structuring life in social life: liberalism had not totally destroyed heteronomy but in fact relied on it to pursue its liberation of civil society from the state’s traditional authority (Gauchet 2007b, 13). Social cohesion thus rested on a fragile synthesis between the remnants of tradition and hierarchy still commanding respect in social life and the individualistic premises of the liberal vision of society. Parliamentarism—used to democratise liberalism—and the broadening of suffrage (which had appeared to many as the way to resolve the new social tensions) were found to be powerless to give form to a new kind of collective power purely predicated on individual autonomy: a new power compatible with the new prevailing value of liberty which had been secured by the triumph of liberalism over the attempts of conservative political ideologies to hold on to the old hierarchical order (Gauchet 2007b, 139–60). Gauchet’s historical account contends that the crisis of liberalism of the late nineteenth century thus fostered a dramatic return of political domination—first in the form of colonial imperialism and nationalism (Gauchet 2007b, 161–66, 209–34; 2010). At the same time, the crisis saw socialism (defined by its emphasis on the collective) gain ideological primacy over liberalism (Gauchet 2010, 100–09). This dominance was secured through a mystique of revolution that, paradoxically, also came to assume a right-wing form (Gauchet 2010, 81–99). The First World War was the watershed in this new transformation of the imaginary of European societies. Its experience of violence, its subjugation of individuals to the collective, its reactivation of a cult of the past and sacrificial logic constituted the matrix within which a

148

Natalie J. Doyle

new ideological phenomenon took shape: totalitarianism (Gauchet 2010, 19–62). Gauchet defends the idea that despite their respective historical uniqueness, Fascism and Nazism on the one hand, and Soviet communism on the other, pursued a similar political objective in the first half of the twentieth century: the recreation of a strong integrating mode of socialisation but through means that reflected the modernisation of European societies, not least their individualistic atomisation which had given birth to a new phenomenon: the urban masses (Gauchet 2010, 64–70, 534–53). In this respect, these new political phenomena were motivated by a very specific, transitional, type of ideology that Gauchet calls secular religion (Gauchet 2010, 548), a term first coined by Raymond Aron (1962). They sought to establish a similar form of political regime, ideocracy (Gauchet 2010, 539–44): the utopia of an absolute collective unification of the state with the masses to be secured by totalitarian political doctrines through the power of an idea. At the same time, though, while similarly rooted in a secular form of religious feeling, right-wing totalitarian and left-wing totalitarian ideologies combined rather differently what Gauchet calls secularity—which overlaps with the notion of modernity—and what he calls religiosity (Gauchet 2010, 546). Fascism and Nazism explicitly aspired to recreate a heteronomous system of domination but disconnected from the forms of spirituality on which it had rested in its traditional form. This made right-wing totalitarianism draw on modern values to recreate a project of imperial domination, not least on the new authority of the nation-state. From the end of the nineteenth century the nation-state had itself used ideological representations in partial continuity with Christianity such as the sacrificial definition of community, representations that were amplified by radical conservatism and conferred on World War I its character of total war (Gauchet 2010, 109–19, 192–204). 4 By contrast, even though Soviet communism totally rejected the past, it was blind to how its ideology and, on an imaginary level, its revolutionary goals drew on pre-existing, imperial aspirations and eschatological representations of history (Gauchet 2010, 281–82). THE SPECIFICITY OF THE CONTEMPORARY CRISIS In his theoretical reconstruction of European history, Gauchet sees the current crisis of European democratic politics as both analogous to the crisis of liberal democracy in the 1930s and quite different from it. Superficially, the disaffection with established political parties, the rise of populist extreme right-wing programmes, the heightened xenophobia directed against immigrants or refugees, and the reappearance of virulent nationalism evoke the tensions of the 1930s. For Gauchet, these parallels, however, constitute a

The Political Imaginary of European Hypermodernity

149

form of optical illusion that obscures the historical novelty of the current political situation and its paradoxical dimension. While totalitarian ideologies appeared in countries where democracy—understood as both a political form and culture—had not been secured and thus represented reactive phenomena to an experience of inner social dislocation induced by modernisation, the new neo-nationalist populism is the product of the very triumph of this political form and culture, triumph based on the combined success of democracy, liberalism and a new globalised form of capitalism (Badiou and Gauchet 2016, 77; Gauchet 2015b; 2017a, 658). Today, these three elements of contemporary democratic culture are no longer questioned by rival ideologies (except Islamism, which remains a geographically limited phenomenon) whereas the nascent liberal democracy of the 1930s was still very much contested. This triumph of democratic culture has, however, produced a new understanding of modern autonomy which is destroying itself from within, a phenomenon which Gauchet first explored at the beginning of the twenty-first century in a critique of the weight acquired by the law and the principle of human rights (Gauchet 2002b; 2002c), which echoes John Gray’s analysis of ‘liberal legalism’ (Gray 1995; 2002). Since the 1990s, Gray’s critique has similarly highlighted the way the new foundational conception of rights that became influential in the course of the 1980s has now given birth to a project of total rationalisation of social life that is essentially depoliticising. Although Gauchet’s analysis also highlights the crucial difference between liberalism and neo-liberalism, it is, however, much more ambitious in its scope as it offers a comprehensive explanation of the historical genesis of ‘liberal legalism’ and of the role it has played in the creation of a new, paradoxical form of democracy which, as we shall see further on, has, to a certain extent, fused with capitalism. For Gauchet (2017a, 635–41), the genesis of this new form of democracy must be understood as the outcome of modern autonomy itself. The considerable advance of the means of autonomy, not least the liberation of individuals from explicit collective discipline (which has established the promotion of individuals rights as the essential purpose of the law and made of economic activity the privileged domain of their self-realisation) has obscured the ends that originally motivated the destruction of the heteronomous social order and underpinned European liberal values: the acquisition by humanity of much greater control over its existence, which encompasses individual autonomy but cannot be reduced to it. Through the development of science, technology and the greater rationalisation of social exchanges that unfolded over two centuries, a form of autonomy has been acquired: humanity is now in possession of an unprecedented capacity for self-production and self-determination. Substantial autonomy—the capacity to create the collective structures that can empower individuals and give societies the conscious

150

Natalie J. Doyle

means to steer their future—has regressed, however (Gauchet 2017a, 641–45). A new form of heteronomy has appeared which exists alongside the new forms of power and the victorious democratic principle, fuelling the perception of a total loss of control. The rise of populism is a symptom of this loss and the anxiety it has produced (Gauchet 2017b, 180). The loss is apparent throughout the Western world and manifests as depoliticisation (not least through the incapacity of representative politics to generate workable forms of political consensus), but Gauchet contends that this depoliticisation has become even more extreme in Europe, where a vision of absolute individual sovereignty seems to have undermined totally the aspirations to collective self-determination that constituted the original kernel of democracy: democracy is now understood in minimalistic fashion as being fully synonymous with whatever serves the extension of individual rights (Gauchet 2015b, 177). Despite the feeling of impotence, the prospect of revolutionary social re-integration has lost its appeal: the reconstruction of commanding social conformism and unity (which made formidable enemies of totalitarian ideologies) can no longer politicise individuals because the social conditions that favoured the totalitarian reaction no longer obtain: there are no longer any masses willing to be mobilised by a strict party discipline, no ideologies that could inspire such a mobilisation (Gauchet 2017a, 20). Put differently, the forms of collective identity on which the ideal of ideocracy rested have disappeared from the imaginary horizon that defines what is now ‘thinkable’ and ‘credible’ for contemporary European societies (Gauchet 2017a, 20). Liberal legalism which Gauchet analyses as a form of ‘abyss’—in which European societies have sunk and from which they struggle to extricate themselves—has deactivated their sense of historicity, locking them in an eternal present because it presents itself as the ultimate realisation of autonomy, in a way that blocks the capacity to imagine anything else (Gauchet 2017a, 21). MODERN AUTONOMY AS DESACRALISED POWER: THE INTELLECTUAL GENEALOGY OF GAUCHET’S THEORY OF NEO-LIBERAL DEMOCRACY Here it is necessary to open up a parenthesis on the way Gauchet theorises modern autonomy. It is important to state that Gauchet’s understanding of autonomy draws on key themes of the reflection of Cornelius Castoriadis on the role of imagination in social life, even though he has subjected them to considerable revision. Gauchet’s engagement with these ideas goes back to the formative period when he worked together with Claude Lefort and Cornelius Castoriadis (his two older mentors) on two rather short-lived journals, Textures and Libre (Dosse 2014, 225; Doyle 2018, 32–33). Before he started

The Political Imaginary of European Hypermodernity

151

to establish his own original theoretical framework, Gauchet, in dialogue with his two main collaborators, reflected on the phenomenon of totalitarianism to refine his own understanding of democratic culture predicated, as we saw previously, on desacralisation (an idea that remained embryonic in Castoriadis’s work 5). In the process, he came to integrate into his own theorisation Castoriadis’s understanding of the social-historical: the capacity of human societies to ‘institute’ themselves through the power of their creative imagination, that is, to create their own mode of social organisation and their specific political form (Arnason 2014a; Castoriadis 1987; Mouzakitis 2014). 6 However, under the influence of Lefort’s own understanding of ‘social institution’ (Lefort 1988), Gauchet gave more weight to the question of the symbolic forms within which the new emerges or to what Castoriadis called new ‘social imaginary significations’ (Castoriadis 1987, 364; Arnason 2014b, 23–51). 7 This led him to abandon Castoriadis’s use of the word ‘imaginary’ as he saw it of limited use when it came to actual historical analysis and what he sought to understand: the processes through which European societies acquired a particular political identity fostering the birth of the radically new relationship to the natural world that characterises modernity. In the book that established his own intellectual project, The Disenchantment of the World (1995), Gauchet focussed on the medieval ‘pre-history’ of modernity, on the role of Christian monarchy and the turning point of the High Middle Age during which states on the seaboard of western Europe encouraged intensified economic exploitation of the land and in return acquired the means to deepen their power over social relationships. In subsequent works (1989, 1995), Gauchet examined the complex symbolic logic that paradoxically allowed political power to transform itself in Europe, highlighting the role of absolute monarchies. In a first step, this encouraged him to focus primarily on historiographical studies—devoted to the French Revolution and nineteenth-century liberalism—which did not offer a level of theorisation commensurate with The Disenchantment of the World. The work of theorisation was resumed later on, however. It established a chronological framework for the genesis of modernity or ‘modern revolution’ which, Gauchet (2007a) argues, was the advent of a new, transformative, future-oriented conception of human power, one which incorporates an aspiration to collective self-determination—and by extension, democracy—but also an aspiration to master the natural world through purposeful economic activity. For Gauchet who, like Castoriadis, integrated into his intellectual project Marx’s teachings about modern historicity and reification, as well as his emancipatory project but rejected Marx’s belief in the existence of ‘objective’ historical laws of history transcending culture, modern power was in fact the outcome of political transformations which ultimately facilitated the development of what Castoriadis (1987) called techne, the development of

152

Natalie J. Doyle

rationalising processes. The genesis of modern power involved what he calls three ‘revolutions of the political’ (Gauchet 2005b, 513–21). 8 The first associated with the historical figures of Luther and Machiavelli established political realism, the autonomy of the state’s specific objectives and prerogatives from the Catholic Church’s own imperialistic political aspiration. The second one, associated with the work of Grotius and Locke, totally redefined the basis of state legitimacy in terms of natural rights. This inspired contract theories and the conceptualisation of a new, dual understanding of political subjectivity, that of the individual citizen and that of the political community as a whole. From this emerged modern democracy, which can be differentiated from its Greek predecessor through its major concern for the individual’s freedom. In this respect, the rebirth of the democratic ideal after a long historical eclipse was predicated on the discovery by liberalism of society’s historical creativity and autonomy from the state and its first attack on the heteronomous framework of social life. This last step toward modernity constituted what Gauchet calls ‘the liberal turn’ or ‘liberal inversion’ (Gauchet 2007a, 155–86; 2015b, 170), which started dismantling tradition, hierarchy and incorporation within the social realm and in the process empowered capitalism. The liberal turn, however, did not quite destroy the imperialistic aspirations of European states as a new wave of colonisation pushed by the states of Western Europe demonstrated in the late nineteenth century. As we shall see further on, the point is central to the contrast Gauchet establishes between the first wave of globalisation and the contemporary one. To return to the theoretical framework of this historical analysis, it must once again be noted that despite the fact that his work significantly diverged from Castoriadis’s understanding of autonomy in its rejection of its dichotomistic oppositions between traditional heteronomy and modern autonomy, between capitalism and democracy (Doyle 2013), Gauchet throughout his work has continued to see the symbolic structures and processes involved in the European genesis of modernity as grounded in the power of collective imagination. Quite significantly, even though he had long abandoned the term ‘imaginary’ in the last volume of his theoretical reconstruction of the history of European liberal democracy, Le nouveau monde, he was compelled to use it repeatedly (Doyle 2017, 206–07; Gauchet 2017a). In his analysis of the decline of revolutionary ideologies in the 1970s and the subsequent emergence of neo-liberal democracy, he thus speaks of a fundamental transformation of the ‘political imaginary of European societies’ (l’imaginaire politique de nos sociétés) (Gauchet 2017a, 482). Neo-liberalism is presented as a new ideology generated by a new social imaginary, one that he defines as being a radicalisation of modernity, a ‘hypermodernity’ (modernité radicale). This imaginary of hypermodernity is not, as Castoriadis argued, the product of the triumph of a specific imaginary signification of ‘unlimited expansion of rational mastery’ (Castoriadis 2007, 54) over the

