SOCIAL

IMAGINARIES
 SOCIAL IMAGINARIES
Coordinating Editors: Suzi Adams (Flinders
University, Australia); Jeremy Smith (Fed-
eration University Australia, Australia)
Editorial Collective: Suzi Adams (Flinders
University, Australia); Paul Blokker ( Charles
University in Prague, Czech Republic); Nat-
alie Doyle (Monash University, Australia);
John Krummel (Hobart and William Smith
Colleges, USA); Jeremy Smith (Federation
University Australia, Australia).
Editorial Assistants: Erin Carlisle (Flinders
University, Australia); George Sarantoulias
(Flinders University, Australia).
Editors-at-Large: Johann P. Arnason (La Trobe
University, Australia/ Charles University,
Czech Republic); Craig Calhoun (LSE, UK);
Fred Dallmayr (Notre Dame University,
USA); Vincent Descombes (EHESS, France/
University of Chicago, USA); Charles Taylor
(McGill University); George Taylor (Uni-
versity of Pittsburgh, USA); Peter Wagner
(University of Barcelona, Spain); Bernhard
Waldenfels (Bochum University, Germany).
Editorial Advisory Board:  Chiara Bottici (New
School for Social Research, USA); Craig
Browne (University of Sydney, Australia);
Ivan Chvatik (Centre for Theoretical Studies/
Patočka Archives, Czech Republic); Marcel
Gauchet (École des Hautes Études en Sci-
ences Sociales, France); Stathis Gourgouris
(Columbia University, USA); Dick Howard
(Stony Brook University, USA); Wolfgang
Knöbl (Göttingen University); Kwok Ying
Lau (Chinese University of Hong Kong,
China); Karel Novotny (Charles University,
Czech Republic); Mats Rosengren (Söder-
torn University College, Sweden); Hans
Rainer Sepp (Fink Archives, Freiburg Uni-
versity, Germany); Kate Soper (London Met-
ropolitan University, UK); Ingerid Straume
(Oslo University); Ted Toadvine (University
of Oregon, USA); Lubica Ucnik (Murdoch
University, Australia).Erin Carlisle, Flinders
University, AU; George Sarantoulias, Flinders
University, AU
Social Imaginaries is a peer reviewed bi-
annual journal that publishes original articles
from diverse disciplinary constellations. Social
Imaginaries interrogates the presuppositions of
cultural ontologies and instituted configurations
of power. It presupposes an understanding of
society as a political institution, which is formed
— and forms itself — in historical constellations,
on the one hand, and through encounters with
other cultures and civilizational worlds, on the
other. The journal aims to pursue intersecting
debates on forms of meaning, knowledge and
truth as they have been historically instituted
and reconfigured, both within disciplinary
confines and beyond. It reflects on the human
condition in modernity, which, amongst other
things, ought to be centrally concerned with
theoretical elaborations of and responses to
the ecological devastation of the natural world.
Social Imaginaries pursues intersecting debates
on (inter)cultural and historical varieties of
meaning, power and socially instituted worlds,
and is situated within the ongoing, albeit
incomplete, hermeneutical turn in the human
sciences.
Social Imaginaries invites contributions from
social theory, historical sociology, political
philosophy, political theory, phenomenology,
hermeneutics, and, more broadly, cultural
studies, anthropology, geography that criti-
cally advance our understanding of the
human condition in modernity. The journal
is published in May and November each year
by Zeta Books (Bucharest, RO).
Submit an article:
social.imaginaries@zetabooks.com
 SOCIAL
IMAGINARIES
Vol. 1 / Issue 1
¤
Zeta Books, Bucharest
www.zetabooks.com

© 2015 Zeta Books for the present edition.

© 2015 The copyrights to the essays in this volume belong to the authors.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronical or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,
or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from
the publishers.

ISSN: 2393-2503 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-606-697-000-6 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-606-697-001-3 (eBook)
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Social Imaginaries – Volume 1, Issue 1

ARTICLES

Editorial, by the Social Imaginaries Editorial Collective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Social Imaginaries in Debate, by Suzi Adams, Paul Blokker,

Natalie J. Doyle, John W.M. Krummel, and Jeremy C.A. Smith . . . . . . 15

Introduction to Castoriadis’s ‘The Imaginary As Such’,

by Johann P. Arnason . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

The Imaginary As Such, by Cornelius Castoriadis, (translated by

Johann P. Arnason) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

Introduction to Nakamura Yūjirō and his Work,

by John W.M. Krummel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

‘The Logic of Place’ and Common Sense, by Nakamura Yujirō,

(translated by John W.M. Krummel) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83

Interpreting the Present – a Research Programme, by Peter Wagner . . . . . . . . . 105

Johann Arnason on Castoriadis and Modernity: Introduction to

‘The Imaginary Dimensions of Modernity’, by Suzi Adams . . . . . . . . . . . 131

The Imaginary Dimensions of Modernity, by Johann P. Arnason,

(translated by Suzi Adams) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135

Introduction to Marcel Gauchet’s ‘Democracy: From One Crisis

to Another’, by Natalie J. Doyle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
6 Table of contents

Democracy: From One Crisis to Another, by Marcel Gauchet,

(translated by Natalie J. Doyle) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163

Modern Social Imaginaries: A Conversation, by Craig Calhoun,

Dilip Gaonkar, Benjamin Lee, Charles Taylor and Michael Warner
(edited by Dilip Gaonkar) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
Social Imaginaries 1.1 (2015) 7-13

Editorial

The Social Imaginaries Editorial Collective

To think is not to get out of the cave; it is not to replace the uncertainty of shadows
by the clear-cut outlines of things themselves, the flame’s flickering glow by the
light of the true Sun. To think is to enter the Labyrinth; more exactly it is to make
be and appear a Labyrinth when we might have stayed ‘lying among the flowers,
facing the sky’ [Rilke]. It is to lose oneself amidst galleries which exist only because
we never tire of digging them; to turn round and round at the end of a cul-de-sac
whose entrance has been shut off behind us—until, inexplicably, this spinning
round opens up in the surrounding walls cracks which offer passage (Castoriadis
1984, pp. x-xi).

The cover chosen by Social Imaginaries—a field of intersecting laby-

rinths—was inspired by this quotation from Cornelius Castoriadis’s 1977
preface to his Crossroads in the Labyrinth (published in English in 1984). In
this text Castoriadis takes up the myth of Daedalus’s labyrinth as a way of
positing an alternative to Plato’s Cave. He draws on the labyrinth metaphor
to rethink reason, thought, truth, social creation, social doing, and the things
themselves.
Labyrinths are human creations: in exploring them we simultaneously cre-
ate new, interconnecting corridors to negotiate. We come to know their truth
in fragments, through articulation, problematisation, and debate. What Cas-
toriadis called ‘thoughtful doing’ is indispensable to such a task; from this,
new worlds—and counter worlds—can emerge. Such concerns are central to
the overall project of Social Imaginaries.
Social Imaginaries is a peer-refereed, interdisciplinary journal that inquires
into complexes of social meaning and cultural projects of power. It is con-
cerned to debate the intertwined problematics of modernity, multiple moder-
nities, and the human condition. It presupposes an understanding of society
as a political institution, which is formed—and forms itself—in historical con-
stellations, on the one hand, and through encounters with other cultures and
civilisational worlds, on the other.
The labyrinth extends globally and in the first instance this international
scope is reflected in the journal itself as its Editors are located in three differ-
ent continents: North America, Australia, and Europe. In addition, several
members of our Editors-at-Large and of the broader Editorial Collective are
scholars with links to East Asia, an important region of interest to the journal.
8 Editorial

Whilst the composition of the journal’s editorial team echoes the geo-
graphical, horizontal extension of the labyrinth, the diversity of the texts it
publishes echoes yet another dimension: the thematic. The labyrinth opens
onto the interplay of many different social imaginaries and associated prob-
lematics across and within different cultural and civilisational horizons.

Why Social Imaginaries?

The scope and aims of Social Imaginaries fill an important gap in current
international debates. The journal’s emphasis on ‘imaginaries’ provides a ma-
jor point of difference from other public fora. The term ‘social imaginaries’
points to several interrelated trends of a major shift in the humanities and so-
cial sciences (explored in greater depth in the first essay of this issue) towards
a new approach to the question of modernity. First, it reveals the modern
concern with—and emphasis on—the imagination as creative and no longer
only reproductive, or fictive; as such, forms of social creativity are seen as the
workings of the creative imagination. Second, social imaginaries highlight the
phenomenon of collectively instituted meaning and its inter-cultural varia-
tions. Third, foregrounding ‘imaginaries’ provides a corrective to a one sided
focus on ‘reason’ as the central tenet (or promise) of modernity. Finally, the
elaboration of ‘social imaginaries’ underscores the ongoing, albeit incomplete,
hermeneutical turn in the human sciences. Thus instead of focusing on the
singular ‘imagination’ or ‘reason’ as a faculty of the individual, it seeks rather
to emphasise the constitutive elements of socio-cultural ‘reality’, such as ‘so-
cial imaginaries’ and ‘forms of rationality’. The more sophisticated versions
of such theoretical frameworks, however, do not reject reason tout court, but
rather do justice to the competing versions of ‘worldhood’ offered by Enlight-
enment and Romantic currents whose conflicting, co-existing interpretations
partially structure modernity.
In brief, socio-cultural contexts of worldhood, imagination, reason and
civilisational forms point to the need for a cultural hermeneutic of moder-
nity (and ‘multiple modernities’). Modernity is not self-grounding but rath-
er grounded in relation to a variety of ‘others’, including classical antiquity,
inter-cultural others, inter-civilisational others, and intra-cultural constella-
tions. Within this context, Social Imaginaries is concerned to elucidate the
trans-subjective, or a-subjective, aspect of cultural meaning, action and power
as the precondition for inter-subjective modes of being-in-the-world. Social
Imaginaries is therefore concerned with the comparative analysis of civilisa-
tions and concomitant elaboration of world histories. The comparative analy-
sis of civilisations, however, has yet to fully assimilate the hermeneutical turn.
There are as a result grounds for further elaboration and clarification, at the
interstices of philosophy and social theory, of the central problems of civilisa-
tional analysis. Social Imaginaries then aims to be a forum for contributions to
 Editorial 9

what Johann P. Arnason characterises as a ‘paradigm in the making’. In this,

the journal locates itself within the broad constellation of the human sciences
as opposed to the more conventional division of labour between the social sci-
ences and the humanities. And thus it seeks to foster disciplinary rigour with
an interdisciplinary disposition (we elaborate further on these problematics in
our collective article in this issue).
Philosophically, Social Imaginaries draws on the resources of phenomenol-
ogy and hermeneutics. The journal understands phenomenology as a move-
ment broader than its self-labelling turn with Husserl. The journal particu-
larly seeks to emphasise those currents of phenomenology that move beyond
a philosophy of consciousness, and welcomes phenomenological perspectives
that open onto the problematisation of society, culture, politics, history and
anthropology, on the one hand, as well as contributions that interrogate the
lines of continuity and discontinuity between anthropos and nature on the
other. It invites contributions that offer an alternative to deconstruction and
post-modernism, or that elaborate phenomenology as an hermeneutical en-
deavour, as well as perspectives that build bridges with analytic philosophy,
particularly concerning ‘the meaning of meaning’.
Social Imaginaries reflects on questions of contemporary politics and the
political, including in relation to the construction of the economic. The recent
trend in civic disengagement in Western societies has resulted from the rise
to dominance of a new social imaginary that expresses itself in the ideologies
of neo-liberalism. These individualistic ideologies have masked the profound
crisis that now affects Western modernity in its specific relationship to the
natural world. In Asia, distinct ‘new modernities’ (to invoke Jan Pieterse) have
been able to navigate past global downturns by way of responsive institutional
constellations and flexible political economic strategies, and hint at the pos-
sibility of alternative experiences with political and economic modernity. As
East Asia is deeply affected by the economic dimension of the crisis, it is also
confronted with the environmental implications of its projects of modernisa-
tion which are, in part, inspired by the experience of the West. The theoretical
response to this exhaustion of the central imaginary significations of moder-
nity, including ‘postmodern’ cultural studies, has failed to articulate the full
significance of the crisis, counter the loss of collective vision, and inspire a
new political imaginary. There is thus an urgent need to find new theoretical
approaches and interpretative frameworks that can re-assert the capacity of
human societies for political autonomy and at the same time conceptualise its
fundamental connection to the natural world.
The journal is thus distinct in concerning itself not only with the constitu-
tion of worldhood and history, but also with the neglected other of the social:
nature. Beyond current debates concerning the environment, the journal will
pursue questions that interrogate the images of nature underpinning these
accounts and the various imaginaries of nature. Modernity has seen the realm
10 Editorial

of history invested with meaning, whilst concomitantly the kosmos has been
stripped of inherent significance. Social Imaginaries aims to interrogate the
lines of continuity and discontinuity drawn between the human and non-
human world. In so doing, the cultural images of nature intersect with the
cultural projects of power concerning nature, and here new forms of ecologi-
cal worldhood and environmental movements come into focus and a com-
parative and intercultural approach becomes a necessity.
In sum, Social Imaginaries aims to pursue intersecting debates on forms of
meaning, knowledge and truth as they have been historically instituted and
reconfigured, both within disciplinary confines and beyond. It seeks to eluci-
date ‘the world in fragments’, and, in demanding the continued problematisa-
tion of existing horizons, the journal, as symbolised by Castoriadis’s labyrinth,
refuses ultimate closure.
Social Imaginaries therefore invites contributions from social theory, his-
torical sociology, political philosophy, political theory, and, more broadly, an-
thropology, cultural and social geography, and phenomenology. Although the
journal will publish English language manuscripts, we shall also occasionally
translate significant essays from a variety of other languages, European and
Asian.
In its diversity and geographical scope, the first issue illustrates the jour-
nal’s ambition.
We open this issue with the programmatic essay Social Imaginaries in De-
bate by the Editorial Collective that scopes the field of social imaginaries qua
interdisciplinary field. As well as constituting a major statement of the field’s
coalescence, Adams et al contend that the theoretical frames underlying social
imaginaries are inherently pluralistic, with the contributions by Castoriadis,
Ricoeur and Taylor constituting its core, and argue that social imaginaries
as a mode of analysis of contemporary phenomena involves reconceptualisa-
tion of social formations as politically-instituted collectivities. Furthermore,
emergence of the field expands an understanding of the imagination from
a singular faculty of the individual (counter-posed to reason) to an under-
standing of multiple collective imaginaries and rationalities that are creative
as well as reproductive. The essay bears this out in a history of the imagina-
tion before turning to specific contemporary imaginaries and problems of the
human condition, including ecology, political-economic modes of life and
inter-civilisational encounters. In all these respects, Adams et al. cast the field
as a paradigm-in-the-making that is strengthened by a diversity of perspec-
tives. Thus constituted as a rich terrain for debates, they contend that ‘social
imaginaries’ stretch beyond critiques of current social practices and towards
the elucidation of movements for social change.
We are excited to publish the first English translation of Cornelius Casto-
riadis’s The Imaginary as Such. He wrote it in the late 1960s, and envisaged it
as the introduction to his ultimately unfinished work, The Imaginary Element.
 Editorial 11

The below excerpt was published posthumously. The Imaginary as Such pro-
vides a reflection on anthropological preconditions that seeks to avoid the
errors of Husserl and Heidegger, on the one hand, and of foundationalism,
on the other. Castoriadis clearly understands the imaginary as elemental to
the human condition. He emphasises the imaginary both as human activity
(as social doing) and as a dimension of human existence (as representation);
this dual emphasis was gradually marginalised in his later works. Of particular
note, is his consideration of the imaginary dimension of language.
The essay, ‘The Logic of Place’ and Common Sense by Nakamura Yūjirō
represents one significant current in contemporary Japanese philosophy and
social thought. Originally a 1983 lecture Nakamura gave at the Collège in-
ternational de philosophie in Paris, the essay discusses the ‘logic of place’ as
developed by the Kyoto School founder Nishida Kitarō in connection with
Nakamura’s own theory of common sense, while tying both to the ‘logic of the
imagination’ developed by another important Japanese thinker Miki Kiyoshi.
Nakamura here calls ‘common sense’ the faculty constitutive of the horizon
of meaning, thinking and acting, within a society through the integration of
the senses and its intimate connections to place in its various significances.
There is an overlap in meaning here with the creative imagination. By tying
the three concepts of common sense, place, and imagination together, Na-
kamura suggests an alternative to the modern Cartesian standpoint that has
formed the paradigm of Western modernity but has led to a certain crisis. His
understanding of the way they work to construct a meaningful picture of the
world interestingly resonates with contemporary developments of the concept
of the social imaginary.
Peter Wagner’s contribution Interpreting the Present – A Research Programme
explicates and further expands Wagner’s historical sociology of modernity, also
by moving beyond European experiences. His sociological endeavour stresses
the way in which current social practices are experienced and interpreted by
the human beings who enact them as parts of a common world that they
inhabit together, drawing attention to the significance of world interpreta-
tions. Wagner’s focus in this essay is in particular on how the dismantling
of ‘organised modernity’ since the 1970s involves rather radical attempts at
erasure of historical time and lived space. But this period has equally seen
the emergence of reactions in the form of a variety of re-interpretations of
modernity, attempting at re-constituting spatiality and temporality, without,
however, overcoming tensions and imbalance, informing an ongoing struggle
over the interpretation of the present.
Johann P. Arnason’s essay The Imaginary Dimensions of Modernity: Beyond
Marx and Weber continues his critical dialogue with Castoriadis’s thought. It
focuses on Castoriadis’s notion of social imaginary significations—in partic-
ular, of ‘autonomy’ and the ‘unlimited expansion of rational mastery’ as the
dual institution of modernity—and reflects on their connections to—and
12 Editorial

critique of—Marx and Weber’s intellectual projects. The key part of his es-
say develops an interpretation of Castoriadis’s understanding of modernity
as post-liberal and post-Marxist, through a greater focus on the historicising
of autonomy and rational mastery in modernity, especially in relation to
capitalism and democracy. In a post-script written especially for this publi-
cation, Arnason emphasises the importance of Gauchet’s thought (for which
Castoriadis was an important intellectual source) for a deeper understand-
ing of historical projects of autonomy and their links to the human condi-
tion in modernity.
Marcel Gauchet is today considered as one of France’s leading intellectu-
als. Yet, only two of his books, and a small number of articles, have ever been
published in English. Social Imaginaries is happy to publish the first English
translation of the programmatic text, La Démocratie d’une crise à l’autre. Pub-
lished in 2007 the text presents a synthesis of Gauchet’s latest project, an
intellectually ambitious theory of the historical genesis of liberal democracy,
of which three volumes have yet been published in French. This dense and
rich text speaks to the contemporary crisis of Western democracy whose para-
doxical character Gauchet interprets though the lens of his earlier theory of
‘religious disenchantment’, a theory considerably developed and refined over
the last three decades. Whilst Gauchet does not actually use the term imagi-
nary, his understanding of modernity is informed by an understanding of
human societies that stresses their political self-institution and their essentially
cultural foundations. In his interpretation of the crisis of western societies he
advocates the need for greater ‘thoughtful doing’ in the pursuit of democracy
which he defines as self-reflexive historicity.
The roundtable discussion Modern Social Imaginaries: A Conversation re-
sumes a dialogue from 1999 amongst Craig Calhoun, Dilip Gaonkar, Benja-
min Lee, Charles Taylor and Michael Warner (published in 2002 as a special
issue of Public Culture on New Imaginaries). The initial dialogue and this itera-
tion test the boundaries of established conceptions of the imaginary and the
imagination in the wake of Taylor’s well-known Modern Social Imaginaries.
In a wide-ranging debate, the discussants interrogate existing conceptions of
ecology, risk, the limits of normativity and market cultures by reconfiguring
meaning and social and cultural practices in relation to social imaginaries. In
doing so, they question the finite number of social imaginaries and bring into
consideration deeper notions of a ‘risk imaginary’, an ‘ecological imaginary’
and a ‘market imaginary’. At the same time the discussion begins to clarify
social imaginaries in relation to culture, power, religiosity, representation and
simultaneity. Throughout the debate, the exchanges acquire a distinctly socio-
logical accent in the form of urban geographies that are probed for instantia-
tions of modern social imaginaries. Ending with problems of climate change
and the amplification of global risk enveloping ‘a community of fate’, the
 Editorial 13

discussion remains necessarily open to further elaboration. The Editorial Col-

lective made a decision not to align the roundtable discussion with the Social
Imaginaries Harvard referencing system in order to maintain a smooth flow of
the text of the discussion. Consequently there are no in-text references and all
references are in endnotes.

Acknowledgments

Some of the translated articles that appear in this issue were originally
published elsewhere. We would like to acknowledge Monash University for
funding towards the copyright fee for the translation of Cornelius Casto-
riadis’s The Imaginary as Such. Permission to translate Cornelius Castoriadis
‘The Imaginary as Such’ was granted by Hermann Editions and we would
like to thank Hermann Editions accordingly. ‘The Logic of Place’ and Com-
mon Sense by Nakamura Yūjirō appeared as a chapter in Nakamura’s book,
Nishida Kitarō no datsukōchiku (Deconstruction of Nishida Kitarō), in 1987
and again in its new edition, retitled Nishida Kitarō vol. 2, in 2001, both
published by Iwanami Shoten. We would like to thank Iwanami Shoten
publishers for arranging the copyright permission to publish the work in
English. We also thank Hobart and William Smith Colleges for providing a
Faculty Research Grant to the translator (John W.M. Krummel) to fund the
copyright. The Imaginary Dimensions of Modernity was an unpublished essay
written in French by Johann P. Arnason and it is published here for the first
time. We thank Johann P. Arnason for permission to translate and publish
the essay. Democracy: From One Crisis to Another by Marcel Gauchet was
published in 2007 as a booklet entitled La Démocratie d’une crise à l’autre,
published by Cécile Defaut. We are grateful to Marcel Gauchet for allowing
us to translate the piece into English.
The Editorial Collective would like to acknowledge generous financial
support for the journal provided by the Faculty of Education and Arts at
Federation University Australia, and Hobart and William Smith Colleges of
Geneva, New York, USA to cover production/publication costs. We are grate-
ful to these institutions for their kind support for our project.
We would also like to thank Ingerid Straume for her enthusiasm and
thoughtful doing in developing the Social Imaginaries project as part of the
Editorial Collective in its early stages, and Johann P. Arnason and Craig Cal-
houn for their enduring and significant intellectual support of our project.
We would further like to thank John McGowan for his kind assistance and
encouragement of the project. And the Editorial Collective would like to ac-
knowledge John Adams and to thank him for his time and the astute legal
advice that he provided in the early planning stages of the journal.
Social Imaginaries 1.1 (2015) 15-52

Social Imaginaries in Debate

Suzi Adams, Paul Blokker, Natalie J. Doyle,
John W.M. Krummel and Jeremy C.A. Smith

Abstract: Investigations into social imaginaries have burgeoned in recent

years. From ‘the capitalist imaginary’ to the ‘democratic imaginary’, from
the ‘ecological imaginary’ to ‘the global imaginary’ – and beyond – the social
imaginaries field has expanded across disciplines and beyond the academy.
The recent debates on social imaginaries and potential new imaginaries reveal
a recognisable field and paradigm-in-the-making. We argue that Castoriadis,
Ricoeur, and Taylor have articulated the most important theoretical frame-
works for understanding social imaginaries, although the field as a whole re-
mains heterogeneous. We further argue that the notion of social imaginaries
draws on the modern understanding of the imagination as authentically cre-
ative (as opposed to imitative). We contend that an elaboration of social imag-
inaries involves a significant, qualitative shift in the understanding of societies
as collectively and politically-(auto)instituted formations that are irreducible
to inter-subjectivity or systemic logics. After marking out the contours of the
field and recounting a philosophical history of the imagination (including
deliberations on the reproductive and creative imaginations, as well as consid-
eration of contemporary Japanese contributions), the essay turns to debates on
social imaginaries in more concrete contexts, specifically political-economic
imaginaries, the ecological imaginary, multiple modernities and their inter-
civilisational encounters. The social imaginaries field imparts powerful mes-
sages for the human sciences and wider publics. In particular, social imagi-
naries hold significant implications for ontological, phenomenological and
philosophical anthropological questions; for the cultural, social, and political
horizons of contemporary worlds; and for ecological and economic phenom-
ena (including their manifest crises). The essay concludes with the argument
that social imaginaries as a paradigm-in-the-making offers valuable means by
which movements towards social change can be elucidated as well providing
an open horizon for the critiques of existing social practices.

Key Words: Social imaginaries – Cornelius Castoriadis – Paul Ricoeur – Charles

Taylor – political imaginaries – creative imagination – economic imaginaries –
ecological imaginaries – multiple modernities – civilisational analysis
16 Suzi Adams, Paul Blokker, Natalie J. Doyle

Introduction

Our approach to the emergent field of social imaginaries involves two sig-
nificant moves. The first is to recognise that debates on social imaginaries have
progressed to the point where it is possible to distinguish an overall ‘field’ that
address central problematics of social and political life. The vitality of the field
can be attributed in some part to the variety of intellectual sources informing
it, as well as to the richness of those sources. We understand the works of Cor-
nelius Castoriadis, Paul Ricoeur, and Charles Taylor to be the cornerstones of
the field. This very diversity of approaches becomes a basis for further reflec-
tion and debate on the theoretical articulation of social imaginaries; indeed,
the social imaginaries field has been enriched through its very heterogeneity.
Subsequently, it has become possible to discuss ecological, global or cosmo-
politan and other emergent imaginaries – as, for example, the participants in
the roundtable discussion on modern social imaginaries in the current issue
do (Calhoun et al. 2015).
The second move is to argue that the emergence of social imaginaries as a
‘paradigm-in-the-making’, to borrow a term from Johann P. Arnason, marks
a qualitative shift in the way that social, cultural and political phenomena are
understood and problematised. Investigations into social imaginaries redefine
overarching ontological, epistemological and anthropological problematics,
on the one hand, as well as concrete political and social questions, on the
other. The key interpretative frameworks encountered within the social imagi-
naries field provide rich, non-reductive understandings of the multi-faceted
aspects of contemporary worlds. Explorations of social imaginaries comprise
inquiries not only into horizons of cultural meaning that fundamentally shape
each society (and civilisational complex), but also into their further articula-
tion as instituted (and instituting) cultural projects of power and social doing.
Most approaches in the field presuppose an understanding of society as a
political institution, which is formed – and forms itself – in historical constel-
lations, on the one hand, and through encounters with other cultures and
civilisational worlds, on the other.
Furthermore, explorations of social imaginaries are centrally concerned
with at least ten interrelated trends. First, social imaginaries emphasise the
properly social aspect of the imagination instead of reducing it to a faculty
of the individual mind. This is the difference between ‘the imaginary’ and
‘the imagination’ (concomitantly, this can be extended to the difference be-
tween ‘rationality’ and ‘reason’). This shift can be understood as central to the
ongoing, albeit incomplete, hermeneutical turn in the human sciences. Sec-
ond, social imaginaries grasp the imagination as authentically creative rather
than as merely reproductive or imitative. This, third, involves a shift from a
one-sided focus on ‘reason’ as the central tenet (or promise) of modernity,
and instead posits modernity as a field of tensions co-instituted by cultural
 Social Imaginaries in Debate 17

varieties of imaginaries and rationalities. This is not to say, fourth, that reason
is rejected; indeed, the more sophisticated theoretical approaches to social
imaginaries also do justice to varieties of rationality and public reason. In this
vein, the practice of logon didonai remains central to all forms of thoughtful
doing and philosophical elucidation. Fifth, modernity’s constitutive tension
between reason and imagination is best elucidated as competing versions of
‘worldhood’ offered by Enlightenment and Romantic cultural currents. Ex-
tending this further, sixth, the question of the varieties of worldhood – and/
or world alienation – in modernity (and multiple modernities) becomes a
problematic in its own right. The problematic of the world has been a long
standing theme of phenomenology, and is an emergent theme in recent socio-
political thought. In taking up the phenomenological question of the world,
approaches to social imaginaries open onto interrogations of the ontological
and anthropological pre-conditions of human modes of being in-the-world.
Seventh, social imaginaries focus on collectively instituted – and instituting
– forms of meaning. Because meaning is social (and not reducible to inter-
subjectivity), this involves an elucidation of the properly trans-subjective as-
pect of socio-cultural activity – in the form of meaning, action, and power
– as the precondition for inter-subjective modes of being-in-the-world. The
trans-subjective aspect of society is what Castoriadis terms the anonymous col-
lective, and is matched to an understanding of the world as an overarching,
trans-objective horizon. In this way, the main approaches to social imaginaries
radicalise the critique of the subject/object division that was central to early
phenomenological analyses by extending it to the properly societal dimension
of the human condition. Eighth, social imaginaries – as cultural articulations
of the world – elucidate cultures (in the anthropological not aesthetic sense) as
open rather than closed. In this way, a richer understanding of human societ-
ies’ encounter not only with other cultures and civilisations, but also with the
world can be developed. The human encounter with the world requires it to
be put into meaning (as world formation). Such approaches posit a minimum
commonality to the human condition writ large but emphasise its historical
diversity as distinct civilizational articulations of the world. This allows for the
human condition to be understood as a unity in a plurality, whilst the accent
on the twofold aspect of meaning (its ‘sociality’ and ‘worldhood’) necessi-
tates a rethinking of philosophical anthropological notions of culture beyond
socio-centric reductionism (c.f. Arnason 1993; Adams 2011a). In this way,
social imaginaries lends itself to analyses of the human condition in its inter-
cultural and inter-civilisational varieties, on the one hand, and to comparative
civilisational analyses of formations and encounters, on the other. Ninth, as
social imaginaries takes society to be a political institution, it emphasises the
situated nature and collective forms of social interaction, in particular regard-
ing democratic politics and the capitalist market economy, whilst, in a related
vein, tenth, it does not reduce analyses of social formations and projects of
18 Suzi Adams, Paul Blokker, Natalie J. Doyle

power to normative considerations alone. This is closely related to the neces-

sity of strengthening debates on political (understood in Castoriadis’s strong
sense of ‘la politique’), and not just ethical responses to our current world
situation (including crises of the environment, democracy and the capitalist
market imaginary). Thus, in problematising the human condition in moder-
nity (and indeed the many modernities of our times) in light of the above
inter-related trends, interpretations of social imaginaries constitute a powerful
field of debate.
We begin this essay by reconstructing the most important theoretical ar-
ticulations of social imaginaries, and then contextualising them within the
broader field. The modern understanding of the imagination as authentically
creative is one of the pre-conditions for contemporary elucidations of social
imaginaries; in this context, we then take measure of the philosophical history
of the imagination. Following on from that, we concretise our discussion by
investigating key approaches to political, democratic, economic and ecologi-
cal imaginaries. We conclude with an outline of the common ground between
the fields of social imaginaries and civilisational analysis.