The Political Imaginary of European Hypermodernity

153

imaginary of democratic autonomy but, paradoxically, the outcome of the very imaginary logic of modern autonomy. As seen previously, for Gauchet, modern power indeed encompasses the emergence of both economic and political modernity and, thus, the twin development of capitalism and democracy, which, although always in tension with one another, were from the start rooted in a common collective vision of autonomy operating at the level of the social imaginary of European societies. THE NEO-LIBERAL IDEOLOGY AND ITS ORIGINS IN THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE SYMBOLIC FRAMEWORK OF SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS Gauchet’s analysis of contemporary European neo-liberalism builds on a specific theory of ideology that was first sketched at the end of The Disenchantment of the World and developed further in the course of historical analysis (Gauchet 1997, 176–79; 2005, 91–108). To sum up, Gauchet defines ideology as the intellectual framework for political action within which those modern societies have become fully aware of their historicity, of their power to shape their future and have thus acquired what Gauchet calls structural autonomy, which encompasses the use of science and technology, as well as more general processes of rationalisation (2017a, 645–55). Ideology provides social actors with a discourse that enables them to gain greater understanding of what they are actually doing and want to achieve, that provides an explanation of the connection that exists between their past and their present, as well as a justification for the choices they make. Whilst these choices condition the future, the future can never be anticipated fully and ideology responds to this experience of historical contingency. Through ideology, human societies left the realm of heteronomy where historical contingency was countered by ‘religion’, a mode of social organisation based on the human experience of religiosity and the idea that the human world has a debt of meaning to a supernatural dimension. The world of ideology is by definition pluralistic. It always involves the contest of different interpretations of history. Gauchet’s history of European liberal democracy contends that there have been three great ideological orientations which have vied for supremacy within modern culture—conservatism, liberalism and socialism (Gauchet 2004a)—but that the 1970s saw the rise to dominance of a new ideology derived from liberalism but vastly different from it: neo-liberalism (Gauchet 2017a, 645–54). Neo-liberalism became dominant because it provided the most convincing interpretation of the course taken by contemporary European societies, one inspired by their new ‘hypermodern’ imaginary (Gauchet 2017a, 605–09). The individualistic parameters that this new ideology inherited from liberalism and radicalised,

154

Natalie J. Doyle

however, do not allow it to provide an accurate interpretation of the political significance of this radicalised form of modernity. This makes it rely on a purely technocratic understanding of autonomy, which incorporates the greater role of juridical regulation. The capacity for scientific, technological autonomy (Gauchet 2017a, 641–45) has become extremely empowered in the hypermodern imaginary but at the cost of a reduced capacity for collective—historical and self-reflexive—autonomy. This has engendered the new form of heteronomy mentioned previously, which can be described as ‘economistic futurism’ although this futurism paradoxically produces a new ‘presentist’ attitude to time (Gauchet 2017a, 433–86). Economic futurism is driven by a new ‘generalised’ form of capitalism (Gauchet 2017, 459–70),[AQ4] which now constitutes the only means hypermodern societies have at their disposal to understand their inner cohesion, their political being. Generalised capitalism has imposed on all forms of social relationships a profoundly depoliticised explanatory model, that of the market. It has given birth to a new collective purpose, the utopia of an anthropocosmos perfectly tailored to human needs (Gauchet 2017a, 468), to be constructed by ‘knowledge societies’, societies defined primarily by their scientific creativity and technological inventiveness. This totally humanised, and rationalised, ideal world is presumably capable of regulating itself outside of state power, through the automatic interplay of rights and interests. The cohesion of ‘hypermodern’ societies, however, remains anchored in symbolic processes but symbolic processes of collective identity that are now invisible to social actors, as a result of desacralisation (Gauchet 2017a, 308–13). The analysis of the superficial de-symbolisation generated by the hypermodern imaginary constitutes the most complex aspect of Gauchet’s definition of European neo-liberal democracy. It is presented through a lengthy historical analysis of the evolution of the state, from the crisis of liberalism at the end of the nineteenth century to the present, which I will now simply sketch in order to define further the process of desacralisation linked to European hypermodernity. I will need to return to it in greater depth later on in the chapter to be able to explicate the historical specificity of hypermodernity and the contradictions of European neo-liberal democracy. As seen earlier, the desacralisation of state power came with liberalism. While they lost the explicitly symbolic dimension conferred upon political power in traditional monarchies (which totalitarian states later tried to recapture), liberal regimes—even in the democratised form they acquired at the turn of the twentieth century—long remained able to benefit from the remains of the symbolic radiance that had hitherto characterised political institutions and given social life a focus of meaning: it survived, for example, in the paternalistic style of government right into the 1960s. The desacralisation of power first induced by the traumatic experience of the First World War, then by that of the contest of totalitarian ideologies and the violence it un-

The Political Imaginary of European Hypermodernity

155

leashed encouraged a transformation of the way the state functioned. In the decades that followed World War II, the state in Europe acquired an unprecedented capacity to anticipate and regulate economic phenomena with a view to managing social needs (Gauchet 2010, 588–99). In the process, European states were able to construct socially inclusive liberal nations, in particular through the redistributive dimension of taxation around which a consensus was forged that put an end to the sharp class divisions that had destroyed the legitimacy of representative democracy in the earlier decades of the twentieth century. This was possible because the state could still exercise a traditional form of authority albeit modernised, a benevolent form of paternalism that increasingly came under attack from the late 1960s onwards. By contrast, the contemporary European state, now largely abstract in character, no longer has any outward capacity to generate a superior, transcendent collective identity, its action being confined to administration and regulation. Gauchet (2010, 308–09) argues that this mediatory role, nevertheless, still performs a symbolic instituting role and although it can no longer rely on the symbolic power of ‘embodiment’ that characterised earlier forms of the state, it still creates symbolic significations for the individuals who constitute a political nation but in a totally unconscious way. The policies implemented by state elites still construct a symbolic collective identity, even if no longer sacralised and visible, which makes European societies continue to conceive of themselves as political bodies, even if the notion of nation can no longer invoke any substantive markers of collective identity as it did in the past. State action, even purely pragmatic and technical, is profoundly communicative. It signals to the members of the national body that they are part of a lasting political community that has a past, a present and a future; that this community can acquire knowledge over itself, understand the way it functions and, as a result, acquire a measure of control over the future it produces (Gauchet 2017a, 309). In other words, desymbolisation cannot be taken at face value. Contrary to appearances, contemporary European societies are still extremely integrated symbolically and aware of their continuity and identity, which explains how they can superficially appear torn by social disagreements and tensions: their high tolerance of a conflictual diversity of opinions is the paradoxical outcome of their high level of underlying symbolic cohesion (Gauchet 2017a, 310). This is not to say that they are completely secure as they are yet to come to terms with all the social consequences of their new, wholly abstract mode of symbolic identity. They are experiencing the destabilisation of their earlier symbolic frameworks. Social relationships used to be organised in a way that made them contribute to the symbolic, political institution of collective life and this conferred upon them their constraining and codified character. Because of the full transfer of the institution of society to the political authority of the

156

Natalie J. Doyle

state and its concomitant desymbolisation, collective discipline has lost its significance in a way that has profoundly transformed social relationships, making them lose their formal character. This transformation of the very basis of social relationships has been experienced as both a liberation—the creation of a wholly new register of interaction between individuals—but also, through the spread of incivility, as a threat to the very foundations of social life. Incivility is the ultimate outcome of a new social imaginary based on individual autonomy, for which social relationships must be actively chosen by individuals and negotiated contractually. The new information technology has provided an amplifying symbolic and technical platform for this extension of the contractual market model to the whole of social life. Digital networks now provide a form of optional coexistence, free of any vertical constraints and totally attuned to the new imaginary understanding of social relationships. Incivility is making visible the limits to the process of desymbolisation induced by desacralisation: as human societies have always known, there is a basic requirement of mutual respect for collective existence. Contemporary European societies are thus now torn between the erosion of civility they are currently experiencing and their growing realisation that it needs to be reinvented in a form that will match the new abstract mode of social cohesion. In this respect, Gauchet notes that incivility has been accompanied by another problem, deinstitutionalisation, the loss of symbolic aura that affects the different forms of political authority, from education to the judiciary or the military. These forms of political authority are now defined purely functionally as services that are constantly required to demonstrate their necessity (and their need to be publicly funded), at the same time as they are on the receiving end of greater expectations emanating from a new public opinion imbued with a much stronger sense of individual rights (Gauchet 2017a, 312–13). For Gauchet, this is, however, only a temporary state of affairs (albeit also dangerous). It is temporary because human societies cannot exist without some imaginary representation of what they create: if the old, symbolic language of signification has become obsolete, a new one will eventually arise to take its place. European societies are now at the point where they must reinvent the political forms through which they secured their autonomy. However, the contemporary era is still haunted by the memory of the old language in which this dimension of signification expressed itself. This is the cause of a profound malaise, which contemporary social theorists have sought to capture (e.g., Bauman 2012) through the Gramscian notion of interregnum. This malaise of the current era of late modernity is a kind of anomie, to borrow the term used by the French sociologist Émile Durkheim to describe the first crisis of modernity which Gauchet analyses as the crisis of liberalism. This malaise is caused by the new social pathologies that have

The Political Imaginary of European Hypermodernity

157

been engendered by the triumph of the neo-liberal ideology and its pursuit of generalised capitalism. This ideology underpins the appearance of a new form of democracy, ‘neo-liberal democracy’, which, in confrontation with globalisation, has inspired radical assertions of cultural identity and a populist rebellion that is now fostering the descent of contemporary European societies into illiberalism. THE ORIGINS OF THE NEO-LIBERAL IDEOLOGY While the neo-liberal ideology found in Europe a political terrain that was most favourable to its rise to dominance, its success, indeed, cannot be attributed exclusively to the new mode of social cohesion that characterises contemporary European societies and the inner destabilisation of nation-states it induced. This success also involves pressures coming from outside Europe, those associated with the new wave of capitalist globalisation fuelled by financialisation. This raises the question of the complex historical relationship between European hypermodernity and its counterpart in the United States: American modernity is indeed the original birthplace of neo-liberal economism. Gauchet’s analysis of the crisis of European democracy stresses the role played in the 1980s by the confrontation of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ countries—namely Great Britain and the United States—with the first consequences of the financial globalisation encouraged by the United States in the course of the 1970s (Gauchet 2016b, 334–35; 2017a, 74–98). In this respect, it goes against the dominant interpretations of neo-liberalism, which, within the traditional framework of the history of ideas, focus primarily on its economism and its roots in new currents of economic theory (rational choice, Friedmanian monetarism). Gauchet’s understanding of the imaginary underpinnings of contemporary economism has led him to establish a different historical narrative. Contemporary critiques of neo-liberalism (Harvey 2005) often identify the 1970s as a crucial decade in the genesis of neo-liberalism but tend to interpret its significance purely in terms of the economic upheavals the decade brought: the end of the convertibility of the dollar to gold and the collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary system, the crisis of economic growth triggered by the oil crisis provoked by the decision of Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to increase dramatically their prices, the emergence of so-called stagflation, and the use of financialisation by the United States to retain its central place in the world’s economy (Varoufakis 2013). They stress the challenges to economic growth these upheavals represented and how the evolution of economic theory favoured a shift in power between labour and capital. The fundamental problem, however, concerns the reasons why this shift in power was not resisted or even how it was

158

Natalie J. Doyle

embraced by societies in a way that opened up the development of a new much more powerful version of capitalism that has now penetrated all the dimensions of social life. The triumph of this capitalism tends to be described as a capitulation of contemporary liberal democracy to the imperatives of the economy but through the notion of neo-liberal democracy, Gauchet argues that it is not a surrender but something much harder to understand and resist: neo-liberal democracy is not dominated by the economic dimension—it has actively invested in the economy its hopes for greater autonomy, both individual and collective, erasing the capacity for self-reflection needed for democratic societies to exercise a degree of political sovereignty over their historical trajectories (Gauchet 2017a, 655–58). The challenge is to understand how this happened. The answer cannot be found within the problem, that is, simply at the level of the power struggle between labour and capital. It has to be sought in the existence of a shared imaginary framework of meaning and the way this imaginary favoured the dominance of the neo-liberal ideology across societies as a whole. Gauchet argues that the economic crisis of the 1970s was in fact not the primary cause behind the advent of the neo-liberal ideology, only the trigger that facilitated an ideological shift already underway across the Western world since the 1960s and linked to profound inner socio-cultural transformations that are not limited to economic activity (Gauchet 2017a, 17). The 1970s constituted a critical period in the emergence of hypermodernity on both sides of the Atlantic, but Gauchet’s argument contends that hypermodernity remained contained in the United States by a nationalistic imaginary that became obsolete for the societies of Western Europe, because of their greater advance on the path of autonomy, of their greater desacralisation. The argument goes right against the dominant self-understanding of European countries, which have long been seen in the United States as a more advanced form of modernity with which they needed to ‘catch up’, at least when it came to economic efficiency. For Gauchet the ‘new world’ of hypermodernity is paradoxically to be found on the old continent, in Europe, not in the United States (Gauchet 2017a, 214–20). Gauchet’s analysis of European neo-liberal democracy is thus accompanied by a complex discussion of the North American variant of modern culture. To clarify the extent to which Gauchet’s discussion of hypermodernity encompasses also the so-called new world to a certain degree, 9 and in order to define the specificity of its European version, I must, at this point, open a long parenthesis and examine Gauchet’s understanding of the place of the United States in modern culture. 10

The Political Imaginary of European Hypermodernity

159

THE UNITED STATES AND MODERNITY The United States has in fact always been a major point of reference for Gauchet’s reflection on the significance of modernity. 11 The analysis of the contrast between the conditions in which liberal democracy was secured on one side of the Atlantic and the other has been central to his approach to European history since the publication in 1980 of a critical assessment of Tocqueville’s understanding of the significance of the American Revolution, ‘Tocqueville, l’Amérique et nous. Sur la génèse des sociétés démocratiques’ (Gauchet 2005d). 12 In this essay, while retaining the idea that modern democracy involved the assertion of the ontological equality of all individuals, discussed as ‘individualism’ 13, Gauchet rejected Tocqueville’s Christian interpretation of the ultimate meaning of this revolution in value, that it was the fulfilment of a divine plan and of a goal of absolute social cohesion, of absolute unity. In what prefigured the essential argument of his first major book, The Disenchantment of the World, Gauchet argued that the advent of equality in both Western Europe and the United States was in fact the outcome of a transformation in the conception of society which no longer needed to define itself as united in submission to a divine will and to a hierarchical order presumably ordained by this will. This was despite the overt survival of religiosity in the culture of the United States. Gauchet’s analysis stressed the fact that both the United States and Western Europe reached similar endpoints despite them having started from vastly different original conditions and them having given birth to different political cultures with respect to the form which public power assumed. (In Europe the state was the vehicle of the destruction of the social hierarchy from which Americans had fled and thus acquired a stronger role in the creation of a new type of society, which in the United States formed independently from the state or in association with the creation of a new form of state whose power continued to be viewed with suspicion and whose power over the organisation of society was fundamentally limited.) Despite these differences, both Europe and the United States underwent a ‘democratic revolution’ that gave birth to societies in which the equality of individuals was linked to the democratic principle of popular sovereignty and in which, at the same time, conflict, rather than the pursuit of absolute unity, was institutionalised politically, in tension with the assertion of collective popular sovereignty. This acceptance of conflict was a rejection of the sacralisation of collective unity and the imposition of hierarchy, which, as seen previously, Gauchet calls ‘religion’. In 2005, Gauchet (2005e) added a postscript to this essay, ‘La Dérive des continents’ (‘The Continental Drift’) to comment on the historical context in which he had first written the essay on Tocqueville and to add another level of complexity to his original analysis of the common trajectory of Western

160

Natalie J. Doyle

Europe and the ‘New World’. This context was the very beginnings of the ‘liberal revolution’ of the 1980s, which, in the decades that followed the essay on Tocqueville, seemed to render invalid Gauchet’s original hypothesis of a fundamental underlying convergence. In the decades that followed the reassertion by Reagan and Thatcher of the autonomy of society from the state (but on an ultra-individualistic basis rejecting the very idea of society), continental Europe seemed to be upholding a different ‘social model’, not least through the creation of European institutions. In his 2005 postscript, Gauchet, however, reasserted his original hypothesis: that the historical paths followed by the United States and Western Europe, despite their differences, shared a common ‘symbolic matrix’. He started clarifying his understanding of the paradoxical modernity of American religiosity as opposed to the socalled European exception (Davie 2002) by looking at the question of American Christian fundamentalism as well as at that of the United States’s civil religion which evolved into a nationalistic cult of the United States’s presumed world mission. In ‘La Dérive des continents’, Gauchet argued that fundamentalism created a small space within which the vision of a heteronomous social order commanded by Christianity maintained itself (paradoxically empowered by the democratic insistence on individual freedom) but that it had remained circumscribed by this very freedom, which assumed many manifestations including religious diversity. The pursuit of individual freedom had in fact created a society pursuing goals that were not compatible with the heteronomous conception of society advocated by fundamentalism, not least those of capitalism and consumerism. Fundamentalism, paradoxically, functioned as an objectively modernising force which converged with the pursuit of happiness as wealth: its individualisation of faith fostered greater individualism and a further retreat from ‘religion’ (Gauchet 2004b, 165–77). The rise of messianic nationalism in the United States to which fundamentalism contributed was evidence of the transition to a secular cult of American geo-power. This transition, however, retained some elements of the sacred. Whereas the United States, in its religiosity, had in the 1930s remained immune to the appeal of the nationalist and totalitarian ‘secular religions’ to which European societies fell prey, the religious overtones of American nationalism now gave it in the early twenty-first century a dangerous edge, something which was becoming apparent in the militaristic reaction to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. These attacks marked a major point of difference with European culture in so far as the experience of World War II had encouraged European countries to turn their back on sacralised expressions of national identity and to view any national sentiments with a high degree of suspicion.

The Political Imaginary of European Hypermodernity

161

CONTEMPORARY CONVERGENCE AND DIVERGENCE BETWEEN EUROPE AND THE UNITED STATES When Gauchet wrote his first assessment of the contrast between American democratic culture and that of Western European countries, Europe and the United States seemed to be taking divergent paths and to be revealing an essential difference with respect to the use of warfare, which the American historian Robert Kagan (2003, 3) famously summarised as ‘Europe being from Venus and the United States from Mars’. Gauchet (2005e, 397–403), nevertheless, reiterated his point about an underlying convergence at the level of individualism, his theoretical definition of individualism incorporating recognition of the differentiation of European and American cultures within a common imaginary of modern autonomy. 14 While the European continent seemed for a very long time to have remained stuck in its world of traditional, hierarchical structures under the influence of the reassertion of liberalism in 1970s and the diminished influence of collectivism, in subsequent decades, European societies caught up with the United States and joined them in the pursuit of a generalised extension of the principle of equality through the struggle against discriminations based on race, gender, sexual orientation, etc., ironically often inspired by a re-interpretation of socalled French theory as defined sympathetically by François Cusset (2003). In Europe, Gauchet argues, this engendered a very particular form of individualism, disconnected from the social structures which continued to retain their weight in the United States, a form of individualism blind to its historical debt to the high degree of collective investment in social protection that had characterised European history after World War II but remained absent in the United States, despite the turn marked by Roosevelt’s new deal (Gauchet 2017a, 75). Even though contemporary American individualism was originally able to present itself as an extension of the founding principles of American society, the pace of social change in the redefinition of the family, of gender identity, etc., however, was also profoundly destabilising in the United States. It fostered a reaction in the form of political conservatism and religious fundamentalism. More recently, it produced a very specific form of populism evident in the election of Donald Trump (Gauchet 2017b). Over the ten years during which Gauchet wrote his history of European democracy and developed his critique of liberal legalism into a full analysis of hypermodernity and of the dominance of the neo-liberal ideology, Gauchet refined this understanding of the contrast between modernity in its original European form and that which appeared in the United States. In particular, his discussion of European totalitarianism led him back to the historical question of knowing why totalitarian ideologies did not take hold in the United States despite the destabilisation induced by the Great Depression. In brief, his argument posits that there lacked the ferment of socialism which, in

162

Natalie J. Doyle

Europe, rose to ideological dominance in the wake of the crisis of liberalism and steered the democratisation of European liberal political regime (Gauchet 2010, 120–27; 2017a, 220–27). Gauchet’s analysis is complex, in particular because it brings in the question of the challenge to classical socialist theories posed by the history of the United States, as the development of industrial capitalism did not engender a strong working-class movement defining itself by its socialist ideology. Whereas the working-class struggle in Europe was part and parcel of the destruction of a hierarchical social structure enshrined by tradition, in the United States, the working-class question was never perceived as central to the collective purpose of society as a whole and never invested with the same emancipatory and regenerative mission. In the United States, where the link to the past had already been broken, and a nation created that was already defined as inclusive on the basis of the aspiration to freedom of individual citizens, the message of social inclusion conveyed by socialism could not acquire as much resonance (Gauchet 2010, 124). Despite some regulatory efforts by the federal level, the state never obtained in the United States the transformative function it came to possess in Europe, not least because of the two tiers of government (Gauchet 2010, 125). The central government’s prerogatives became restricted to addressing the lacunae of government action at the level of the states, to organising transfers of wealth across them and, in exceptional circumstances, to projecting the country’s values in other parts of the world but in a way that always excluded outright colonisation (Gauchet 2007a, 225). The state never acquired the power to structure society as strongly as it did and was expected to in Europe (albeit to different degrees across various countries). The revolutionary birth of the United States also established a very different relationship to the past, a strong symbolic foundation marked by the aspiration to universal exemplarity, that is, by a specific form of futurism paradoxically defined by the belief in an original perfection established from its very rebellion against the British state (Gauchet 2017a, 223–26). This made the country resistant to the attraction of the totalitarian secular religions and their eschatological visions but, as seen earlier, created the terrain within which religious fundamentalism acquired a strong political value. In agreement with the American historian Richard Hofstadter, Gauchet thus summarises as follows the fundamental contrast between Europe and the United States: the United States, as a nation, never had ideologies because it was its own ideology (Gauchet 2010, 126). By contrast, even though messianic aspirations were also very present in European nationalism and coalesced in the ‘civilising mission’ of late nineteenth-century colonialism, the self-definition of European nations could not benefit from the geographical and cultural isolation in which the American sense of nationhood grew. National identities were marked by constant and often military confrontation with regional counterparts, which, Gauchet argues—echoing Rémi Brague (2002) but with

The Political Imaginary of European Hypermodernity

163

more lucidity—fostered, in parallel with a propensity to extreme chauvinism, a culture favouring a decentred perspective (Gauchet 2017a, 224). The analysis of the specificity of the United States’s history and of the country’s totally unique nationalism leads Gauchet to conclude that the country perfected its own variant of modernity which, despite its influence during the era of Pax Americana post-World War II, was never seen as a strong model for Europe until the turning point of 1972–1973 when the beginnings of globalisation converged with the inner transformation of European societies, the new wave of individualism, to produce a major crisis of civilisational identity (Gauchet 2017a, 13). After World War II, European countries saw the superiority of the economic efficiency perfected in the United States but sought to appropriate it only as the means to pursue their vastly different project of social transformation and their vision of a radically different future. In the course of the 1970s and 1980s, however, as the belief in the objective of radical social change faded, as the demands of new powerful economic actors in the rest of the world destabilised the European model of social cohesion based on the state’s redistribution of the benefits of growth, European countries came to see in the American variant of modernity a model they should emulate to regain their self-confidence. They thus became converted to the unmitigated benefits of economic liberalism and, hence, to the American model of capitalism, with its embrace of financial globalisation (Gauchet 2017a, 213). 15 This apparent Americanisation, however, was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the significance of American political culture, which Europeans saw as more advanced on the path of individual autonomy when it rested, rather, on a very strong sense of nationhood, one commanding unquestionable loyalty to which the rights of individuals had to bow. This strong sense of nationhood is most apparent in the way the United States has held on to the belief in the death penalty and its moral justification (Manent 2007, 38), whereas it has become for European countries a major question of human rights, as part of the new foundational status the idea of human rights has actually acquired in Europe since the 1970s (Gauchet 2017a, 570–73), a point to which I will return when I discuss the specificity of European hypermodernity. The turn to economic ultra-liberalism fostered by Ronald Reagan was from the start coloured by nationalism (Gauchet 2017a, 74). 16 It constituted the United States’s response to the first challenge to its civilisational primacy posed by the victory of the Japanese industrial model, ‘Toyotism’, which was overtaking American ‘Fordism’ in its innovative capacity (Gauchet 2017a, 43–48). This bring us back to the American genesis of the neo-liberal ideology, which Gauchet contends is in fact a minimal ideology devoid of coherent content, which makes it quite adaptable (Gauchet 2017a, 648). Quite unlike preceding ideologies in its aspirations, it does not have the goal of transform-

164

Natalie J. Doyle

ing reality; it simply justifies it and proposes to optimise it. In this respect, it is rather agnostic when it comes to political content. It has readily combined with pre-existing political ideologies and has assumed both right-wing and left-wing forms, a point I return to at the end of the chapter. It has also expressed itself differently in the context of diverse cultural traditions. In the United States, neo-liberalism first assumed the deceptive form of neo-conservatism and appeared as a return to the very foundations of American political culture. By contrast, the neo-liberal turn of the late 1970s and early 1980s presented in Europe as a radical rupture with the earlier conception of the state which engendered a new post-national ideal pursued through the creation of the greater European market, the technocratic institutions of the European Union and the nebulous definition of European citizenship (Gauchet 2017a, 236–37). To explore this crucial difference, which Gauchet argues underpins the appearance of neo-liberal democracy in Europe, I now need to explore further the significance of the 1970s for the countries of Western Europe. THE TRANSFORMATION OF HISTORICAL TIME, THE END OF THE BELIEF IN REVOLUTIONARY CHANGE AND THE REVIVAL OF LIBERALISM During the decade, European societies totally eradicated the remnants of the heteronomous mode of socialisation based on sacralisation. They transformed the role of religious practise in social life (Gauchet 2017a, 167–79), questioned the traditional definition of the family—the oldest and most resistant form of hierarchy alongside education and the nineteenth-century notion of nation (Gauchet 2017a, 413–17). They questioned the subjugation of women (Gauchet 2017a, 322) and rejected the paternalistic style of government, whereas the relationship between individuals and the social whole was reversed and individual freedom elevated as the ultimate value (Gauchet 2017a, 555–56). This detraditionalisation transformed their relationship to their past. The past lost its authority over the present and totally ceased to be the primary source of identity. In the process, it became objectivised, seen as very distant from the present but, at the same time, as a reservoir of unexplored meaning whose value needed to be maintained for potential future use. This, paradoxically, imposed a constant duty of preservation not felt by traditional societies, which do not need to protect the constructions of the past as they define themselves in perfect continuity with its foundational model. This new duty was first conveyed by the idea of heritage, which, not coincidentally, inspired the 1972 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization convention on the protection of global cultural heritage (Gauchet 2017a, 418). The new relationship to the past that emerged in

The Political Imaginary of European Hypermodernity

165

the 1970s established another form of collective identity still predicated on continuity across time but one positing a radically new form of futurism than the one that had inspired modern culture, first with the notion of progress and later with that of ‘History’. The new futurism broke with the sacredness that had survived within the philosophies of history that dominated the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century (Gauchet 2017a, 382–83). The philosophies of progress and those of revolution were indeed still framed by the heteronomous definition of collective identity, seen as the outcome of a process of total unification across time. They still saw unification as requiring the abolition of social divisions, even if this unity was now re-defined as the endpoint of history, rather than the lost foundation established by the golden age of tradition. In its ideological forms, from the liberal belief in the natural progress delivered by the liberation of individual creativity from state control to the socialist vision of a unity to be realised through the revolutionary overthrow of existing social structures, this futurism relied on a theological understanding of history (Gauchet 2017a, 383–84). Whereas history’s capacity to unify was seen by liberalism as already being accomplished in the present, Marxism defined it as yet to be realised, as a result of its presumed finitude (its possessing a beginning and end), presumed finality (its possessing an inner logic and purpose) and presumed completeness, its being directed toward its accomplishment, that is, to an endpoint which would reveal its meaning retrospectively (an idea conveyed through the French word of finition) (Gauchet 2017a, 386). 17 The change in the relationship to time was in fact part of a cultural evolution that encompassed Western Europe as a whole and produced in a short time its complete conversion to liberal democracy from 1974 in Portugal to 1975 in Spain and then Greece (Gauchet 2017a, 63; 2015b, 172). In parallel, the principle of human rights gained ground in the East. Whilst the Helsinki accord signed in 1975 by the Soviet Union and the United States may not have effected much change, save empower a dissident intellectual minority, it signalled a transformation in the very mindset of the societies under Soviet control: the growing resonance that the principle of human rights gained in the context of a hardening of state discipline (Gauchet 2015b, 172; 2017a, 63). This resonance so grew that it eventually forced the capitulation of the Communist elites and the self-dismantling of the Soviet Union’s communist project. This was claimed as a victory by the United States where the neo-liberal ideology assumed the form of a conservative return to internal foundations while, outside, it became a particularly aggressive reactivation of anti-communism, in reaction to the Soviet Union’s ideological activism in the developing world and its military interference in the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan (Gauchet 2017a, 80–81).