I. Theorising Social Imaginaries

The social imaginaries field is very heterogeneous. There are a number of
possible reasons for this: there is a range of intellectual sources and currents
that inform debates on social imaginaries, but specific perspectives tend to be
advanced without real acknowledgment of – or engagement with – this diver-
sity, and the concomitant field of tensions that it engenders. These intellec-
tual sources range from the sociological tradition, beginning with Durkheim’s
(1976 [1912]) notion of collective representations (as distinct from the collective
conscience) and including Benedict Anderson’s (1991 [1983]) neo-Durkheim-
ian approach to imagined communities, to (especially Francophone) phenom-
enological currents of thought, articulated, for example, in Sartre’s (1962,
1966 [1944]) distinction between the imaginary and the imagination, and
in Merleau-Ponty’s hesitations about the mode of being of the imaginary in
his later work, to approaches influenced by hermeneutic-phenomenological
problematics, such as the three thinkers under consideration here: Ricoeur’s
(1986) work on the social imaginary of ideology and utopia, Taylor’s (2004)
post-Merleau-Pontian understanding of the background horizon of meaning,
and Castoriadis’s (1987 [1975]) critical engagement with Merleau-Pontian –
and to a lesser extent, Sartrean – approaches to the (social) imaginary. Lacan’s
legacy for social imaginaries is mixed but cannot be ignored. He brought the
term ‘imaginary’ into common academic parlance (as part of his tripartite
understanding of psychical structures: the symbolic/the imaginary/the real),
but his articulation of the imaginary can also be seen as a psychoanalytic re-
sponse to Sartre’s earlier elucidation of the imaginary and the imagination
 Social Imaginaries in Debate 19

(Lacan 1977). Some thinkers who are associated with the social imaginar-
ies field, however, especially those who work more explicitly in relation to
political imaginaries (such as Claude Lefort or Ernesto Laclau and Chantal
Mouffe) fruitfully engage with aspects of his thought. Here it is instructive
to note the importance of Freud for Ricoeur and Castoriadis’s respective un-
derstandings of the creative imagination in relation to dreams and meaning,
but strictly speaking the psychical domain is quite separate from the region
of social imaginaries, and thus is of lesser relevance in the present context. Fi-
nally, historical interpretations of ideology have been linked to the imaginary
(and more broadly, the symbolic) and this has been influential for the social
imaginaries field, for example, in Ricoeur (1986) and Lefort’s (1986) thought.
This essay identifies the three most significant articulations of social imagi-
naries to be those by Cornelius Castoriadis (1987), Paul Ricoeur (1986), and
Charles Taylor (2004), respectively. Castoriadis had been writing on social
imaginary significations since the mid-1950s; his ‘first attempt’1 at systemati-
cally elucidating social imaginaries occurred in the mid-1960s (although his
preferred term is social imaginary significations); and his mature elucidation of
social imaginary significations – and his concomitant turn to ontology – be-
gan from the early 1970s. These two attempts were published in his magnum
opus, L’Institution imaginaire de la société in 1975. In the same year, Ricoeur
presented two series of seminars at Chicago University. The first was his now
famous lectures on ideology and utopia (1986), which comprise the two poles
of the cultural imagination; the other seminar series was on the philosophy of
the imagination, more generally.2 Ricoeur used the term social imaginary un-
systematically; he more often employed concepts, such as ‘ideology’, ‘utopia’,
or ‘cultural imagination’ to refer to these ‘practical fictions’. The actual term
social imaginaries was popularised almost three decades later with the publica-
tion of Charles Taylor’s Modern Social Imaginaries (2002, 2004); here Taylor
was influenced by Branislow Baczko’s earlier work (1984; c.f. Abbey 2006).
Each of the above mentioned three thinkers anchored his account of social
imaginaries in understandings of the modern imagination as both creative and
social, although the contrasts between them cannot be overstated (we return
to the philosophical question of the imagination in the next section below).
Put simply, theories of social imaginaries elucidate the ways in which cul-
tural configurations of meaning creatively configure the human encounter
with – and formation (as articulation and doing) of – the world, on the one
hand, and, articulate their centrality for the emergence, formation and re-
production of social institutions and practices, that is, of social change and
social continuity, on the other. To paraphrase Castoriadis: society itself is an
imaginary institution. A central innovation of the social imaginaries field has
been to connect the formation of meaning to the creative imagination (or
more specifically: to the imaginary element). It is important to note, how-
ever, that social imaginaries are irreducible to meaning alone. The three main
20 Suzi Adams, Paul Blokker, Natalie J. Doyle

approaches to social imaginaries identified herein variously incorporate other

dimensions of the human condition as well, such as power, action/social do-
ing, and/ or institutions.
The emphasis on the imagination is in sharp contrast to the more conven-
tional focus placed on the import of reason/rationality for modernity. Indeed,
the tension between reason and imagination is central to the institution of
cultural modernity (and understandings of the human condition within it).
One of the key aspects of the modern imagination is that it is understood to
be fundamentally and authentically creative (or productive) – not just repro-
ductive or imitative (we return to a more detailed discussion of the history
of the imagination below). More specifically, social imaginaries highlight the
imaginary element of the human condition instead of the imagination as a
faculty of the singular human being. As Arnason has argued, the still partial
shift to the imaginary is to be understood as an ongoing but incomplete her-
meneutical shift from the imagination to the imaginary and, concomitantly,
from reason to rationality. It is worth quoting him in full on this point:

To shift our notions of reason and imagination in this direction would be to

relate them more closely to the constitution and appropriation of meaning to
patterns of world-interpretation, and to the space that is thus opened up for
interpretative conflicts. More specifically, the hermeneutical transformation
referred to above would entail a revision of dominant preconceptions: if we
still tend to think of reason and imagination primarily as abilities or compe-
tences – reason as the ability to ground and justify to find and give reasons
imagination as the ability to envisage and fantasise to grasp and generate im-
ages – we may have to learn to think of them as dimension or elements (in the
sense that Bachelard, Merleau-Ponty and Castoriadis have given to the term
‘element’) i.e. as aspects or component of culture more precisely of the cultural
articulations of the world (Arnason 1994, p. 155).

Clearly Arnason is working towards a cultural hermeneutics but one that is

grafted onto phenomenology; specifically, a post-transcendental phenomenol-
ogy that takes the problematic of the world horizon in its trans-subjective/
trans-objective interlacing, as a question in its own right.

Despite the richness of their accounts – and the rapid proliferation of

the social imaginaries field, more broadly – scant attention has been given
to critical comparisons of Castoriadis, Ricoeur and Taylor’s perspectives on
social imaginaries. There are very few exceptions: Graham Ward (2005) has
given an overview of their respective approaches to social imaginaries in re-
lation to cultural change and religious practice; Johann Michel (2013) has
recently brought Castoriadis and Ricoeur into dialogue on the question of
social imaginaries and institutions; Suzi Adams (2011) has discussed the re-
spective approaches of Ricoeur and Castoriadis to creation and interpretation
 Social Imaginaries in Debate 21

(2011b); Karl Smith (2010) has compared Castoriadis and Taylor’s accounts
of subjectivity and the self in modernity, but his focus was not social imagi-
naries per se; Meili Steele (2003) has critically discussed Taylor and Ricoeur’s
approaches to language and narrative, but, again, the question of social imagi-
naries was not the central concern. On a more general level, Claudia Strauss’s
(2006) rather one sided account of ‘the imaginary’ includes a discussion of
Castoriadis and Taylor but her interest in psychological aspects precludes a
constructive engagement with key tenants of the social imaginaries field. John
Grant (2014) has recently criticised the ‘imaginaries’ field for neglecting the
properly political dimension, but he focuses only on three North American
accounts, reduces Castoriadis to a footnote, and excludes mention of Ricoeur
altogether, which is perplexing given Ricoeur and Castoriadis’s central grap-
pling with various aspects of socio-political imaginaries with which Grant
concerns himself (we return to the question of political imaginaries, below).
There is, however, a very interesting, albeit indirect, encounter on the ques-
tion of the social imaginary to be found in eminent Ricoeur scholar, Richard
Kearney’s interview with Charles Taylor (Kearney and Taylor 2007). There is
moreover a record of a direct encounter between Ricoeur and Castoriadis in
1982 on Radio France (Culture).3 Whilst this discussion focussed more on
the question of the imagination as creative/ productive/ interpretative, it also
touches on issues concerning social imaginaries.Each of the three theorists
under consideration clearly emphasises the importance of the imaginary di-
mension for the human condition (in modernity), but they do so in different
ways. We shift our attention now to consider each in turn.
Castoriadis’s mature work elucidates social imaginary significations in on-
tological terms. The social-historical as the radical imaginary of instituting
society, creates a world of meaning – as, in, and through social imaginary
significations – ex nihilo, through and as which we encounter/institute ‘real-
ity’. This forms the background horizon for the configuration of key institu-
tions of each society. He writes: ‘The institution of society is in each case the
institution of a magma of social imaginary significations, which we can and
must call a world of significations’ (Castoriadis 1987, p. 359; emphasis in
original). Social imaginary significations ‘create a proper world for the society
considered – in fact, they are this world’ (1994, p. 152, emphasis in original;
see also Castoriadis’s contribution to this issue: Castoriadis 2015). Castoria-
dis’s shift to ontology in the early 1970s was in order to elucidate the mode
of being underlying collective autonomy (particularly in the form of direct
democracy) as self-creating, and, simultaneously, as a critique of theories of
society that reduce it to frameworks of determinacy, such as systemic logics.
After his critique of Marx, Castoriadis reactivated ancient Greek images of di-
rect democracy – that is, a society that understands itself to be self-instituting
and as such does not attribute its form, laws, culture and customs to an extra-
social source, such as God, and that recognises the need to institute collective
22 Suzi Adams, Paul Blokker, Natalie J. Doyle

self-limitation – in his rethinking of the project of autonomy. On his account,

the ancient Greeks created – brought into being – democracy as a new form
(eidos) of society. This has weighty ontological implications: human societies
create ontological form. Castoriadis’s ontology is thus, as Dick Howard (1988)
has termed it, a political ontology, properly understood. If autonomy was Cas-
toriadis’s enduring political project (he identified as a revolutionary long after
his critique of Marx and the disbanding of Socialisme ou Barbarie), then the is-
sue of human creation was his most enduring philosophical problematic. The
previously noted modern tension between imagination and reason plays out
on the ontological level for Castoriadis. His ontology of the radical imaginary
as instituting society forms a key part of his critique of the presuppositions of
traditional western philosophy, specifically the understanding of being as de-
terminacy and identitary logic (or as he called it ensemblistic-identitary logic).
In this he is part of a broad current of thought that critiques the metaphysics
of presence, along with thinkers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida.
Central to understanding Castoriadis’s approach to social imaginary signi-
fications is his connection between time and creation, on the one hand, and
time as social-historical time, on the other. In brief this refers to his rejection
of time as quantitative and measurable (the ‘spatialisation of time’, as he calls
it) and the development of a qualitative notion of time as the social-historical
auto-creation of ontological otherness, as the emergence of new forms – such
as the ancient Greek creation of democracy – and the rejection of ‘abstract
time’ as devoid of concrete content. Thus time is the creation of new onto-
logical forms (eide) in and as history. These overarching forms are then open
to a plurality of further articulations, such as ancient Greek democracy in, for
example, its Spartan, Athenian, and Corinthian variants, or modern capital-
ism in its English, German or Japanese varieties.
Castoriadis’s approach to social imaginary significations plays out not only
on the ontological level but also on the cultural hermeneutic level: concrete
articulations of the world are activated through their articulation in – and as
– key social institutions. Thus, for Castoriadis, modernity is a dual institution
comprising the central social imaginary significations of autonomy and the
infinite pursuit of (pseudo) rational mastery. These social imaginary significa-
tions underpin the institutions – and their interwoven social practices – of,
for example, democracy, on the one hand, and bureaucracy and capitalism,
on the other. Here the main point is that Castoriadis understands these social
practices/ institutions as articulations, or concrete manifestations, of broader
imaginary significations that fundamentally shape the modern human condi-
tion in-the-world (See Arnason’s essay in this issue: Arnason 2015).
Like Castoriadis, Ricoeur draws on the specifically modern understand-
ing of the productive imagination to articulate the social imaginary – specifi-
cally in its open dialectic with the reproductive imagination, which he identi-
fies as the core of ideology and utopia (1986). The ideological imagination
 Social Imaginaries in Debate 23

reproduces an image that society has of itself (usually a founding image/

myth), whilst the utopian imagination produces alternative images of society
that put ideological images into question. For Ricoeur, the social imaginary is
a product of the cultural imagination in its ideological and utopian variants
(these roughly correspond to Castoriadis’s understanding of instituted soci-
ety and instituting society) and these overlap in his thought with the social
and political imagination. Ricoeur understands the social imaginary as ‘the
touchstone of the practical function of the imagination’ (1994, p. 118), in
contrast to its theoretical mode (although the utopian imagination is situ-
ated more at the intersection of theory and practice). In the lectures, Ricoeur
undertakes a rich hermeneutic of the ideological and utopian poles of the
imagination (1986). As the emphasis is on practical life, Ricoeur focuses on
a hermeneutical phenomenology of action both as symbolic and as anchored
in symbolic contexts. He writes: ‘Ideology and utopia have ultimately to do
with the character of human action as being mediated, structured and inte-
grated by symbolic systems’ (1976, p. 512). In addition, and unlike Castoria-
dis, Ricoeur explicitly includes an analysis of power in his understanding of
the cultural imagination.4 Although Ricoeur had developed his own account
of action in relation to symbolic systems, he enriched it further through an
intensive engagement with Clifford Geertz’s (1973) notion of ‘symbolic ac-
tion’ and ‘symbolic systems’, coupled with Mannheim’s (1954 [1929]) insight
of ideology and utopia’s ‘non-congruence’ with social reality. Ricoeur wants to
delineate both the polarity between each term, as well as the ‘functional’ and
‘pathological’ or ‘distorted’ modalities that both ideology and utopia can take.
In the case of ideology, this can mean the concealment of hidden interests; for
utopia it means eschewing the necessity of action in favour of escapism into
the ‘empty space of ‘nowhere’’ (1976, p. 22). Ricoeur goes on to argue that
ideological ‘distortion’ of social reality is only possible if social reality is always
already symbolised (and symbolising). In its functional sense, ideology repro-
duces society’s image of itself; it maintains collective identity and cohesion; its
role is to legitimate and integrate society’s representation of itself. Where the
ideological imagination is conservative, the utopian imagination is subversive.
In its positive aspect, utopia problematises the instituted order of society, and
offers a counter-world characterised by alternative configurations of power in
its search for ‘the possible’ as opposed to the ‘given’.
Ricoeur’s focus on human action is in line with his overall philosophical
anthropology that takes the ‘capable self ’ as its basis. However, the capable
self acts within – and draws on and interprets – socio-cultural contexts, and
it is here that Ricoeur’s version of the imaginary element as trans-subjective
emerges. Ricoeur’s approach to the imaginary element is anchored in his
theory of linguistic meaning, and occurs at the intersection of its symbolic,
metaphoric and narrative versions. Unlike Castoriadis, Ricoeur does not make
a formal distinction between symbolic and imaginary elements of meaning:
24 Suzi Adams, Paul Blokker, Natalie J. Doyle

for him, the social imaginary is ‘an ensemble of symbolic discourses’ that can
‘function as a rupture or a reaffirmation’ (1991a, p. 475), that is the activity
of the socio-cultural imagination as it pertains to the practical domain; the
imaginary element is a given society’s ‘hidden mytho-poetic nucleus’ (1991b,
p. 483).
Unlike Castoriadis and Ricoeur, Charles Taylor’s approach to social imagi-
naries was not developed solo but in loose collaboration with the Centre for
Transcultural Studies, including, for example, Craig Calhoun, Dilip Gaonkar,
Benjamin Lee, and Michael Warner (see their collective contribution to this
issue: Calhoun et al. 2015). The associated journal, Public Culture, published
a special issue on New Imaginaries (Lee & Gaonkar 2002), to which Taylor
contributed the essay ‘Modern Social Imaginaries’ (2002). He reworked the
essay into what is arguably the best known text in the social imaginaries field
tout court –– Modern Social Imaginaries (2004) –– and then developed the
framework further still in sections of A Secular Age (2007). Articulated as part
of an overall approach to multiple modernities, Taylor’s account, like the de-
bates on multiple modernities and civilisational analysis spearheaded by S.N.
Eisenstadt (2003) and Arnason (2003), argues for a cultural approach to mo-
dernity and its multiplication (Taylor 1999).Modern Social Imaginaries does
not specifically deal with multiple modernities however; rather, it seeks to
articulate a self-understanding of the modern western social imaginary from
which inter-civilisational variants can then be further elaborated in an open
dialectic of self- and other-understanding (we return to this thematic in the
final section of this essay).
Taylor does not explicitly engage with Castoriadis or Ricoeur’s earlier ac-
counts of social imaginaries; instead his key intellectual sources include Bene-
dict Anderson’s (1991) notion of ‘imagined communities’, and, as mentioned
above, Bronislaw Baczko’s (1984) approach to social imaginaries. Taylor’s ver-
sion reworks the tension of reason and imagination in modernity by main-
taining that he was not providing a theory of social imaginaries; the social
imaginary is ‘not a set of ideas; rather it is what enables, through making
sense of, the practices of society’ (2004, p. 2). Key aspects here to note include
the centrality of meaning-making to social imaginaries, coupled with already
instituted forms of social doing (rather than openings towards rupture and
social change), and the emphasis on the collective dimension of society (rather
than the on the self, as was most notably the case in Sources of the Self (1989),
although he has always rejected individualist and atomist social ontologies).
His long interest in the phenomenological themes of practical know-how and
implicit knowledge influence his understanding of social imaginaries. Al-
though Taylor traces the advent of social imaginaries through key philosophi-
cal-theoretical articulations by such thinkers as Locke, Grotius, Rousseau and
Tocqueville, his aim is rather to assert their common bedrock in everyday life
 Social Imaginaries in Debate 25

as well as what underlies an (admittedly fragile) sense of unity dispersed across

geographical space (in the vein of Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’).
Finally, Taylor elucidates three spheres of social practices that institute mo-
dernity and which draw on the horizon of the social imaginary for meaning
and legitimation: First, popular sovereignty and collective self-governance,
which points to the prior existence of society to the polity, and the importance
of common agency; second, economic practices of, in particular, the market
economy, which is depicted as private and without a sense of common agency;
and, third, the public sphere which sits external to the polity but internal to
society and highlights the answerability of the former to the latter.
Although Castoriadis elucidates social imaginary significations at the on-
tological level, his hermeneutic of modernity – and the political project of
autonomy, more broadly – brings his account of social imaginaries into prac-
tical life in line with Ricoeur and Taylor’s approach. Both Ricoeur and Cas-
toriadis place considerable emphasis on the creative/productive imagination
elucidated by Kant and the Frühromantiker, and seek to rework its implica-
tions, whereas this is of less concern for Taylor. Both Castoriadis and Ricoeur
are interested in instituted/ reproductive forms of the social imaginary, as
well as the rupturing/instituting aspect, but where Castoriadis is most inter-
ested to elucidate the radical instituting imaginary, Ricoeur, in his seminars
on social imaginaries (1986), devotes fourteen lectures to ideology and only
three to utopia (but it is relevant to note that he meditates on some of the
utopian aspects of the imagination via the poetic imagination which he car-
ries out in other works). Both Taylor and Ricoeur have an explicit interest in
hermeneutics and narrative, and both tend to equate social imaginaries with
a sense of the symbolic, whereas for Castoriadis the symbolic is essential for
the imaginary element, but the imaginary forms the precondition of symbolic
networks. Although, Castoriadis’s approach to social imaginary significations
arguably incorporates a hermeneutical dimension (Arnason 2015; Adams
2011), he himself explicitly rejects this aspect. This informs his disagreement
with Ricoeur regarding the productive imagination versus the creative imagi-
nation, and Ricoeur’s insistence on the hermeneutical aspect of production
(and more broadly, the open dialectic between reproductive and productive
aspects of the imagination).5 The hermeneutical dimension also points to the
question of the imagination as a key aspect of philosophical modernity’s ‘field
of tensions’ (Arnason 1991), to which we now turn.

II. History of the Imagination

The social imaginary as a philosophical concept is related to the imagina-
tion itself both in terms of its meaning and its historical context. For its his-
torical inception we can look back to Aristotle’s discovery of the imagination
(phantasia). The imagination here as the requirement for thought is passive
26 Suzi Adams, Paul Blokker, Natalie J. Doyle

(pathos), functioning in relation to the power of sensation (Aristotle 1986,

Book 3). As a consequence the Greek tradition has taken the imagination to
be fundamentally imitative or reproductive of sense perception. But because
the sensible object’s activity upon the imagination is mediated by the senses,
the imagination escapes its full constraint to become active and creative to
an extent. This makes it potentially deviant, a source of error as we find later
in René Descartes’s devaluation of the imagination. Yet more recent thinkers
have noted something about that creativity of the imagination that never re-
ally won its proper place within the Western philosophical tradition, an im-
plicit poiesis although Aristotle himself never makes the connection between
phantasia and poiesis.
That creative or productive function of the imagination becomes pro-
nounced in modern philosophy with Immanuel Kant. Creativity at least in
its epistemic significance – and eventually in its ontological significance for
the Romantic tradition and the German idealists – becomes a function of the
human mind and no longer confined to divinity.6 In Kant, who jumpstarts
this move, the imagination (Einbildungskraft) is an a priori faculty of intuition
that is productive (produktive) or active (tätiges) (1965/1993, p. A118, A120),
rather than passive.7 But the centrality of its creativity Kant underscores in
the first edition of the Kritik der reinen Vernuft is subsequently reduced and
submerged under the dictates of reason in the second edition.
In the first edition of the Critique, Kant describes the imagination as one
of the original sources of all experience that itself cannot ‘be derived from
any other faculty of the mind’ (1965/1993, p. A94). He speaks of its a priori
transcendental synthesis as antecedent to all experience and ‘conditioning
the very possibility of all experience’ (1965/1993, p. A101), allowing for the
empirical application of the categories of the understanding to the sense im-
pressions we receive (1965/1993, p. A125). In this way it brings sensibility
and understanding, intuitions and concepts, together. On this basis he makes
the implicit suggestion that the imagination is actually the ‘common, but to
us unknown, root’ of sensibility and understanding (1965/1993, p. B29, p.
B863). As the power of synthesis in general, the imagination as such is ‘a blind
but indispensable function of the human soul’ necessary for cognition (Kant
1965/1993, p. A78/B103).
Another definition of the imagination Kant provides is that it is ‘the fac-
ulty to represent in intuition an object even without its presence’ (1965/1993,
p. B151). This can refer to the reproductive sense of the imagination when
one has an 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. Despite its
placement as the mediator between the receptivity of sense impressions and
the spontaneity of conceptual understanding, there is an active-creative com-
ponent here belonging to the side of spontaneity.8 The process of the schema-
tism in the second edition underscores this a priori formative feature of the
 Social Imaginaries in Debate 27

imagination as ‘an art concealed in the depths of the soul’ (Kant 1965/1993,
p. B180). The schematism provides rules for producing images for concepts.
With the concept of ‘dog’, or ‘triangle’, for example, the schematism delin-
eates its figure in a general manner without delimiting it to the determinate
image a particular experience (of a dog or a triangle) might present (Kant
1965/1993, p. B180). Thereby it represents that which is not itself present,
not an image – the schema.9 Hannah Arendt (1992 [1982], pp. 80, 84-85),
more recently, has noticed how an analogous sort of creativity can be found
10
in the construction of exemplary rules in the historical or political domains,
and Ricoeur (1994, pp. 112-123; c.f. 1986) has interpreted this more gener-
ally as metaphorical attribution that gives image to meaning.
In the end, though, Kant retreats from that primacy of the imagination as
a creative power of synthesis, which may entail uncertainties, and relegates it
to a more secondary status, subordinate to epistemic concerns. This becomes
11
evident in the second edition of the first Critique, as has been noted by some.
The potentially unbounded creativity of the imagination – along with its his-
torical or temporal contingency as later noted by Heidegger and Castoriadis
– become tightly fettered to the laws reason lays down a priori for the sake of
true cognition.
But what was circumscribed within cognitive bounds in the first Critique
is given a somewhat looser rein in the Kritik der Urteilskraft (Kant 1952)
within the realm of aesthetics. Kant gives the imagination, in its ‘free activ-
ity’ or ‘free play’ (Kant 1952, pp. 122-123, 212), an artistic role beyond the
epistemic domain in the productive capacity of the genius to create the unseen
and thus reorder reality (Kant 1952: §§46-47, 49). 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.
Kant problematises that unconstrained creative activity of the imagination
further with the introduction of the sublime. In the sublime one experiences
awe and anxiety before the powers of nature or humanity that transcend the
bounds of any purposiveness. The imagination’s creative dimension here is
loosened from its cognitive function and expanded in pursuit of reason’s idea
of infinity, but which, moving beyond reasonable limits, moves to inevitably
exceed any sense of purpose that reason assigns to things – whether our own
humanity or to nature (Kant 1952, §§23-28; c.f. Rundell 1994, pp. 103-
104). The sublime points to that creative unboundedness of the imagination
perceived externally while genius is the bearer of that creativity within to give
it aesthetic expression. Both the sublime and genius underscore the creativity
of the imagination irreducible to the terms of reason and understanding in the
cognitive or theoretical sphere, and problematises its communicability. On
the other hand Kant does attempt to fetter that creativity with his notion of
taste as socialised for ‘universal approval’ under the faculty of judgment (Kant
28 Suzi Adams, Paul Blokker, Natalie J. Doyle

1952, §50; c.f. Rundell 1994, pp. 106, 116 n.66), which in turn, however,
opens the question of historicity and contingency underlying communal taste
and with which the imagination engages in hermeneutical dialogue.
After Kant, the German Romantics and Idealists take up the theme of the
creative imagination. The productivity Kant discovered begins to replace that
of divine creation to fully flower in Schelling, for whom the imagination is an
organ of nature, expressing its creativity through our unconscious, ultimately
transcending individual subjectivity and its finitude (Roberts 1994, p. 173). A
little later Heidegger, by contrast, reads Kantian imagination in the opposite
direction centring on human finitude.
Heidegger focuses upon the imagination’s formative capacity (Vermögen
des Bildes) (Heidegger 1977, p. 278; 1990, p. 89; 1991, p. 128; 1997, p.
189) as indicated in the German einbilden, literally, ‘to in-form’, ‘to form
in(to)’. Radicalising the sense of our being-situated in the world, he ontolo-
gises the imagination beyond its epistemic functions. His Kant reading of the
1920s, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik of 1929 but also Phänomenolo-
gische Interpretation von Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft of 1927-28, takes
Kant’s imagination that brings together sensibility and intelligibility (Hei-
degger 1990, pp. 103, 121; 1991, pp. 153, 177), especially as indicated in
its time-formation and the schematism, to be derivative of – in some sense
even identical with – the temporality (Zeitlichkeit) of human existence that
constitutes the horizon of comportment analysed in Sein und Zeit in the sense
that our cognitive concerns are ultimately and tacitly guided by our existen-
tial concerns, our concern for being in the face of death. The latter allows for
and guides our projection of a world-Bild (world-picture or image) as the
contextual horizon or ‘pre-form/view’ (Vor-Bild) in light of which things can
manifest for us and be meaningful (Heidegger 1969, pp. 88-89; 1990, p. 99;
1991, pp. 144-45; 1998, pp. 122-123). Einbildungskraft in its Bildung of a
Bild is thus broadened as ontologically constitutive of our being-in-the-world.
But its creativity in the formation (bilden) of the horizon is inextricably linked
to – even derivative of – human finitude, lived temporality as the ultimate
horizon of mortal existence.
In his later (post-1930) works Heidegger either demotes the imagination
as a representational faculty belonging, as an epochal feature, to modernity;
or furthers its ontological broadening, radicalising it in terms of the clear-
ing event (Lichtung, Ereignis) or poiesis of being that opens the world and
12
human existence. Common to both is a further downplaying of the spon-
taneity of human subjectivity. Finitude and receptivity in human existence
become even more pronounced. In Beiträge zur Philosophie of 1936-38, for
example, the imagination is no longer a transcendental faculty of the soul, ‘…
but rather event [Ereignis] itself… as the occurrence of the clearing [Lichtung]
itself ’ (Heidegger 1994, p. GA 65: 312; 1999, p. 219). Here the imagination
as the unfolding of being is released from confinement to the human subject,
 Social Imaginaries in Debate 29

instead understood as the process of ontological formation in the configur-

ings of unconcealing-concealing. Die Zeit des Weltbildes (1938), on the other
hand, historicises the imagination as a station in ‘the history of the forgetful-
ness of being’ (Heidegger 2003). Parallel to the modern self-deification of
consciousness, the world as a totality of beings becomes represented through
the imagination – Einbildungskraft – in a picture or image, Bild, thus objecti-
fied by man, in the modern age (Heidegger 2002, pp. 69-70, 76; 2003, pp.
92-93). And during the 1950s, Heidegger speaks of imagings or imaginings in
the plural – Ein-Bildungen (‘in-formations’) – as the ‘poietic’ occurrence of be-
ing that brings to human beings the measure of dwelling and to which poetry
responds (c.f. Sallis 1990). ‘Poetry’ in its deeper ontological significance as
poiesis speaks in ‘images’ or ‘forms’ (Bilder) – the provision of an ontological
measure – and thus involves ‘imaginings’ (Ein-Bildungen) of sorts (Heidegger
1971, pp. 225-226; 2000, pp. 204-205). The imagination as ontological or
‘poetic’– dichterische Einbildungskraft (Heidegger 1985, p. 17; 1971, p. 197) –
sounds from a source beyond human subjectivity. Hence the ‘free’ spontaneity
of the imagination in Heidegger’s last phase ultimately comes to refer to the
anonymous opening of being wherein the human being-(t)here is thrown,
opened, and grounded.
The notion of a creative imagination has developed in other disparate ways
throughout the twentieth century in different corners of the world. Castoria-
dis credits Sigmund Freud’s analysis of the unconscious and its psychic cre-
ativity as ‘an important but unacknowledged rediscovery of the imagination’
(Castoriadis, 1987, p. 281; c.f. 1994, p.136). The American pragmatist phi-
losopher John Dewey conceived the imagination (e.g., in A Common Faith,
1962 [1934]) as a faculty that projects ideals and values, offering possibili-
ties and motivations for thought and action, and that provides a picture of
the whole, serving to secure a sense of community and communion with the
universe.
The power of the imagination as creative and constitutive of human social
existence has been recognised in East Asia as well. In World War Two Japan,
Miki Kiyoshi in his Kōsōryoku no ronri (Logic of the Imagination) for example
took the imagination’s creation of images out of emotion, passion, or impulse
– pathos – to culminate externally in the production – poiesis – of ‘formed
images’ (keizō) (from the Greek eidos and German Bild) (Miki, 1967a, p. 46;
1967b, p. 473). As examples he mentions myth, technology, and the institu-
tions (seido) of society, all of which undergo change through the history of hu-
man action. The imagination as such expresses the human impulse to act and
produce by inventing, constructing, and altering reality (Miki, 1967a, pp. 15,
49; c.f. Miki, 1967b, p. 477). And in post-war Japan, Nakamura Yūjirō, who
looks to Miki as a predecessor, discusses the same sort of social collective cre-
ativity that forms the world in terms of ‘common sense’ (kyōtsū kankaku). Tak-
ing off from Aristotle’s koinē aisthēsis and Vico’s sensus communis, and referring
30 Suzi Adams, Paul Blokker, Natalie J. Doyle

to Kant’s Gemeinsinn from the third Critique, Nakamura in Kyōtsūkankakuron

(On Common Sense, 1983) develops an understanding of ‘common sense’ as
the way in which the various senses are integrated at the point where the
senses and reason meet. As such it is in phase with the imagination and is
constitutive of a communal horizon of meaning, making judgment and com-
munication possible. Nakamura associates common sense with the creativity
of the imagination in Miki, and in this association we may find possible reso-
nances with contemporary notions of the social imaginary.
Meanwhile, roughly contemporary to Nakamura, a major thinker in the
contemporary West who has thematised the creative imagination in its on-
tological significance, while developing the concept of the social imaginary,
is Cornelius Castoriadis. More generally, Castoriadis utilises the notion of
the ‘creative imagination’ as an umbrella term for the more specific radical
imagination of the psyche, on the one hand, and the radical imaginary of
the social-historical (as social imaginary significations) on the other. Taking
off from Kant’s understanding as well as Aristotle’s, and building on Freud’s
theory of the unconscious, Castoriadis defines the imagination as ‘the power
to make be that which realiter is not’ (Castoriadis 1994, p. 139; emphasis in
original; c.f. 1997, pp. 213ff, 246ff), meaning what is not given whether in
perception or previously constituted thought. The radical imagination (and
the radical imaginary) – taking radical in its root sense, radix, as originary – is
a creative force that creates ex nihilo (Castoriadis 2007, p. 73). This capacity
distinguishes, for example, the human psyche from the animal psyche and is
founded on the flux of representational spontaneity at the root of our psyche
that escapes subordination to any predetermined end. One of Castoriadis’s
many contributions to the discussion of the imagination is to show that it
is a ‘spontaneous, creative, afunctional force’ (2007, p. 205). What the cre-
ative imagination creates are images but which are forms – forms of being,
whether language, institutions, art, and so on (1994, p. 140; 2007, p. 73). In
its afunctional spontaneity, the creative imagination needs to be tamed but
the taming is never fully accomplished and it can never be brought under
complete control. Human activities ‘introduce infinitesimal alterations’ in the
imaginary significations thus instituted (2007, p. 109). The forms imagina-
tion creates are never complete but allow for alteration and novelty. Thus like
Heidegger in his reading of the Kantian imagination, Castoriadis emphasises
temporality as well (c.f. 1987, pp. 372-373). But if Heidegger focuses on the
finitude revealed in the receptivity of the imagination, Castoriadis focuses
on the autonomy or freedom revealed in the spontaneous flux of the radical
imagination that on the one hand precludes reduction to functionality and
escapes predetermination, but on the other hand permits creativity, novelty,
and ruptures.
In the various above-mentioned analyses, starting with Kant, the depth
of the imagination that begins to open up in its creative significance for the
 Social Imaginaries in Debate 31

human experience leads to the temporality, historicity, and contingency of

the transcendental and the a priori. In some cases, it has also opened up onto
articulations of the social imagination, which is more properly understood
as the social imaginary (as distinct from the imagination as a faculty of the
mind). The particular tension engendered by modern understandings of the
imagination and reason – and more particularly in this context, of imaginaries
and rationalities – plays out further in the socio-political domain, to which
we now turn.