166

Natalie J. Doyle

The gradual loss of belief in the promises of the future deceivingly appeared as signalling the passage to something completely new, in rupture with modernity, something that was first designated as postmodernity. In the course of the 1980s, the notion of postmodernity fostered the perception that the belief in historicity itself had been lost, that the belief in the capacity of humanity to change its world, across historical time, had been essentially illusory, as Francis Fukuyama’s thesis about the ‘end of history’ was widely thought to argue. Fukuyama’s thesis, however, pointed to something else: the end of a certain ‘regime of historicity’, 18 which, Gauchet argues (2017a, 381, 388–89), was paradoxically the consequence of an intensification of modern historicity, understood as the affirmation of the transformative capacity of human creativity, that is, also of the heightened historical contingency this transformative capacity engenders. This intensification was motivated by a renewed belief in humanity’s power to create its own world, not through a consciously common political purpose (as argued by Marxism) but through the liberation of society from the state, that is, ultimately, through the liberation of individuals from collective constraints. It was, in other words, inspired by a reactivation of liberalism after decades during which the political, i.e., the imperative of collective unity, had dominated, not least through the emphasis on national identity in which the notion of class identity fostered by the socialist critique of liberalism had come to be subsumed. As already stated, this revival of liberalism was pioneered by Great Britain and the United States and legitimised by a certain interpretation of the economic crisis triggered by the dysfunctionalities of the Bretton Woods system and the sudden price increase in oil—both forerunning signs of a new wave of globalisation which came to challenge the economic dominance of the West, exacerbating the shift to a logic of economic innovation already favoured by the inner evolution of Western societies. The end of the Cold War only confirmed the radical change of orientation for the countries of Western Europe: the reversal of the logic of ‘societal introversion’ which had dominated their national cultures in the three decades that followed World War II and secured the creation of states responsible for inner social cohesion (Gauchet 2017a, 49–54). The opening up of economies, the growth of international exchanges, the integration of research and development into industry with the support of the state had become operative forces since 1945 but the disruption of economic growth in Western countries from the mid-1970s gave them unprecedented influence over public policy, competitiveness becoming the overriding concern. As export was favoured in response to the increase of the price of petrol and business corporations widened their international footprint, the quest for innovation accelerated dramatically and left the realm of public action. The new form of capitalism this fostered went hand in hand with the progress of desacralisation and the growth of individualism (Gauchet 2017a, 54–62).

The Political Imaginary of European Hypermodernity

167

This undeniably constitutes the great originality of Gauchet’s approach: the analysis of the inner transformation of European societies that favoured neoliberal democracy is interconnected with an original interpretation of the specific significance of the contemporary wave of globalisation, defined in contrast with its first colonial manifestation. This approach highlights yet a different point of difference between the European experience of hypermodernity and that of the United States, which explains how ‘neo-liberal democracy’ appeared in Europe. THE EXTERNAL SIDE OF DESACRALISATION: GLOBALISATION Gauchet’s interpretation of globalisation stresses the appearance of a wholly new dialectics of nationalisation and internationalisation, at the centre of which remains the nation-state as interface between these two dimensions. This dialectical process is in fact transforming how all nation-states are defining themselves internally because what used to be the outside world has now become a central consideration of the internal world of nation-states, which now define themselves in economic and cultural competition with other nation-states (Gauchet 2017a, 242). Paradoxically, globalisation is for Gauchet the triumph of two aspects of European modernity: the triumph of its scientific/technological/economic power and of the political form it invented: the nation-state. Gauchet argues that the nation-state has become the political basis on which the contemporary, purely commercial, form of contemporary globalisation is based. It is the political structure that facilitates both commercial and cultural exchanges Globalisation has produced both a new ‘symbolic geography’ of the world and, for the very first time in European history, a common world but at the same time an intensified rivalry of cultural identities (Gauchet 2017a, 229–31). In this respect, Gauchet’s theory of globalisation constitutes a major critique of what Calhoun called ‘the cosmopolitan dream’, the dream that dominated the first years of the twenty-first century. This dream assumed different forms on both sides of the Atlantic and was in fact the manifestation of a loss of imperial control, apparent earlier in Europe because of decolonisation. The capitalist oligarchies which, within the West, encouraged the emergence of a truly globalised form of capitalism powered by financialisation were blind to the political significance of what they were promoting, which was in total contrast with the globalisation pursued from the late nineteenth century in association with a project of colonial political domination. Whereas colonial globalisation was administered from the European centre and its imposition of European modernity remained rather superficial, contemporary commercial globalisation has led to an appropriation of mod-

168

Natalie J. Doyle

ernity by the periphery, which has induced a transformation of modern culture itself. Contemporary globalisation is not encouraging all countries to pursue simply economic goals. Through their economic objectives, they are also pursuing political ends to do with cultural identity and new demands with respect to the structures that regulate the coexistence of civilisations. Behind economic globalisation thus hides a major transformation, the deimperialisation of the world, predicated on the diffusion of the political form of the nation-state and most importantly of the logic of citizenship and political representation from which it is inseparable (Gauchet 2017a, 243–73). GLOBALISATION AND THE DESTABILISING EFFECTS OF CULTURAL DEIMPERIALISATION Gauchet argues that the very logic of political representation carries with it what he calls a ‘schème de pensée’ (a thought pattern), which operates at the imaginary level and is defined by a symbolic logic that is based on an individualistic definition of state legitimacy, a point to which I will return later on in the chapter. This logic cannot help but engender new aspirations to rights, both individual and cultural, that are destabilising modernising countries and are potentially engendering the pacifistic form which globalisation has so far largely assumed (Gauchet 2017a, 232). Under the impact on certain sectors of society of the economic consequences of globalisation such as deindustrialisation, tensions have appeared within Western societies themselves and European societies especially, not least with respect to the questions of immigration and Islamist terrorism. These tensions in fact conceal the logic of cultural equality, which, Gauchet (2017a, 285) argues, is encouraged over the long term by globalisation, a counter-intuitive idea that echoes the paradox central to his original exploration of the logic of modern culture based on a refutation of Foucault’s history of madness. In Madness and Democracy, Gauchet and Swain (1999) argued that the fact that the mad were increasingly locked up away from sight in the course of the eighteenth century signalled a major shift toward ontological equality. It showed that their existence had become unsettling: they were no longer seen as completely Other but as fellow human beings, whose madness could be explored rationally. Similarly, civilisations are currently becoming more hostile toward one another because they are forced to acknowledge one another; they can no longer remain in a state of splendid isolation. Against certain post-colonial assessments of globalisation that focus on the rise of global politics of civilisational identity as synonymous with a rise of enmity (Mbembe 2016), Gauchet thus sees in the new global politics the manifestation of the discomfort which globalisation is creating by imposing on all

The Political Imaginary of European Hypermodernity

169

nations the need to compare themselves with one another and adopt on themselves an external perspective. Globalisation is experienced as a form of dispossession for Westerners—who thought their culture was the sole expression of universalism and are now discovering that there are others—and as a brutal intrusion for the rest of the world. Contemporary globalisation has very visibly encouraged a superficial, economic Westernisation of the world through economic competition but, in parallel, also a process of de-Westernisation, as modernity is appropriated in different cultural contexts (Gauchet 2017a, 253). Now that the instrumental rationality that first developed in Europe has become dominant across the planet, Europe is in fact losing its pre-eminence, which is adding a civilisational dimension to the crisis of European hypermodernity. This crisis, Gauchet argues, involves a fundamental blindness of Europeans to the significance of their history, to what they contributed to world culture but also to the significance of the current stage in the process of deimperialisation, which started in fact with decolonisation, of which the process of European economic integration was an important moment (despite the illusions that accompanied it). This blindness incorporates a misunderstanding of the role Europeans have played in the creation of contemporary globalised capitalism, in which they now struggle to defend their interests. THE EUROPEANS’ NEO-LIBERAL VISION OF GLOBALISATION In Europe the neo-liberal ideology born in Great Britain and the United States was amplified in a way that inspired the creation of a new form of state action, one powered by a vision of juridical self-regulation and inextricably associated with a radical programme of market freedom and deregulation. This creation ultimately fuelled the rise of ‘pan-capitalism’, as the freedom of capital was extended to the world outside of the European Union, making of Europe the region most open to financialisation. 19 The ‘post-communist’ era opened up by the disintegration of the Soviet empire and marked by American triumphalism first offered the prospect of a world freed of ideological rivalries, under the benevolent leadership of the United States: this is what allowed the dissemination of its vision of a planet unified by contractualised commercial exchanges and its European re-interpretation in terms of rules-based regional governance. Gauchet contends that this re-interpretation, however, was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the American perspective. In the 1990s, during the Clinton era, this ideal of a new rules-based global governance seemed to be shared by the United States but this was in fact an optical illusion, one encouraged by the very specific political imaginary that accompanied the implantation of modernity in the new world as discussed

170

Natalie J. Doyle

earlier: the ideal of the American nation as a universal nation transcending the exclusionary logic that first defined national citizenship in Europe, an identity that was infused with religiosity, something which the notion of civil religion explored by Robert N. Bellah first revealed (Gauchet 2017a, 226). The United States’s idiosyncratic sense of national identity made them misinterpret the capitalist globalisation they encouraged as an Americanisation of the planet, whereas the Europeans mistakenly perceived the American enthusiasm for globalisation as convergent with their own project (Gauchet 2017a, 273). Liberated at the end of the Cold War from the need for military defence, the societies of Western Europe were encouraged by their new individualistic suspicion of the state (which converged with that associated with the memory of communism in the countries formerly dominated by the Soviet Union) to see American commercial globalisation as compatible with their postnationalistic vision: the creation of multi-lateral global governance. The American pursuit of globalisation was, however, classically imperialistic (Gauchet 2017a, 272–73). It became obvious after the terrorist attacks of 2001, with the neo-conservative response to aggression, that aimed to export the American model of society and ‘good democracy’ but through the actions of American multi-nationals, given free rein. 20 American blindness thus merged with European blindness to create the ‘mirage’ of cross-Atlantic convergence, which played a major role in the global spread of capitalism (Gauchet 2017a, 237). The European blindness involved a fundamental misunderstanding of the historical roots of the project of regional economic integration. The institutional architecture established in the late 1950s, which had led to the creation of the European Economic Community, was presented as having been exclusively responsible for the pacification of the nation-states of western Europe in the decades following the end of World War II, when their creation was in fact the consequence of this pacification, greatly encouraged by the threat of war between the United States and the Soviet Union (Gauchet 2005f; 2017a, 261). With this misunderstanding came the abandonment of the classical understanding of national sovereignty seen as complicit with xenophobic violence, a repudiation that became synonymous with civilisational progress, itself assimilated with the creation of an even greater European market. The loss of vertical authority of European states that was induced by the desacralisation of the societies of western Europe was thus exacerbated externally by their integration within the European Union, in a way that amplified depoliticisation, as well as the appeal of the neo-liberal ideology (Gauchet 2016b, 335). The transformation of the relationship between state and civil society that accompanied the advance of individualism in turn comforted the perception that European countries now lived in a morally superior, post-political and post-national era, a perception that fostered the neo-liberal redefinition

The Political Imaginary of European Hypermodernity

171

of democracy dominated by the quest for economic-historical innovation and by a new depoliticised logic of rights. THE SOCIETY OF INDIVIDUALS AND THE SYMBOLIC LOGIC OF RIGHTS: THE LAW AND THE NATION-STATE This conception of democracy corresponds to the creation of a new type of society, a society of individuals. 21 The creation of this novel type of society emerged from the convergence of the logic that saw a new form of political legitimacy appear in Europe with the transformation of social relationships encouraged by the discovery of the historical creativity of human societies and its amplification through the liberation of individuals, first prepared by the concept of individual property in the late seventeenth century but also linked to a redefinition of state legitimacy (Gauchet 2017a, 524). The revolution in the definition of the political bond in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as against the background of an intractable conflict over religious ideas, saw both the notion of sovereignty and that of reason of state become central to the understanding of the state’s autonomous legitimacy. In confrontation with the rise of absolutism and through the rather artificial detour of contract theories of society, the abstract individualism of natural law established the elementary principle of political legitimacy: the freedom of conscience of individuals and by extension their rights. This, Gauchet argues, established the fundamental symbolic logic of modern European culture based on individual rights, which, as seem above, underpins its understanding of political representation. The idea of individual right remained confined within philosophy and was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries largely ineffective socially, as it seemed incapable of generating new social bonds within the traditional mindset that endured in different forms right into the twentieth century. Yet, according to a complex process unfolding over centuries which Gauchet analyses in a lengthy and dense chapter of Le nouveau monde (and to which this text can only do partial justice) (Gauchet 2017a, 487–632), this assertion of rights in fact generated at the imaginary level a new understanding of the basis of collective life. Gauchet’s analysis seeks to demonstrate how the schema of rights functioned as a kind of ‘free rider’ (Gauchet 2017a, 521–31) within developments that seem at first alien to it. Even though the abstract individual endowed with natural rights was in the nineteenth century repudiated as an irrelevant mythical construct next to the reality of the political order and the collective logic of social life, it was still a source of inspiration on a nonconscious, imaginary plane. The ideal of the abstract individual endowed with natural rights first formulated by natural law survived within the formalised and rationalised legal system of positive law whose construction liberal-

172

Natalie J. Doyle

ism encouraged. It also survived within the consolidation of the nation-state as political form because it was implied by the very logic of representative politics. In the twentieth century, the imaginary of individual rights eventually transcended the dualistic opposition between individuals and society on which collective discipline had always been built, in all human societies. It allowed individual freedom to become the collective norm from which the form assumed by power was derived, then the very structure of society. In the process, as seen previously, the symbolic, political structure of society became essentially infrastructural, invisible, allowing both the economy and the law to appear as the ultimate truth of hypermodern democratic societies. The individualisation of social relationships has indeed involved a profound transformation of the very understanding of the law and of its role in social life: both as a technical tool and as the privileged domain in which the ultimate values of modern democratic culture are expressed. Moving away from its original function of countering the abuses of power, the principle of human rights has thus acquired in the political imaginary of contemporary European societies a much more important role. It now works as a generative principle of social life, which, to use the term coined by Castoriadis, has also involved the appearance of a new imaginary signification, that of constitutionalism, which goes with a new understanding of democracy stressing the supreme authority of the law (Gauchet 2017a, 566). In conjunction with the societal transformation of 1970s, this constitutional control acquired a foundational role: that of promoting as the central task of democracy, the promotion of fundamental rights. This is where the difference between European and American hypermodernity is most apparent: as seen previously, in the United States, the political dimension associated with national citizenship was not displaced by the discourse of human rights quite to the same extent as it was in the type of cosmopolitanism that grew alongside the process of European economic integration. Here also, despite its critique of the depoliticising consequence of the European logic of human rights and of the cosmopolitan naivety of contemporary European culture, Gauchet’s analysis remains defiantly Eurocentric, in the sense that it remains resolutely affirmative of the universal resonance of European modernity. This relevance does not reside in the discourse of human rights—which Gauchet sees as having only developed a value that exists in all human societies, even if in embryonic form—but in the new socio-political form it perfected: the nation-state. In this respect, Gauchet attacks the assimilation of the nation-state to chauvinistic nationalism and colonial imperialism. In his reconstruction of European history, Gauchet argues that the nation cannot be reduced to the phenomenon of belligerent, exclusionary and colonial nationalism, as nationalism was a historically transitory phenomenon, a secular religion linked to the persistence, within the modern nation-state, of the imperial vision of power progressively erased by democratic culture (Gauchet 2017a, 209–56).

The Political Imaginary of European Hypermodernity

173

Albeit at the price of great violence in the colonies, the religiosity that survived in the nation-state through nationalism loosened traditional social bonds (e.g., between generations), and thus paradoxically facilitated the later emancipation of societies from a vertical mode of political authority, as well as from the imposition by the state of social conformism. In parallel with decolonisation, this emancipation produced a new mode of social cohesion now based on an implicit sense of nationhood, which, for the thirty years that followed World War II, produced an unprecedented level of well-being, freedom and equality unprecedented in human history. This success, although it has been undermined for more than thirty years by the rise of the neo-liberal ideology, still exercises attraction over other parts of the world, manifest today, among other things, in the influx of so-called illegal immigrants. THE HISTORICAL NOVELTY OF NEO-LIBERALISM The rejection of the nation-state constitutes in fact one major point of difference between classical liberalism and neo-liberalism (Gauchet 2017a, 649–50). As opposed to liberalism, which originally had to assert its principles against the resistance of the pre-existing heteronomous order, the neoliberal ideology has not had to formulate a clear theory. It shares the principles of liberalism, especially the belief in the benefits of society’s independence from the state, which makes it tempting to interpret it simply as an extremist form of liberalism. However, if one considers neo-liberalism’s very broad field of application as well as its consequences, one has to acknowledge that there is an essential discontinuity, which is to do with neo-liberalism’s lack of boundaries. The liberal ideology always accepted the authority of the nation-state. It only sought to limit it so it would not violate private freedoms and would respect the rights of individuals, these freedoms and those rights being thought to be essential to the collective good but being also identified with a national interest. With neo-liberalism, the pursuit of the fundamental principles of liberalism are no longer contained, be it by the borders of the nation-state or pre-existing social bonds. Neo-liberalism pursues an idea of radical emancipation, an absolute liberation of personal behaviour and private initiative from all forms of collective constraint, whatever form it takes. The historical novelty of neo-liberalism resides in this emancipation from the principle of social obligation, which has been at the root of political authority in all human societies and in its ambition to configure human communities so they are only the product of free association and voluntary consent. Different political interpretations of individual emancipation can be encompassed within that broad purpose and in the last decade neo-liberalism

174

Natalie J. Doyle

has thus fundamentally undermined the classical opposition between left and right (Gauchet 2016b) and created a soft consensus which Gauchet describes as ‘liberal-libertarian’ (in the European definition of the word liberal), one that combines radically pro-market economic liberalism with libertarian social mores (Gauchet 2017a, 651–52). 22 This consensus now defines the political centre in a way that has fostered the perception that there are no longer differences of political vision, only disagreements of views over the implementation of a common vision. This penetration of neo-liberalism has produced a new version of conservatism in which economic competition and the divide between the winners and the losers replace the old hierarchies (Gauchet 2017a, 653). European socialism has itself evolved to become social-individualism where socialisation, reduced to the principle of economic redistribution, is made to serve primarily the recognition of individual diversity. In this respect, it must be noted that neo-liberalism, with its lack of clear doctrinal content, has in fact fused with social practice itself (and determines its direction) without its goal ever being articulated explicitly, which gives it its ‘soft-totalitarian’ power (Gauchet 2016b, 356). At the same time, the appearance of a centrist consensus centre has favoured the appearance of two new forms of extremisms that exercise their attraction over the centre and often dictate the terms of political debates: libertarian anarchistic individualism pursuing absolute individual liberation and a disciplinarian economism pursuing absolute efficiency (Gauchet 2017a, 651). The neo-liberal thought system has infiltrated social life; it inspires it and sets the course without ever becoming a coherent and overall programme of action. What passes as opposition to neo-liberalism itself often only attacks one of its manifestations and remains trapped in its imaginary (Gauchet 2017a, 653). The advent of the neo-liberal ideology has involved a kind of revolution, one that did not in any way change existing political institutions but has profoundly transformed the way they are understood. Neo-liberal democracy is the outcome of a reduction of politics, of society and history to one objective. It replaces the obsolete, illusory goal of popular sovereignty (with its tendency to absorb the private sphere into the public one) with a different goal: the sovereignty of the autonomous individual, defined by his or her rights in a way that establishes the total primacy of civil society (Gauchet 2017a, 655–56). This has reduced representative politics to their essential principle of representation: government no longer seeks to embody a collective transcending the existence of individuals—its role is now one of arbitration between individuals and the groups they form. Whereas the old ideal of popular sovereignty led European states to develop their bureaucratic power and organise society through laws and regulations with a view to bringing it closer to an ideal of justice, this role of the state is now seen as an obstacle to what is now perceived intuitively as the truth of democratic power: the power

The Political Imaginary of European Hypermodernity

175

to create, invent, produce and optimise collective existence in all its dimensions (Gauchet 2017a, 657). At the same time, this creative power of humanity is understood to belong only to individuals, to be fulfilled only when they are given freedom as governments are thought to be incapable of fostering it or guiding it. In this respect, the neo-liberal ideology is encouraging a fundamental misunderstanding of the real foundations of collective life and of the social requirements of effective individual autonomy. This has engendered a new form of frustration in the minds of individuals, who feel increasingly deprived of the means to fulfil their aspirations to freedom, which the neoliberal ideology presents as the natural and universal condition of human beings (Gauchet 2015b, 178; 2017a, 656). This frustration is heightened by a new, paradoxical form of bureaucratisation. As Gauchet stresses, the neo-liberal ideology, despite its claims to the contrary, is profoundly bureaucratic. It is based on one simple philosophical principle established as the ultimate rule of collective life: there are only individuals defined in abstraction by their rights and concretely by their economic interests. The only political question that remains is that of regulating the coexistence of different types of right and of giving individuals the conditions within which they can maximise their self-interests (Gauchet 2016b, 329–30). This is now the sole function of the state, which seeks to define and regulate the space in which individuals can exercise their independence. In the process, the state has in fact grown, which flies in the face of the rationale of ‘small government’ (Gauchet 2016b, 338). The new logic of rights and interests is the key to understanding economism. The way the market functions as the best representation of collective life is not only about efficiency. Economism has reasons that are not strictly economic. As soon as the good of society is understood as being served only when the collective body is defined by it being composed of individuals, free to pursue their interests without any direction imposed from above, the market becomes the sole form of collective coordination that is both conceivable and acceptable. THE TWO FACETS OF EUROPEAN NEO-LIBERALISM: DEPOLITISATION AND THE NEED TO REINVENT THE NATION-STATE Economism is the most obvious manifestation of neo-liberalism and the imperative of economic efficiency appears as its major driving force. However, it is only its concrete facet; juridification has been the other force inspiring a reconfiguration of the sphere of public action. Economism and juridification have actually been working together, the independence of central banks 23 that was established as a principle in Western societies in the course of the 1980s being a particularly emblematic example of this ideological collusion.

176

Natalie J. Doyle

It was dictated by the belief that the stability of economic life depended on monetary stability and thus needed to be protected from the interference of the state’s self-interest, accused of being responsible for exchange fluctuations and inflation. In Europe, the independence of the European Central Bank was clearly inspired by the German ordo-liberal economic philosophy and the idea that the state’s monetary sovereignty needed to be juridically constrained to protect social actors from the presumably arbitrary and detrimental decisions of the state. The very narrow definition of the mission entrusted to the European Central Bank which was inspired by ordo-liberalism was not only in tune with the growing depoliticised understanding of monetary creation fostered by the new economic theories that appeared in the 1970s in the United States. Much more fundamentally, it converged with the way European societies were starting to see themselves. As a result, European societies constructed an entire institutional framework of governance subject to the international law of treaties, treaties that deprived them of the political power needed to be able to address the major economic shock induced by the global financial crisis of 2007/2008. This shock destabilised their monetary system and plunged them into a profound economic, political and cultural crisis from which they now struggle to extricate themselves, the euro being a central symbol of their hypermodernity. European legalism in the economic sphere cannot in fact be dissociated from the new role that the idea of human rights came to acquire in the selfdefinition of contemporary European societies, when it acquired an ideological function, that of being the principle explaining collective existence and establishing its normative dimension. In Europe, the neo-liberal understanding of democracy has established a new type of society, one that is defined through and for the law by ‘pan-legalism’. The role of the law has been totally redefined by the consciousness that individuals now have of their rights and by the new common sense engendered by the individualisation of social relationships; in this respect, the role of law has escaped the control of jurists and can even be turned against them. The principle of individual rights, which was purely abstract in its natural law form, has indeed become subjectivised (Gauchet 2017, 609–26). In the process, individual rights have stopped being ideal norms to become fundamental rights, that is, positive, enforceable rights. This has established a fundamentally new understanding of legitimacy that Gauchet defines by appropriating a quote from Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism and giving it a very different twist: individuals have not only acquired new rights but also the right to have rights that is now the generative principle of social life and the benchmark of all forms of public authority (Gauchet 2017a, 514). As the political ‘community’ imperative has disappeared from view and all social relationships have become increasingly contractualised, these societies have been plunged in the vortex of an ever-increasing list of competing

The Political Imaginary of European Hypermodernity

177

rights claims and are now incapable of formulating socially inclusive political projects, both at the national level and at that of the European Union. Whereas contemporary European societies still benefit today from the civic capital constructed by earlier political regimes on the basis of the notion of citizenship, this notion itself is but a fading star (Gauchet 2017a, 669). European neo-liberal democracy is indeed a democracy without demos as the political community is now defined only as a collection of individuals that present together on a given territory at a given moment, this being subject to change. It is a type of society which, by definition, is incapable of setting boundaries (national or civilisational), as the European Union has been subject to a logic of constant expansion, and which is ultimately incapable of seeing in culture, social mores and identity as anything more than something subject to individual choice (Gauchet 2017a, 675). As seen earlier, it is also a society without kratos where the classical definitions of sovereignty, power and government have lost their relevance. This makes European societies particularly vulnerable to globalisation. Globalisation has not only created economic actors whose size matches the global market (the financial sector, multi-nationals) and to which the states, locked within territorial limits, struggle to stand up (Gauchet 2017a, 673). It has also encouraged a planetary mobility which, although limited in its scope, converges with the European aspiration to a universal community of individuals endowed with rights in a way that creates an ideological obstacle to the imposition of regulation (Gauchet 2017a, 674). This has fuelled a largely irrational fear of ‘cultural invasion’ which has become one of the major themes of populist politics, covering over the discontent to do with the economic consequences of globalisation: the re-appearance of inequality and of a new form of plutocracy (Gauchet 2015b, 179–80; 2016b, 339–40). There is, however, no going back to the vertical impositions of collective identity. The ‘genie’ of autonomy cannot be put back in the bottle. A new form of citizenship thus needs to be invented. This new form of citizenship requires a deeper, self-reflexive understanding of what autonomy actually means, a new form of rationality that knows the limits of practical rationality and is capable of imposing limits upon it. This is, by no means, a purely philosophical project. For Gauchet (2017a, 734–40), it is an essentially political project, the re-invention of political subjectivity, and it can only take form within the nation-state. The nation-state is the only political form able to give individuals some degree of mastery over their future and at the same time allow them to connect with a bigger dimension, that of the common world being constructed by modern rationality. This does require the creation of new forms of international cooperation, and despite his critique of the European Union’s post-national rhetoric, Gauchet points to its pioneering role.