III. Social Imaginaries and Modernity

I. Political-Economic Imaginaries
The notion of political imaginary draws attention to the historical and con-
textual nature of political phenomena and to their sui generis nature under
conditions of modernity. It points to their fundamental embeddedness in so-
cial life as well as their roots in imaginary configurations of meaning. The no-
tion of political imaginary draws attention to the fact that political meaning
is essentially social and not reducible to individual meaning-giving. 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 self-reflexive in
democracy.
The work of two thinkers has been particularly seminal with regard to the
theorisation of political imaginaries: that of Claude Lefort and Cornelius Cas-
toriadis, both of whom emphasised the historical mode of social life that un-
derpins 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 crucial key distinction between the political,
as an attribute of all societies and politics. The latter is an innovation explic-
itly 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. (Lefort’s distinction is also central to the
writings of Marcel Gauchet on the tensions of the contemporary democratic
imaginary as his essay in this issue illustrates; Gauchet 2015). Both Casto-
riadis 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 (we return
to this below). For Castoriadis, the political is a dimension of any society’s
self-institution which takes the form of explicit power, of forms of authority
that are ‘capable of formulating sanctionable injunctions’ (1991, p. 156). For
Lefort, drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, the notion incorporates
that of symbolic representation: power is always power of representation and
32 Suzi Adams, Paul Blokker, Natalie J. Doyle

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 through a rather elliptic play on words when he says that a society’s
‘mise en sens’ (structuring of meaning, in others words the creation of its imag-
inary identity) is 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.
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 dis-
play a political dimension, the political is not institutionalised in the same
way, while politics manifests itself in different ways and in various arenas de-
pending 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 democ-
racies. 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
in that politics for him only exists when it is self-reflexive, when it includes
13
active societal engagement, and concerns the common good.
These insights are important, in that politics is too often understood as
a self-evident phenomenon, undergirded by self-explanatory, universalistic
principles, such as representation, equality etc. (cf. Rosanvallon 2009). Lefort,
in contrast, argues that the distinct modern understanding of politics is his-
torically 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 re-
gime, the principles on which it is based, and the distinct meaning of the rel-
egation 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
 Social Imaginaries in Debate 33
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 ap-
pears 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 de-
fined as particular, while the principle that generates the overall configuration
is concealed (Lefort 1988, p. 11).

This ‘principle’ which Lefort alludes to and which, as seen above, he de-
fines as a process of symbolisation ultimately originates in the social imagi-
nary. 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 understand-
ing 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 (rather than the heteronomous ones that predominate
in human history) 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
indeterminate nature of human society, which resists closed views of the hu-
man world’s reliance on an otherworldly dimension.
Thus, under circumstances of democracy, a special relation between politics
and the imagination can be identified, which involves ‘struggles over the col-
lective outcome of imagination’ (Karagiannis and Wagner 2012, p. 14). In a
way similar to Lefort’s insistence on the dangers of closure, whose radical reap-
pearance in modern form he identified in totalitarianism (1986, pp. 273-291).
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. Such attempts
are nowadays often based on notions of human and fundamental rights, the
rule of law, and divisions of power. One of his key insights is that imagination
is ultimately unpredictable and cannot be fully channelled or grasped a priori.
Lefort equally emphasises this indeterminate nature of democracy, in which
every aspect of society can ultimately be questioned, although he was less dis-
missive of the significance of modern liberalism in which he saw the creation
of a new imaginary of power, which cannot be dissociated from democracy.
Building on his analysis of totalitarianism as an attempt to deny social conflict
and political indeterminacy by reintroducing a unitary representation of soci-
ety fused with an egocrat (1986, pp. 292-306), Lefort defined the imaginary
of modern democratic power as an empty space (lieu vide); that is, popular
34 Suzi Adams, Paul Blokker, Natalie J. Doyle

sovereignty exercised by people who never incarnate it but merely represent it

for the limited time set by elections (Lefort 1988).
The political imaginary of democracy requires extensive reflection and ex-
ploration, but does not receive such attention in much of political philoso-
phy 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 or nature. This means,
first, that democracy entails a highly uncertain and indeterminate political
form, which is open to critique and re-imagination, 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 overarch-
ing horizon (which can only ever be partially grasped in, by, and as institu-
tions). 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 acknowledgment of agon or political struggle in
which various political imaginaries are contested, on the one hand, and the
changing nature of democratic societies over time, on the other. One upshot
of such a view is that democratic societies are understood as less cohesive 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 (cf. Blokker 2010; Eisenstadt
1999; Lamont and Thevenot 2000; Taylor 2002).
The necessity for an analysis of (shifting) political imaginaries in con-
temporary times is evident. In an age of intensified internationalisation and
globalisation, as well as the fragmentation of nationally based political com-
munities, the linkage between the democratic imaginary and a commitment
to (collective) autonomy seems to have become less and less self-evident. Cas-
toriadis already labelled contemporary ‘advanced democracies’ as ‘liberal oli-
garchies’ (Castoriadis 1991, p. 231). The imaginary signification of autonomy
has lost its hold in contemporary democracies leading to a possible ‘lack of
political imagination’ (Karagiannis and Wagner 2012, p. 26), and appears in-
creasingly displaced by attempts to achieve some form of closure. This occurs
through the promotion of imaginaries of technological or technocratic mas-
tery (technocratic/elite rule), of cultural unity (populism), and/or depoliti-
cised or ‘natural’ universal principles (human rights).
 Social Imaginaries in Debate 35

The imaginary signification of collective autonomy has increasingly lost its

purchase, and must be related to the affront of neo-liberalism as a radical form
of capitalist modernity. This 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), which in
itself contributes to the depoliticisation of the public realm, not least in terms
of social solidarity. The explicit posture of some form of interrelationship be-
tween 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 econ-
omy is always in some way politically constituted (as Joerges et al. 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).

II. The Ecological Imaginary

Neo-liberal capitalism as an instantiation of closure of the political imag-
ination intensifies the unending pursuit of rational mastery, as Castoriadis
characterised the social imaginary significations of capitalism. The dominance
and resilience of contemporary neo-liberal capitalism has widely-recognised
implications and dangers for the world’s already-imperilled environments and
there is significant opposition to the degree of destruction of the biosphere.
For Castoriadis the counter-point of capitalism’s quest for rational mastery is
the project of autonomy. While he did not use the phrase ‘ecological imagi-
nary’ it is possible to discern in his work an approach to such a demarcation
of the limits of modernity and a reconceptualisation of the continuities and
discontinuities of the human and non-human world. What is often taken as
the other of the social – nature – is gravely at risk and there is an urgent need
to interrogate the various imaginaries of nature in modernity as well as the
images of nature that underpin current debates concerning the environment.
Modernity has seen the realm of history invested with meaning, whilst con-
comitantly the kosmos has been stripped of its intrinsic significance. Modern
forms of rationality and rationalisation, such as those embedded in the classi-
cal scientific worldview, have underscored the ‘meaningless’ of nature, whilst
the expansion and intensification of the imaginary significations of capitalism
have rendered the natural an endless ‘quarry’ of resources without cultural
significance. That being said, even notions of nature as seemingly bare of
36 Suzi Adams, Paul Blokker, Natalie J. Doyle

meaning and reducible to rational knowledge alone (such as those at the core
of scientistic and capitalistic imaginaries) still demonstrate a very particular –
and peculiar – configuration of meaning only possible through the emergence
of the social-historical condition of modernity. Many of the current elabora-
tions of modernity’s core social imaginaries (see the above section on the field
of social imaginaries) have generally downplayed – or ignored – the imaginary
of ‘nature’ as a central signification for the modern human condition (un-
like ‘history’ or ‘freedom’). In these cases, nature is reduced to a background
phenomenon, as it is not considered a purely generative (and we might add,
human created) signification.
Castoriadis is a partial exception to this neglect. Examination of the shifts
in his ontology and his philosophy of nature indicate an exploration of the
ecological imaginary (Adams 2011, 2012). There are two inter-related parts
to his thinking: his ontology in The Imaginary Institution of Society (1987) and
ecological politics in relation to his project of autonomy. In The Imaginary In-
stitution of Society, nature is cast as the ‘first natural stratum’ which is self-orga-
nising (but not self-creating). The first natural stratum encompasses physical
and organic strata of nature. A perceptible shift in his thinking occurred after
the initial publication (in French) of the The Imaginary Institution of Society in
the late 1970s. Over the course of many years of participation in lively debates
around biological being (and particularly in exchanges with the Chilean bi-
ologist Francisco Varela), Castoriadis developed a distinctive characterisation
of the living being. He increasingly reconsidered the creative aspects of nature,
and during the 1980s began to argue for all modes of being (both human and
non-human) as self-creating. As part of this shift, he began to develop a poly-
regional ontology of modes of being for-itself which spanned the living being
to social-historical being. Common to each of these modes of being was the
capacity to ontologically create a proper world (Eigenwelt) (Castoriadis 1997,
pp. 142-150). The living being is characterised by three capacities: ‘the finality
of self-preservation, self-centredness, and the construction of a world of one’s
own’ (Castoriadis 1997, p. 143). Each kind of being for-itself exercises the
three characteristics in ways that go beyond elementary sentience. Living be-
ings are thus able to ‘image’ and ‘relate’ different elements of the environment
as ‘a world of one’s own’ thus creating a primary horizon of ‘proto meaning’
of existence (Castoriadis 1997, p. 148). In acts of representation of related
elements different beings are creating (and not just assembling) worlds for
themselves and all beings do this – notwithstanding the significant variations
of existence marking different modes of being.
With this shift, Castoriadis elucidated ‘a general ontology of creative emer-
gence’ (Adams, 2012, p. 319). It is important to stress that he did not collapse
the specificity of human modes of being into nature; that is, he maintained
the tension between nomos and physis at the political level, whilst extending
his notion of self-creation as physis more generally at the ontological level to all
 Social Imaginaries in Debate 37

regions and modes of being. If, as Castoriadis suggests, creative emergence is a

shared ontological condition of all living beings then the degree of continuity
between humanity and other species is greater than he had earlier reckoned.
Yet the notion of nature elaborated in The Imaginary Institution of Society
(1987) endured in Castoriadis’s adherence to the project of autonomy which
presupposed a specific form of creation instituted by human societies; that is,
the capacity for autonomous self-determination (as nomos). Castoriadis’s con-
clusions in his second philosophy of nature developed across the 1980s and
1990s therefore have further implications for his overall project. One sym-
pathetic critic believes that ‘he never reformulated the central themes of his
philosophy in light of ecological thought’ (Clark 2002, p. 74). This is a hasty
judgment. The above account of his philosophy of nature shows a second
phase in which he departed from more sociocentric perspectives to anthropo-
logically situate humanity in the world. In connecting with what Adams calls
‘a Romanticist imaginary of nature’ (2011, pp. 137-144), Castoriadis places
humanity in constant worldly engagement with nature. By implication, Cas-
toriadis not only recuperates a Romantic vein of thought and representation
but also develops a line of inquiry that could lead in different directions other
than the project of autonomy.
This brief survey of Castoriadis’s conception of nature and ecology would
be incomplete, however, without a presentation of his more specific thinking
on ecological politics and autonomy, which also emerged in the 1980s. In
his 1981 publication on ecology and autonomy (crafted with Daniel Cohn-
Bendit) Castoriadis argues that ecology calls into question the social by prob-
lematising the creation of needs, questioning the neutrality of the Enlighten-
ment’s scientific imagination and illuminating the collective desire for con-
quest of non-human worlds within the capitalist imaginary. Yet, ecology also
casts doubt over the conceptual apparatus of political economy by invoking
‘the total position and relation between humanity and the world and, finally,
the central and eternal question what is human life? What are we living for?’
(1981, p. 14). By raising and addressing the ‘primary questions’ in a certain
way, ecology was pre-figuring future of the project of autonomy in Casto-
riadis’s optimistic estimation. Ecology’s capacity to apprehend environmental
crises as a problem of the social imaginary gives its questions and arguments a
radicalism in the sense of going to the fundaments of the capitalist imaginary.
His angle on the ethics of autonomy – as it might be known in another regis-
ter – is vital in countering the hubris of the imaginary signification of rational
mastery; that is capitalism’s tendencies to endless growth. Ecological auton-
omy in his assessment is ‘the question of the self-limitation of society’ (1981,
p. 19; emphasis added) in the most general sense. Specific currents of green
politics do not in themselves necessarily produce the politics of self-limitation.
But ecology tends to situate human life in the world. ‘It isn’t a love of nature;
it’s the need for self-limitation (which is true freedom) of human beings with
38 Suzi Adams, Paul Blokker, Natalie J. Doyle

respect to the planet on which they happen to exist by chance’ (Castoriadis

2010, p. 203). Reconceiving the continuities and discontinuities of humanity
on the basis of collective self-limitation would be a starting point for the re-
imagination of forms of sustainable worldly engagement with nature.
As mentioned above, Castoriadis’s reconsideration of science and knowl-
edge from the vantage-point of a philosophy of nature is consubstantial with
the outgrowth of his interest in physis. But at the same time he does not aban-
don his overall emphasis on the imaginary of nomos. The latter remains a
key discontinuity between human and other modes of being. Arguably his
advances towards a far-reaching theorisation of the ecological imaginary
founded on this particular and significant limit to his ontology. In addition,
with his emphasis on a radical notion of time as creation, the problematics
of space and place do not figure in his political thought, in general, and his
philosophy of nature, in particular. Yet, as key phenomenologists have shown,
phenomenology of experiences of place would seem to be vital to imaginaries
of nature (Casey 1993; Malpas 1999; Sallis 2000; c.f. the essay by Nakamura
Yujiro (2015) and the accompanying introduction by John Krummel (2015)
in this issue). In this vein, a notion of place/space as qualitative and dynamic
would be an important complement to Castoriadis’s notion of qualitative
time as creation of otherness (Nishida’s notion of basho would be an impor-
tant resource in this regard. c.f. Adams 2014; Krummel 2014). Re-thinking
imaginaries of nature and potential ecologies also requires a reconsideration
of capitalist modernity. Recognition of the close connection between capital-
ism and environmental devastation is of course obligatory. At the same time,
complexities of modern capitalism can be further elucidated in terms of (a)
inter-relationships with modern political figurations (as we argue in the sec-
tion on political imaginaries) and (b) the sheer varieties of instantiation of
the capitalist imaginary (Arnason 2001; Smith 2014a, 2014b; Straume and
Humphrey 2010).
Notwithstanding this, Castoriadis goes further in relating social and eco-
logical imaginaries than any other thinker in the field of social imaginaries
(see also recent developments by Soper 2009, and Rundell 2012; c.f. Calhoun
et al. 2015, in the present issue). On the other hand, Taylor’s preliminary
engagement with ecology in his early Philosophical Papers (1985) and his essay
on Heidegger (1995) is not continued in Modern Social Imaginaries (2004). In
this context cross-fertilisation with other fields can be a beneficial strategy. If
the ecological imaginary is a newly charted frontier for the field of social imag-
inaries, then it is a fresh one also for civilisational analysis, as Arnason (2003,
p. 218) has noted. Robust approaches in civilisational analysis would need to
relate to the ontological aspects of the imaginaries of nature discussed above.
At the same time, the sketches of the ecological imaginary we find in the
field of social imaginaries could gain from an understanding of the manner in
which civilisational constellations circumscribe the continuum of human and
 Social Imaginaries in Debate 39

non-human worlds and shape the degrees and types of responsiveness to the
contemporary crisis of environmental atrophy. While these specific connec-
tions cannot be detailed here, suggestion of a productive cross-fertilisation of
this sort demands some elaboration of general articulations of the two fields of
social imaginaries and civilisational analysis, to which we now turn.

III. Multiple Modernities, Comparative Civilisations and

Social Imaginaries
Common ground between the fields of social imaginaries and the com-
parative analysis of civilisations has yet to be fully delineated and explored.
Studies of civilisations have proliferated since the 1980s when S. N. Eisen-
stadt (1986) led renewed interest in questions of Axial civilisations emergent
in Eurasia in the first millennium BCE. Karl Jaspers (1953 [1949]) famously
theorised this period as the Axial Age. Comparative and historical sociolo-
gists joined histories in multidisciplinary projects that fostered debates about
the emergence of reflexivity and complex creativity (Arnason, Eisenstadt and
Wittrock 2005; Bellah and Joas 2012). Discussions of the difficult coales-
cence of civilisational patterns with definable ontological distinctions of dif-
ferent levels of reality – the ‘transcendental’ and ‘mundane’ in Eisenstadt’s
terms – alluded to social imaginary significations without explicitly invoking
‘social imaginaries.’ Principally, the imagination of a higher order of reality
had ramifications for how economic, political, religious and cultural life were
structured and reformed, according to advocates of Axial Age hypotheses. The
Axial Age was debated as one in which civilisations capable of problematising
and re-imagining the worldly order emerged (Taylor 2012). Ancient Greece
has been an exemplar of Axial transformation from some points of view just
as it was paradigmatic of creation and autonomy in Castoriadis’s eyes. Begin-
ning with the Homeric imagination, the Greeks were the first to question the
given world, a conclusion separately reached by Eisenstadt and Castoriadis
(Arnason 2012). Many of the disputes about Axial Age civilisations are un-
settled, however, including the generation of varieties of reflexivity across dif-
ferent civilisations. Be that as it may, the quality and nature of the questions
raised about this era of cultural and ontological differentiation and second
order cognitive reflexivity relate to major changes in the modes of life. As it
broached metatheoretical issues so innovatively, the Axial Age debate acted to
refine civilisational analysis as a paradigm. Moreover, it marked the emerging
paradigm with a defining feature: pluralism. Pluralism and metatheoretical
reconstruction became defining features of civilisational analysis and featured
in its most contentious claims.
Along with the retrieval of the Axial Age, civilisational analysis has debat-
ed the controversial proposition of multiple modernities, first developed by
Eisenstadt (2000). The intention was clearly to guide civilisational analysis in a
more deeply pluralistic and non-Eurocentric direction. ‘Multiple modernities’
40 Suzi Adams, Paul Blokker, Natalie J. Doyle

is a kindred perspective of civilisational analysis that Eisenstadt and his col-

laborators developed along a long path out of modernisation sociology. They
have not been alone in infusing the concept of modernity with an awareness
of pluralities. Gaonkar theorised a notion of ‘alternative modernities’ (1999;
2001), Pieterse one of ‘new modernities’ (2012), Therborn ‘entangled mo-
dernities’ (2003), Arnason’s ‘multiplication of modernity’ (2002), and Kaya
‘later modernities’ (2004) to mention only a few. If social theory is dense with
attempts to reformulate the idea of modernity, Eisenstadt and his associates
distinguish themselves by delimiting the cultural ontologies of multiple civilisa-
tions to arrive at a portrait of multiple modernities. Those cultural ontologies
thereby set a conceptual limit to the number of modernities under analysis.
For Eisenstadt cultural ontologies frame processes of cultural, political and
economic institutionalisation.
Taylor and Arnason merit special consideration in the context of consid-
eration of multiple modernities, civilisations and social imaginaries. Taylor
sees the imaginary as background meaning enabling moderns ‘to grasp society
as objectified, as a set of processes, detached from any agential perspectives’
(2004, p. 163). The connection with multiple modernities is latent in his
elucidation of social imaginaries. On one hand, he analyses a distinct social
imaginary which differentiates Western modernity. Western modernity imag-
ines a collective order running through categories of sovereignty, democratic
practices and a democratic public sphere, and market economies. The particu-
larity of the West lies in, for instance, imagination of the economy as a system
rather than a set of practices. Connections between particular social imaginar-
ies and modernities are expressly made, even though Taylor does not invoke
the phrase ‘multiple modernities’. On the other hand, his feeling is that there
are other modernities other than the West, which implicitly he leaves to others
to spell out (Taylor 2004, pp. 195-196).
Arnason goes further in the comparative historical sociology of ‘other’ mo-
dernities through development of a theoretical perspective that reconfigures
Castoriadis’s elucidation of the social-historical as part of a civilisational frame-
work (Arnason 2003, 2012). In effect he challenges the field of civilisational
analysis to deepen its pluralism with understanding of the multiplication of
modernity thereby invoking multiple imaginaries. In his post-transcendental
phenomenological terms, if the social imaginary (in the singular) can be cast as
a world, then the imaginary is also relative to different forms of interpretation,
processes of state formation and regimes of accumulation, that is civilisational
contexts of meaning, power and wealth. Arnason activates a cultural herme-
neutic of modernity (and multiple modernities) by reconceiving civilisational
forms as socio-cultural contexts of worldhood. Thus, crucially, modernity is
not self-grounding but is rather grounded in relation to – and encounters
with – a variety of ‘others’, including classical antiquity, intercultural oth-
ers, inter-civilisational others, and intra-cultural constellations. The cultural
 Social Imaginaries in Debate 41

hermeneutic of modernity is brought to bear in cases of highly creative civili-

sational constellations through exploration of how meaning and institutions
of power and wealth are generated through encounters within and between
civilisations. In instances of particularly intense and creative encounters forms
of interpretation become highly active in processes of transformation. In his
own comparative historical sociologies, Arnason examines how creative in-
terpretations of traditions have informed formations of Soviet and Japanese
modernities. In this regard, Arnason links post-transcendental phenomenol-
ogy to historical sociology in order to deepen a pluralistic conceptualisation of
civilisations. Arguably, however, the comparative analysis of civilisations has
yet to fully assimilate the hermeneutical turn he has initiated.
With perspectives on civilisations, social imaginaries and modernities such
as Taylor’s and Arnason’s, civilisational analysis has become a more open field.
Other currents add to the range of viewpoints. Social theorists, historical soci-
ologists, world historians and archaeologists are joined in the growing field of
civilisational scholarship by comparativists in international relations and eco-
nomic sociology (Hall and Jackson 2007; Katzenstein 2010). Interdisciplin-
ary research carried out in this vein has thus far achieved much in exploring
and debating the character of institutional and economic dimensions of past
and present social formations. In particular development of longer histories
of transformation across Eurasia has produced two telling results. First, it has
brought attention to early modernities (explored along with multiple moder-
nities) with findings that bring richer nuances to arguments that the trajec-
tories of modernity had sixteenth century beginnings, rather than roots in
the eighteenth century Enlightenment. Second, it has rightly created the im-
pression of a higher level of connection, encounter and engagement between
civilisations than previously reckoned. The longer historical view at work in
civilisational analysis, however, also underscores the multidimensionality of
social formations and the variety of modernities referred to above. Not only
is more empirical and historical research needed; modification of the entire
frame of civilisational analysis is an imperative, particularly in light of debates
around social imaginaries.
There are therefore grounds for further elaboration and clarification, at
the interstices of philosophy and social theory, of the central problems of
civilisational analysis. Calls from outside the field for a stronger emphasis
on experience as well as interpretation (Wagner, 2015) and for engagement
with Critical Theory (Delanty 2010) suggest that the interpretive and criti-
cal energies of civilisational analysis could expand still further. Along with
Jose Domingues’s (2012) invocation of ‘civilisational imaginaries of mo-
dernity’ as the counter-weights of global modernity and new currents in
international relations scholarship there is also evident potential for new
versions of civilisational analysis after Eisenstadt and in wake of his focus on
cultural ontologies. International relations scholars researching civilisations
42 Suzi Adams, Paul Blokker, Natalie J. Doyle

and world politics traverse histories of the present. They draw heavily from
funds of social and political theory, but are not generative of theory as such.
Domingues’s sociology by comparison is quite theoretically ‘agile’, though
enticingly incomplete when it comes to social imaginaries. His image of
the civilisational imaginaries of modernity is fragmentary but serves as a
reminder of the critical conditions of the present. Eisenstadt (2004) too
supplied a prompt on the present in his analytic of the ‘civilisation of mo-
dernity’, as has, from another point of view, Roland Robertson (1987) with
his sociological reflections at the interface of civilisational analysis and the
globalisation paradigm. All three are timely supplements to the sharp his-
torical sensibilities of civilisational analysis which sometimes leave scholars
in the field focused on past horizons rather than present issues. Much re-
mains ill-defined on this frontier, however. Eisenstadt’s civilisation of mo-
dernity is the least systematised aspect of his sociological theory and Rob-
ertson’s globalism has not been extensively debated in civilisational analysis.
Domingues’s alternative links globality with a budding notion of civilisa-
tional imaginaries. Yet this remains a promissory note about articulation
of a different direction – civilisational imaginaries and globalities in the
present – rather than a defined position. A great deal of potential exists for
theoretical exchange between the fields of civilisational analysis and social
imaginaries.

Conclusion
As noted, the social imaginaries field is heterogeneous. Indeed, as Calhoun
et al. (2015) observe in this issue, the term ‘social imaginaries’ has been used
in a way that can empty it of content. What is needed is a more systematic
approach and comparative research program to build on and extend the key
contributions to the field without flattening the ongoing conflict of interpre-
tations. In other words, the social imaginaries field opens onto problematics
which resists closure. We argued that social imaginaries has much to offer
as a paradigm-in-the-making. This is especially the case when the theoreti-
cal frameworks underpinning it are not simply reduced to ‘culture’ or ‘cul-
tural meaning’ but incorporate notions of social doing and power, as well. Its
phenomenological and hermeneutic sources make it particularly helpful in
developing an open (as opposed to closed) conception of culture as modes of
being-in-the-world, that allow it to fruitfully engage with questions of the in-
tercultural aspect of the human condition, be that at a concrete political level,
or at the macro-level of multiple modernities and civilisational analysis. Social
imaginaries presuppose society as a self-altering social world comprised of in-
stituted and instituting aspects: it is thus well placed to elucidate movements
towards social change, as well as recognising the existence of meaningful so-
cial practices. Finally, social imaginaries underlie notions of socio-political
 Social Imaginaries in Debate 43

critique: for to be able to change social worlds, means that social worlds can
be problematised and put into question.

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Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Erin Carlisle and George Sarantoulias for their tireless
help in preparing the manuscript for publication.

Author Biographies
Suzi Adams is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Flinders University (Adelaide), and
External Fellow at the Central European Institute of Philosophy, Charles University
(Prague). Her most recent essays include ‘The Commonality of the World and the
Intercultural Element: Meaning, Culture, and Chora’, in Ming Xie (ed.), The Agon of
Interpretations: Towards a Critical Intercultural Hermeneutics (2014); ‘Merleau-Ponty,
Castoriadis and Nature’, In K Novotný, P Rodrigo, J Slatman & S Stoller (eds.),
Corporeity and Affectivity: Dedicated to Maurice Merleau-Ponty. (2014); ‘Castoriadis,
Arnason and the Phenomenological Question of the World’. In IS Straume & G
Baruchello (eds.), Creation, Rationality and Autonomy: Essays on Cornelius Castori-
adis (2013); Castoriadis at the Limits of Autonomy? Ecological Worldhood and the
Hermeneutic of Modernity’. European Journal of Social Theory, 2012, vol. 15, no. 3,
and ‘Castoriadis and the Non-Subjective Field: Social Doing, Instituting Society and
Political Imaginaries’, Critical Horizons, 2012, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 29-51. Recent books
include Castoriadis’s Ontology: Being and Creation (2011) and Cornelius Castoriadis:
Key Concepts (2014). Address: Sociology, Flinders University, GPO Box 2100, Ad-
elaide, SA, 5001, Australia. Email: Suzi.adams@flinders.edu.au

Paul Blokker, PhD. (European University Institute, Florence) is Associate Professor

in Sociology at the Institute of Sociological Studies, Charles University, Prague. His
recent publications include: ‘The European Crisis and a Political Critique of Capital-
ism’, European Journal of Social Theory, 2014, vol. 17, no. 3; ‘Boltanski and Demo-
cratic Theory: Fragility and Critique as Democracy’s Essence’, Thesis Eleven, 2014,
vol. 10, no. 23; New Democracies in Crisis? A Comparative Constitutional Study of the
Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia, Routledge Advances in Eu-
ropean Politics (2013); guest editor of special issue on ‘Pragmatic Sociology: Theory,
Critique, and Application’, European Journal of Social Theory, 2011, vol. 14, no. 3;
Multiple Democracies in Europe. Political Culture in New Member States, Democrati-
zation Series, London/New York: Routledge (2010). Address: Faculty of Social Sci-
ences, Institute of Sociological Studies, Charles University, U Kříže 8, 158 00 Prague
5 – Jinonice. E-mail: paulus.Blokker@fsv.cuni.cz
50 Suzi Adams, Paul Blokker, Natalie J. Doyle

Natalie J. Doyle is Senior Lecturer in French Studies and European studies at Monash
University and deputy director of the Monash European and EU Centre. Her most
recent publications include: ‘The De-Politicising Logic of European Economic In-
tegration’ in NJ Doyle & L Sebesta (eds.), Regional Integration and Modernity. Cross
Atlantic Perspectives, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014, pp. 213-263; ‘Governance and
Democratic Legitimacy: the European Union’s Crisis of De-Politicization’ in Crisis
and Democracy in the Twenty-First Century: Democratising Governance, 2014, B Isa-
khan & S Slaughter (eds.), Palgrave MacMillan, New York, NY; ‘Islam, Depoliticiza-
tion and the European Crisis of Democratic Legitimacy’, Politics, Religion & Ideology,
2013, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 265-283; ‘Autonomy and Modern Liberal Democracy: From
Castoriadis to Gauchet’, European Journal of Social Theory, 2013, vol. 15, no. 3, pp.
331-347. She is currently working on a book to be published by Lexington Books,
‘European Democracy, De-Politicization and Imaginary Constructs of Islam: the Loss
of Common Purpose’. Address: School of LLCL, Faculty of Arts, Monash University,
Clayton, Vic 3800 Australia. Email: Natalie.Doyle@monash.edu

John W.M. Krummel is Associate Professor in the Dept. of Religious Studies at Ho-
bart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY. He has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from
the New School for Social Research and a Ph.D. in Religion from Temple University.
He is author of Nishida Kitarō’s Chiasmatic Chorology: Place of Dialectic, Dialectic of
Place (Indiana University Press, 2015 forthcoming). His writings on topics such as
Heidegger, Nishida, Schürmann, and Buddhist philosophy, among others, have ap-
peared in a variety of philosophy journals and books. He is also the co-translator of,
and author of the introduction for, Place and Dialectic: Two Essays by Nishida Kitarō
(Oxford University Press, 2011), and has translated other works from Japanese and
German into English. In addition to being an editor for Social Imaginaries, he is also
the Assistant Editor of The Journal of Japanese Philosophy published by SUNY Press.
Address: Religious Studies, Demarest Hall, 300 Pulteney St. Hobart and William
Smith Colleges Geneva, NY 14456-3382, U.S.A. Email: Krummel@hws.edu

Jeremy Smith is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education and Arts at Federa-
tion University (Ballarat), and Visiting Fellow at the Center for Studies in Religion
and Society, University of Victoria (Victoria, Canada). He has published in Euro-
pean Journal of Social Theory, Journal of Intercultural Studies, Political Power and Social
Theory, Critical Horizons and Atlantic Studies on Europe, the Americas and Japan
and key theorists in civilizational sociology. He is author of Europe and the Americas:
State Formation, Capitalism and Civilizations in Atlantic Modernity (Brill, 2006), has
co-edited (with Danielle Petherbridge, John Rundell, Jan Bryant and John Hewitt)
Contemporary Perspectives in Social and Critical Philosophy (Brill, 2004), and is co-
editor (with Alice Mills) of Utter Silence: Voicing the Unspeakable (Peter Lang, 2001).
He has recently authored Debating Civilizations: Interrogating Civilizational Analysis
in the Global Age, (Bloomsbury, forthcoming). Address: Faculty of Education and
Arts, Federation University Australia, Mt Helen Campus, PO Box 663 Ballarat VIC
3353, Australia Email: Jeremy.smith@federation.edu.au
 Social Imaginaries in Debate 51

Notes
1 The ‘First Attempt’ is taken from the sub-title of his essay published first in
Socialisme ou Barbarie and then, with very minor addenda, in the1964-65 section
of The Imaginary Institution of Society, as ‘The Imaginary and the Institution: A
First Approach’.
2 Ricoeur’s seminars on the philosophy of the imagination are currently in
preparation for publication in both French and English (Edited by George Taylor).
3 The Castoriadis/Ricoeur dialogue is currently being edited by Olivier Fressard
and Johann Michel for publication in a collection of essays commissioned by the
EHESS. Publication is expected in 2015.
4 Castoriadis does not ignore the phenomenon of power but it is treated
unsystematically in his thought.
5 This disagreement is at its most explicit in their Radio France (Culture) discussion
6 See Kearney 1988, p. 155-156.
7 Numbers followed by A in parentheses refer to pagination from the German
original of the first edition Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and those followed by B
refer to pagination from the second edition (both in Kant 1965 and 1993).
8 Wayne Waxman, for example, reads Kantian imagination as a non-discursive form
of spontaneity in contrast to the understanding that is the discursive form of
spontaneity. See Waxman 1991, pp. 285-86.
9 Kant calls this creative act of the productive imagination in the schematism,
‘figurative synthesis’ (1965/1993, p. B151).
10 As noticeable in the functioning of the symbol (e.g., beauty as the symbol for
morality) in the aesthetic realm. See Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1952), §59.
11 For example, Johann P. Arnason, John Rundell, and Cornelius Castoriadis’s essays
in G Robinson & J Rundell (1994).
12 The claim that Heidegger was totally silent on the subject of the imagination after
his Kant-reading of the 1920s (Castoriadis 1994, p. 136) is plainly not true. See
Krummel (2007).
13 It must be pointed out that Castoriadis and Lefort offer different assessments of
the relationship between the economic and political dimensions of modernity
which translates into a different interpretation of democratic autonomy and
of the historical significance of the Greek model. Castoriadis established a
stark dichotomy between the imaginary of limitless (pseudo)rational mastery
underpinning and the imaginary of democratic autonomy defined by an
acceptance of historical indeterminacy. By contrast, Lefort’s work stressed the role
played by a new relationship to the natural world (encapsulating the notion of
work) in the formation of a modern historical perspective predicated on a new
understanding of state power (see below, in main text) essentially distinct from the
historicity evident in Greek democracy (Lefort 1978 [1953]; ‘The Permanence of
the theologico-political?’ in Lefort 1988). The idea that the economic perspective
and the notion of market played a role in the historical genesis of modern
liberal democracy was developed by Lefort’s erstwhile doctoral student Pierre
Rosanvallon in Le Capitalisme Utopique. Critique de l’idéologie Économique (1999
52 Suzi Adams, Paul Blokker, Natalie J. Doyle

[1979]). It also inspired the theory of modernity put forward by Marcel Gauchet
(another former student of Lefort) in The Disenchantment of the World (1999). In
recent writings (see ‘Democracy: From One Crisis to Another’ in this issue, 2015)
Gauchet has presented a critique of the oligarchic evolution of contemporary
democracy which evokes one of the strong themes of Castoriadis’ work. Whilst
Gauchet’s analysis also rejects Castoriadis’s opposition between capitalism and
democracy, like Lefort’s work before it and its understanding of ideology, it still
remains indebted to Castoriadis’s exploration of the roots of human institutions
in imaginary constellations of meaning (Doyle 2013).
Social Imaginaries 1.1 (2015) 53-57

Introduction to Castoriadis’s
The Imaginary as Such
Johann P. Arnason

The text published below was written before Castoriadis began to work on
the most systematic exposition of his thought, now known as the second part
of The Imaginary Institution of Society (1987[1975]). In his commentary on
the French publication, Arnaud Tomès (2007) dates the draft to 1968-1969.
It was obviously an exercise in self-clarification, not meant to reach a broader
public, but it can now be read in light of later writings and the debates devel-
oping around them. In that context, several original features of Castoriadis’s
reflections stand out, and the most prominent ones should be briefly noted.
The most striking aspect of this text is a series of introductory steps that
differs from both parts of The Imaginary Institution of Society. The chapters
written in the early 1960s and originally published in Socialisme ou Barbarie
approach the imaginary and its role in history through a critique of Marx-
ism and a reinterpretation of psychoanalysis. By contrast, the more systematic
and self-contained second part, written in the early 1970s, begins with a leap
in medias res and poses the question of the social-historical in ontological
terms. As will be seen below, the analysis of the imaginary as such is already
oriented towards a rethinking of the social-historical, but with due allowance
for preparatory moves that show both Castoriadis’s affinities with the phe-
nomenological movement (defined in a broad sense) and marked contrasts
with other approaches of that kind. Castoriadis wants to thematise and prob-
lematise presuppositions (both those of the dominant tradition and those of
twentieth-century critics, such as Husserl and Heidegger, who promised a
new beginning but proved unable to break with inherited premises) while at
the same time avoiding all versions of foundationalism. To quote Hans Blu-
menberg’s untranslatable term, the goal is Entselbstverständlichung, a question-
ing of entrenched assumptions that have a history of returning in new guises.
As Castoriadis stresses, the conditions to be explored – in other words: the
sources of the social-historical – belong to the ‘order of facts’, and are as such
incompatible with the idea of ultimate or rigorous grounding. The project
thus defined is as distant from Husserl’s transcendental arguments as from
54 Johann P. Arnason

Kant’s, and the reference to an ‘order of facts’ signals a domain far beyond the
restrictive Heideggerian notion of facticity. There is no good reason to rank
Castoriadis among the protagonists of an existential turn in phenomenology,
but of his fundamental affinity with one of them (arguably the most impor-
tant), Maurice Merleau-Ponty, there can be no doubt; this is most clearly
evident in Castoriadis’s insistence on the ‘uneliminable givens, the reality of
the real and the subjectivity of the subject.’ This is a variation on the arch-
phenomenological theme of intentional correlation, but with a new emphasis
on the ability of the subject to put reality at a distance and to add an ‘unreal
extension’; it would not seem far-fetched to suggest that this capacity, synony-
mous with the imagination, is what enables us to grasp reality as a world. Cas-
toriadis uses the latter term at the beginning of the text, but seems reluctant to
elaborate, and disinclined to raise a complementary question: what is it about
reality that makes detachment through imagination possible? Further discus-
sion of that problem would bring in the theme of indeterminacy and the
phenomenological concept of horizon as the most significant philosophical
response. Castoriadis does not explore these issues. He is, however, at pains to
distinguish his conception of the imagination from another phenomenologi-
cal view. There is no mention of Sartre (every reader of Castoriadis’s political
writings will guess the reason), but the strong emphasis on the imaginary as
‘the emergence of something positive’ is directed against Sartre’s attempt to
reduce it to a mode of negation.
In brief, the proposed line of reflection is a highly original and far-reaching
transformation of phenomenological precedents, but it also opens up possi-
bilities (so far unused) of confrontation with other currents and perspectives
within that tradition. The next step to be noted is an anthropological and
historical turn, taken by Castoriadis as a matter of course; the bipolar constel-
lation of subject and reality merges into the human condition as a presup-
position and a result of history. The threat or the temptation (depending on
the thinkers in question) of an anthropological interpretation was built into
phenomenology from the very outset; Husserl resisted it and tried to defeat
it on its own ground by incorporating the lifeworld into the transcendental
domain; Heidegger (in Being and Time) took it on board, up to a point, and
subordinated it to ontology in a new key. Later protagonists of more or less
revised phenomenology went much further (Sartre’s much-quoted description
of existentialism as a humanism may be understood as a shorthand expression
of this trend). We can assume that Castoriadis was familiar enough with de-
velopments in French phenomenology to regard the anthropological turn as
accomplished in principle, even if all specific issues were open to debate. The
historical turn was most forcefully argued in his own critique of Marxism: the
demolition of historical materialism had paved the way for an alternative in-
terpretation of history, opposed to all versions of naturalisation, and an effort
to integrate history into the very notion of the social.
 Introduction to Castoriadis’s The Imaginary as Such 55

The combination of anthropological and historical approaches, against a

phenomenological background, is reminiscent of Hans Blumenberg. Corne-
lius Castoriadis (1922-1997) and Hans Blumenberg (1920-1996) were al-
most exact contemporaries, but it seems clear that there was no contact be-
tween them. It is just possible that Castoriadis might have read Blumenberg’s
Legitimacy of the Modern Age, first published in 1965, but I do not know of
any reference to it in his writings, seminars or correspondence. And it is a safe
guess that Blumenberg did not know about Castoriadis. There are, neverthe-
less, interesting affinities between their intellectual projects. In both cases,
a historical view of the human condition includes a specific account of the
original ‘take-off of history from nature’, and for both authors, the imagina-
tion is central to the beginning as well as to the continuation. It is true that
Blumenberg did not mention it as often as Castoriadis, but its presence is
beyond doubt. Blumenberg occasionally referred to ‘systems of the imagina-
tion’ (Imaginationssysteme) to describe the cultural formations that he was try-
ing to reconstruct, and interpreters of his work (Haefliger 1996, Heidenreich
2014, p. 23) have used the term in a more emphatic way; there is no reason
to disagree – provided, of course, that we do not assimilate the ‘systems’ in
question to those posited by systems theory. Moreover, Blumenberg’s empha-
sis on metaphor and his project of a ‘metaphorology’ (strangely unmentioned
in his most substantial writings, but never abandoned) have to do with the
work of the imagination; and although Castoriadis did not write a treatise on
metaphor, he did (in the concluding chapter of The Imaginary Institution of
Society) stress the fundamentally metaphoric character of language. That said,
contrasts between the two thinkers are massive and obvious. On the level of
basic concepts and commitments, Blumenberg never tired of going back to
the two foundational figures of the phenomenological tradition, Husserl and
Heidegger, for new rounds of interpretation and criticism (in Heidegger’s case
increasingly hostile); Castoriadis, though no doubt aware of a phenomeno-
logical background to his project of elucidation, saw it as a closed chapter in
no need of reassessment (with the exception of his essays on Merleau-Ponty).
With regard to substantive interests, the most salient fact is that Blumenberg
had no use for any idea of the social-historical, and was even more unwilling
to consider the political problems bound to arise on that level. He was, al-
though he never put it that way, interested in the cultural-historical, including
technology, and its social context was sidelined. For Castoriadis, the main task
was to rethink the social-historical, beginning with its mode of being, and to
spell out the political consequences of this approach.
The focus on the social-historical is very evident in the text published
below, and so is the idea of representing and doing (both of which are active
on collective and individual levels) as the basic components of this realm of
being. In fact, the draft sets out to analyse the relationship between the two
modes of activity in a more balanced way than was later done in the second
56 Johann P. Arnason

part of The Imaginary Institution of Society. But it also becomes clear that
Castoriadis runs into problems with this line of argument. Doing proves a
more difficult theme to grasp than representing; at one point, the text con-
tains a single sentence on this subject, obviously meant to be elaborated, but
left undeveloped when Castoriadis put the draft aside. The upshot was that
when it came to systematic formulations, representing (and its imaginary
source) was discussed at great length, but a comparable analysis of doing was
only foreshadowed.
One more aspect of Castoriadis’s draft should be underlined. The com-
ments on structuralism in The Imaginary Institution of Society are very dis-
missive, and might seem to show that Castoriadis never took this school of
thought seriously. The draft suggests otherwise: in the late 1960s, he saw the
structuralist image of society – inspired by linguistics and by Lévi-Strauss’s
structuralist anthropology – as a challenge to be met, and the encounter with
this adversary was one of the circumstances that shaped his road beyond Marx
and Freud. The basic flaw of structuralism was its ultra-reductionist concep-
tion of meaning as a by-product of signs in changing combinations; the im-
possibility of structuralist semantics left no doubt about the self-defeating
character of this project, and an alternative account of language had – as ar-
gued at length in the last part of the draft – to bring in the imaginary as
a source of meaning. Seen in this context, the development of Castoriadis’s
ideas in the late 1960s appears as a critical response to the structuralist main-
stream of French thought. Other such responses were in the making at the
same time. Derrida’s early work on writing and grammatology is an obvious
case in point, and as we know from François Dosse’s recent biography (Dosse
2014), Castoriadis found it interesting enough to initiate contact. But in the
1970s, the two thinkers moved very far apart. Paul Ricoeur’s sustained herme-
neutical critique of structuralism is another example, covering more common
ground with Castoriadis; but here I cannot take the discussion further.

References

Castoriadis, C 1987 [1975], The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. K Blamey, Pol-
ity Press, Cambridge, UK.
Blumenberg, H 1985 [1965], The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, MIT Press, Boston,
MA.
Dosse, F 2014, Castoriadis, Une Vie, La Découverte, Paris.
Haefliger, J 1996, Imaginationssysteme. Erkenntnistheoretische, anthropologische und
mentalitätsshistorische Aspekte der Metaphorologie Hans Blumenbergs. Peter Lang,
Frankfurt.
Heidegger, M 1996 [1927], Being and Time, State University of New York Press, New
York, NY.
 Introduction to Castoriadis’s The Imaginary as Such 57
Heidenreich, F 2014, ‘Bedeutsamkeit’, in R Buch & D Weidner (eds), Blumenberg
lessen. Ein Glossar, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, pp. 43-56.
Tomès, A 2007, ‘Commentaire de L’Imaginaire comme tel’, in C. Castoriadis,
L’Imaginaire comme tel, Hermann, Paris.

Author Biography
Johann P. Arnason is emeritus professor of sociology at La Trobe University, Mel-
bourne, and professor at the Faculty of Human Studies, Charles University, Prague.
Address: Fakulta humanitních studií, Univerzita Karlova v Praze, U Kříže 8, 15800
Praha 5, Czech Republic. E-mail: J.Arnason@latrobe.edu.au
Social Imaginaries 1.1 (2015) 59-69

The Imaginary as Such1

Cornelius Castoriadis
Translated by Johann P. Arnason

Abstract: This text is a draft introduction to a planned work on imagination in

society and history. It begins with reflections on the abilities and activities that
set human subjects apart from other living beings and thus at the same time
enable the ongoing creation of society and history. This is to be understood as
an exploration within the ‘order of facts’, on the level of anthropological pre-
conditions. The most elementary precondition is the human capacity to add an
‘unreal extension’ to reality, and thus to put the latter at a distance; considered
as an activity, this is what defines the imagination, but considered as a dimen-
sion of human existence, it is the realm of the imaginary. The two concepts are
strictly complementary. To clarify their role in the proposed rethinking of social-
historical being, we must link them to closer analysis of the latter’s two main
components, representing and doing. On both sides, Castoriadis emphasises the
imaginary element as a decisive point against empiricist and rationalist reduc-
tions. Representing is as irreducible to perception as it is to thinking, and taking
the argument one step further, both perception and thinking can be shown to
be dependent on the imaginary. Similarly, on the level of doing, human action
can neither be understood as a response to given needs nor as an application of
pre-given representations; its creative potential presupposes an imaginary hori-
zon. Finally it is argued that language – closely related to both representing and
doing – has an imaginary dimension, central to the emergence and the enduring
innovative capacity of meaning. The basic flaw of structural linguistics was its
refusal to take the imaginary source into account.

Key Words: Subject – imagination – imaginary – representing – doing – so-

cial-historical – language

We encounter the imaginary in history, as an ongoing origin, an ever-

actual foundation; it is a central component, at work in both the maintenance
of every society as a unit and in the generation of historical change. It is thus,
60 Cornelius Castoriadis

properly speaking, a constitutive component of the social-historical, but in

that capacity, it has gone fundamentally unnoticed by theoretical reflection as
well as by everyday consciousness. The reason is simple: for both these modes
of thought, a recognition of the imaginary in its radical role would mean
a loss of every natural, rational or transcendent reassurance. It would mean
envisioning the human being as a finite but indefinite and unlimited creativity,
as a freedom whose good use is not ensured by any particular embodiment,
and as fully responsible for an existence that may have been unwanted as
such even when it was produced, and that is – because and in spite of this –
profoundly her or his own. This primary reality is obscured when we reduce
human history to the effects of natural conditions, to progressive adaptation
through tools and thoughts conceived as extensions of biological factors, to a
Bildungsroman of reason or to a combinatory play of supposedly unchanging
structural elements.
We can grasp the imaginary as soon as we ask a basic question: what
are the most general conditions for the existence of an individual subject
or a collectivity of subjects? These conditions can be summed up in two
points: there is a given reality that is a resistant ground (sol), coherent and
inexhaustible; and a given other of reality, not a (real) negation of the real,
but an a-reality. The latter springs from and is supported by the essential
characteristic of subjects, that is their ability to ignore the real, to detach
themselves from it, to put it at a distance; and thus to take a view that differs
from the seemingly straightforward one, to add to reality an unreal extension,
to think of something else, to represent and do what is not given, and to
make the possible exist. This essential characteristic, constitutive of human
existence, is what I call the imaginary (or the imagination, when the emphasis
is on the corresponding subjective activity).
Here I will not elaborate on the justification for these claims. They will,
I hope, be indirectly justified by the whole book.2 This definition of basic
conditions is, in my view, the only possible answer to a question that we
must never tire of repeating to all those – be they philosophers, historians,
sociologists or psychoanalysts – who develop a discourse on man, from whatever
angle: What defines the border between animality and humanity, the take-
off of history from nature? But claims about ultimate conditions cannot be
justified directly, at least if by that we mean some kind of demonstration. The
conditions belong to the order of facts, and as such, they cannot be grounded;
they can be elucidated, but not deduced. This example reveals to us the limits
of knowledge, understood as an effort to ground. A negative grounding, in
terms of the impossibility to think otherwise, may seem feasible. It is indeed
true that a subject without a vertical dimension, brought down to the level of
the world where he/she lives, is inconceivable (because such a subject would
not be anything other than the world, and even the repetition or the rigorous
reproduction of the latter would not be distinguishable from the original);
 The Imaginary as Such 61

similarly, a reality without coherence or capacity to resist would either be

indistinguishable from the subject or make the latter’s existence impossible.
But this negative deduction is misleading; it is a simple tautology. All that it
says presupposes, de facto and de jure, the ineliminable givens: the reality of
the real and the subjectivity of the subject.
That said, the elucidation of the imaginary aspect (détermination imaginaire)
can proceed in two ways. It can be done positively and concretely, through the
description and analysis of those aspects of the social-historical that originate
from the imaginary. This will be done at length later in the book. It can also
be done in a negative and abstract fashion by showing the impossibility of
grasping the specificity of the social-historical through classical categories.
That is the approach to be adopted here.
The elements through which the social-historical exists in collective
or individual forms are directly given as belonging to the inextricably
interconnected realms of representation and of doing. These dimensions of
representing and doing are not reducible to natural or logical determinations.
a) The imaginary conditions of the representable will be discussed at length
later. Here it is enough to note that representation in general is as irreducible
to perception as it is to thought (réflection). Both that which is perceived and
that which is thought presuppose, in their very mode of being, that which is
represented, because they are only its possible modalities, or more precisely
its fulfilments (Erfüllungen) among others.3 Among these others, the case of
a concrete imagined thing is enough to prove my point. But perception and
thought (as well as concrete products of the imagination) presuppose the act
of representation as a permanent originating activity. Representation creates
and maintains an original region where any other region must emerge as
given. It does this, first and foremost, by making any kind of object exist for
a singular subject, hic et nunc, in its specific, indescribable and underivable
mode, which is precisely that of representation. The modern refutations of
empiricism and rationalism are correct, but superfluous as soon as we have
understood the originating character of representation. Then empiricism and
rationalism appear as what they really are: attempts to reduce the condition to
one of the conditioned phenomena – as if we were to reduce space to colour
or tone. It is easy to show the intractable apories of every theory that treats
perception as a reflection (reflet), even more so any theory of thought as a
reflex; and the same thing applies to rationalist views of perception or even
thought (the latter point remains to be pursued). But the principal and most
evident obstacle to any kind of empiricism or rationalism is the following
one: any discussion on the origins of the contents of perception or thought
presupposes both of them existing as representation for a subject. And it is not
clear what ‘explanation’, the first thing to do with regard to any physical or
logical process, would mean in this context.
62 Cornelius Castoriadis

But beyond this formal point of view, it is easy to show that representation
is not only a fundamental and ineliminable modality of everything that can be
given to the subject; it is also a partly unmotivated activity, and in that capacity,
its intervention is essential to any concrete case of perception or thought. It
is true that perception and thought are distinctive human features. But as
such, they exist not only for the human being on the level of representation
in general. Above and beyond that, the constitution of their specific contents
involves a component that has no analogy in any model known from
elsewhere, be it physical or logical (which, in the last instance, amounts to
the same thing). It is this component, the imaginary or – in other words – the
unmotivated element of representation, that makes perception irreducible to
reflection, to a rational grasp of a sensory datum, or to whatever mixture of
these two things. It is also what enables humans to think in the genuine sense
of the word, to be distinguished from the kind of mechanical activity that can
be fully reproduced by a computer. There is, to put it another way, an aspect
of human thinking that sets it apart from a thinking machine: the ability to
bring forth elements and relations that are neither predetermined nor defined
in advance, and would not be contained in the memory, the programme or
the operational rules of any machine.
b) The imaginary conditions of the doable will also be analysed later. What
we must underline at this point is the irreducibility of categories concerned
with doing and the doable to any other levels, especially to processes and
models of the physical or the logical order. Human doing would not be
human doing, and in that capacity an element of social-historical being, if
it was a simple logical-mechanical automatism, or animal activity based on
reflexes. It is of course true that animal activity already exceeds the framework
of reflexology; contemporary research has clarified the ability of animals to
respond, within certain limits, to different situations (to grasp something
like a ‘global meaning’ of the situation and to produce a ‘meaningful’, that is
biologically adequate response). But in the case of human beings, we are on
the one hand dealing with an ability to produce inadequate responses, and
not only in catastrophic situations; the possibility of this deficiency, even if it
were exceptional, is enough to prove that the meaning defined by biological
purposes is not omnipresent and not always dominant. More importantly, the
human being is capable of producing different responses to the same situations.
The naturalisation of history, whether it takes a Marxian or a Freudian
line, has always, implicitly or explicitly, been based on the evident biological
reality of the human being, most clearly manifested in needs; human doing
has then been interpreted as a response to these needs. As I will show later,
needs on the human level cannot be defined in terms of purely biological
presuppositions, and the objects of needs, as scarce and useful, are socially
constituted. For the time being, suffice it to say that ‘natural’ need, the lack
that it inflicts on the biological being, and the activity through which the
 The Imaginary as Such 63

latter attempts to satisfy it are undeniable presuppositions of history, and not

yet parts of history. Need is the transition from the biological to the historical.
An animal that lacks food looks for its food; if it does not find it, it declines
and in the end it dies. A human being lacking food also declines; but before
dying, he/she looks for another kind of food, fabricates a stick, invents a trap,
goes to war or tells a story.
It is impossible to reduce doing to a logical-mechanical automatism. We
cannot conceive of doing as the ‘application’ of a thought. It is not even
understandable as derived from a preceding representation. The relationship
between doing and representing is surely one of the most difficult questions to
think through, and we must try to grasp it in terms of an identity within the
most radical kind of distinction, a bifurcation from an unthinkable common
origin, or through the image of two trunks, each of which continues in a
sense to be part of the other. We might say that representing and doing are
equi-original, if by that we mean not only that there can be no relationship
of logical or real priority between them, but also that they are an origin, one
and the same in their very differentiation. I do not mean the simple formal
reciprocity that could be expressed by saying that representing is a kind of
doing, and that there is no doing that is not simultaneously represented. I
mean, first and foremost, that representing and doing embody, undividedly,
an essential human characteristic: the ability to evoke into existence, to
make things emerge, to be unable to exist without positing another thing
that is both self and non-self, unable to exist without making exist. This is
the creative finite imagination (sometimes described, in recent parlance, as
‘transcendence’, which causes gratuitous confusion) – in contrast to the fiction
of an infinite creativity that can only mean the absolute independence of a
creator in relation to his creations (the nili indiget ad existentiam, unthinkable
for the human being)4, and at the same time the ability to create an absolute
non-self (this has been one of the many conundrums of rational theology).
Representing is not only a kind of doing, in the sense of an activity of the
subject; it makes something exist and makes oneself exist, because the subject
considered in isolation from what it represents to itself is a pure virtuality.
Conversely, doing always involves representing, not just the self-representation
of a subject in the course of doing, but in the sense of making present,
realising something that did not exist. No less than representation, doing is
thus the creative imagination in action, not to be understood as a carrying-
out of arbitrary prior representations, but as the emergence of something that
was not necessarily prefigured in any way. It does not depend on an image
that would presumably be independently represented as such; it is, rather, a
case of the directly realising imagination, the presentation of an image in and
through a modification of the real.
The sui generis relationship between doing and representation, the specific
and not necessarily explicit immanence of imagination in doing, is already
64 Cornelius Castoriadis

evident at the individual level. In the way the hand takes hold of an object
for the first time and relates it to another one – while the gaze takes an
anticipating turn that adds to the existing and normally expected order of
things a view into the future where a new image is taking shape, expanding
and transforming the one already inherent in effective movement – the
imagination manifests itself as bodily or embodied, and its product as a real
manifestation that realises an absolutely virtual image or configuration. (We
will later examine the relationship between the virtual and the real on the
one hand, the represented act and the accomplished act on the other; it goes
beyond formal tautologies).
But this relationship also appears on the level of social doing. We
tend to assume that the latter is dependent on a social representation that
materialises through it, and thus to subordinate the conditions of that which
can be done to those of that which can be represented. That may be due to
the conflation of the social dimension inherent in all individual doing with
social doing properly speaking; but if this error is avoided, the assumption
only applies to one aspect of social doing. However, the latter as such is also
characterised by another essential feature, namely the constitution or creation
of configurations (images), realised without being at all explainable in terms
of pre-given representations (or their totality); these configurations can only
enter the domain of social representations after and in consequence of this
doing. If we regard Salamis or Waterloo, 1789 or 1917, Los Alamos or the
Rocket travelling between Stockton or Darlington5, Columbus’s voyage or
Hamlet, as significant configurations in action, and not only as effective social
representations and sources of further possible representations, they surpass –
in indefinite ways – the prior representations of participants and actors. This
applies even more to the first and most fundamental form of social doing,
instituting doing, which is certainly in part linked to prior representations but
also surpasses them in indefinite ways, inasmuch as it posits the conditions
of representing and doing. To institute means to establish between human
beings (and social things) a-natural and a-rational relations (it has never been
necessary to enact gravitation or the Pythagorean theorem through legal
norms); far from reflecting or ‘sublimating’ real relations, the instituted ones
are the preconditions of real relations that can neither exist nor be conceived
without them. As conditions of the representable, they are not necessarily
(and never exhaustively) represented on a [conscious and] explicit level by the
participants – as can be seen from the fact that we need analysis to gain access
to them.
It should be clear that what we are describing here as the imaginary or the
imagination is much more and essentially other than the mere distancing of
the real by representation, or its annihilation (néantisation) by consciousness.
The imaginary is the emergence of something positive, other than the real, or
a-real. It is only from the reflexive or comparative point of view (as developed
 The Imaginary as Such 65

by Kant or Lask6) that the imagination can appear as an annihilation. That

view can, in other words, only be taken by a theoretical consciousness
constituted on the basis of a real correlate; this is a formal, partial and
derivative perspective. But on the original level, the constitution of something
fully real, even the mere notion of it, is only one of two sides to a primary
and perpetually renewed split, through which a subject in the world and a
world for the subject come into being. A human reality does not exist before
or independently of the imaginary, that is independently from representing
and doing. The real and the a-real can neither be posited nor conceived
independently of each other. But the a-real would not amount to anything,
and could not function within this polarity, if it was a simple annihilation
and an abstract negation, an empty ‘this could in fact not be.’ It is always
a concrete a-real, fulfilled or accomplished, another determination which
only appears as negative from a reflexive point of view. The subject does not
constitute itself and its world by opposing the real in general to the possible
in general – these formulations are meaningless. The constitution of concrete
possibilities, even in the form of pure representation, is a concrete creation.
Human reality as a mixture of the possible and the impossible, undefinable
without reference to concrete meanings of these categories, presupposes the
possible, and the latter in turn presupposes representing and doing. It is true
that to the speculative consciousness of the individual, doing can appear as a
simple realisation of pre-constituted possibilities. But the actual relationship is
the other way around. On the mental level, the possible is posited and reality
is relativised human representing and doing. It is their positing of a concrete
other of reality that makes the possible and the real emerge as interconnected
dimensions; thus the world constitutes itself as a human world, a space of
mobility and a network of virtual trajectories – a supportive basis on the one
hand, an obstacle, a resistance and a limit on the other.
Every doing necessarily involves a symbolic component; even at the most
elementary level, any act of a subject must appear to others as a signifier
to which some signified content must be attached. From these points, and
from the fact that the institution presents itself as a symbolic network, it is
sometimes concluded that the social is of a symbolic character or that the
symbolic is its ultimate foundation. This is a confusion, implicitly based on the
identification of the distinction between the social and the individual with the
one between the symbolic and the real-life meaning. It is true that the symbolic
is by definition trans-subjective, and even a ‘private’ symbol is only a symbol
inasmuch as it expresses and communicates distinctive subjective experiences.
Moreover, every meaning that is effectively lived is necessarily individual; its
site of existence is the region of individual representing, envisaging and being
affected. But this is precisely the point. A symbol only becomes more than a
personal symbol by relating or communicating the significations effectively
lived by an indefinite number of individuals, and lived as open to participation.
66 Cornelius Castoriadis