178

Natalie J. Doyle

Re-inventing citizenship means going beyond the granting of individual rights and establishing the social conditions that can make the exercise of those rights effective. It also means reflecting on how a new society, producing fully autonomous individuals, can remain faithful to the ideal of justice which was originally contained within the idea of rights, for a society of individuals can also become a purely competitive world, totally alien to any idea of justice. Ultimately, it requires a reappraisal of what constitutes human power, in front of the looming environmental crisis: humanity’s power, grounded in imagination and culture, is a power of symbolic self-definition. It has been constructed first and foremost in confrontation with the natural world, on which it ultimately depends (Gauchet 2017a, 732). This is so, regardless of the fantasies of purely artificial life encouraged by the neoliberal ideology (Gauchet 2017a, 710). NOTES 1. This has become very apparent since 2017, with a series of political upheavals across the continent. The sequence can be said to have started in fact with the outcome of the British referendum which signalled ‘Brexit’. Britain having always been on the margins of the process of European integration, its political crisis appeared shortly as an aberration. Subsequent elections in the Netherlands, France, Austria, Germany and Italy, have, however, confirmed the crisis of the government parties. In different ways, they have revealed a loss of confidence, affecting especially the centre-left and the growing influence of ‘anti-system’, ‘eurosceptic’ and neo-nationalist parties. The crisis is also affecting central Europe but in a different way as a result of the way that hypermodernity has come from Western Europe and has interacted with the legacy of Soviet communist domination. 2. I am referring mostly to the last volume of his theoretical reconstruction of European history presented in the four volumes of the tetralogy L‘Avènement de la démocratie. This last volume, Le nouveau monde, offers an interpretation of the contemporary situation. Although I draw mostly on this book, to contextualise I also make references to the previous volumes or to other complementary texts. 3. Gauchet’s notion of incorporation is indebted to the work of Louis Dumont (1986) and its theory of modern individualism with which he engaged in the late 1970s (Gauchet 2005). Later, I touch upon Gauchet’s first treatment of the theme of individualism when I discuss his understanding of the symbolic matrix shared by the United States’s version of modernity and that of Western Europe. 4. This chapter cannot do justice to the complexity of Gauchet’s analysis of the common imaginary logic behind Italian fascism and Nazism, as well as their historical specificity. 5. See Castoriadis (1997). As I have argued (Doyle 2018, 49–50), one can detect in this article the imprint of a discussion Castoriadis had with Gauchet. 6. The notion of ‘institution’ first used by Lefort and Castoriadis in the 1970s originated in the work of Merleau-Ponty (2010). When it comes to Gauchet’s specific use of it, it is necessary to go back to his input into the article (Lefort and Gauchet 1971) which he wrote on the basis of Lefort’s lectures, to which, he has argued, he added a lot (Gauchet 2003, 48, 159). 7. Gauchet has substituted for the notion of ‘social imaginary signification’ that of ‘schème de pensée’ which he developed on the basis of the originally Kantian idea. He has used this to analyse the way ‘symbolic forms’ establish a continuity within history while evolving and allowing new meaning to appear at the level of the social imaginary (Doyle 2017, 130). 8. Gauchet defines the political (le politique) as the framework of shared meaning and value which allows all human communities to exist and confers upon them a structure. The specificity of the political in contemporary democratic societies is in the fact that it institutes

The Political Imaginary of European Hypermodernity

179

collective life without determining it or without controlling it, which explains the role played by politics (la politique). As we shall see, in contemporary hypermodern societies, the political deceptively seems to have been absorbed in politics and its role to have been replaced by the law (Gauchet 2005c, 551–57). 9. It is clear that Gauchet’s analysis of hypermodernity and the neo-liberal ideology it has produced is often relevant also for an understanding of the direction taken by the other societies derived from the British model, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Devoid of the form of nationalism that characterises the United States, they have, in some respects, come close to the model of individualism that has developed on the European continent. In this chapter, my task, however, remains to outline Gauchet’s argument as it pertains to European modernity in a narrow geographical sense, which the contrast with the United States facilitates. 10. The following sections on the United States expand on my article published in Social Imaginaries (Doyle 2017). 11. References to the history of American democracy already appear throughout Gauchet’s analysis of the political debates of the French Revolution in La Démocratie des Droits de l’ homme (Gauchet 1989) and La Révolution des pouvoirs (Gauchet 1995). 12. An English translation of the first two parts of ‘Tocqueville, L’Amérique et nous. Sur la génèse des sociétés démocratiques’ appeared in New French Thought edited by Mark Lilla (Gauchet 1994b). The original article is, however, considerably longer with seven parts. 13. As discussed in note 3, the focus on individualism is linked to Gauchet’s debt to Louis Dumont’s definition of modernity. 14. Gauchet’s understanding of the genesis of modernity in the United States and the specific form it assumed that brings his work within the theoretical orbit of the so-called school of multiple modernities pioneered by the work of S. N. Eisenstadt (2000; 2007), even if it never engages with it explicitly. 15. Germany always constituted an exception to the dominance of socio-democratic economic ideas. After World War II under the influence of American occupation it was influenced much more by classical economic liberalism and produced the original synthesis of liberalism and European-style welfare known as the ‘Sozialmarktwirtschaft’. 16. Space constraints prevent me from discussing the convergence of Thatcherism with the neo-conservative form assumed by neo-liberalism in the United States: it included the same revival of imperialistic nationalism and a projection of military power through the Falklands War. At the same time, Gauchet argues that British society is caught in the same process of detraditionalisation as continental Europe (see Gauchet 2017a, 70–71, 97). 17. Gauchet’s use of the words ‘finitude’, ‘finalité’ and ‘finition’ was inspired by the book La Fin de l’histoire by the French sociologist Henri Lefebvre (1970). 18. The expression ‘regime of historicity’ was first coined by François Hartog (2015) in a book published in French in 2003 which engages with the question of twenty-first-century ‘presentism’, one sub-theme of Gauchet’s overall discussion of hypermodernity. I use the expression as a useful shortcut, especially as the English translation of Hartog’s book has made it more familiar in the English-speaking world. Although his analysis goes over some of the problems examined by Hartog such as the novelty of the notion of heritage, Gauchet does not acknowledge Hartog. Hartog himself deals with Claude Lefort’s pioneering discussion of the way a certain attitude toward time is central to modern culture, discussion to which Gauchet’s theorisation is indebted. The lack of mutual acknowledgement is probably due to the consequences of the fallout between Lefort and Gauchet in the 1980s (Dosse 2014, 238; Doyle 2017, 45–47). Although there is a substantial overlap between Hartog’s analysis of ‘presentism’ and part of Gauchet’s analysis of hypermodernity, there is a major difference. In keeping with Lefort’s own analysis of contemporary desacralisation as de-symbolisation Hartog considers presentism as a new and inescapable condition, whereas Gauchet considers it as a transitional phenomenon that can be managed through a new form of self-reflexive autonomy, as I discuss briefly in my conclusion. 19. The role played by the European Union and French policy makers in the development of globalisation and the vision of juridical regulation which inspired it has been outlined by Rawi Abdelal in his book Capital Rules (2009).

180

Natalie J. Doyle

20. The so-called nation-building projects clearly lacked the level of financial support once put into the reconstruction of liberal democracy in Western Europe after World War II. 21. Gauchet claims intellectual ownership over the notion of ‘a society of individuals’ formulated in much broader terms than Norbert Elias with whom it is commonly associated. As Gauchet (2017a, 554) stresses, the expression ‘society of individuals’ was first used by him and his wife Gladys Swain in Madness and Democracy, which was published in French in 1980. The writings that compose Elias’s The Society of Individuals (Elias 1991) were published ten years later. As I have argued, History and Madness constituted the first step in Gauchet’s theorisation of the link between modernity and desacralisation (Doyle 2017, 5–12). 22. The existence of ‘progressive neo-liberalism’ and its alliance with economic neo-liberalism in the United States has also been analysed by Nancy Fraser (2017). 23. It is clear that the principle of the central bank’s independence was to a large extent ideological, as Western governments continued to exercise significant influence over central banks (except for within the outside the eurozone). The state is in fact still at the centre of monetary creation, as Mitchell and Fazi (2017) convincingly demonstrate.

REFERENCES Abdelal, Rawi. 2009. Capital Rules: The Construction of Global Finance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Arnason, Johann. 2014a. ‘Institution’. In Cornelius Castoriadis: Key Concepts, 101–06. London: Bloomsbury. Arnason, Johann. 2014b. ‘Social Imaginary Significations’. In Cornelius Castoriadis: Key Concepts, edited by Suzi Adams, 23–42. London: Bloomsbury Aron, Raymond. 1962. The Opium of the Intellectuals. Paris: Calmann-Lévy. Badiou, Alain, and Marcel Gauchet. 2016. What Is To Be Done? A Dialogue on Communism, Capitalism, and the Future of Democracy. London: Polity. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2012. ‘Times of Interregnum’. Ethics and Global Politics 5 (1): 49–56. Brague, Rémi. 2002 Eccentric Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press. Calhoun, Craig. 2007. Nations Matter: Culture, History and the Cosmopolitan Dream. Hoboken, NJ: Taylor & Francis. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1987. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Translated by Kathryn Blamey. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1997. ‘Institution of Society and Religion’. In World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis and the Imagination, edited by David Ames Curtis, 311–30. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 2007. ‘The Rationality of “Capitalism”’. In Figures of the Thinkable, translated by Helen Arnold, 47–70. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Cusset, François. 2003. French Theory. How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States. Translated by Jeff Fort. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis. Davie, Grace 2002. Europe, the Exceptional Case: Parameters of Faith in the Modern World. London: Darton Longman & Todd. Dosse, François. 2014. Castoriadis: Une vie. Paris: La Découverte. Doyle, Natalie J. 2013. ‘Autonomy and Modern Liberal Democracy: From Castoriadis to Gauchet’. European Journal of Social Theory 15 (3): 331–47. Doyle, Natalie J. 2017. ‘The United States in the Work of Marcel Gauchet: A Critical Introduction to “Populism as Symptom”’. Social Imaginaries 3 (1): 195–206. Doyle, Natalie J. 2018. Marcel Gauchet and the Loss of Common Purpose: Imaginary Islam and the Crisis of European Democracy. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Dumont, Louis. 1986. Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. 2000. ‘Multiple Modernities’. Daedalus 129 (1): 1–29.