These significations as such define the social, and without them social symbols
would be nothing more than pure materiality. ‘Open to participation’ should,
in the first instance, be understood in a pragmatic or operative sense: the
absolute singularity of an individual experience, corresponding to some social
symbol, does not prevent a thousand persons from responding in the same way
to the command ‘present arms!’ or, more generally speaking, from reacting in
a practically and effectively identical fashion, for most of the time and under
any circumstances, to the immense quantity of social symbols to which they
are constantly exposed.
The confusion is also due to lack of clarity about the concept of symbolism.
In the case of society, we are not dealing with symbolism in general, but always
with a specific symbolism, and its specificity is due to its grounding in the
imaginary. This aspect was recognised, but only in part, by the linguists who
noted the unmotivated character of the linguistic sign. For this is not only
a matter of the ‘arbitrary’ nature of the sign, the conventional link between
signifier and signified as the general presupposition of language, but also of a
continuing functioning of the relatively unmotivated, that is the imaginary, in
the constitution of language and in the course of its use. What distinguishes
human society from any ‘animal society’ is not language as a symbolic system
in general, a code of signs corresponding in fixed ways to significations; there
is no doubt that several kinds of animals possess such a code. What makes
human language a language in the strong sense, and turns the symbolic system
into social symbolism, is that its significations are not fixed. If they were,
language would only be a subject matter for reflexology or for a rigorous kind
of cybernetics. But human language is a perpetual mobility and transition, a
simultaneously determined and indeterminate forming of relations, an act of
opening up in the very moment of positing; and what constitutes it as such
is precisely that which, from the viewpoint of information theory, appears
arbitrary, pure nonsense, or as a deficiency of the message and an increase in
the entropy (that is the indeterminacy) of communication: ‘Her mouth is a
flower’, ‘the numberless laughter of the sea waves’7, ‘we no longer have what
we took and we still have what we did not take’8, ‘the identity of identity and
non-identity.’9
Human symbolic capacity differs from a simple symbolic code in that
the relations on which it rests and through which it expresses itself are not
only of the ‘a=b’ type, or the more composite ‘x a y, a=c’ type; there is a
whole range of other relations: ‘a=b & a=c & a=d &’(what Aristotle called
pollachos legomenon10, polysemy in the strong sense), ‘if a+b+c+.. =A, then
a=A’ (metonymy); ‘if a+b+c +..=B, then A=B’ (metaphor); ‘if a+b+c+..=A,
then non-A’ (antinomasy and irony); ‘if a+b+..=A, then a=b’ (displacement
and syncretism). The essential aspect of this is not the possibility of
formalisation, but its impossibility, indicated by the suspending dots, and the
simultaneous use of some or all these relations without rules fixed in advance,
 The Imaginary as Such 67

and nevertheless without anomie. There is no doubt that these relations add
up to a rational element, but this does not mean that they are reducible to
that aspect. It is no longer necessary to criticise the attempt to derive language
from ‘natural’ relations, and current efforts to reduce language to combinatory
operations seem to forget that no combinatory system can explain the
specificity of a given language as such. However we define the ‘elementary
terms’ of a language, the number of their possible combinations is enormous,
and it allows all possible languages, but none in particular. For a language to
emerge, for a concrete language to be established through a definite but not
closed choice from the infinity of possible combinations, something else must
be involved. This choice, unmotivated yet conditioned, exemplifies the way
the imagination works.
Language as language is thus neither to be found at the material nor at
the rational level, and the phonological mixture at the two levels shows us –
whatever current confusions may suggest – only the preconditions of a seme, not
of a signifier. Combinations of phonemes belong to language, but only as one
aspect of its conditions; without the fusion with properly semantic elements,
it could be transcribed on perforated cards. It is characteristic of structuralist
methods that they were only rigorously applied to the part of language that
is not yet language in the proper sense. No less characteristic is the silence
about the non-existence, even impossibility of a structuralist semantics. The
same applies, finally, to the systematic presentation of a picture that stands
real relationships on their head, equating phonology with linguistics precisely
on the basis of aspects irrelevant for proper linguistics and at most useful for
semiotics in the most abstract sense; concomitantly, this misrepresentation
hides the part of proper linguistics that can never be reduced to ‘structure’ –
that is the essence of language, its relationship to signification.
When phonology identifies the conditions for the existence of a seme,
working at the most reduced possible level (that of language’s abstract
materiality), it aims at specifying the laws that ensure – in its view – an
adequate perception of language, by suppressing equivocation or ambiguity.
For a seme to exist, any uncertainty about the material-abstract being-thus of
the spoken sequence must be eliminated. But the exact opposite is the case:
there is no semanteme, there is no language as opposed to a code, without
something beyond the univocal being involved. This does not simply mean
that ‘equivocation’, ‘ambiguity’, in short polysemy in the broadest sense,
are ineliminable. They are neither shortcomings nor impurities – they are
positively constitutive of language as language. They implement, express
and – if I am allowed to put it that way – to some extent clarify the double
function of language: as the medium or element of both the imaginary and
the rational, of poetry and truth and also – which is not the same articulation
– of the subject and the real. For polysemy is not only the lifeblood of poetry;
it also endows language with genuine, that is non-algorithmical significations
68 Cornelius Castoriadis

that always refer to something else, starting from somewhere. It is in and

through polysemy that meaning can circulate in language. But it is also in
virtue of polysemy that a subject can support and suffer language. For it is
the polysemic aspect of language that makes it forever impossible to reduce
the subject to a Turing machine, ‘computing computable functions.’11 It is
also that which corresponds to the first world of the subject, the unconscious
conglomerate where language has one of its roots. In short, language only
needs monosemy at the phonematic level, in order to establish polysemy at
the semantic level, which is its domain par excellence.

Notes

1 Translator’s Note: This text is a draft, and would never have been published
unchanged by the author; but the content is important enough to deserve
translation. It was impossible to produce an acceptable English version without
sometimes interfering with the word order and the construction of sentences. All
due care has been taken to ensure that this does not affect the meaning of the
argument. In one case, an obvious error in the French original has been corrected:
the last sentence of the second paragraph only makes sense if the brackets close at
its end, rather than after ‘imagination’. In another case, a short statement (about
the irreducibility of doing) was clearly meant to be elaborated, but the author
never came back to it. To avoid confusion, I have translated ‘réflection’ as thought,
and ‘reflet’ as reflection. The abstract and key words were written by the translator
for the English language translation/publication.
2 This refers to a book project called Le fondement imaginaire du social-historique;
the text is extracted from drafts for this work. (Translator’s note: The project seems
to be identical with the one later called L’élément imaginaire).
3 The German term for fulfilment is borrowed from Husserl’s phenomenology.
4 ‘He lacks nothing needed to exist’: this is a reference to Descartes’s definition of
substance and God (Principes de la philosophie, I, 51; Premières réponses, AT, VII,
109).
5 This is an allusion to the locomotive travelling along the first English railway.
6 Emil Lask (1875-1915) was a German philosopher in the Neo-Kantian tradition,
author of Logik der Philosophie und die Kategorienlehre (1911).
7 Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, verses 89-90 (in David Grene and Richmond
Lattimore (eds), The Complete Greek Tragedies, v. 1: Aeschylus,Chicago:University
of Chicago Press, 1991. (Translator’s note: The French original erroneously lists
verses 106-107).
8 Heraclitus, Fragments; this is a reference to a cryptic sentence allegedly said to
Homer by some fishermen; they were talking about their lice.
9 This is the Hegelian formula for the third moment of the dialectic: the overcoming
of the contradiction between identity (in itself ) and non-identity (for itself ).
 The Imaginary as Such 69
10 An expression to be understood in many ways.
11 Alan Turing (1912-1954), an English mathematician and logician, inventor of
the famous Turing machines, which can be considered as the first computers.
(Translator’s note: In the French original, the name is misspelt as Türing).

Author Biography

Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997) co-founded Socialisme ou Barbarie with Clau-

de Lefort, and remained a committed revolutionary until his death. He has written
hundreds of essays on topics as diverse as democracy, the psyche, ancient Greek litera-
ture, varieties of capitalism, ecology, mathematics, epistemology, the economy – just
to name a few. His best known work L’Institution imaginaire de la société (1975) has
been translated into more than 25 languages.

References

Aeschylus, 1991, ‘Prometheus Bound’, trans. D Grene, in D Grene & R Lattimore

(eds), The Complete Greek Tragedies: Volume One, University of Chicago Press,
Chicago, IL.
Descartes, R 1991 [1644], Principles of Philosophy [Principes de la Philosophie], Kluwer
Academic Publishers, Dordreecht.
Heraclitus, 1991, Fragments, trans. TM Robinson, University of Toronto Press, To-
ronto.
Lask, E 2003 [1911], Die Logik der Philosophie und die Kategorienlehre: Die Lehre vom
Urteil, Dietrich Scheglmann Reprintverlag, Jena.
Social Imaginaries 1.1 (2015) 71-82

Introduction to Nakamura Yūjirō

and his Work
John W. M. Krummel

Nakamura Yūjirō (中村雄二郎) (1925-) is one of the more significant

philosophers of contemporary Japan.1 He graduated from the Faculty of Lit-
erature at the University of Tokyo in 1950 and spent his teaching career from
1965 to 1995 at Meiji University, specializing in philosophy and intellectual
history. Probably the most important theme that reappears throughout Na-
kamura’s philosophical project of his mature years is the concept of ‘common
sense’ (kyōtsū kankaku 共通感覚). There are additional issues that are impor-
tant in his philosophy, such as the imagination and place. In the following I
touch upon these concepts while outlining his general trajectory leading up
to, and providing the context for, the essay following this introduction. And I
end with a discussion of the relevance of this piece as well as his general proj-
ect. I then briefly describe the context for the essay.

Common Sense
Nakamura discusses common sense, the content of section three of the fol-
lowing article, through a variety of works.2 But the most important work that
explicates this idea is his 1979 Kyōtsūkankakuron 『共通感覚論』
( On Com-
mon Sense) (Nakamura 1983; hereafter referred to as OCS).
Nakamura starts with the point that human beings exist not merely as
individuals but always within some sort of a meaningful social framework—a
‘world’—assumed in our perceptions (OCS, pp. 1-4). Perception must assume
the world as its necessary context—an intersubjective horizon of experience
(OCS, p. 86-87). Common sense usually has this meaning of a sense that people
possess common to a society (OCS, p. 7). In Japanese this is called jōshiki (常識).
It is our common understanding based on the self-evident or obvious within
the common semantic field of a particular society or culture at a given time,
but which we hardly ever notice (OCS, p. 5). However, it can also block our
view of what is not obvious or self-evident.
72 John W. M. Krummel

Nakamura wants to remind us of the original meaning of the term, com-

mon sense, that is, as a sense that is common to, coordinates and integrates the
various sensations (sense), a synthetic sense that gathers and arranges the so-
called five senses (OCS, p. 7). The meaning of common sense as the faculty
of judgment common to society became its more popular meaning only in
eighteenth century England. But Nakamura traces it back to the humanis-
tic lineage that stems from the Roman classics, includes Cicero, and extends
up to the Renaissance (OCS, pp. 7, 152-153). He traces its older and more
originary sense, on the other hand, to Aristotle’s koinē aisthēsis or what in
medieval times became known in Latin as sensus communis. Common sense in
this significance is what is in phase with, and required by, the imagination as
its ‘seat’, serving as the contact point between sensitivity and reason (OCS, p.
199). Aristotle (1941, p. 582) understood common sense as such as a primor-
dial sensible faculty that compares, distinguishes, and coordinates the distinct
senses.3
René Descartes, inheriting that Aristotelian notion of common sense, re-
fers to the sensorium commune that is the organ or seat of the sensus communis
(sens commun) and identifies it with a small part of the brain, the pineal gland
(in Meditations IV, On Man, and On the Passions I) (OCS, pp. 174-176). At
the same time, he distinguishes sens common as sensible and bodily from con-
ceptual thought and reason, and devalues it together with the imagination as
the cause of error (OCS, pp. 178-179, 343). Although the tradition based on
this Aristotelian sense of common sense occupied the main current up to the
period of the Renaissance (OCS pp. 152-153), since the beginning of moder-
nity it became forgotten and today remains only as an undercurrent.
Historically, there is a relationship between the two lineages of common
sense—the Aristotelian-Scholastic line and the line from the Roman classics
to Renaissance humanism—when Cicero took Aristotle’s sensus communis and
changed its meaning from the integration of the five senses to the faculty of
sound judgment common to a people. Cicero changed its meaning by empha-
sizing ceaseless inquiry, open debate, the value of probability in the pursuit
of truth, and the importance of consensus and agreement concerning public
issues (OCS, pp. 240-241). And he proposed a rhetorical form of knowledge
that appeals to common sense in this social sense and deals with concrete
practice (OCS, pp. 288-289). In the eighteenth century Giambattista Vico (in
his Scienza Nuova) inherited this humanist notion of sensus communis from
Cicero and, in his anti-Cartesian stance, advanced his understanding of it as
the criterion of practical judgment over which a community is in consensus.
Parallel to this Vico advocated rhetorical knowledge as the knowledge of prob-
able truths founded on common sense. Nakamura inherits this understand-
ing of common sense as what facilitates the integration and interpretation of
meanings, serving as the logic of the ‘life world’ (OCS, pp. 42-43).
 Introduction to Nakamura Yūjirō and his Work 73

Nakamura thus points to two aspects of common sense: the faculty of re-
ceptivity within an individual human being that integrates the various senses;
and the faculty of judgment held in common among people. And each sense
has been the focus of one or other of two distinct intellectual pedigrees in the
history of Western thought (OCS, pp. 152-153). In Nakamura’s view, the two
are supposed to correspond (OCS, p. 10) for the synthetic integration of the
various senses ought to found the communal standards of a society and the
latter ought to be an externalization of the former. But in turn on the basis of
common sense (jōshiki) as the socially habituated, taking root at the uncon-
scious level, our common sense (kyōtsū kankaku) can become fixed in its mode
of integrating the five senses (OCS, pp. 28-29). Certainly habituation as such
on some level is convenient and necessary—indeed indispensable for social
life—for example in the act of buying a ticket to ride public transportation
or waiting for the green light to cross a cross-walk (OCS, pp. 29, 32). Yet it
can become congealed as what is merely “common place,” mere convention,
through captivation to invisible institutions, to the extent that it loses—and
even obstructs—the ability to deal with the abundant diversity and altera-
tions of reality (OCS, pp. 30, 188). In such situations common sense needs
to be questioned as inadequate in its grasp of reality (OCS, p. 11). This entire
issue brings the two senses of common sense—kyōtsū kankaku and jōshiki—
together (OCS, p. 280). For it is not simply social convention that becomes
congealed but, even deeper, the integration of the senses so that one no longer
grasps reality in its diversity, and it becomes necessary to rearrange the senses
in a way that would re-activate them and retrieve the original activity of com-
mon sense (OCS, p. 30).
Nakamura distinguishes common sense in its healthy recombination of
the two aspects from reason’s ability to analyze, divide and partition. Com-
mon sense in its ideal function is rather what takes the whole picture into
view and spontaneously responds to the ever-changing demands of the real
world and its concrete situations. He refers to Hannah Arendt (1998 [1958],
pp. 283-284), according to whom common sense originally meant the sense
that adapts each of the five senses to the world common to everyone (OCS,
pp. 151, 324.n.11). According to Nakamura, the critique and requestioning
of knowledge and theory today leads us to the roots of the self-evidence of ev-
eryday experience. On this basis he thinks it would be meaningful to retrieve
the original idea of common sense to shed new light on what we mean by
common sense. The various contemporary issues surrounding the grounding
of perception—body, identity, language, critique, time and space, landscape,
institution, consciousness, etc.—all relate to, and converge on, this issue of
common sense (OCS, p. 9). Moreover there is the issue of the disintegration
of the senses when the inherited social paradigm no longer seems applicable.
Nakamura refers to Kimura Bin (木村敏) (1931~), who takes both schizo-
phrenia and depersonal neurosis to be such pathologies, whereby common
74 John W. M. Krummel

sense as the faculty that orients us to the world as whole is no longer at work
(OCS, p. 44-46).
In any case it is this recognition of common sense as what constitutes or
perceives that horizon of the world along with rhetoric as a form of knowledge
that cognizes the possibilities of that horizon that leads Nakamura in section
three of the following essay to a discussion of Nishida Kitarō’s concept of place
as well as the “predicate”-nature of the Japanese language. If it is common
sense rather than pure reason that is the faculty for making practical decisions
within specific communal contexts, it is also common sense that compre-
hends language in its natural use with all of its logical ambiguity or polysemy,
metaphorical expressions, and contextuality. And it is also common sense that
relates to place (topos, locus), connecting us to the environment. The rational
subject cannot be abstracted from that contextualizing interrelationality of
common sense, language, and place.

Place

Place (basho 場所) was an important concept in the thought of Nish-

ida Kitarō (西田幾多郎) (1870-1945), famous as the founder of the Kyoto
School of philosophy. Nakamura raises the issue of place as it comes up in
Nishida’s “logic of place,” and believes it to have contemporary significance.
He attempts to reconceptualize this theme by relating it to various issues,
without relying on Nishidian jargon (OCS, pp. 300-302, 304; 2001b, p. 2).
Before looking at Nakamura’s reading of Nishida, I will first give a short expli-
cation of Nishida’s theory in order to help contextualize the Nakamura essay
that follows.
Nishida in his 1926 essay ‘Place’ (Basho) attempted to overcome the
subject-object dichotomy that raises the question of how two ontologically
distinct entities are related in the process of cognition. His method was to
de-focus attention away from the object—the grammatical subject (shugo 主
語) of a judgment—and to turn attention towards what encompasses the di-
chotomized terms in the first place, allowing for their relationship. This led
him to his notion of place (basho), which he also regards as what becomes
the predicate (jutsugo 述語) in that it is what determines and contextualizes
the grammatical subject. He thus views cognition and judgment as founded
upon, contextualized on the basis of, the self-determination or differentia-
tion of place that in cognitive terms is a non-differentiated, un-objectifiable,
transcendental unity. The dichotomized terms are but abstractions, articula-
tions, objectifications, of that concrete unity, which we are in touch with prior
to our cognitive or judicative acts. Nishida understands place in a variety of
ways, such as in terms of the field of consciousness (ishiki no ba 意識の場)
or the world (sekai 世界) of human interactivity. But the deepest and most
 Introduction to Nakamura Yūjirō and his Work 75

foundational place for Nishida is what he calls the place of absolute nothing
(zettai mu no basho 絶対無の場所) that encompasses, implaces, all, includ-
ing opposites and contradictories.4
Nakamura (in section two of the following essay) finds Nishida’s theory
of place as what is ‘predicate-like’ (jutsugoteki 述語的) to be analogous to
Tokieda’s Motoki’s (時枝 誠記) (1900-1967) linguistic theory of the Japanese
language. Tokieda focuses on one’s situatedness assumed by language in terms
of a ‘scene’ or ‘field’ (bamen 場面)—neither strictly objective, nor purely sub-
jective—implied in, and broader in significance than, the literal meaning of
a sentence. Nakamura suggests there may be something unique to Japanese
thought traditionally, due to its language, in its recognition of ‘rhetorical
knowledge’, which had been traditionally suppressed in Western modernity.
As opposed to a narrower view that would reduce language to the object-
indicative, Nakamura believes Tokieda’s theory points to a view to language in
terms of common sense that involves a reconsideration of the positive signifi-
cance of imagery in language to underscore the logos of common sense (OCS,
pp. 286, 289-290, 344).
Nishida’s relating of place to a ‘nothing’ (mu) can easily lend its reading
to mystical terms. Nakamura finds Nishida’s ‘absolute nothing’ (zettai mu 絶
対無) as such to be a concept that excludes the dimension of relativity. He
believes this closes the path to unfolding various concrete issues belonging to
place (Nakamura 1995, p. 20). Nishida’s pupil, Miki Kiyoshi (more on him
below) attempted to overcome Nishida’s limits by incorporating discoveries
from the social sciences, but his career was cut short by imprisonment and
death. Nakamura sees his own project as inheriting Miki’s legacy. In a variety
of works, Nakamura thus spells out four principle ways in which place as such
has become an issue for us today: 1) place as ontological ground; 2) place as
somatic, the body; 3) place as symbolic space; and 4) place as the linguistic
or discursive topos involved in concrete inquiry or argument (OCS, pp. 258,
295; 2001a, p. 68; 2001b, p. 30). These aspects of place are also the topic
Nakamura covers in the first section of the following essay.
The issue of place, according to Nakamura, became neglected in modern
philosophy as its opposite concept, the epistemological subject, became the
substratum instead. Nakamura takes Descartes’ statement, “I think, therefore
I am,” as not only expressing the desire of modern man for independence but
to also be an epochal claim that provided its grounding (2001a, pp. 65-66).
But as the possibility of the subject’s independence became realized, its exces-
sive pursuit has begun to undermine the very foundation of its sustenance,
e.g., the eco-system. In turn this has put the autonomous inner reality of the
ego-subject into question, turning much of our focus upon the community
(kyōdōtai) or the native environment (koyū kankyō) (2001a, pp. 66-68). Place
as ontological ground thus involves a variety of concrete issues that are urgent
76 John W. M. Krummel

today, including the global environment as the eco-system, the native envi-
ronment of living things, the community of human beings, the realm of the
unconscious, etc., issues that are not necessarily distinct (1995, p. 20).
Place as ground is ontological place, the foundation for the establishment of
being, shaping the field wherein the ego is constituted and from out of which we
eventually emerged and emancipated ourselves as individuals (OCS, pp. 258-
259). As a paradigmatic example of this correlative and dynamic relationship
between self (subject) and place (substratum), Nakamura discusses in several of
his works, including the following essay, the relationship between the hero (the-
atrical actor, leading role) and the chorus (members of the performing group) in
ancient Greek tragedy, and the historical emergence of the former out of the lat-
ter (e.g., OCS, p. 259ff; 2001a, pp. 66-67). Nakamura laments that the modern
ego’s gradual congealing and independence signifies the severance of its ties to,
and loss of, the chorus-like substratum (2001a, p. 67).
A prime case of such a substratum is one’s native environment—the Um-
welt or environing world—having biological and ecological connotations,
permitting the sustenance and activity of the individual. But Nakamura adds
that it can have a broad “spiritual” significance as the concrete manifestation
of the chorus-like community or unconscious, as indicated in the expression
genius loci (OCS, pp. 261-262; 2001a, pp. 67-68). The community, the un-
conscious, and the native environment can all be place as ontological ground
in this sense, but there are other senses of place as well.
Place as the ego’s ontological ground overlaps with somatic place, the
body. On the one hand the ego-subject cannot exist without having a body as
its substratum. On the other hand, an external spatial place in turn is given
meaning and articulated through one’s bodily existence (OCS, p. 262; 2001a,
p. 68-69). The active body we live opens us to the world, shaping its horizon
(2001a: 69). The body as place is thus not the physiological body bounded by
skin but rather the phenomenological body that spreads outward to include
the extended space of perception (1995: 20). And implicated in this is a com-
munal sense. Place as such is a correlate of common sense (OCS, p. 48).
The internal articulation of space can also happen in the dimension of
symbols, leading to the notion of place as symbolic space. As an example, Na-
kamura mentions sacred space or mythical or religious space as distinguished
from ordinary or secular space, and established through the selection of a
place, such as a mountain peak or the interior of a forest, as having special
meaning, usually taken to possess a self-coherent wholeness, so that shrines or
places of worship are built there (OCS: 266-267; 2001a, p. 69-70). As we can
see the above three aspects of place—as ground, somatic, and symbolic—all
overlap one another and moreover touch upon the issue of common sense.
Lived place is the object of common sense in its most characteristic sense
(OCS, pp. 269-70). It is also the horizon of the world where we are interrelat-
 Introduction to Nakamura Yūjirō and his Work 77

ed with one another and with thing-events. Because it involves us in manifold

ways, we can deal with it only by relying on common sense (OCS, p. 270).
The fourth kind of place is linguistic or literary topos for discourse and
inquiry as found in the theory of topics (topica) in ancient rhetoric. In ancient
times, the method of disputation and accumulating ideas in regard to a spe-
cific theme was called topica. According to Nakamura, this was related to the
strongly placial character of language (1995, pp. 20-21). In Aristotle, topics
had to do with what kind of, and how much, matter an argument is to deal
with and where it is to begin. For Cicero (1949, §§7-8, pp. 386-387; 2003,
p. 119), in order to advance an adequate argument, we need to know its hid-
den place or topic (locus, topos) that allows us to uncover the issue (OCS, pp.
270-271; Nakamura 2001a, pp. 70-71). Topos in this sense is the contextual
locale where a group of points concerning a certain issue for discussion can be
found (OCS, pp. 162-163). So topica is rhetoric that makes use of such topoi,
and according to Nakamura, its basis is common sense.
Because topics (topica), in dealing with concrete matters, has to be based
on probability, it came to be regarded as uncertain and thus ignored in mo-
dernity (OCS, p. 271; 2001a, p. 71). Yet Nakamura points out that the prob-
able, when tied to discovery, has an extremely positive significance. Descartes’
criteria of truth—clarity and distinctness—cannot apply to anything beyond
the realm of mathematics and natural science. It does not apply to history or
the humanities (OCS, pp. 272-273). Recognizing this, Vico (1965, p. 13)
stated that common sense (sensus communis) based on probable truth is both
the criterion of practical judgment and the guiding criterion of speech and
debate (OCS, pp. 271-272).5 Common sense is the sense that provides or
uncovers (contextual) places (topoi) for our communal understanding6 amidst
the multi-sidedness of human existence (OCS, pp. 164-166, 272). Nakamura
makes the point that within the life-world, a concrete issue possesses a coher-
ence of its own for which we need to discover its topos—the context wherein it
coheres—while avoiding quasi- or abstract universal explanations on the one
hand and utter individualism that would abandon explanations on the other
hand (OCS, pp. 275, 301). We can only grasp the meaning of history in the
form of an approximate sense possessed by the assemblage of facts and belong-
ing to the multi-sided consideration of concrete issues (OCS, pp. 276, 301).
Related to this, Nakamura regards what have been called generative ideas—
ideas that through their polysemantic, multi-layered, and dynamic nature give
rise to other ideas in history—as linguistic topoi. Like topoi in ancient rhetoric,
they are loci where various meanings are implicit and stored (OCS, pp. 277-
278), waiting to be uncovered by common sense. Nakamura makes the point
in section three of the following essay that common sense relates to place in
all of the above significances.
78 John W. M. Krummel

Imagination

Another major Japanese philosopher who Nakamura discusses in a variety

of works is Nishida’s student, Miki Kiyoshi (三木清) (1897-1945). What
interests Nakamura in Miki’s work is especially his theory of the imagination.
Miki (1968, p. 453) attempted to surpass Nishidian philosophy by overcom-
ing what he took to be its defects (Nakamura 1995, p. 5),7 but before he
was able to accomplish this task, he was arrested for harboring a Communist
friend and died in prison. Ironically World War II had already ended a month
prior to his death but amidst post-war confusion, political prisoners of the
previous regime had not yet been released (1995, p. 5).
In his attempt to uncover the concrete unity of the subjective and the ob-
jective, Miki arrived at the notion of the (creative) imagination (kōsōryoku 構
想力) (in Kōsōryoku no ronri, Logic of the Imagination, 1937), whose function,
Kant had recognized in the first and third Critiques (1995, pp. 6-7, 10n).
For Aristotle the imagination is passive (pathos) in being worked upon by the
sense impressions. Yet because the object’s activity upon it is indirect, medi-
ated by the senses, the imagination escapes the object’s constraint to become
active and creative (OCS, pp. 228-229). This is why Descartes devalued the
imagination as a source of error. Miki however focuses upon that creative
power, takes the imagination to be a faculty that operates on a collective level
in the construction of civilization or culture, and takes its logic to be a “logic
of form” (katachi no ronri 形の論理).8 Consequently, as Nakamura explains
in section three of the following essay, Miki felt that with his notion of the
imagination as the faculty of the formation of forms he had been approach-
ing Nishidian philosophy with its notion of the self-formation of the formless
arising out of the place of nothing (1995, pp. 7, 10). Miki’s theory, in Naka-
mura’s view, provides a more concrete expression for Nishida’s theory by tying
Nishida’s formulations of place to the concrete structures and institutions of
society and history. Nakamura therefore suggests, in section three of the essay,
a parallel between his thought and Miki’s when he says that he stands in the
same current of awareness of issues as Miki and that while Miki, borrowing
Kant’s terminology, proposed a ‘logic of imagination’, he himself, borrowing
Aristotle’s terminology, proposes a ‘theory of common sense’.

Relevance

There are several points where Nakamura’s work is relevant for theorists of
the social imaginary and readers of Social Imaginaries. Studies of the imagina-
tion and sensus communis in intellectual history provides a historical context
to contemporary discussions. But in addition to outlining that intellectual
 Introduction to Nakamura Yūjirō and his Work 79

history, Nakamura’s investigations also captures some of the unique ways in

which modern and contemporary Japanese philosophy can contribute to that
discussion.
Common sense for Nakamura provides the horizon of self-evidence that
shapes a certain layer of thought and behavior within a given time, society,
culture, etc. (OCS, pp. 280-282). But when the ground it shapes begins to
fragment and becomes overly diverse, we lose our sense of normality and are
overcome with anxiety as we come in touch with the not-self-evident, the
non-ordinary (OCS, p. 280). In periods of crisis when the horizon is thus
shaken, a rearrangement or recomposition of ‘knowledge’ becomes neces-
sary (OCS, p. 280). From the invention of the printing press to the recent
emergence of the electronic media, our central nervous system has come to
receive increasingly irresistible stimuli. What was at first an expansion of the
self through new media of communication has, in Nakamura’s view, led to a
sensory paralysis and an amputation of the self. What is necessary, more than
ever, then is the rearrangement or recomposition of the senses and, borrowing
Marshall McLuhan’s (1964, p.45) terms, the discovery of a ‘new sense ratio’
for the distribution of the various senses (OCS, p. 59) that would allow us to
overcome the paralysis caused by technological media. As each new media
invention—such as the radio or photography—changes the distribution ratio
of sensation, altering our whole sensory experience, we need a method for
managing, from a psychological and social perspective, the alteration of the
distribution ratio of sensation (OCS, p. 61). For this, common sense along
with the imagination, in its constitution of the horizon of meaning, cannot
be ignored as issues of inquiry. And on the basis of such an understanding of
common sense Nakamura believes the rhetorical form of knowledge needs to
be re-acknowledged (OCS, p. 301).
Operating on the collective level among people sharing cultural values,
common sense motivates the socio-culturally endorsed way of interpreting
meaning and nurtures the emotions common to a group of people. Naka-
mura’s theory of common sense should thus have something to contribute to
current discussions of the imagination and much of what he says might be
rephrased in terms of the social imaginary. In all of Nakamura’s examinations
of Nishida’s notion of place or predicate, Tokieda’s notion of the linguistic
scene, and Miki’s notion of the imagination, what Nakamura notices is a ho-
listic image—a knowledge of the horizon constitutive of the world (or ‘world
picture’)—necessary for knowledge. The arrangement of the senses, working
in concert with collective understanding, into a coherent meaningful picture
of the world, resonates with an understanding of the social imaginary in the
constitution of a meaningful world for a collective.
80 John W. M. Krummel

Context of the Essay

The following essay was originally given as a lecture in France in Fall of

1983. Previously Nakamura had published another essay and given two lec-
tures in the French language.9 As a result he was invited to give a lecture
at the Collège international de philosophie, which at the time was presided
over by Jacques Derrida. The talk titled, ‘The “Logic of Place” and Common
Sense’ was subtitled, ‘A Theme in Contemporary Japanese Philosophy’, and
was chaired by Derrida himself. This was in the wake of the impact of con-
temporary French theory on Japanese thought during the 1970s but also of
an increase in interest among French theorists on things Japanese. Derrida’s
involvement also seems significant in light of his critique of Western phono-
centrism.
In the talk, Nakamura begins by discussing the ‘rediscovery of topica’,
positions Nishida’s ‘logic of place’ within contemporary developments, and
explicates its connection to the logic of the Japanese language. He raises the
issue of common sense to show that the split between rationality and sensibil-
ity that is a worldwide issue is keenly felt especially in Japan, and that there is
a need for philosophers to respond to this (Nakamura 2001b, p. 29). He ex-
plains that this issue was presented in 1930 in Miki’s Logic of the Imagination
and that his own project of a ‘theory of common sense’ inherits Miki’s ‘logic
of the imagination’. And in delving into the matter, he also had to inherit the
issue of place from Nishida (Nakamura 2001b, p. 29-30). His current philo-
sophical undertaking was to shed new light on Nishida’s ‘logic of place’ from
the standpoint of his own ‘theory of common sense’, and in turn to develop
his own thinking on the matter (2001b, p. 30). As he states in his prefatory
note to the essay, his own theory of common sense thus ties into both the is-
sues of place and the imagination and he attempts to make this connection
explicit in the talk. Thereby he presents his own theory of common sense that
he developed after borrowing the term from Aristotle, and relates it to Nish-
ida’s concept of place, as an example of contemporary Japanese philosophy.

References
Arendt, H 1998 [1958], The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press, Chi-
cago, IL.
Aristotle, 1941 The Basic Works of Aristotle, (ed.) R McKeon, Random House,
New York, NY.
Cicero, MT 1949 De Inventione, de Optimo Genere Oratorum, Topica, (trans.) HM
Hubbell, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Cicero, MT 2003, Ciero’s Topica, (trans.) T Reinhardt, Oxford University Press,
Oxford.
 Introduction to Nakamura Yūjirō and his Work 81
Krummel, JWM 2015, Nishida Kitarō’s Chiasmatic Chorology: Place of Dialectic,
Dialectic of Place, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN.
McLuhan, M 1964, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McGraw-Hill,
New York, NY.
Miki K 1968, Miki Kiyoshi zenshū dai jūkyūkan [The Collected Works of Miki Kiy-
oshi vol. 19], Iwanami Shoten, Tokyo.
Nakamura, Y 1983, Kyōtsūkankakuron—chi no kumikae no tame ni [On Common
Sense: For the Rearrangement of Knowledge], Iwanami Shoten, Tokyo.
Nakamura, Y 1995, Nishida tetsugaku to nihon no shakai kagaku [Nishidian Phi-
losophy and the Social Sciences of Japan]. Shisō [Thought], November 1995, pp. 5-22.
Nakamura, Y 2001a, Basho—“mu no ronri” [Place: “The Logic of Nothing”], in:
Nishida Kitarō I, Iwanami Shoten, Tokyo.
Nakamura, Y 2001b, Gendai shisō to Nishida Kitarō [Contemporary thought and
Nishida Kitarō], in: Nishida Kitarō II, Iwanami Shoten, Tokyo.
Nishida, K 2011, Place and Dialectic: Two Essays by Nishida Kitarō, (trans.) JWM
Krummel & S Nagatomo, Oxford University Press, New York, NY.
Vico, G 1965, On the Study Methods of Our Time, (trans.) E Gianturco, Bobbs-
Merrill Co, Indianapolis, IN.
Vico, G 1968, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, (trans.) TG Bergin and MH
Fisch, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY.

Author Biography

John W.M. Krummel is Associate Professor in the Dept. of Religious Studies at

Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY, USA.
Address: Religious Studies, Demarest Hall 300 Pulteney St. Hobart and William
Smith Colleges Geneva, NY 14456-3382, U.S.A. Email: Krummel@hws.edu

Notes
1 Throughout this essay I follow the traditional Japanese order of putting the family
name first and the given personal name second in Japanese names.
2 E.g., Kansei no kakusei (The Awakening of Sensibility) (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1975),
Patosu no chi (The Wisdom of Pathos) (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1982), Rinshō
no chi towa nanika (What is Clinical Wisdom?) (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1992), Basho
(Toposu) (Place (Topos)) (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1988), etc.
3 Aristotle, De Anima (On the Soul) III, 425a14-19. In discussing the various
sensory phenomena related to Aristotelian common sense, Nakamura (OCS,
pp. 43, 309-312.n.23) refers to a number of other authors, most notably
Japanese psychopathologist and philosopher Kimura Bin as well as to Maurice
82 John W. M. Krummel

Merleau-Ponty, who grasped man as a single sensorium commune, an organ of

common sense.
4 For a detailed explication of Nishida’s theory, see my Introduction to Nishida
Kitarō, Place and Dialectic: Two Essays by Nishida Kitarō (2011) and my Nishida
Kitarō’s Chiasmatic Chorology: Place of Dialectic, Dialectic of Place (Krummel 2015).
5 Vico, Il Metodo degli Studi del Tempo Nostro (On the Study Methods of Our Time), III.
6 Vico, Scienza Nuova (The New Science) §142 (Vico 1968: 63).
7 Miki expresses this sentiment in a letter from 1945.
8 Here we might remind our readers of how the German for imagination,
Einbildung, is made up of the word Bildung meaning ‘formation’ or ‘cultivation’,
in turn including Bild which means ‘image’ but can also mean ‘form’.
9 For the special issue on Japan for the journal Critique (1983, vols. 1-2), Nakamura
wrote “Nishida: le premier philosophe original au Japan.”
Social Imaginaries 1.1 (2015) 83-103

‘The Logic of Place’ and Common Sense1

Nakamura Yūjirō2
Translated by John W.M. Krummel

Abstract: The essay is a written version of a talk Nakamura Yūjirō gave at

the Collège international de philosophie in Paris in 1983. In the talk Naka-
mura connects the issue of common sense in his own work to that of place in
Nishida Kitarō and the creative imagination in Miki Kiyoshi. He presents this
connection between the notions of common sense, imagination, and place as
constituting one important thread in contemporary Japanese philosophy. He
begins by discussing the significance of place (basho) that is being rediscovered
today in response to the shortcomings of the modern Western paradigm, and
discusses it in its various senses, such as ontological ground or substratum,
the body, symbolic space, and linguistic or discursive topos in ancient rhetoric.
He then relates this issue to the philosophy of place Nishida developed in the
late 1920s, and after providing an explication of Nishida’s theory, discusses
it further in light of some linguistic and psychological theories. Nakamura
goes on to discuss his own interest in the notion of common sense traceable
to Aristotle and its connection to the rhetorical concept of topos, and Miki’s
development of the notion of the imagination in the 1930s in response to
Nishida’s theory. And in doing so he ties all three—common sense, place, and
imagination—together as suggestive of an alternative to the modern Cartesian
standpoint of the rational subject that has constituted the traditional para-
digm of the modern West.

Key Words: Common sense – sensus communis – place – imagination – topos

– basho – topica

Prefatory Note3
As I state within the essay, the following piece, ‘“The Logic of Place” and
Common Sense’ is a talk I gave when I was invited to the First Public Lecture
Series of Collège international de philosophie led by Mr. J. Derrida at the
time, after his visit to Japan. I intended to give it my best shot but, in any case,
84 Nakamura Yūjirō

because it was my first time at such a grand occasion I could not feel comfort-
able and did not have much confidence in the outcome. For that reason I was
delighted to hear that P. Ricoeur who was in attendance that day had written
in a letter to Mr. K that it was a ‘great success’.
I developed this piece as ‘one thematic in contemporary Japanese philoso-
phy’ by connecting the issue of ‘common sense’ in my own work to Nishida’s
‘logic of place’ and Miki Kiyoshi’s ‘logic of the imagination’, which constitute
a single genealogy of Japanese modern philosophy. ‘The theory of common
sense’ ties into ‘the logic of place’ through the issue of topos and ties into ‘the
logic of the imagination’ through the issue of the imagination. In emphasizing
the importance of ‘place’ or ‘common sense’, there may be a tendency to take
this to imply anti-subjectivism or anti-rationalism. But ‘place’ and ‘common
sense’ constitute the root of the subject and of reason and are indispensable in
their real establishment.

Introduction
I am very honoured to be granted the opportunity to give a lecture here at
the first public lecture series established by the Collège international de phi-
losophie that has been founded with a new vision and in collaboration with
the Social Science Higher Research Center and the École normale supérieure.
One of the principle aims of this organization is stated to be a truly contem-
porary ‘new integration of knowledge’. In that case this should, of course, be
inclusive of non-Western knowledge as well. And the reason why I and others
are greatly sympathetic to such aims is that this has already been an urgent
issue for those of us who do ‘philosophy’ [tetsugaku 哲学]4 in Japan.
Throughout this century, Japanese society and culture have been devel-
oping approximately on the basis of the principle of modernity derived from
Western Europe. Hence when one speaks of ‘philosophy’ in Japan, it contains
a twofold significance. That is to say that while in one respect it cannot be con-
ceived without taking as its pivot the idea of a universalist philosophia founded
upon the tradition of Greece and Western Europe, in another respect, for
those who do ‘philosophy’, there is a need to bring to life and recognize the
wisdom of East Asia, including Japan, in order to secure our own identity.
And yet this is no simple matter. In such cases, an external or formal join-
ing or blend of Western knowledge and non-Western knowledge makes no
sense at all. Indeed the project of an ‘East-West cultural synthesis’ has been
repeated in such form many times throughout this century in Japan, and yet
they have all ended in failure. Why? In a word it was because ‘philosophy’ as a
transplanted discipline was still at an immature stage in Japan. But that is not
all. Although I cannot help but simplify the situation in saying this, I think
that it also had something to do with the closed universalism or universalist
faith of Western philosophia.
 ‘The Logic of Place’ and Common Sense 85

Taking this point into consideration, fortunately ‘philosophy’ as a Western

discipline in Japan has finally come to take root and strengthen its nativity
after the passing of a hundred years since its transplantation. At the same time
philosophia of the West as well has come to clearly recognize that there is an
‘ethno-logo-centrism’ within its hidden premise. We might thus say that the
contemporary situation for those who do ‘philosophy’ in Japan has become
quite favourable. Needless to say, this recognition or prospect is not only of
myself alone. It is gradually spreading among those who do ‘philosophy’ in
Japan.
On the basis of this outlook and in order to establish its realization, I have
taken as the theme of this lecture, ‘‘the logic of place’ and common sense’. The
‘logic of place’ [basho no ronri 場所の論理] is what the Japanese philosopher
Nishida Kitarō [西田幾多郎] demonstrated by logicizing and universalizing
a way of feeling and thinking, called ‘the place of nothing’ [mu no basho 無の
場所], that is particularly familiar to the Japanese and Easterners. And ‘com-
mon sense’ [kyōtsū kankaku 共通感覚], while relating to the former, is what I
borrowed from Aristotle as a new creative concept. In discussing these themes
I think I can show you one particularly qualitative outcome of modern Japa-
nese ‘philosophy’ along with my own commitment to ‘philosophy’ in contem-
porary Japan.

1. The Rediscovery of Topica (The Theory of Place)

What is the ‘logic of place’? But before we answer this question it would
be appropriate to see how people are noticing the importance of the issue of
‘place’ within the broad sphere of contemporary philosophy. In other words,
in what ways are topica [topics] (the theory of place) being re-discovered?
For us, human beings, ‘place’ is an issue that is extremely ancient and yet
new.5 And within the history of philosophy as well it is an issue with a pedi-
gree from Greek philosophy. It has appeared from ancient times, such as in the
form of ‘chōra’ in Plato (Timaeus) or of ‘topos’ in Aristotle (De Anima, Topica,
etc.). And yet modern philosophy of the West has hardly reflected upon this
‘issue of place’. What is the reason? To answer this quite simply, taking sub-
ject (the epistemological subject) as the counter-concept to place, it is indeed
because the ego-subject (epistemological subject) became the substratum. It is
because the subject (epistemological subject) assumed a position of indepen-
dence. That is to say that modern man, as subjective ego, attempted to be in-
dependent by not relying on its other as much as possible. Descartes’ ‘I think
therefore I am’ [cogito ergo sum] was an epoch-making assertion that not only
best represents this desire of the moderns but also provided its grounding.
By grounding the self in this way, human beings (individuals) were able to
push forth their independence. And on the basis of the ‘subject-object’ schema
modern thought and modern civilization were enabled therein to thoroughly
86 Nakamura Yūjirō

pursue that possibility. Taking this independence and dynamism of the epis-
temological subject as the premise, human beings pursued their involvement
in, and domination of, the external world and nature all the more. However,
as the potential of this advancement was about to be fully realized, it became
gradually evident that its excessiveness will crush the foundation of the exis-
tence of man him/herself, for example, the eco-system. As a consequence, the
independence of man that takes the ego-subject of consciousness as its inner
truth has become strongly suspected. In terms of C.G. Jung, this is a suspicion
towards the independence of the ‘ego’ that had been severed from the basis
of the unconscious, in the sense of being differentiated from the ‘self ’—the
center of the mind’s integration, including the unconscious.
In this way people began to deeply reflect again upon the community or the
unconscious or the native environment (the elements) as that which shapes the
hidden ontological ground of the ego-subject of consciousness. Human be-
ings had obtained their vitality at the inception of modernity by emancipating
themselves from such ‘places’. Yet at the time, busy with their own emancipa-
tion, they were unaware that the vitality was in fact due, not a little, to that
place.
The community or the unconscious, in distinction from one’s native en-
vironment (the elements), ordinarily does not have the sense of something
that shapes a place in space. Yet they do shape the field or place wherein the
ego of consciousness is implaced to be established. In other words, whether
we speak of the community, the unconscious, or one’s native environment,
we can say that it plays the role of place as substratum, place qua substratum,
for the human self. And what is most prototypically indicative of this correla-
tive and dynamic relationship between ego (subject) and place (substratum)
would have to be the relationship between the hero (the dramatic actor, the
lead role) and the chorus (those belonging to the group of singers and dancers)
in Greek tragedy. Of the hero and the chorus, the chorus as a human collective
that assumes a community serves as the foundation. In fact in the origins of
Greek tragedy, all members were allegedly the chorus. From there, through
differentiation [of roles], emerged the hero.
In contrast to the hero who is the actor of the drama, the chorus [χορός,
choros] does not act. But its word is the voice of the people, the voice of the
gods, and the voice of the earth. The chorus conspicuously embodies the com-
munity’s unconscious. And while the hero emerges in differentiation from the
chorus, without the chorus, its consummate being would not be established.
The consummate hero is a human being who envelops within his individuality
the multi-layeredness of the deep and surface layers of human existence. The
ego of modernity, by contrast, gradually became self-sufficient and established
by having its tie to the chorus-like substratum cut off, thus losing that chorus-
like substratum.
 ‘The Logic of Place’ and Common Sense 87

I stated that, like the community and the unconscious, one’s native en-
vironment (the elements) as well is a place that is a substratum of the ego
of consciousness. This expression, native environment, originally had strong
biological and ecological connotations, and to that extent points to the bio-
logical and ecological foundation that establishes the existence and activity
of individuals. It is what Jakob von Uexküll called Umwelt (the environing
world). However, we can apply what the native environment means in a much
broader sense, including its spiritual [or: mental, psychological] significance,
to human beings as well. For in regard to human beings, it can also be the con-
crete manifestation of the chorus-like community or the unconscious. There
is the expression genius loci (the spirit of the land) indicative of the spiritual
specificity of a certain place or land, and it aptly represents the spiritual aspect
of the native environment.
Place as an issue today, however, is not exhausted by the above, that is
‘place as the ground of being, or as substratum’. There are, in addition, at least
three ways of understanding place: ‘place as somatic’, ‘place as symbolic space’,
and ‘place as the hidden locus of issues and disputes’.
Considering ‘place as somatic’, it relates to ‘place as the ground of being’
and there is some partial overlap. For the ego-subject of consciousness in real-
ity cannot exist without assuming the place that is its body as its substratum.
And further, by means of bodily existence established therein, a spatial place
is in turn given sense and becomes articulated.
Needless to say, when we speak of ‘place as somatic’, that body [soma] is
not in essence distinguished from the mind [or: spirit]. For the mind is noth-
ing other than the self-consciousness of the acting body. We do not possess the
body, rather we live the body itself. And at that moment, while consciousness
acts towards the world, our body in relation to that consciousness serves as the
foundation and thus shapes the horizon. In addition, each of us as acting bod-
ies are opened toward the world, and, instead of ending with the physiological
body enclosed by the skin, our bodies spread to a sphere transcending those
boundaries. What is indicative of that expanded body in an easily discernible
fashion would be the territory (domain) as a particular field shaped within
the space of society. Territory as such originally meant what ethology calls the
sphere of habitat segregation, and is the sphere that an individual or a species
dominates. But in the case of human beings, it strongly takes on a spiritual
[or: mental, psychological] significance and possesses a variability that cannot
be fixed to a specific place.
Now space or world qua territory is not simply bordered along other ter-
ritories on its exterior. Space or world—and at the same time that also means
the interior of a territory—is internally articulated in response to the desires
of those dwelling within it. And especially in the case of human beings, we
notice such articulation of space not only in the actual dimension of desire but
88 Nakamura Yūjirō

also in the symbolic dimension of desire. ‘Place as symbolic space’ is nothing

other than the world or space articulated in this way.
‘Place as the hidden locus of issues and disputes’ deals with the problem-
atic of what ancient rhetoric—deriving from Greece—called topica (the theory
of topos), by grasping it anew from a wider perspective. Cicero was the one
who advanced this idea originating in Aristotle by connecting it with discovery
(inventio), one of the five canons of ancient rhetoric. According to him, in the
same way that we can easily find something concealed by knowing its place
of concealment, in order to make an adequate argument we need to know
its place, that is, its locus (topos). In this way topica came to be regarded as a
method of discovery and became something indispensable for argumentation
concerning concrete cases of politics and law.
For a long time, especially up to the modern era, topica has often been
ignored as something uncertain because it concerns arguments based upon
probability. But in recent years, within the trend of restoring practical phi-
losophy, people are re-examining the necessity of discovering adequate points
in question in the examination and discussion of concrete cases (problems)
and the legitimacy of accepting probability, considering the abundant mani-
foldness of the actual. For even if an argument based upon necessary truth is
indeed authentic, no matter how much one argues accordingly, it does not
mean that one has considered the multiple aspects belonging to the issue.
In the above I have briefly examined how ‘place’ (topos) has become an is-
sue in contemporary times. Namely, whether ‘place as the ground of being’ or
‘place as somatic’, ‘place as symbolic space’ or ‘place as the hidden locus of is-
sues and disputes’, the perspective of ‘place’ (topos) in each of them is opposed
to, and excluded by, the mono-dimensional determinism, the homogeneous
space, and the atomistic and mechanistic ideas of modern knowledge. But
even within modern knowledge it is not necessarily the case that there was
no recognition of the issue of place. For example, ‘topology’ that deals with
the state of the aggregation of points in a figure, and its development in the
‘theory of topological space’ that deals with the relative positions of [topologi-
cal] domains, boundaries, and dual domains, are big issues within the field
of mathematics. And in the natural sciences, field, whether as the electro-
magnetic field in physics or as the embryonic field in biology, has emerged as
an issue. And in psychology as well, there is a ‘field theory’ that assumes a field
of psychological features and explains human behaviour as a function of this
field. And in contemporary philosophy, the involvement of place, such as in
the later Husserl’s ‘life-world’ or in its development in Heidegger’s ‘being-in-
the-world’, has become an issue.
But in the contemporary period, I think the philosopher who took up
this issue of place from its deepest root as a philosophical issue and, through
it, attempted a radical conversion of the logic of philosophy itself, was Nishi-
da Kitarō. Nishida’s theory of place exposes the world and reality from [the
 ‘The Logic of Place’ and Common Sense 89

standpoint of ] a nothing [mu 無], that is, what he calls the absolute noth-
ing [zettai mu 絶対無], by taking place as something that must be a nothing
through an exhaustion of logicism, needless to say, even while assuming as
its premise the experiential, intuitive grasp of that issue of the nothing. And
it does so practically without leaving any room for a concrete and phenom-
enological inquiry into place. What sort of issues are then borne by Nishida’s
theory of place?

2. The Logic of the Subject and the Logic of Place

Nishida Kitarō approaches the issue of ‘place’ by logicizing the grounding

of the activity of consciousness (self-awareness [jikaku 自覚]) according to
the structure of judgment (the subsumptive relation). According to Nishida,
while previous epistemology took the subject-object opposition as its starting
point, this was not an appropriate method and one should start from con-
sciousness (self-awareness) instead. And in this case, the fundamental root of
cognition is to be sought, more than anything else, in the circumstance where
‘the self is reflected within itself ’. This is because to be conscious of something
entails the reflection of the self as actor within its own field of consciousness.6
Concerning the relationship between act and reflection, Nishida in his essay
‘Place’ [Basho「場所」] (1926)7 states the following: An act is a relationship
we see between a reflected object and a reflecting place. If there is only some-
thing reflected, it would be but a mere object with no activity. But behind the
object, there would have to be a mirror that reflects it, a place wherein the
object is. And in the ‘field of consciousness-in-general’ that reflects everything
by utterly emptying itself, all cognitive objects and places would envelop the
act [between the object and its place] by transcending it.
By the way, the self as actor was an idea suggested by Fichte’s understand-
ing of the Tathandlung (fact-act), and the field of consciousness is a concept
taken over from Husserl. By grasping anew Husserlian ‘field of consciousness’
within the structure of judgment, and using the ideas of Plato’s ‘chōra’ (the
place of the ideas) and Aristotle’s ‘hypokeimenon’ (substratum) as its medium,
Nishida arrived at his idea of ‘place’ [basho 場所].
That is to say that, for Nishida, while the field of consciousness has the char-
acter of a place (a universal), this is most clearly evident within the logical
structure of judgment. For judgment, in formal logic, originally meant the
subsumption of the particular (the grammatical subject) within the universal
(the predicate), that is, that the particular is implaced in the universal. In this
way the subsumptive relation we see in the judgment, ‘S is P,’ is a relationship
whereby the universal (P) envelops the particular (S). Moreover it is the uni-
versal’s own particularization, that is, the universal’s self-determination. For a
judgment to fit reality, there must be a concrete universal at its root. And what
90 Nakamura Yūjirō

he calls the concrete universal is the world or the place that most abundantly
reflects itself within itself.8
Nishida claims moreover that the system itself of human knowledge is gen-
erated from the overlapping of endless multiple layers of the concrete universal
possessing this structure. And it possesses two opposing directions: On the
one hand at the extremity in the direction of the grammatical subject of judg-
ment, we can see an infinitely deep intuition. At the same time at the extremity
in the direction of the predicate, on the other hand, we see an infinitely broad
universal that encompasses everything there. Now in the self-determination
of this concrete universal, that is, in the analysis of judgment, there appears
in opposition the epistemological subject and its object. In the two opposing
directions above, what appears in the former is the universal as the substratum
qua grammatical subject, that is, that which thoroughly becomes the grammat-
ical subject but not a predicate. By contrast what appears in the latter is the
universal as the transcendent predicate pole, that is, what thoroughly becomes
the predicate but not the grammatical subject.9
The predicate pole [or: plane] is here emphasized over the grammatical
subject pole and this is because consciousness is inconceivable without the
field of consciousness and accordingly possesses a predicating character.10 This
means then that the unity of the I (self ) is not the unity of a grammatical
subject but a predicative unity. In the same essay, ‘Place,’ Nishida states the
following: Ordinarily we think of the I as the unity of a grammatical subject
possessing various characters, like a thing. But instead of being the unity of a
grammatical subject, the I is a unity of predicates. It is not a single point but
rather a single circle, not a thing but a place. The reason why the I is, strictly
speaking, unable to know the I is because the I (self ), as something predica-
tive, cannot become a grammatical subject.
Nishida’s way of grasping the I (self ) here deserves attention in two senses.
First the characteristic of the ‘self ’ as distinguished from the ‘ego’ is here re-
lated to place. And second it directly takes up the placiality (topos-character)
of the body as substratum (the existential body).
Let us return our discussion to the aforementioned issue concerning the
directions of the grammatical subject and of the predicate. At the extremities
of these two directions, judgment significantly exceeds the usual subsumptive
relationship of judgments. In particular, at that very point, the universal at
the root of judgment becomes a predicate that cannot become a grammatical
subject (the transcendent predicate pole), and in turn the judgment’s gram-
matical subject pole (the universal as substratum qua grammatical subject)
becomes the grammatical subject that cannot become the predicate (a true
individual). For this reason the two poles significantly surpass the subsump-
tive relationship of formal logic and become utterly disconnected. At this
point only the self-determination of a concrete universal (place) in the activity
of self-awareness11 that reflects itself within itself can bring the two together.12
 ‘The Logic of Place’ and Common Sense 91

While all beings are implaced in this concrete universal, namely the tran-
scendent predicate pole, and appear as its (the universal’s) self-determination,
it itself cannot be determined by anything. It is that which determines with-
out being determined. Therefore it cannot be any being (entity).13 In this way
Nishida, in a positive sense, came to call it ‘the place of nothing’. In addition,
this place of nothing is not only contrasted with the place of being but divided
into two, the place of relative nothing and the place of absolute nothing. Nishida
takes the characteristics of these three places and what can be discerned there-
in in the following manner. First, the place of being is the predicate pole of
universal concepts concerning the material realm, and what we see therein are
active things (acts). By contrast, the place of relative nothing is the transcendent
predicate pole (the field of consciousness) lying behind the place of being, and
what we see therein are acts of consciousness.14 And finally, what is the place of
absolute nothing or the place of true nothing? It is where the bottom of the above-
mentioned transcendent predicate pole (field of consciousness) is further torn
asunder, and, what we see therein, we are told, is the truly free will.15
In this way, Nishida initiates something like a Copernican turn, away from
the standpoint of a grammatical-subject-logicism that had been the common
assumption of almost all of previous Western ‘philosophy,’ and towards the
standpoint of a predicate-logicism. And through that turn Nishida in addition
grounds all of reality by means of the predicating substratum, that is, the noth-
ing, and grasps the place of nothing not as a lack of being but as the bottom-
lessly abundant world.16
At this point, two points in Nishida’s ‘logic of place’ deserve our atten-
tion. The first point is that it unexpectedly clarifies ‘the logic of the Japanese
language’. What made me aware that Nishida’s ‘logic of place’ embodies ‘the
logic of the Japanese language’ was Tokieda Motoki’s (時枝誠記) theory of
Japanese grammar. Ever since his Principles of Japanese Grammar [Kokugogaku
genron『国語学原論』] (1941),17 even while basing himself on Japan’s tradi-
tional linguistics, Tokieda has constructed the first full scale linguistic theory
of the Japanese language by way of a critical adoption of Saussure’s linguistics.
Its crux is what has been called the ‘linguistic process theory’ based upon Ja-
pan’s traditional notion of the word as an event [koto 事] rather than the word
as a thing [mono 物].18
What makes the connection between Tokieda’s ‘linguistic process theory’
and Nishida’s ‘logic of place’ easily discernible, at least in words, is the idea
of the ‘scene’ [bamen 場面] as a condition of linguistic behaviour. By ‘scene,’
Tokieda has in mind neither the purely objective world nor purely subjective
acts but rather the world wherein subject and object are in harmony. But
even more relevant to Nishida’s ‘logic of place’ than this notion of ‘scene’ is
the syntactics of the Japanese language grasped in the connection between
word [shi 詞] (as objective expression) and word [ji 辞] (as subjective expres-
sion).19 That is to say that he takes the sentence in the Japanese language to
92 Nakamura Yūjirō

be a unification of objective expression (word [shi])20 and subjective expres-

sion (word [ji]),21 a unity whereby the latter envelops the former.22 And this
fundamental structure of the syntactics of the Japanese language, grasped in
this manner, contains many suggestive perspectives for thinking the logic of
the Japanese language.
If we are to retrieve some of the major ones, it would be the following four.
First, in the Japanese language because the whole of a sentence is repeatedly
enveloped by the word [ji] (subjective expression) that comes at the very end,
emotional sentences bearing subjectivity more or less become the norm. Sec-
ond, in the Japanese language because the sentence is tied to the subject who
speaks by means of words [ji], and also tied to the scene where he/she belongs,
the scene proves to be significantly constraining. Third, because the Japanese
sentence contains the subject-object fusion of word [ji] + word [shi] in many
layers, it is convenient for deepening experiential language, but unfavorable
for constructing a world of objective and conceptual ideas. And fourth, in a
Japanese sentence, because the real [knowing, speaking] subject can be dis-
cerned within the word [ji] only as an activity through the sentence structure’s
constitution by the binding of word [shi] + word [ji], the existence of a formal
grammatical subject is grammatically not so important.
Each of these various points not only indicate the fundamental character-
istics of the Japanese language, but significantly touch upon the areas prob-
lematized by Nishida through his ‘logic of place’. What above all intimately
ties into Nishida’s assertion of ‘the logic of place’ is the fourth point indicating
an idea that corresponds to Nishida’s predicate-logicism—the idea that the true
subject [of expression] is interior to the activity of the word [ji] and that the
grammatical subject is not so important in the grammar.
Now another point in Nishida’s ‘logic of place’ that deserves notice is that
it clarifies a certain logic that, advancing further, broadly governs the mental
depths of the human race in general. That is, it provides a key to solving the
puzzle of ‘psychological schizophrenia’, a mental disorder representative of
contemporary times. Gathering its main points they are the following.
Nishida’s ‘logic of place’ was one kind of logic of the predicate. Logic of
the predicate in general is what reverses logic of the grammatical subject (the
logic originating in the identity of the grammatical subject) that has served as
the nucleus of Western logic since Aristotle. Therein is opened the world of
predicate identity. Now concerning the world of predicate identity, there is,
for example, a certain argument taking the form of a syllogism: ‘I am a virgin.
The Holy Mother Mary is a virgin. Therefore I am the Holy Mother Mary’.
Needless to say, this thought as a rule is not logical. Nevertheless there are
cases where we see this sort of thinking. Most typically we see this in cases
of schizophrenics. Silvano Arieti called the logic operative in such cases, ‘pa-
leologic’. He states that the schizophrenic through his desires or wishes can
connect and identify in this way two things that are ordinarily considered
 ‘The Logic of Place’ and Common Sense 93

unrelated. He states that this is because the patient has the power to decom-
pose into separate pieces the whole of reality ordinarily united by means of
the logic of the grammatical subject. From here Arieti in Creativity: the Magic
Synthesis23 (1976) discusses how this paleological (predicate-logical) thinking
can be discerned not only in schizophrenics but in the mechanism of symbolic
acts and creativity.
This predicate-logical thinking and what Nishida calls ‘the logic of place’
are connected in the following way. Although individual things by nature ex-
ist in forms discontinuous [with one another], ordinarily they are felt by us
as continuous and connected [with one another]. This is because we subsume
them under the predicate pole from the interior of our depths to establish a
connection between them. But what would happen if the predicate pole that
provides unity and continuity in this way to the grammatical subject pole
became something utterly different and the grammatical subject pole became
unified by means of a predicate pole unfamiliar to us?24 In such a case the
grammatical subject pole (the various ideas and concepts) would probably
appear to us as something scattered.
Therefore what in general are considered to be the ‘incoherent thought’
or ‘schizophasia’ of schizophrenics, from the perspective of Nishida’s ‘logic
of place,’ would be thought unified by means of the predicate pole of an un-
familiar and strange dimension. That is to say that we might consider what I
here call an unfamiliar predicate pole as something close to what Nishida calls
the transcendental predicate pole or the absolute nothing.25 And in the case of
the schizophrenic, it [the predicate pole] has lost its tie to the relative nothing
or being that is an actuality to instead manifest in the place of being in isolated
form.