The Political Imaginary of European Hypermodernity

181

Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. 2007. ‘Multiple Modernities: A Paradigm of Cultural and Social Evolution’. ProtoSociology 24: 20–318. Elias, Norbert. 1991. La Société des individus. Translated by Jeanne Étoré. Paris: Fayard. Elias, Norbert. 1991. The Society of Individuals. Translated by Michael Schrö ter. London: Basil Blackwell. Fraser, Nancy, 2017. ‘The End of Progressive Neoliberalism’. Dissent, 2 January. Fukuyama, Francis. 1989. ‘The End of History?’ The National Interest 16: 3–18. Gauchet, Marcel. 1989. La Révolution des droits de l’homme. Paris: Gallimard. Gauchet, Marcel. 1994a. ‘Primitive Religion and the Origins of the State’. In New French Thought: Political Philosophy, edited by Mark Lilla, 116–22. Princeton, NJ: Princeton N. J. Gauchet, Marcel. 1994b. ‘Tocqueville’. In New French Thought: Political Philosophy, edited by Mark Lilla, 91–115. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gauchet, Marcel. 1995. La Révolution des pouvoirs. Paris: Gallimard. Gauchet, Marcel. 1997. The Disenchantment of the World. Translated by Oscar Burge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gauchet, Marcel. 2000. ‘A New Age of Personality: An Essay on the Psychology of Our Times’. Thesis Eleven 60: 23–41. Gauchet, Marcel. 2002a. ‘Croyances religieuses, croyances politiques’. In La Démocratie Contre Elle-Même, 91–108. Paris: Gallimard. Gauchet, Marcel. 2002b. ‘Les droits de l’homme ne sont pas une politique’. In La Démocratie contre elle-même, 1–26. Paris: Gallimard. Gauchet, Marcel. 2002c. ‘Quand les droits de l’homme deviennent une politique’. In La Démocratie contre elle-même, 326–85. Paris: Gallimard. Gauchet, Marcel. 2003. La condition historique. Paris: Gallimard. Gauchet, Marcel. 2004a. ‘Le socialisme en redéfinition’. Le Débat 131: 87–94. Gauchet, Marcel. 2004b. Un Monde Désenchanté? Paris: Editions de l’atelier/Edition ouvrières. Gauchet, Marcel. 2005a. ‘Les tâches de la philosophie politique’. In La condition politique, 505–57. Paris: Gallimard. Gauchet, Marcel. 2005b. ‘Le problème européen’. In La condition politique, 465–504. Paris: Gallimard. Gauchet, Marcel. 2005c. ‘La Nouvelle Europe’. In La condition politique, 494–504. Paris: Gallimard Gauchet, Marcel. 2005d. ‘Tocqueville, l’Amérique et nous’. In La condition politique, 305–84. Paris: Gallimard. Gauchet, Marcel. 2005e. ‘La Dérive des continents’. In La condition politique, 385–403. Paris: Gallimard. Gauchet, Marcel. 2005f. ‘De l’avènement de l’individu à la découverte de la société’. In La condition politique, 405–31. Paris: Gallimard. Gauchet, Marcel. 2007a. La révolution moderne. Volume I. L’Avènement de la démocratie. Paris: Gallimard. Gauchet, Marcel. 2007b. La crise du libéralisme. Volume II. L’Avènement de la démocratie. Paris: Gallimard. Gauchet, Marcel. 2010. À l’épreuve des totalitarismes. Volume III. L’Avènement de la démocratie. Paris: Gallimard. Gauchet, Marcel. 2015a. ‘Les ressorts du fondamentalisme islamique’. Le Débat 3 (185): 63–81. Gauchet, Marcel. 2015b. ‘Democracy: From One Crisis to Another’. Social Imaginaries 1 (1): 163–88. Gauchet, Marcel. 2016a. ‘Droite et gauche en redéfinition’. Le Débat 5 (192): 35–46. Gauchet, Marcel. 2016b. Comprendre le malheur français. Paris: Stock. Gauchet, Marcel. 2017a. Le nouveau monde. Volume IV. L’Avènement de la démocratie. Paris: Gallimard. Gauchet, Marcel. 2017b. ‘Populism as Symptom’. Translated by N. J. Doyle. In Social Imaginaries 3 (1): 207–18.

182

Natalie J. Doyle

Gauchet, Marcel, and Gladys Swain. 1980. La Pratique de l’esprit humain. L’Institution asilaire et la révolution démocratique. Paris: Gallimard. Gauchet, Marcel, and Gladys Swain. 1999. Madness and Democracy: The Modern Psychiatric Universe. Translated by Catherine Porter. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gray, John. 1995. ‘Agonistic Liberalism’. Social Philosophy and Policy 12 (1): 111–35. Gray, John. 2002. The Two Faces of Liberalism. Oxford: Polity. Hartog, François. 2015 [2003]. Regimes of Historicity, Presentism and Experiences of Time. New York: Columbia University Press. Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kagan, Robert. 2003. Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Lefebvre, Henri. 1970. La Fin de l’histoire. Paris: Éd. de Minuit. Lefort, Claude. 1978. ‘Société “sans histoire” et historicité’. In Les Formes de l’histoire, 46–77. Paris: Gallimard. Lefort, Claude. 1988. ‘The Question of Democracy’. In Democracy and Political Theory, translated by David Macey, 9–20. Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press in association with Basil Blackwell. Lefort, Claude. 2007. ‘Brèves réflexions sur la conjoncture actuelle’. In Le Temps Présent, 937–46. Paris: Belin. Lefort, Claude, and Marcel Gauchet. 1971. ‘Sur la démocratie: le politique et l’institution du social’. Textures 2-3: 7–78. Manent, Pierre. 2007. Democracy without Nations? The Fate of Self-Government in Europe. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books. Mbembe, Achille. 2016. Politiques de l’inimitié . Paris: La Découverte. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2010. Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collè ge de France (1954–1955). Translated by Leonard Lawlor and Heath Massey. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Mitchell, William, and Thomas Fazi. 2017. Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World. London: Pluto Press. Mouzakitis, Angelos. 2014. ‘Social-Historical’. In Cornelius Castoriadis: Key Concepts, edited by Suzi Adams, 89–100. London: Bloomsbury. Stiglitz, Joseph E. 2016. The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Varoufakis, Yannis. 2013. The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy. London and New York: Zed Books & Palgrave Macmillan.

Index

absolute spirit, 37 acceleration, 129, 166; constitutional, 129; societal, 129, 153 action, x, xix, 7, 9, 10–12, 13, 15–16, 21, 27, 32, 36, 52, 62, 68, 83, 93, 94, 123 Althusser, Louis, xxvi Anderson, Benedict, xxvii, xxviii, 19–20, 54, 83 anthropology, xxv, 102, 105 Arendt, Hannah, 31, 46, 50, 55–59, 127 Aristotle, xxiv, xxx, 46–48, 54, 60, 70, 71n1 Arnason, Johann P., xvii, xxviii, xxxi, 24, 77, 81, 92, 97–104, 105, 107n14–107n14 autonomy, xxviii–xxix, 5, 7, 18, 24, 30, 70, 92, 93, 98, 111–112, 116, 117, 123, 124, 125, 126, 128–129, 130, 145, 149, 150–152, 161, 177; processual, 83, 153; structural, 149, 153 Baczko, Bronislaw, xxvii, 19–20 Bellah, Robert N., 107n6, 169 (being-)in-the-world, xxx, 3, 21, 28, 29, 30, 45, 46, 51, 60, 63, 67, 70, 70–71, 98 Bottici, Chiara, xxix Bourdieu, Pierre, 18, 19, 21 Brague, Rémi, 162 Bretton Woods monetary system, 157, 166

Calhoun, Craig, xxviii, xxix, 16, 18, 40n24, 40n34, 167 capitalism, xxix, xxxii, 4, 7–8, 83, 97, 98, 124, 130, 146, 147, 148–149, 151–153, 156, 157, 163, 166, 167, 169, 169–171 Castoriadis, Cornelius, xiii, xvii, xxn2, xxv, xxvi–xxvii, xxviii, xxx, 1–8, 14, 16, 18, 24, 26–29, 30–31, 32–33, 34–35, 37, 38n2, 38n4, 39n8, 39n9, 39n11, 40n45, 40n46, 41n54, 46–59, 64–65, 67, 69, 72n16, 77, 79–82, 97, 100, 112, 113–114, 116, 117, 118–119, 124, 128, 150, 151–152 chaos, 1, 119 civilisations, 86–97; Axial, 85, 86, 89–92, 95, 105; indigenous, 103–104, 106; Islamicate, 85, 90, 95, 96, 100; Sinic, 95, 98, 100 collective anonymous, xxiv, xxvii, xxx, 7–8, 31, 32, 36–37, 45–46, 65, 79, 83, 104, 112, 117, 146–147, 152, 174–175, 178n8 collective identity, 12, 20, 28, 35, 41n53, 64, 87–88, 150, 154, 155, 164–165 collective representations, xxv–xxvi, 34, 130 common sense, xxx, 45–47, 48, 53–54, 56–61, 66–71, 116, 176. See also gemeinsinn constituent power, 121, 125, 131, 132, 136

183

184

Index

constitutionalism, 111–112, 119, 121, 122, 123–124, 125–127, 128–130, 131–132, 134–135, 137, 138–139, 140n10, 140n12, 172 cosmopolitanism, xxix, 70, 172 creation, xxix, 2, 5–6, 7, 18, 24, 36, 67, 69, 77–79, 80, 81, 82, 85, 87, 93, 97–98, 100, 102, 103, 106n2, 112, 113, 114, 117, 159, 169, 171 creation ex nihilo, xvii, 5, 7, 8, 24, 29, 37, 64, 80, 81, 82, 97 creativity, xviii, xxiii, xxiv, xxvi, xxvii, 1, 9, 24–26, 33, 34, 37, 45, 50, 56, 65, 68–69, 86, 90, 119, 154, 165, 166 culture, xxviii, 9, 17, 22, 53, 86–87, 89, 94, 97, 98, 100, 105, 112, 146–148, 148–149, 153, 159, 166, 167, 168, 169, 171–172, 179n18 cultures, 9, 17, 103–104, 159, 166 Descombes, Vincent, 34, 35–37, 41n51, 41n53 disengaged reason, xvi, 26 distortion, 10–11, 12–13, 15 doing, xxv, xxx, 7–8, 30, 32, 34, 37, 39n9, 39n12, 118. See also praxis Durkheim, Émile, xxv, 3, 34, 40n34, 83, 94, 102, 156 einbildung, 45, 48, 51, 65 Eisenstadt, Shmuel N., xxviii, xxxi, 77, 85–93, 105, 106, 179n14 Ellul, Jacques, 9, 39n15, 39n17 Enlightenment, ix, x, xiv, 24, 26, 34, 58, 115, 127 Eurasia, 90, 95, 96, 99 Europe/European/European Identity, xii, xxxi–xxxii, 84, 90, 91–92, 95, 99, 105, 120, 130, 135, 139n6, 140n13, 145–178 feminism, xi, xxix, 161, 164 fiction, xiii, xxn3, 14, 24, 25, 39n13, 48, 68 fictions, practical, xxxi, 15, 54, 120, 121, 122, 123 field of tensions, 24, 111 Friedmanian, 157 Fukuyama, Francis, 166

Gauchet, Marcel, xxvi, xxix, xxxii, 102, 145–178, 178n3–179n13, 179n16, 179n18, 180n21 Geertz, Clifford, xxn3, 10, 12, 34 gemeinsinn, 46–47, 53, 54, 57, 59, 60, 66, 67, 70. See also common sense global financial crisis, 130, 145, 175 globalization, xxix, xxxii, 128–129, 146, 157, 163, 166, 167–170, 177, 179n19 Gramscian, 156 Greece, 18, 89, 95–96, 118, 165 Grotius, Hugo, 22, 152 ground power, 1, 31 Habermas, Jürgen, 16–17, 24, 31, 41n52, 140n8 Habermas-Gadamer debate, 9. See also Habermas, Jürgen habitus, 18, 22–23 Hegel, G. W. F., 20, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37, 40n31. See also Hegelian Hegelian, 1, 33, 35, 37. See also Hegel Heidegger, Martin, xxvii, 21, 29, 30, 47, 50, 51–54, 67, 71n6 hermeneutics, xxvii, 9, 12–13, 23, 24–25, 39n10, 39n14, 39n19, 98 hermeneutical, xxxii, 29, 62, 81. See also hermeneutics historical sociology, 77, 80–81, 86, 91, 93, 96, 98, 100, 105, 106n4, 107n10, 107n14 historicity, xiii, xxxiii, 67–69, 80, 82, 85, 89, 100, 103–104, 104, 114, 118, 123, 138, 150, 151, 153, 166, 179n18 human condition, xxvii, 6, 16, 22, 23, 24, 28–29, 37, 100, 102 Husserl, Edmund, 9, 15, 29, 40n35 hypermodernity, xxxii, 153–154, 157–158, 161–163, 166, 169, 172, 175, 178n1, 179n9, 179n18 ideological imaginary, 9, 12, 14, 15–16, 25, 27, 30, 47, 66 ideology, xvi, xviii, xxvi, xxx, xxxii, 9, 10–16, 25, 27, 31, 33, 37, 39n13, 39n15, 39n16, 63, 67, 68, 70, 86, 98, 114, 118, 123, 124, 137, 145, 148, 152, 153–158, 161, 163, 166, 169, 170, 172, 173, 174, 178, 179n9

Index imaginary, xvii–xx, xxn1, xxn3, xxiii, xxv–xxvii, xxviii, xxx, xxxii, 2–3, 4–5, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 21, 22, 27, 32, 38n1, 39n9, 59, 62, 64–65, 66, 67, 69, 77, 81, 82, 83, 93, 98, 102–103, 105, 111, 113, 121, 123, 152, 171 imaginary element, xxvi, 1–3, 4, 10, 16, 27, 34, 35, 39n9, 40n45 imaginary significations, xxviii, xxix, xxx, xxxi, 1–8, 18, 24, 30–31, 37, 39n10, 41n48, 65, 67, 80, 93, 97, 100, 102, 113, 123, 125, 126, 140n9, 150 imagination, creative imagination, productive imagination, reproductive imagination, social imaginative variations imagined communities India, 85, 89, 91 instituted society, 8, 18, 47, 65, 79, 82, 86, 98. See also instituting society instituting society, 8, 18, 27, 36, 47, 79, 112 institution, 8, 15, 21, 26, 27, 30–33, 35, 35–36, 37, 39n11, 41n48, 63–66, 69–70, 77, 79, 81, 82, 83–84, 97, 98, 103, 104, 112, 114, 117–118, 123, 125, 155, 178n6 integration, xv, 10, 11–13, 15, 37, 63, 124, 134, 169, 170 intercivilisational encounters, xxxi, 77, 87, 89, 93, 94, 95, 96, 100, 103, 105, 106 international relations, 81, 102, 145 intersubjective, xxiv, 7, 21, 31, 32, 35, 37, 45, 59–60 Japan, 47, 85, 98 Kant, Immanuel, x, xxiv, xxx, 9, 45, 47, 48, 48–51, 53, 54–59, 62, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72n10, 72n15. See also Kantian Kantian, xix, 26, 50, 52, 54, 57, 62, 128, 178n7. See also Kant koinē aisthēsis, 46–47, 48, 54, 57, 59, 60 kōsōryoku, 46, 53. See also imagination Lacan, Jacques, xxvi, 45, 65 language, xix, 6, 26, 27, 32, 35, 37, 39n9, 45, 50, 55–60, 62