3. Common Sense and the Theory of Topos

Now Nishida’s ‘logic of place’ is not completely accepted in the philo-

sophical world of contemporary Japan. I had to rediscover its significance
instead. And what prompted this rediscovery, and received grounding all the
more for it, was my own idea of ‘common sense’ [kyōtsū kankaku 共通感覚].
What I mean here by ‘common sense’ is what in Latin is sensus communis and
in Greek is koinē aisthēsis rather than the English common sense. Instead of sens
commun in the sense of a legitimate faculty of judgment common to members
of society, I mean ‘common sense’ as the primordial sense that penetrates and
unites the five senses.26
Needless to say, this idea of ‘common sense’ originally derives from Ar-
istotle. But in my case it was not that I received the hint from Aristotle or
learned it from him at the start. Instead I came to borrow his concept in
order to express and develop an idea I obtained in my search for a dependable
94 Nakamura Yūjirō

standpoint in doing philosophy in contemporary Japan. The circumstances

were as follows.
The separation or split between the senses and reason, generally speaking
and viewed globally, is a significant issue today. This issue is especially felt
keenly in Japan and philosophers are required to provide an answer in some
form or another. For throughout this century, while on the one hand Japan
has aggressively incorporated the rationalist civilization of Western modernity
and pursued this to the extent of even surpassing the West at least in its tech-
nical aspect, on the other hand, she has frequently suppressed and repressed
her own particular senses and feelings.
From ancient times in Japan and the East there have been concepts like
‘hunch’ (kan 勘) and ‘awakening’ (kaku 覚) that have been emphasized as
cognitive faculties of a higher order. They imply an intuitive knowledge that
has been somaticized. And it is said that Japan’s ancient arts and up to the
forefront in contemporary technology—for example, the technics of the elec-
tronics industry—owe much to these concepts. Concerning such ‘hunch’ and
‘awakening,’ however, their workings and mechanism, for the most part, have
been considered ‘too difficult to explain,’ and have thus remained unclarified
or excluded from the issues of ‘philosophy’.
Within this situation, out of the projects we have seen in Japanese philoso-
phy that is quite noteworthy, there is Miki Kiyoshi’s (三木清) The Logic of the
Imagination [Kōsōryoku no ronri『構想力の論理』] (1939). Miki was one of
Nishida’s top students. His thought was moving closer to Marxist philosophy
and he contributed much to the construction of the social sciences in Japan.
He problematized how the objective and the subjective, the rational and the
irrational, the intellectual and the emotional, are combined, and attempted
a logic of ‘the imagination’27 in the Kantian sense as a faculty of the synthesis
of logos and pathos.
Catching a clear glimpse of the crisis globally dawning on modern civiliza-
tion already in the 1930s, and bearing in mind the contribution of Eastern
civilization to the cultures of the human race, Miki writes in his preface to The
Logic of the Imagination as follows:28 The ideal of the culture of the Gemein-
schaft, prior to that of the Gesellschaft, was ‘form’. Today when the abstractness
of the modern Gesellschaft culture bound with the ideals of science is apparent
and we feel the need for a new culture of the Gemeinschaft, ‘the logic of the
imagination’ that problematizes the formation of forms29 can provide a philo-
sophical foundation for the creation of a new culture. And just as it was for
Gemeinschaft culture in general, we can say that the ideal of Eastern culture
was also ‘form’. In Greece, form was viewed objectively and came to mean con-
cept, and eventually became coupled with modern science. By contrast in the
East, form was grasped subjectively and hence came to mean something sym-
bolic. What possesses form is the shadow of the formless, and this subjective
viewpoint was exhaustively completed through the thought of the ‘formless
 ‘The Logic of Place’ and Common Sense 95

form’. This thought, for us, is a momentous one. A form is form vis-à-vis [an-
other] form, and each form is independent. What lies at the root of such forms
and ties them together is neither the laws that are the ideal of modern science
nor anything that can be objectively grasped. Instead it must be a form beyond
form, that is, a ‘formless form’.30
In spite of the appropriateness of its focal points, for example, in examin-
ing ‘myth,’ ‘institution,’ ‘technics,’ and ‘experience,’ one after the other, as
what binds logos and pathos together, Miki’s project in his Logic of the Imagi-
nation regrettably failed to produce any philosophically noteworthy outcome.
(However, among Miki’s best work, there is his Investigation of Man in Pas-
cal [Pasukaru ni okeru ningen no kenkyū『パスカルに於ける人間の研究』]
(1926) that discusses Pascal’s Pensées through a prompt application of Hei-
degger’s methodology.31 As an existentialist study of Pascal, this work has been
taken to be of a world-class level.)
I do not see myself as necessarily inheriting Miki’s idea of ‘the logic of the
imagination’. And yet, looking at the big picture, I stand within the same cur-
rent of awareness of the issue as Miki. And while Miki proposed a ‘logic of the
imagination’ by borrowing Kant’s terminology, I proposed and developed a
‘theory of common sense’ by borrowing Aristotle’s terminology. Although this
is as I have already related, my discovery of the concept of ‘common sense’ as
a kernel to my thought was not only of great importance to myself but also
involved a somewhat unusual situation.
The unusual situation is that its discovery was made not directly from
Aristotle but through a reconsideration of anti-Aristotelian Cartesian philoso-
phy. That is to say that in the process of re-examining Descartes who, while
erecting on the one hand the basis for modern rationalist philosophy, also
advocated the oneness of body and mind in writing The Passions, I noticed the
following: 1. In Descartes there appear two types of ‘sens commun’. 2. One is
what in English is ‘common sense’ and the other is the ‘sensus communis’ that
is active in the glande pinéale (pineal gland), the organ that anatomically con-
nects the mind and the body. 3. Furthermore, Descartes neither relates the lat-
ter to Aristotle nor did he theoretically develop it, and eventually abandoned
the idea.
For Descartes to abandon the idea of a ‘common sense’ was a matter of
course. For ‘common sense’ is incompatible with ‘reason’ and ‘good sense’ that
Descartes proclaims to be faculties of the pure mind. Put differently, while
on the one hand Descartes relates common sense (or rather the sensorium
commune) with the mind or the brain, on the other hand he persistently took
these as emotional or somatic, thus clearly distinguishing common sense from
pure thought or reason in order to guard the autonomy of thought and mind.
In such a manner the discovery of Descartes’ surreptitious way of securing
‘reason’ through the elimination of ‘common sense,’ indeed, opened for me a
variety of prospects.
96 Nakamura Yūjirō

What I mean is that when we grasp ‘reason’ and ‘common sense’ by con-
trasting and opposing them to one another, correspondingly, the meaning of
contrast between ‘philosophy’ and ‘rhetoric,’ ‘concept’ and ‘language,’ ‘ego’
and ‘self,’ and ‘method’ and ‘memory’ become evident. And I became aware
that in the West by stressing one side or other of the terms of contrast (the
former or the latter of each), two different currents have resulted in the history
of thought.
Of this series, the contrasts of ‘concept’ as unambiguous [or mono-seman-
tic] and ‘language’ as ambiguous [or poly-semantic] (i.e., natural language),
and of the ‘ego’ of consciousness and the ‘self ’ as integrative to also include
the unconscious, are easy to understand. What might be more difficult is the
contrast between ‘method’ and ‘memory’. Because this contrast is not so com-
mon, I would like to touch upon it.
It was after discovering ‘common sense’ as concealed in a peculiar form in
Descartes that I became clearly aware of the significance and importance of
this contrast by probing the deep source and the history of ‘common sense’. In
this way I learned from The Art of Memory (1966) and other works by Francis
Yates that not only does the history or the rise and fall of the idea of common
sense overlap with that of rhetoric but also with the history or the rise and fall
of ‘the art of memory [or: mnemonics]’ (ars memoriæ). And on top of that I
learned that ‘method’ in the Cartesian sense, while inheriting the aim of an-
cient and medieval ‘mnemonics’ of the West—the linking of representations
and concepts—flatly rejected its means—memory by association—replacing
it with logical coherence. Now memory and habit are closely related, and G.
Bachelard states in Le Rationalisme appliqué that ‘…method is the antithesis
of habit’.
Speaking of ‘mnemonics,’ it was by means of its study that I came to know
that the topos of ancient topica [topics] (the theory of topos) as rhetoric not
only points metaphorically to a place that harbors a connected group of issues
and expressions, but also indicates a place that is itself spatial. Just to make
sure, I will refer to Rhetoric to Herenius [Rhetorica ad Herennium]. Therein it
states the following:32 Mnemonics is established by means of places and im-
ages. By places (loci) we mean places that can be easily grasped by means of
memory, for example, a house, the space between columns, a corner, an arch,
etc. And by image we mean the form, sign, or picture of what we want to
memorize. For example, in order to remember an animal, such as a horse, a
lion, or an eagle, we need to arrange them in determinate places (loci).
Since this is the case, the contrast that emerged earlier between ‘reason’
and ‘common sense’ not only overlaps with the contrasts between ‘concept’
and ‘language,’ ‘ego’ and ‘self,’ and ‘method’ and ‘memory,’ but on top of these
also overlaps with the contrast between ‘subject’ and ‘place’. The reason why
‘place’ and ‘subject’ are here contrasted and opposed is, in short, while ‘mem-
 ‘The Logic of Place’ and Common Sense 97

ory’ is exceedingly related to ‘place,’ ‘method’ is something that exceedingly

pertains to the ‘subject’.
This chain of contrasts is indicative only of a very rough standard. Be that
as it may, we can draw a few interesting conclusions from it. For example, one
is that while from the standpoint of ‘reason,’ ‘the ego’ is ‘the subject,’ from
the standpoint of ‘common sense,’ ‘the self ’ is a ‘place’. It may sound odd to
say that ‘the self ’ is ‘a place,’ but if we look for the activity of our human con-
sciousness in ‘the reflection of the self within itself,’ it is not so odd. Instead
we can take it to be an appropriate way of grasping the matter that clarifies a
previously concealed truth. As I already stated, Nishida’s ‘logic of place’ was
initiated from such a conception. In this way, by re-capturing ‘the logic of
place’ from the perspective of ‘common sense,’ we can clearly see that it is not
necessarily something specifically Japanese or Eastern, and we can see what it
takes as its background for its establishment.
And another quite interesting conclusion that derives from the series of
contrasts above is a reconsideration of what we might call the knowledge of
‘rhetoric’. That is to say that, as in the case of ‘language’ in relation to ‘con-
cept,’ or ‘common sense’ in relation to ‘reason,’ so also in the case of ‘rhetoric’
in relation to ‘philosophy,’ in each case we can take the former as supporting a
somaticity and a whole as image that, as a rule, is lost in the latter. The point
is to clearly evaluate ‘rhetoric’ as not just a technique for linguistic expression,
but as a bona fide form of knowledge.
One person who clearly indicated ‘rhetorical’ knowledge by contrasting
and opposing it to ‘philosophical’ knowledge was Giambattista Vico. In eigh-
teenth century Italy, he advocated from the standpoint of ‘common sense’
‘topica’ as precisely ‘rhetorical’ knowledge, and set it against ‘critica’ (philo-
sophical criticism) as ‘philosophical’ knowledge in the narrow sense. Although
I cannot enter into a more detailed discussion of Vico here, the above ad-
equately suggests that through a self-recognition of the standpoint of ‘topica,’
the idea of ‘common sense’ caused the confrontation of ‘rhetorical’ knowledge
with ‘philosophical’ knowledge in its restricted sense.
And by emphasizing the role of language in human behavior, such ‘rhe-
torical’ knowledge serves, in addition to opening ‘philosophy’ to an abundant,
subtle, and complex reality, to expand the concept of ‘philosophy’ from its
restricted sense to something broader. At present, a general re-questioning of
‘philosophical’ knowledge through a deep consideration of language is taking
place within the broad global sphere. In this regard as well I think that a clear
configuration of ‘rhetorical’ knowledge is immensely significant for Japanese
philosophy.
I say so because the thinking of the Japanese has often been seen, for bet-
ter or worse, in a special light through its frequent characterization as aes-
thetic or literary. By contrast the configuration of ‘rhetorical’ knowledge in
the above sense should be able to clarify to a greater extent than previously,
98 Nakamura Yūjirō

structurally and logically, the points of difference from the traditional philo-
sophical knowledge of the West by indicating the predicate-character of Japa-
nese thought.33

Conclusion

In the above, taking the title ‘“The Logic of Place” and Common Sense’ as
the basis, I indicated some aspects of the issue of ‘place’ (topos), being noticed
today globally in many fields and from a variety of angles, in the fundamental
requestioning of modern knowledge. While this mainly involves ‘place as the
ground of being,’ ‘place as somatic,’ ‘place as symbolic space,’ and ‘place as the
hidden locus of issues and disputes,’ I also pointed out how there is a ‘logic of
field’ dealing with the ideas of ‘topology’ and the ‘theory of topological space’
in mathematics, the electro-magnetic field in physics, the embryonic field in
biology, and the field of psychological features in psychology, and furthermore
how the later Husserl’s ‘life-world’ and Heidegger’s ‘being-in-the-world’ are
also relevant to this idea.
However in my opinion, as far as I can see, there has not been a theory that
plunges into the issue of ‘place’ and considers it as a principle, with the excep-
tion of Nishida Kitarō’s ‘logic of place’. And the year Nishida set forth his
‘logic of place’ was 1926, that is, the latter half of the 1920s. Nishida’s advoca-
cy of the ‘logic of place’ was not unconnected to the philosophy and thought
of the West of that period. Rather, through confronting major theories from
Greek philosophy up to contemporary Western philosophy, he attempted to
overcome the principle of modernity as the crisis of modern civilization was
gradually becoming apparent in the 1920s. In doing so he was engaging in an
intellectual and philosophical self-awakening as a Japanese person and as an
Easterner.
We can understand this further if we consider Nishida’s ‘logic of place’
together with the project of Miki Kiyoshi’s The Logic of the Imagination (1939)
in its attempt to construct a logic that surpasses Nishida by incorporating the
conclusions of the social sciences. Miki’s ‘logic of the imagination’ was unable
to yield a logically complete outcome because he was arrested and imprisoned
towards the end of the Second World War for suspicion of anti-state activities
and died in prison in the discord of the war’s end. But I think that, together
with Nishida’s ‘logic of place,’ it provided a significant configuration of issues
for ‘Japanese philosophy’ of the first half of the twentieth century.
I myself started the scholarly study of philosophy right after the end of the
Second World War. The trigger was Miki Kiyoshi’s aforementioned Investiga-
tion of Man in Pascal. Although I was much interested in Miki’s ‘logic of the
imagination’ for that reason, I was unable to obtain from it any viable clue
for inheriting and developing its investigation. As I continued my own grop-
 ‘The Logic of Place’ and Common Sense 99

ing and speculation for quite a while, what I encountered after successively
thematizing ‘passion,’ ‘institution,’ and ‘language,’ was ‘common sense’.
And after re-reading anew Nishida Kitarō’s works, I found Nishida’s ‘logic
of place’ to be commensurate, not in the least, with my own ‘theory of com-
mon sense’. What I am in the process of undertaking today as a significant
portion of my philosophical work, in addition to shedding new light on
Nishida’s ‘logic of place’ from the standpoint of my ‘theory of common sense,’
is in reverse to expand and develop my own thought by its means. My talk this
evening was the gist of this project.

(This paper is the Japanese language version of the lecture ‘La “logique de
lieu” et le sensus communis’ given at the Collège international de philosophie
First Public Lecture Series held at the lecture hall of Ecole Polytechnique,
Paris in November 1983.)

References (appended by the translator)

Arieti, S 1976, Creativity: The Magic Synthesis, Basic Books, New York, NY.
Merleau-Ponty, M 1962, Phenomenology of Perception, Routledge, New York, NY.
Miki, K 1926, The Investigation of Man in Pascal, Iwanami Shoten, Tokyo.
Miki, K 1939, The Logic of the Imagination, Iwanami Shoten, Tokyo.
Motoki, T 1941, Principles of Japanese Grammar, Iwanami Shoten, Tokyo.
Nakamura, Y 1983, Kyōtsūkankakuron—chi no kumikae no tame ni [On Common
Sense: Towards a Rearrangement of Knowledge], Iwanami shoten, Tokyo.
Nakamura, Y 1984, Jutsugoshū—kininaru kotoba [A Collection of Terms: Words We are
not Sure of], Iwanami Shoten, Tokyo.
Nakamura,Y 2001, Nishida Kitarō II, Iwanami Shoten, Tokyo.
Nishida, K 2003, Nishida Kitarō zenshū [Collected Works of Nishida Kitarō], Iwanami
Shoten, Tokyo.
Nishida, K 2012, Place and Dialectic: Two Essays by Nishida Kitarō, trans. JWM
Krummel & S Nagatomo, Oxford University Press, New York, NY.
Yates, F 1966, The Art of Memory, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.

Author Biography

Nakamura Yūjirō was born in Tokyo in 1925. He graduated from Tokyo University,
Dept. of Literature and was professor at Meiji University from 1965 until retiring
in 1995. He has authored numerous books in Japanese, among them, Pascal and his
Time, The Age of Pathos, The Awakening of Sensibility, On Common Sense, Philosophy’s
Present, What is Clinical Knowledge, The Odyssey of Form, Notes on a Philosophy of Evil,
and The Predicate World and the Institution.
100 Nakamura Yūjirō

Notes

1 © 1984, 1987, 2001 by Yūjirō Nakamura. Reprinted by permission of the propri-

etor by arrangement with Iwanami Shoten, Publishers, Tokyo.
2 Translator’s note: The main part of this text is taken from Chapter 1 of Naka-
mura’s Nishida Kitarō II (Nakamura 2001, pp. 37-66). As he explains in the fol-
lowing prefatory note, the text is originally a lecture he gave in France in the early
1980s. The personal names in this translation will follow the Japanese convention,
with the family name first and the personal name after.The translator would like
to thank Iwanami Shoten for arranging the copyright permission to publish this
work in English. The translator would also like to thank Hobart and William
Smith Colleges for providing the Faculty Research Grant for 2014-2015 to fund
the copyright for this piece.
3 Translator’s note: This prefatory note is from the preface to the book (Nakamura
2001, pp. v-vi) in which the essay is inserted as the first chapter.
4 Translator’s note: This is a neologism from the Meiji period (1868-1912) devel-
oped to translate the Western term, philosophy, when a generation of scholars
were devoted to importing a variety of academic fields from the West, including
‘philosophy’.
5 Translator’s note: In the following and throughout this paper, Nakamura will be
using the word ‘place’ (basho) in a broad sense that encompasses the meanings of
‘context,’ ‘environment,’ and ‘field.’
6 Translator’s note: In other words, the self as knower together with the known
thing is reflected in the field of consciousness. The subject-object relation presup-
poses this prior holistic standpoint that for Nishida is thus pre-subjective and
pre-objective.
7 Translator’s note: The essay ‘Place’ can be found in volume 3 of the latest (2003)
edition of Nishida’s Collected Works: Nishida Kitarō Zenshū (Nishida 2003). And
the English translation is available in Place and Dialectic: Two Essays by Nishida
Kitarō (Nishida 2012). Nakamura’s phrasing of Nishida here and in the following
is not exact and not set in quotation marks.
8 Translator’s note: Nishida, having initiated his theory of place in 1926 with an
analysis of judgment and consciousness, in the 1930s extends that theory outward
with a view to what he comes to call the socio-historical world. The concept of the
concrete universal that expresses or manifests itself in the world is borrowed from
G.W.F. Hegel.
9 Translator’s note: Nishida’s attempt here is to explicate the two poles (or planes)
of judgment that transcend its very determinate structure: the transcendent sub-
stratum or object that becomes the grammatical subject on the one hand and the
contextual background that provide determining predicates for the object. Both
ultimately transcend the sayable, the determinate. Nakamura will explicate this
further below.
10 Translator’s note: The assumption here is that consciousness involves a field of
predicates or categories for knowing, articulated for example in the act of judg-
 ‘The Logic of Place’ and Common Sense 101
ment. And a corresponding important point is that the self cannot be reduced to
a grammatical subject, it cannot be objectified.
11 Translator’s note: This term jikaku (self-awareness) can also be translated as self-
realization or self-awakening. Its meaning, especially in this context, encompasses
all of these senses.
12 Translator’s note: Nishida here takes off from Hegel. For him, judgment as the
self-determination of the concrete universal is also a form of self-awareness. That
‘self ’ here however refers to the pre-subjective holistic field or ‘place’ that tran-
scends the individual or objectifiable self. In his later works of the 1930s, this
becomes understood in terms of the ‘world’ (sekai).
13 Translator’s note: This is due to Nishida’s Eastern understanding of the concept of
‘being’ (yū 有) which has the sense of a determinate and relative entity, equivalent to
what in Heidegger’s terms would be the ontic sense of being. In that sense the place
or universal that determines itself to express itself in individual beings, is hence noth-
ing, no-thing. In this particular sentence, ‘being’ translates sonzai (存在) and ‘entity’
translates yū (有), but both terms are reduced in significance to that ontic sense of
being.
14 Translator’s note: Nishida’s understanding of consciousness here in terms of a
place of relative nothing is akin to Sartre’s sense of consciousness as a nothingness
vis-à-vis the being of objects. But for Nishida there is ultimately a place of absolute
nothing that grounds, encompasses, and contextualizes the place of beings and the
place of relative nothing, object and subject, being and non-being.
15 Translator’s note: The reference to the will shows the influence of nineteenth cen-
tury German philosophy, including Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and the Neo-
Kantians, on Nishida. What distinguishes Nishida however, as Nakamura points
out in the following paragraph, is his turn away from the grammatical subject,
away from the objectifiable, to the pre-objectified holistic situation that he calls
‘place’ or ‘predicate.’ For a detailed explication and analysis of Nishida’s theory of
place, see John W.M. Krummel, ‘Basho, World, and Dialectics: An Introduction
to the Philosophy of Nishida Kitarō’, in Nishida (2012, pp. 3-48).
16 Translator’s note: Hence it is important here to understand what Nishida means
by ‘the nothing’ as not utter nothingness but rather an abyssal abundance that is
undeterminable, indeterminate, allowing for the myriad ways in which it becomes
determined. ‘Being’ for Nishida then is the determined, and ‘the nothing’ is the
indeterminacy that becomes determined, or what he also calls ‘the self-forming
formlessness’.
17 Translator’s note: Nakamura himself did not provide bibliographical information
to all of his references. However, the translator has found most, though not all,
of the sources, and includes their bibliographical information in the end reference
list.
18 Translator’s note: The Japanese term for ‘word’ here, gengo (言語), also means ‘lan-
guage.’ So an alternative translation would read ‘language as event’. The reader
should keep in mind that both senses are intended here.
19 Translator’s note: Note that these two expressions both translated into English as
‘word’ and both alternately pronounced as kotoba, also translatable as ‘language’
102 Nakamura Yūjirō

or ‘speech,’ are written with different ideographs in the Japanese original: 詞 for
shi and 辞 for ji, both meaning ‘word.’
20 Translator’s note: This term, also pronounced kotoba and written as 詞, has the
connotation of expression in the sense of the wording, or of meaning in the sense
of the information literally conveyed.
21 Translator’s note: This term is also pronounced kotoba but is written with a differ-
ent ideograph 辞. The connotation here is of meaning or expression in the sense
of the speaker’s or writer’s state of mind conveyed.
22 Translator’s note: The sense here is that the state of mind expressed (the subjec-
tive meaning) (kotoba as ji 辞) in the word or sentence is metaphorically more
expansive or has greater depth, less restricted in significance or meaning, than the
actual objective meaning or information (kotoba as shi 詞) conveyed in that very
word or sentence. It is the ‘scene’ (bamen), or in Nishida’s terms the ‘place’ (basho),
expressed in the literal sense. In other words in the Japanese language there is far
more implied than the literal meaning, much that remains ‘unsaid’ or ‘unwritten,’
and yet ‘understood’.
23 Translator’s note: the Japanese title is Sōzōryoku — Genshokarano tōgō which liter-
ally means ‘Creativity: Primordial Synthesis’.
24 Translator’s note: In other words, if the context that previously provided a certain
coherence for objects and concepts, is no longer familiar. What then?
25 Translator’s note: Or perhaps we might understand this as a rearrangement of a
previously familiar predicate pole (context) into a new and unfamiliar predicate
pole on the basis of the abyssal place of nothing that allows for such seemingly
arbitrary creativity. The place of nothing in Nishida both grounds and ungrounds.
26 Translator’s note: In his Jutsugoshū—kininaru kotoba [A Collection of Terms: Words
We are not Sure of] (Nakamura 1984, pp. 83-85), Nakamura suggests this com-
mon sense to be a psychic nucleus or originary sense that communicates with,
guides or governs, and distinguishes as well as integrates the five senses so that they
make sense. This would be what Aristotle called sensus communis (koinē aisthēsis).
For Aristotle this faculty was also what permitted the perception of movement,
rest, form, size, number, unity, etc. that each of the five senses alone would fail to
perceive. He also regarded it as the bearer of the imagination. The English mean-
ing of common sense as communal judgment shared by members of society derives
from that older significance. On this basis Nakamura refers to Merleau-Ponty’s
quotation of Herder in his Phenomenology of Perception: ‘Man is a permanent sen-
sorium commune…’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962, pp. 235, 238) It is ‘the primary layer
of sense experience’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 238) that gives meaning or sens.
See also Nakamura’s Kyōtsūkankakuron—chi no kumikae no tame ni [On Common
Sense: Towards a Rearrangement of Knowledge] (Nakamura 1983).
27 Translator’s note: More than one term can be used to translate ‘imagination’ in
Japanese. But the term and graph, kōsōryoku (構想力), tells us that what is spe-
cifically meant is the imagination as a creative or productive faculty rather than as
mere fantasy (phantasy).
28 Translator’s note: This is Nakamura’s loose paraphrasing of Miki rather than exact
quotations.
 ‘The Logic of Place’ and Common Sense 103

29 Translator’s note: Form here translates the Japanese term kata or katachi (形). It
would also be good to keep in mind here the German term for ‘imagination,’
Einbildungskraft. Bild in Einbildung means ‘image’ but also has the sense of ‘form.’
Bildung, which means ‘education’ or ‘cultivation,’ also literally has the sense of
‘formation.’ Miki has all of this in mind when developing his concept of kōsōryoku
or imagination.
30 Translator’s note: Miki’s teacher, Nishida, referred to the ‘formation of the form-
less’ when speaking of the activity of the place of nothing.
31 Translator’s note: The reader ought to take note of the year of its publication: one
year before Sein und Zeit was published. Miki studied in Germany during 1922-
24 under Rickert and Heidegger among others.
32 Translator’s note: This is not an exact quotation but a loose paraphrase and is not
placed in quotation marks in the original.
33 Translator’s note: By ‘predicate’ in this sense, Nakamura has in mind the broad
philosophical sense of ‘predicate’ used in Japanese philosophy, as deriving from
Nishida’s theory of place, that is, the character of assuming an implicit unsayable
contextual and holistic significance that, metaphorically speaking, ‘envelops’ what
is said or thought as its ‘place’.
Social Imaginaries 1.1 (2015) 105-129

Interpreting the Present –

a Research Programme
Peter Wagner

Abstract: Sociologists have increasingly adopted the insight that ‘modern so-
cieties’ undergo major historical transformations; they are not stable or under-
going only smooth social change once their basic institutional structure has
been established. There is even some broad agreement that the late twentieth
century witnessed the most recent one of those major transformations leading
into the present time – variously characterized by adding adjectives such as ‘re-
flexive’, ‘global’ or simply ‘new’ to modernity. However, neither the dynamics
of the recent social transformation nor the characteristic features of the present
social constellation have been adequately grasped yet.
Rather than assuming a socio-structural or politico-institutional perspec-
tive, as they dominate in sociology and political science respectively, this article
concentrates on the way in which current social practices are experienced and
interpreted by the human beings who enact them as parts of a common world
that they inhabit together. It will be suggested that current interpretations are
shaped by the experience of the dismantling of ‘organized modernity’ from
the 1970s onwards and of the subsequent rise of a view of the world as shaped
by parallel processes of ‘globalization’ and ‘individualization’, signalling the
erasure of historical time and lived space, during the 1990s and early 2000s.
In response to these experiences, we witness today a variety of interconnected
attempts at re-interpretation of modernity, aiming at re-constituting spatial-
ity and temporality. The re-constitution of meaningful time concerns most
strongly questions of historical injustice, in terms of the present significance
of past oppression and exclusion and in terms of the unequal effects of the
instrumental transformation of the earth in the techno-industrial trajectory
of modernity. The re-constitution of meaningful space focuses on the relation
between the political form of a spatially circumscribed democracy and the eco-
nomic practices of expansionist capitalism as well as on the spatial co-existence
of a plurality of ways of world-interpretation.