185

the law, xxxiii, 3, 65, 111, 119, 121, 122, 127, 128, 129, 131–132, 134–137, 139n4, 140n8, 149–150, 171–172, 174, 176, 178n8. See also legal resentment Lefort, Claude, xxvi, xxvii, xxix, 38n1, 111, 116–117, 118–119, 123, 124, 132, 133, 150, 178n6, 179n18 legal resentment, 134–137 legitimation, xvi, 10, 12–13, 15, 22, 31, 128 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, xxvi, 5, 34, 102 liberal democracy, 137, 145, 147, 148, 152, 153, 157, 159, 165, 180n20 lichtung, 30, 51 Locke, John, 22, 151 magma, 5–8 majoritarianism, xxxii, 133–134 Mannheim, Karl, 9, 10, 39n15. See also Mannheim’s Paradox Mannheim’s Paradox, 10, 14 the market, 15, 32, 80, 83, 84, 128, 130, 154, 155, 175, 177 Marx, Karl, ix, x, xxvi, xxx, 2, 10–11, 22, 151. See also Marxism Marxism, 2, 11, 79, 113, 157, 166 Mauss, Marcel, xxv, 94, 102 meaning of meaning, xxx, 5–6, 27–29, 37 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, xxv–xxvi, xxvii–xxviii, 21, 28–29, 32, 39n8, 40n44, 40n45, 66, 69, 98, 117, 178n6 metaphor, xvi, xviii–xx, 6, 9, 25, 27, 39n14, 50, 62–63, 68, 72n15, 113, 122, 138 Miki Kiyoshi, xxiv, xxvii, 46, 47, 53–54, 60, 63, 65, 71n7, 71n8 Modernities modernity, xxiv, xxviii, xxviii–xxix, xxxi, xxxii, xxxiiin1, 16–17, 18–20, 22, 24, 25, 27, 30, 37, 40n30, 45, 51, 67, 83, 91, 93, 94, 98, 99, 100, 106, 112, 116, 118, 125, 130, 131, 145–158, 148, 151, 152, 154, 157, 158, 159–160, 161, 163, 166, 167, 169, 172, 178n3, 179n9, 179n14 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis, 11, 18, 20, 32, 34, 35 moral order, 20, 22, 23, 66, 84

186

Index

multiple modernities, xxviii, xxx, xxxi, 16–17, 37, 85–93, 100–101, 105, 179n14 myths, xxxi, 19, 22, 23, 27, 63, 88–89, 104, 117 narratives, 19, 22, 23, 27, 63, 64, 98, 125 nation-state, 22, 104, 111, 145, 148, 157, 167, 168, 170, 171–173, 176 neo-liberalism, xxxi–xxxii, 130, 145, 149, 153–157, 163, 173–178, 179n16, 180n22 Nelson, Benjamin, xxxi, 29, 77, 90, 94–96, 100, 105, 107n13 ontological, 5, 79, 80, 94, 95 ontological turn, 1–2, 5, 29, 79 objective spirit, xxx, 1, 20, 24, 32–37, 41n51, 41n52, 41n53 phantasia, xxiv, 48, 60, 71n1 phenomenological, xxiv, xxvi, 2, 3, 6, 9, 28–30, 32, 39n5, 40n46. See also phenomenology; hermeneutical phenomenology, xxvi, xxviii, 39n8, 40n45, 46, 52, 98, 117 philosophical anthropology, 5, 16, 24, 26, 39n10 philosophy, xi, xxiv, xxv, xxvi, xxvii, xxviii, xxix, xxx, xxxii, 1, 5, 27, 34, 37, 45, 47, 50, 60, 67, 71n7, 95, 100, 102, 117, 119, 171, 175 populism, xxxi, xxxii, 115, 129, 131, 132, 133–134, 135, 137, 139, 148, 149, 161 populist, xi, 111–112, 128–134, 135–136, 137, 139, 140n10, 145, 148, 156, 177. See also populism; social imaginary, populist power, xvi, xxviii, xxix, xxx, xxxi, 1, 12, 15, 29, 30, 31–32, 32, 36, 67, 77, 84, 86, 90, 92, 100, 102, 105, 112–113, 114–117, 118, 119, 121, 123, 125, 127, 128, 131, 132, 133–134, 135–136, 137, 138, 146–147, 149, 150–151, 154, 157, 159, 162, 167, 171–172, 175, 176, 178, 179n16 praxis, xxviii, 7, 10–11, 13, 15, 22, 30, 31, 68. See also doing production, 5, 24, 32, 55, 63, 82

project of autonomy, 2, 3, 5, 7, 30, 97–98, 117. See also autonomy presentism, xxxii, 153, 179n18 psyche, 5, 24, 39n7, 39n10, 39n11, 64, 65 psychoanalysis, xi, xxv–xxvi, 1, 37, 39n7, 41n54 public sphere, xxix, 20, 22, 57–58, 83–84, 117, 128, 130, 159, 166, 174, 175 radical imagination, 5, 24, 39n7, 39n10, 64, 65, 69, 118 rational mastery, xxv, xxviii, 4, 123, 124, 125, 126, 129, 152, 177 Reagan, Ronald, 159, 163 real-rational, xxvi, 1, 2–3, 4, 11, 15, 52–54, 65, 115 referent, 7, 10, 15, 24 religion, ix, xii, 3, 15, 18, 37, 102, 106n3, 107n10, 118, 139n4, 147, 160, 178n5 revolution, 12, 18, 27, 84, 85, 89, 91, 92, 121, 128, 136, 138, 139n4, 147, 151, 159, 162, 165, 179n11 Ricoeur, Paul, x, xiii, xvi, xviii–xx, xxn3, xxvii, xxx, 1, 5, 6, 9–16, 24, 24–26, 27–33, 35, 37, 38n2, 39n15, 39n16, 40n35, 41n47, 46–47, 50, 54, 62–63, 65, 66, 67, 68–69, 71n3, 71n5, 72n15, 77, 79, 82–84, 104, 114, 124, 138, 139n3 rights, 116, 119, 123, 128, 129, 135, 136–137, 140n8, 149–150, 154, 156, 163, 165, 168, 170, 171–173, 174–175, 176–177, 178 Romantic, xxix, 24, 40n23, 40n39 rule of law, xxxi, 111, 119, 127, 128, 131, 132, 134–135, 135–136, 137, 139n4 the sacred, 1, 3, 87, 102, 146, 160, 178n5 Sartre, Jean-Paul, xxvi, 9, 52 schematism, 26, 40n38, 49–50, 51, 55–56, 62, 68 secular, xxxiiin1, 18, 20, 27, 40n30, 148, 160, 162, 172. See also secularization secularization, xii, 102 sensus communis, xxxi, 45, 46, 54, 57, 59–60 the social-historical, xxiv, xxvii, 2–3, 5, 6, 24, 28–29, 31, 34, 37, 39n10, 39n11, 64–65, 69, 77–82, 97–98, 100, 102,

Index 103, 104, 107n12, 150 Socialisme ou Barbarie, xxvi, 38n3 social imaginary: capitalist, xxv, xxix, 4, 130, 145; constitutional, xxxi, 111, 114–115, 120, 121, 125–128, 130, 132, 135, 137, 138, 139, 140n8, 140n11, 140n13; cosmopolitan, xi, xxv, xxix, 135, 167; ecological, xi, xxv, xxvii, xxix; feminist, xi, xxix; global, xxix, 92, 145, 148, 167–170; humanitarian, xi, xxiii, 129, 172; nationalist, xi, xxv, xxviii, 19–20, 145, 158; political, xxiii, xxvi, xxix, xxxi–xxxii, 38n1, 111, 112, 112–120, 122, 123, 129, 138, 139n1, 145–178; populist, xi, 111–112, 130–132, 133–134, 137, 139; utopian, xi, xxx, 9–16, 24, 25, 27, 30, 39n13, 40n35, 47, 66, 89 social imaginary frameworks, xv, xvii, xviii, xxiii, xxxiiin1, 1, 9, 31, 35, 37, 38n2, 40n23, 41n53, 83, 86, 93, 100, 106, 138 social imaginaries, xxiv, xxxii, xxxiiin1, 1, 5, 16–37, 38n1, 38n2, 40n23, 40n24, 41n53, 65, 66, 83, 86, 93, 96, 97, 111, 114, 115, 116, 123, 137, 138, 139n1, 139n5 social memory, 32, 39n15, 39n17 social practice, xxiv, 21, 40n43, 124, 174 social practices, xxviii, 19, 21–22, 23, 26, 27, 30, 32, 37, 63, 83 socio-cultural memory, 9, 12 sociology, xxviii, xxxii, 1, 14, 77, 80, 81, 86–91, 93, 94, 96, 100, 102–103, 106n4, 107n10, 122 Soviet Union, 165, 170 Swain, Gladys, 168, 180n21

187

symbolic, x, xi–xiii, xv, xvii, xxn3, xxv–xxvi, xxvii, 1–2, 5, 7, 8–18, 11–12, 13, 15, 22, 27, 38n1, 39n9, 40n43, 45, 62–65, 67, 94, 145, 150, 155, 171 tacit background, 17, 30 Taylor, Charles, xxvii, xxviii, xxx, xxxi, 1, 9, 11–40n30, 16, 16–24, 24, 26, 27, 30, 32–34, 37, 40n24, 40n40, 41n51, 66, 72n16, 77, 82–84, 103, 105, 107n6, 115–116, 123 Taylor, George H., xxvii, 11, 24, 31–32, 39n16, 40n42, 71n5 technocracy, 111, 129, 130, 131, 153, 163 Thatcherism, 159, 179n16 time, xiii, 20–21, 80, 103, 153, 165 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 159, 179n12 trans-subjective, 7, 16, 30–32, 37, 41n49 United States, xxxii, 85, 131, 159–164 utopia, xiii, xvi, xviii, xxvi–xxvii, xxx, 8, 9–10, 14–15, 16, 25, 27, 31, 33, 37, 39n13, 39n16, 40n20, 63, 67–70, 114, 124, 138, 148, 154 Volksgeist, 35, 41n52 Wagner, Peter, xxviii, xxxi, 84, 106n1, 130 Weber, Max, xxviii, 1, 10, 12, 80–81, 86, 94, 102, 106n4, 107n10 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 19, 21, 30, 34, 50 world, x, xiii, xxiii, xxvii, xxx, xxx–xxxi, 3, 4, 6–7, 8, 14, 15, 18, 20, 24, 27–30, 32, 34–35, 37, 40n45, 40n46, 45–47, 48, 50, 51–52, 54, 57, 59, 60, 61–66, 67–70, 71, 79, 89, 95, 98, 100, 119, 125, 129

Notes on Contributors

Suzi Adams is a senior lecturer in the College of the Humanities and Social Sciences (Flinders University), permanent external Fellow of the East-Central Institute for Philosophy (Charles University), and a coordinating editor of the Social Imaginaries journal and book series. She has published widely on the social imaginaries field. She has recently edited the English language publication of the Ricoeur–Castoriadis radio encounter from 1985, with accompanying essays (Castoriadis and Ricoeur in Discussion: On Human Creation, Historical Novelty, and the Social Imaginary [Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017]) and is currently writing a monograph entitled Castoriadis and the Imaginary Element (Rowman & Littlefield International). Paul Blokker is associate professor in political sociology at the Department of Sociology and Business Law, University of Bologna, Italy. He is also research coordinator at the Institute of Sociological Studies, Charles University Prague, Czechia. His research focusses on a sociology of constitutions, constitutional politics, democratic participation and populism. Among his recent publications are: ‘Varieties of Populist Constitutionalism: The Transnational Dimension’, in special issue on ‘Populist Constitutionalism: Varieties, Complexities, and Contradictions’, coedited with Bojan Bugaric and Gábor Halmai, German Law Journal (2019, 20 [3]); Sociological Constitutionalism (edited with Chris Thornhill; 2017); and Constitutional Acceleration within the European Union and Beyond (ed.; 2017). Natalie J. Doyle is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Arts at Monash University (Melbourne, Australia). Doyle has researched for two decades the work of the French political philosopher and historian Marcel Gauchet. She has produced translations of some of his key texts as well as critical commentar189

190

Notes on Contributors

ies. In recent years she has written on the contemporary crisis of the European Union and political radicalisation in the name of Islam. Recent publications include Marcel Gauchet and The Loss of Common Purpose: Imaginary Islam and the Crisis of European Democracy (Lexington Books, 2018) and, coedited with Irfan Ahmad, (Il)liberal Europe: Islamophobia, Modernity and Radicalization (2018). John W. M. Krummel is associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. He has a PhD in philosophy from the New School for Social Research and a PhD in religion from Temple University. He is author of Nishida Kitarō’s Chiasmatic Chorology: Place of Dialectic, Dialectic of Place (2015). His writings on topics such as Heidegger, Nishida, Schürmann, imagination and Buddhist philosophy, among others, have appeared in a variety of philosophy journals and books. He is also the editor of Contemporary Japanese Philosophy: A Reader (Rowman & Littlefield International, forthcoming); co-translator of, and author of the introduction for, Place and Dialectic: Two Essays by Nishida Kitarō (2011); and has translated other works from Japanese and German into English. He is coeditor for the journal Social Imaginaries, assistant editor of The Journal of Japanese Philosophy, and the president of the International Association of Japanese Philosophy. Jeremy C. A. Smith is in the School of Arts at Federation University Australia. He has published in European Journal of Social Theory, Critical Horizons, Journal of Intercultural Studies, Atlantic Studies and Political Power and Social Theory, and is the author of Europe and the Americas: State Formation, Capitalism and Civilizations in Atlantic Modernity (2006) and Debating Civilizations: Interrogating Civilizational Analysis in a Global Age (2017). He is also a coordinating editor of the international journal Social Imaginaries and the Social Imaginaries book series (Rowman & Littlefield International). His current work revolves around civilisational analysis and social imaginaries.