Key Words: Globalization – individualization – modernity – space – time

106 Peter Wagner

Introduction: The Present as a Matter of Interpretation

‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the
point however is to change it’, Karl Marx famously suggested in his Theses on
Feuerbach of 1845. Debating the relevance of Marx’s work one and a half cen-
turies later, at the end of the twentieth century, the phrase was often turned
around: ‘The philosophers have only wanted to change the world in various
ways; the point however is to interpret it.’1 The ‘point’ of this article is that we
may first have to see how people interpret the world at a given time as a basis
for developing a sound understanding of the present that, in turn, may help
in changing the world.
The world has considerably changed over the past half century. Sociolo-
gists have reluctantly but increasingly adopted the insight that ‘modern soci-
eties’ undergo major historical transformations. In contrast to what had long
been believed, these societies are not stable or undergoing only smooth social
change once their basic institutional structure has been established. There
is even some broad agreement that the late twentieth century witnessed the
most recent one of those major transformations leading into the present time.
However, neither the dynamics of the recent social transformation nor the
characteristic features of the present socio-political constellation – in the fol-
lowing referred to, in short, as ‘the present’ – have been adequately grasped
yet. The prevailing approaches in this debate either consider the present as
marked by ‘globalization’ conceived as self-propelled processes of ever-further
extension of networks of social relations; or by the building of political and
economic institutions with global reach (supranationalism, cosmopolitan-
ism). They, thus adopt a socio-processural or a politico-institutional perspec-
tive respectively. Without denying some validity to these approaches, the fol-
lowing reasoning claims that for understanding the present it is more fruitful
to concentrate on the ways in which current social practices are experienced
and interpreted by the human beings who enact them as parts of a common
world that they inhabit together and on the question of how far global institu-
tions sediment such an interpretation of the world. In other words, this article
aims at understanding the present time as given shape by the interpretations
human beings give to the transformations they experience.
Towards this end, the socio-political transformations over the past half
century will be analysed as processes of re-interpretation of modernity. These
interpretative processes vary across world-regions in the light of prior experi-
ences with modernity. At this point in time, furthermore, there is no consen-
sus over the most appropriate and adequate interpretation of modernity for
our time – certainly not globally, but mostly not regionally either. However,
the ongoing interpretative processes share a background in the dismantling
of the institutional structures that were dominant half a century ago and the
interpretations sedimented in them. In other words, they have a common
 Interpreting the Present – a Research Programme 107

focus on the normative and functional deficiencies that resulted from the de-
structuring of the ‘organized modernity’ of the 1960s (Wagner 1994). From
the 1980s onwards, this dismantling was often referred to as parallel processes
of ‘globalization’ and ‘individualization’, signalling the erasure of historical
time and lived space. More recently, though, it has become clear that such
erasure is unlikely to occur. Rather, we witness a variety of interconnected at-
tempts at re-interpretation of modernity, aiming at re-constituting spatiality
and temporality. As will be shown in more detail below, the re-constitution of
meaningful time concerns most strongly questions of historical injustice, in
terms of the present significance of past oppression and exclusion and in terms of
the unequal effects of the instrumental transformation of the earth in the techno-
industrial trajectory of modernity. The re-constitution of meaningful space
focuses on the relation between the political form of a spatially circumscribed
democracy and the economic practices of expansionist capitalism as well as on the
spatial co-existence of a plurality of ways of world-interpretation.
The reasoning will proceed as follows: First, it will be demonstrated that
it is possible to understand the present as a plurality of ways of re-interpreting
modernity because an extended scholarly debate about the recent socio-polit-
ical transformations can serve as a background and that it is necessary because
this debate has until now failed to bring about an adequate understanding of
the current socio-political constellation. Secondly, it will be shown how a his-
torical-comparative sociology of modernity that focuses on agency and inter-
pretation can provide the tools for advancing towards such an understanding
of the present. Thirdly, a brief sketch of the occurrences, and their interpreta-
tions, that led to the de-structuring of organized modernity will provide a set
of guiding assumptions for the analysis. Against this background, fourthly, a
conceptual frame for analyzing current interpretative processes will be devel-
oped that, finally, serves to generate the agenda for the analysis of ongoing
processes of re-interpretation of modernity.2

The Recent Transformation of Modernity

Across the disciplines of the social sciences, the profound way in which the
present socio-political constellation differs from the preceding one has recent-
ly been a topic of core concern. Within sociology and social theory, the debate
was triggered as early as 1979 by the socio-philosophical thesis about the ad-
vent of a postmodern constellation, drawing on and extending the earlier the-
sis about post-industrial society and emphasizing the impact of new informa-
tion and communication technologies. This provocative thesis was made more
amenable to sociological debate by the suggestion of a transformation of mo-
dernity, rather than its end, and the advent of a ‘second’, ‘reflexive’ or simply
‘other’ modernity, replacing socio-political orders with boundaries and history
by a ‘network society’, ideas that have guided much sociological research since.
108 Peter Wagner

In political science, in particular in the areas of government and of compara-

tive political economy, a similar observation of a profound transformation
was connected to, on the one side, the changes in the international division
of labour and the related crisis of national macro-demand management and,
on the other, the changes in form and self-understanding of public action, as
expressed in the terminological change from ‘government’ to ‘governance’ and
the arrival of ‘new public management’. This transformation has often been
characterized, mostly by critical observers, as the ‘rise of neo-liberalism’ as a
new and hegemonic understanding of the relation between states and markets
in an increasingly interconnected social world. In the field of international re-
lations, the event that announced the transformation towards the present time
was the end of Soviet socialism and, thus, of the bipolar world-order that had
characterized the post-Second World War period. It is now common instead
to speak of a post-Cold War period that, rather than witnessing a unipolar he-
gemony of the United States of America, is increasingly multipolar due to the
rise of new powers, but also marked by the decline of stable political authority
in several parts of the world. Significantly, this transformation puts into ques-
tion key concepts that served to guide earlier analysis as well as practice, such
as the one of state sovereignty. Within historiography, evidently less focussed
on the present time, the rise of global history mirrors this transformation in
the sense that the turn away from predominantly national historiography re-
flects the decreasing capacity of nation-states to shape the present social world
and, concomitantly, invites for a critical review of past interconnectedness as
well. Some emphasis has been placed on analysing ‘the birth of the modern
world’ (CA Bayly) during the decades around 1800 in a global perspective,
and significantly this modern world is sometimes seen as emerging according
to a novel dynamics that reaches up until the 1960s (Osterhammel 2009).
Taken together, these debates and findings support the observation of a major
socio-political transformation having occurred between the 1960s and the
1990s. Furthermore, it is often suggested that the specificity of our current
socio-political constellation emerges as the outcome of this transformation.
At the same time, this scholarship shows shortcomings in several respects:
First, (1) detailed analysis has often been limited to the European (or: West-
ern) situation and, accordingly, the variety of different socio-political constel-
lations in the current world has not been in focus. Secondly, (2) the transfor-
mation has been too little placed in historical perspective and, accordingly,
it has not been possible to grasp the specificity of the current situation in
comparison with the past. Thirdly, (3) in the absence of nuanced, spatio-tem-
porally well-defined findings, there has been a tendency to work with overly
general concepts on socio-political trends and structures.

(1) Most of the general research on ‘macro-sociological’ transformations

as well as analyses of specific issues, such as transformations of identities
 Interpreting the Present – a Research Programme 109

(Buchmann 1989) or of guiding motivations in economic life (Boltanski and

Chiapello 1999), have focused on Western, indeed mostly: on European So-
cieties. The extended research programme explicitly dedicated to testing the
hypothesis of the emergence of ‘reflexive modernization’, for instance, pur-
sued by the late Ulrich Beck (1999-2009, funded by the German Research
Society), concentrated on ‘industrial modernity’. My own early work offered
an intra-European comparison and a limited angle on a comparison between
Europe, the USA and the Soviet Union (Wagner 1994). Its perspective was
taken up in analyses of Latin America (Domingues 2008; Larrain 2000), Tur-
key (Kaya 2004) and Korea (PhD thesis by Shin Jong-Hwa). While being ex-
ceptions at their time, these works provided further case analyses but did not
aim at developing a broader comparative – world-sociological – perspective.3
This situation changed only very recently when an explicit interest in analyz-
ing the current socio-political constellation from a world-regional perspective
emerged, which has borne first fruit (see Arjomand and Reis 2013; Arjomand
2014; Wagner 2011, 2015; for conceptual reflections, Delanty 2015; Wagner
2014).
(2) The existing research is often marked by drawing an overly sharp con-
trast between the situations before and after the recent transformation. This
may initially have been motivated by the need to underline the observation of
a profound transformation, against the then prevailing view of only gradual
change. The consequence, however, is a lack of historical understanding: ev-
erything before the transformation is relegated into a single past that, further-
more, was seen as basically well understood by existing concepts. In turn, the
present time is characterized by its opposition to this past. Thus, the social
world is seen as having moved from functional differentiation as a dominant
principle of social organization to either over-differentiation or de-differentia-
tion; the political world is seen as having moved from the Westphalian system
of sovereign states to either ‘new Middle ages’ or to a cosmopolitan order.
One of the explicit purposes of my Sociology of Modernity (1994) had been
the introduction of a more nuanced view of history into the sociological analy-
sis of social transformations, but at the time of writing the emerging contours
of ‘the present’ could only be speculated about. Applied to the history of West
European societies over the past two centuries, this view helped to identify an
earlier major transformation of modernity from the late nineteenth century
onwards, leading towards the socio-political constellation called ‘organized
modernity’ that entered into crisis from the 1960s onwards. This historico-
sociological perspective has recently become one point of reference for current
globally oriented analyses of the present, then defined as a third phase of mo-
dernity – with the risk, though, of again abstracting too much from temporal
and spatial variety (Bringel and Domingues 2015).
(3) The focus on the Western (European) experience and the overstated
nature of the rupture between the recent past and the present, as discussed
110 Peter Wagner

above, invite conceptual simplifications that, in the next step, become ob-
stacles to further insight. Two such simplifications can be singled out. Within
sociological debate, the recent transformation is seen as the product of long-
term processes of change in the form of trends or tendencies (for a forceful cri-
tique: Raymond Boudon). More specifically, the current era emerges through
‘globalization’ conceived as a largely self-propelled process of ever-further ex-
tension of networks of social relations, not least driven by new information
and communication technology permitting ‘time-space compression’ (David
Harvey). That which is sometimes called ‘neo-modernization theory’ builds
on such assumptions (e.g. Schmidt 2014; see Therborn 2010 for a suggestive
synthesis). This view is often connected to a parallel theorem of ‘individualiza-
tion’, suggesting that bonds between human beings are weakening and that
individual self-realization becomes the major commitment – and also obliga-
tion, in the form of the ‘enterprising self ’ – of our time. Taken together, the
theorems of globalization and individualization suggest the emergence of a
social constellation in which there are few phenomena of significance between
the individual human being and the globe. More strongly present in the fields
of political science and international relations, the recent transformation is
seen as the weakening or even dismantling of national political institutions
and, in response, the building of political and economic institutions with
global reach (supranationalism, cosmopolitanism) as the emergent dominant
characteristics of the present. This view is consistent with the sociological view
described above, as the individualized human beings acting in a globalized
world do not require intermediate political institutions any longer.
It should immediately be added that this strong image reflects the state-of-
the-art of the 1990s and early 2000s rather than of the present. Today, there
is intense sociological research on the actual creation and maintenance of ex-
tended relations of interactions and on the emergence of new social structures,
such as through migration patterns, with a keen interest in the less-than-glob-
al spatial configurations that emerge – sometimes labelled ‘globalization from
below’. In political science and international relations, current topics include
regional integration as well as the activities of international non-governmental
organisations, thus precisely phenomena beyond national but below global
reach – sometimes labelled ‘transnational’. However, the above description re-
mains relevant for two reasons: first, because the recent research developments
underpin the emergence of a new perspective on the present time but they do
not yet provide it. To do so, one must deliberately go beyond the conceptual
emphasis on either processes or institutions – this approach will be spelt out
in the following section. And secondly, the above image of the world remains
relevant as a marker of its own time, as a contribution to the re-interpretation
of modernity during the 1990s and early 2000s. As such, as an empirical phe-
nomenon, it will be taken up in the subsequent section.
 Interpreting the Present – a Research Programme 111

Agency and Interpretation in the Transformations of Modernity

The turn – or: return – to an emphasis on human agency is an outcome

of the agency-structure debate of the 1980s and is common to many current
approaches, including rational choice theory and analytical sociology. More
rarely, though, is it combined with a social ontology that sees human beings
as ‘self-interpreting animals’ (Charles Taylor) and emphasizes the human need
for, and capacity of, creatively interpreting the situations they find themselves
in with a view to providing meaning and giving orientation for action. The
human faculty of imagination is central in linking experiences of the past to
understandings of the present and expectations for the future. Social processes
can then no longer be seen as self-propelled. Present meaningful human ac-
tion is always required to let a social process continue – even though the
emergence of unintended consequences as the collective outcome of the sum
of many individual actions is recognized. Similarly, institutions need to be
regarded as dependent for their continued existence on the present enactment
of their rules, on the one side, and themselves being created as the sedimenta-
tion of earlier interpretations, on the other. Rather than postulating that logics
of social processes or structural constraints of institutions determine social
change, therefore, social transformations need to be analysed as the interpreta-
tive engagement of human beings with the situation they find themselves in
and as the work at re-interpretation of the situation should it be found defi-
cient and unsatisfactory. Concatenated re-interpretative action, such as in cur-
rent social movements, can result in processes of world-transformation. And
new interpretations can sediment in new institutions, such as the creation of
a BRICS development bank or the signing of a free-trade agreement, to give
just two recent examples of the concerns to which I will return below.
Sociological research on entire social configurations (‘macro-sociology’)
has often focused on the reproduction of society, the question of social or-
der. In the light of the above, reproduction occurs when the existing institu-
tions are seen as satisfactory or when their change is prevented by forms of
domination. In turn, when existing institutions are seen as deficient, they are
subjected to criticism that can lead to re-interpretation. Deficiency can be
expressed in functional and in normative terms: institutions do not solve col-
lective problems and/or they do not do so in accordance with prevailing value
commitments. The most general problématiques of human social life concern
the satisfaction of material needs, the determination of the rules for living
together, and the determination of the knowledge bases on which social life
can rest (the economic, political and epistemic problématiques, respectively).
Current value commitments – under conditions of modernity – find their
most general expression in the terms autonomy and mastery: the commit-
ment to individual and collective self-determination; and the commitment to
control the relations to nature, to others and to oneself (Wagner 2008).
112 Peter Wagner

By the 1960s, the sociology of ‘modern societies’, accompanied by the

view of social change as ‘modernization and development’, tended to see the
most ‘advanced’ societies of the time as the functionally performative institu-
tionalization of autonomy. It was unaware – or unconvinced – of the ambiva-
lence within the modern commitment to autonomy and mastery and, conse-
quently, of its persistent openness to interpretation. Sociological debate from
the 1970s onwards, in turn, recognized functional and normative deficiencies
of the existing institutional arrangements. The renewed emphasis on agency
and interpretation, as mentioned above, accompanied such critical analysis
within sociological theory. However, the connection between this conceptual
renewal, which focused on interaction settings, thus mostly ‘micro-sociolog-
ical’ issues, and the critical diagnosis of a socio-political constellation proved
difficult. A significant step towards creating such connection was done when
the general human faculty of imagination and interpretation was sociologi-
cally conceptualized as the critical capacity of human beings, aiming to iden-
tify the appropriateness of an action as well as the adequacy, or not, of insti-
tutional arrangements in the light of an always existing plurality of registers
of justification (Boltanski and Thévenot 1991; Boltanski 2009). In historical
perspective, social change is no longer seen as steered by an actorless and pre-
determined dynamics of progress, either smooth or conflictive, but crucially
as driven by the critical engagement of actors with their situations and with
the institutional arrangements that they inhabit, emphasizing the contingency
of outcomes (Wagner 1994, ch 4; 2008, ch 13; 2012, ch 4; Boltanski and
Chiapello 1999; Sewell 2005; Honneth and Sutterlüty 2011).
These innovations address all the shortcomings in the analysis of the re-
cent transformation and the current constellation of modernity. In conceptual
terms, they help to overcome the inclination towards inappropriate simpli-
fications in terms of global trends and structures. In turn, they demand a
detailed analysis, first, of sedimented interpretations of modernity and the
criticism to which they have been exposed in the recent past and, secondly,
of the re-interpretations that are proposed in the light of such criticism. In
temporal terms, they help avoid a simple opposition between past and pres-
ent and suggest instead the possibility of sequences of transformations in the
light of re-interpretations and subsequent unintended consequences of such
re-interpretation. In spatial terms, they demand specificity in the look at the
experiences human beings make with the interpretation of modernity they
inhabit and, accordingly, in the need for re-interpretation they see in the light
of those experiences.
Starting out from these reflections, one still needs to ask in which sense
the present socio-political constellation should be analysed in terms of ‘world’
and of ‘present’ before one can proceed. Most of social science has taken the
spatial meaning of the term ‘world’ for granted and has spatially analysed so-
cial phenomena as extending across (parts of ) the earth in the form of material
 Interpreting the Present – a Research Programme 113

or communicative exchange or as covering spaces on the earth in the form

of the reach of legal, political or other institutions. Placing the emphasis on
interpretation, however, requires a distinction between world and earth. Earth
is the planet on which we live, the ground of our existence; world, in turn, is
the social space human beings create between themselves. There is only one
earth, but the human faculty of imagination can institute different worlds –
worlds that can co-exist with each other; and worlds that can be the imaginary
point of reference for action (Karagiannis and Wagner 2007, 2012; draw-
ing on Hannah Arendt and Cornelius Castoriadis). ‘World-making’ (Nelson
Goodman), therefore, is a core component of the current re-interpretation of
modernity.
World-interpretations, in turn, are themselves situated in space and time.
They occur in plural forms and are not necessarily connected to each other.
However, the increasing connectedness of social phenomena, enabled by tech-
nologies of information, communication and transportation, also entails an
increasing connectedness of forms of world-interpretation. The very possibili-
ty of writing world-history – and world-sociology, as here proposed – depends
on some pronounced form of connectedness, which has existed for many so-
cial practices since the late eighteenth century (Osterhammel 2009). Such
connectedness, though, does not lead to homogenization, as often assumed
in globalization research. Rather, it entails that any world-interpretation, and
the institutions that may be based on it, needs to take the co-existence of
other world-interpretations into account. In this sense, the unity of the ‘pres-
ent’ as object of analysis is constituted by a common movement of world-
interpretation that starts out from the dismantling of spatio-temporally well
circumscribed interpretations of modernity (the constellation of ‘organized
modernity’), goes through a radical erasure of specificities of time and space,
and currently focuses on the reconstitution of meaningful temporality and
spatiality in plural, though interconnected forms. In other words, comparison
takes a new form: the units of analysis are no longer entities such as nations,
societies, civilizations, defined by territory and/or populations, but contem-
poraneous interpretations of a shared issue/problem. In this sense, the term
‘world-region’, as employed here, does not contain as strong conceptual con-
notations as the terms ‘society’ or ‘civilization’. It is used for organizing the
investigation, leaving the question whether there are ‘interpretative world-
regions’ in the present, spatially circumscribed and shaped by common expe-
rience, subject to empirical findings.

Organized Modernity and its De-structuring

A quick portrait of the main lines of transformations of modernity and
their interpretations from the 1960s to the present will have the following
contours: (1) The period around 1960 was the moment of consolidation of
114 Peter Wagner

‘organized modernity’, organized in territorially separated forms with a con-

siderable degree of variation. (2) This organized modernity was exposed to
criticism – along with limitations of its performance – that led to its disman-
tling. (3) The dismantling opened the way to an imaginary of socio-political
organization without boundaries and without significant ties to the past; the
imaginary of globalization and individualization. (4) As it proved impossible
as well as undesirable to let this interpretation sediment in the form of global
institutions and practices, the present is marked by a work of reinterpretation
that re-introduces notions of historical time and lived space, but without re-
turning to the forms of organized modernity that had succumbed to criticism.
In more detail:
(1) The global socio-political constellation at around 1960 was (perceived
as) relatively consolidated, as captured by the then widespread use of the
three-worlds image: a First World of liberal-democratic capitalism, a Second
World of Soviet-style socialism; and a Third World of developing countries.
This imagery was sociologically conceptualized from the First-World point
of view as oneself having reached modernity, the status of ‘modern society’;
the Second World constituting a deliberate and organized deviation but with
trends of convergence of those two worlds; and the Third World still needing
to undergo processes of ‘modernization and development’. From a current
point of view, the comparative analysis needs to be made more nuanced and
symmetric by reconsidering the situation around 1960 as a co-existing variety
of regional interpretations of modernity. Several steps towards this reconsid-
eration have already been done: in the contemporary, today largely forgotten
attempts at a socio-historical mapping of the existing constellation and its
historical trajectory (Louis Hartz in 1964; Darcy Ribeiro in the late 1960s);
in the distinction between varieties of Atlantic modernity (North America,
South America, sub-Saharan Africa, Europe; see the contributions to Wag-
ner 2015); in the comparison of varieties of modernity within the BRICS
countries (Domingues 2012); in the ongoing work at characterizing in detail
the Brazilian, South African and European interpretations of modernity in
(Dlamini, Mota and Wagner, in preparation). The then existing interpreta-
tions of modernity had some basic features in common:

– The attempt at creating and managing the domestic economic assets in such
a way that relative stability can be expected: through Keynesian demand
management; through socialist organization of production; through import
substitution policies; even including stable relations of dependence in colo-
nial and neo-colonial situations;
– The attempt at similarly stabilizing the political constellation: by compet-
itive-party democracies based on ‘political apathy’ (Gabrial Almond and
Sidney Verba) rather than high-intensity participation; by the imposition
of a historical-materialist framework for political action in the Soviet-social-
ist ‘people’s republics’; by the organization of political life in authoritarian
 Interpreting the Present – a Research Programme 115
frameworks, whether through military dictatorships or organicistically in-
spired socio-political organization; by the expectation that former colonies
claiming the right to self-determination would follow one of the above po-
litical paths;
– The limitation of the need for recognizing – and accepting – cultural dif-
ference (otherness) by considering functional requirements as the supreme
determinant of socio-political organization;
– The expectational ‘freezing’ of the existing constellation in time, allowing
only for smooth and predictable change, such as convergence between First
and Second World and modernization of the Third World.

(2) Highlighting these features of the socio-political constellation of

around 1960 helps to understand the dynamics that unsettles this constella-
tion and through its dismantling brings about the core contours of the pres-
ent. In other words, the main issues that need to be confronted when aim-
ing to understand the present can be identified by reading the conflicts and
transformations from the 1960s to the 1990s as challenges to the prevailing
interpretations of modernity, in the light of perceived normative and func-
tional deficiencies, against the background of the respective experiences with
modernity within the regional settings. The movements for decolonization
and national liberation in the ‘Third World’ gained momentum during the
1960s, but they were initially misconceived as merely a step ahead towards the
‘modernization and development’ that the ‘First World’ had already accom-
plished. In turn, the years of intensified protest at the end of the 1960s and
during the early 1970s were much more than a short ‘crisis of governability’
from which one could easily return to elite government and political apathy
as usual. In socio-economic terms, the accommodating response of elites in
many Western polities – in contrast to the persistence or re-instauration of
authoritarian regimes in Latin America, South East Asia and South Africa
– restored legitimacy for a moment, but also deepened the fiscal crisis of the
Keynesian welfare states. The so-called rise of neo-liberalism is best considered
as the next step of elite response to the threat of the withering away of profit-
able production possibilities. It involved the weakening of protective labour
legislation and the curtailing of trade-union power, but also the ‘structural
adjustment policies’ in what is now often called the global South and the
relocation of major sectors of industrial production from the supposedly ‘ad-
vanced industrial societies’ to initially East Asia and now many parts of the
globe. In politico-cultural terms, and despite the intentions of the early pro-
test activists, a major consequence of the movements that started in the 1960s
was a weakening of the collective concepts the political use of which had
marked the preceding one-and-a-half centuries: nation, class, state, and also
society. These collective conventions and regulations had not only stabilized
modernity temporarily in the West but also contributed to giving meaning to
social life. Their dismantling, both through institutional changes and cultural
116 Peter Wagner

re-significations, was partly brought about by elites who saw their power en-
dangered. But these conventions and regulations were also under attack by
people who experienced them as constraining their liberties and capacities for
self-realization. Thus, a double-pronged attack, highly differently motivated,
on collective conventions led to the destabilization of the existing form of
modernity. The fall of Soviet socialism in the decade after the rise of the first
neo-liberal governments to power – in Chile, the United Kingdom and the
United States of America – then appeared to confirm the de-collectivizing
tendency of recent political change. Globalization, seen in connection with
the decline of the nation-state, and individualization, seen as the weakening of
the capacity for collective action, became the keywords for describing socio-
political change during the 1990s.
(3) These occurrences worked towards the dismantling of the conventions
of organized modernity, appearing in the form of rebellion against imposed
constraints, in normative terms, or as consequences drawn from the insights
into functional deficiency, in some instances as a combination of both criti-
cisms. But they contained only a weak image of a constructive re-interpreta-
tion of modernity, the key elements of which are: the general idea of equal
individual rights, such as in the women’s movement, the civil rights move-
ment in the USA or the struggle against apartheid; inclusive collective self-
determination, or: democracy, in liberation from colonial rule (including the
particular case of South Africa) and from authoritarian rule such as in South-
ern Europe and Latin America; and freedom from particular constraints in the
forms of commercial freedom, media freedom, freedom of movement, and
freedom for self-realization.
There was a moment in this exit from organized modernity, during the
1980s and early 1990s, when this weak image gained stronger contours. At
this moment, much public political philosophy – from Francis Fukuyama to
Richard Rorty – suggested that an abstract commitment to individual free-
dom and to collective self-determination was about to be globally and un-
problematically implemented. It would be accompanied and underpinned by
an idea of economic freedom that suggests that constraints to economic action
are both freedom-limiting and dysfunctional for economic performance and
thus need to be removed. These politico-philosophical ideas translated into
a political discourse about ‘human rights and democracy’ and an economic
discourse about a strong return to market freedoms and free trade, both in
temporarily hegemonic positions. Furthermore, these discourses found partial
institutional expression in various forms: in the abolishing of domestic forms
of economic regulation; in the lowering of international barriers to economic
exchange; in the introduction of the ‘responsibility to protect’ principle in
international law in tension with the principle of state sovereignty; in ele-
ments of the internationalization of penal law; in the tendency to identify
 Interpreting the Present – a Research Programme 117

public protest movements with an expression of collective self-determination,

among others.
These discourses were far from having had the effect of abolishing insti-
tutional structures and boundaries of various kinds. But they have provided
elements for a novel and global re-interpretation of modernity with very char-
acteristic features. Like the theorem of globalization and individualization,
this political discourse suggests that there is (and: should be) little, or noth-
ing, between the individual human being and the globe. Every social phe-
nomenon that stands in-between tends to be considered as having freedom-
limiting effects. Significantly, the notion of democracy, which presupposes a
specific decision-making collectivity and thus appears to stand necessarily in
an intermediate position between the individual and the globe, tends to be
redefined. Rather than referring to a concrete, historically given collectivity,
processes of self-determination are, on the one side, related to social move-
ments without institutional reference, and on the other side, projected to the
global level as the coming cosmopolitan democracy. We can characterize this
conceptual tendency as the erasure of space. In a second step, we can identify
a similar tendency towards the erasure of time. The individual human beings
in question are seen as free and equal, in particular as equally free. Thus, their
life-histories and experiences are no longer seen as giving them a particular
position in the world from which they speak and act. And political orders are
seen as associations of such individuals who enter into a social contract with
each other, devoid of any particular history. The imagery sketched here never
became the globally dominant interpretation of modernity at any time. But it
provided significant orientation for much political action after the exit from
organized modernity.4
(4) At the current moment, the imagery still exists, but it has lost plausibil-
ity and persuasiveness to a considerable degree, due to occurrences that have
been interpreted as signs of its inadequacy, such as: a sequence of economic
crises across the world; increasing concern about past injustice impacting on
the present; the increased awareness of the consequences of human-induced
climate change; regional crises of democracy; lack of criteria for evaluating
international conflicts.
In the light of such occurrences, attempts at reconstruction are currently
being made that are consciously situated in social space and acknowledge the
historicity of human social life. In some way, the events in Teheran in 1979,
often referred to as the Iranian Revolution, are an early example of such re-
construction. As specific as the Iranian circumstances were, they can now be
seen as an opening towards a broader understanding of political possibilities
in the present, since then intensified not only by the strengthening of political
Islam but also by ‘emerging’ novel political self-understandings reaching from
the variety of ‘progressivist’ political majorities in Latin America to the trans-
formation-oriented post-apartheid polity in South Africa to post-communist
118 Peter Wagner

China. The acceleration of European integration since the Maastricht Treaty,

accompanied by intense debates about the European self-understanding, is
generally recognized as a major such attempt at regionally based world-inter-
preation. More recently, the emergence of BRICS entails a further proposal
to re-constitute specific spatiality – the global South – and temporality – rec-
tification of past Western (Northern) domination. These observations sug-
gest that one can analyze the present as an ongoing attempt at re-interpreting
modernity, with again significant regional varieties against the background
of earlier experiences with modernity (but in a context of greater connected-
ness). This attempt is far from reaching a new consolidated form, but the key
task in understanding the present time lies in identifying the main contours
of these processes of re-interpretation.

A Framework for Understanding Current Interpretative Processes

The past half century witnessed the transformation of a globe composed

of a set of consolidated regional, indeed: spatially defined, interpretations of
modernity into a globe with de-structured social relations of highly variable
extension and significance, but with the projection of a boundaryless setting
populated by unattached individuals looming large. Against this background,
the current struggle over re-interpretations of modernity is characterized by
two fundamental tensions:

– the tension between those who hold that the acceptance of the principle of
equal freedom supports a view of the human being as holder of equal rights
in this time, on the one side, and those who hold that the consequences of
past experiences, not least experiences of oppression and injustice, weigh on
the present and that there is a need for differential consideration of rights
and normative claims, on the other. This is the question about the temporal
configuration of modernity.
– the tension between those who hold that boundaries limit the expression of
autonomy, both political and economic, with negative normative and func-
tional consequences, on the one side, and those who hold that boundaries
are a precondition for the exercise of collective autonomy, which in turn is a
necessity for the creation of spaces of personal freedom, on the other. This is
the question about the spatial configuration of modernity.

No general answer can be given to resolve these tensions. As discussed

above, the modern commitment to autonomy and mastery is open to in-
terpretation. Such interpretation will occur in the light of experiences with
earlier answers and their sedimentation in institutions. In this sense, there are
only situation-specific answers. This insight places the burden on the analysis
and interpretation of the situation one finds oneself in. As in earlier periods,
 Interpreting the Present – a Research Programme 119

socio-political situations today vary considerably between regions. But not

only is the degree of interconnectedness today higher than in earlier periods,
the current work of re-interpretation also takes place in the context of a com-
mon experience, in general terms, of the dismantling of existing institutions
and commitments without clear and concise guidance for their rebuilding.
More specifically, in the face of the experience of attempted erasure of tempo-
ral and spatial significance, the current re-interpretation encounters the need
for a high degree of justification for any spatio-temporally specific collective
commitments.

A Research Agenda: The Re-constitution of Meaningful Temporality

and Spatiality

The analysis of the ongoing re-interpretation of modernity, therefore,

needs to focus on the ways in which a reconstitution of meaningful temporal-
ity and spatiality is introduced into current views of socio-political organisa-
tion, both in regional and in global debate. Every human activity is situated
in both time and space. The interpretation of one’s situation, however, can
privilege temporal or spatial aspects, can see either the one or the other as
most significant and/or most problematic. Thus, one can distinguish key is-
sues of re-interpretation according to their focus on either temporal or spatial
aspects, always bearing in mind the spatial connotations of the former and the
temporal connotations of the latter.
Throughout the past half century, there have been general attempts at
world-interpretation, often framed in terms of world-regional distinctions.
The high-point of organized modernity is marked by the coining of the term
‘Third World’ (1952) and the elaboration of the three-world imagery. This was
a Northern conceptualization reserving a particular place for what is today of-
ten called the global South, namely carrying specific claims, connecting with
the notion of ‘tiers état’ preceding the French Revolution, but also relegating
the inhabitants of this world to the ‘not yet’ of modernity. This imposition
was responded to, one might say with hindsight, by the active positioning of
‘Southern’ countries in the Bandung conference of 1955. The diagnosis of the
breaking-up of organized modernity has been a key theme of the Trilateral
Commission, which held its first meeting in 1973 and soon after published
its report on the crisis of democracy. The heyday of globalization has been
monitored and interpreted by the World Economic Forum (1987, preceded
by the European Management Forum) and, as a critical alternative, the World
Social Forum (2001, preceded by ‘encuentros’ in Latin America). Whereas
the former promoted the erasure of time and space through its discourse on
economic globalization, the latter provided a mirror image rather similarly
devoid of specific place and history. Re-interpretation is currently expressed
120 Peter Wagner

prominently by the organisation of the BRICS countries, a term coined in

2001 – as BRIC – by a business analyst but later appropriated by those to
whom it was assigned and used to counter the asymmetries of power and
wealth due to historical domination. Against this historical background, the
following issues stand out in the current struggle over re-interpreting moder-
nity for the present and re-constituting meaningful temporality and spatiality:

1. The reconstitution of temporality: The question of the temporality of

modernity presents itself today as the tension between a political self-under-
standing erected on abstract and ‘presentist’ concepts of the individual and
the collectivity (‘human rights and democracy’), on the one hand, and the
widespread experience of human beings as living under, or having only re-
cently emerged from, conditions of domination and injustice that keep mak-
ing themselves felt in the present, on the other. The former view importantly
includes the notion that the present dominates over the past; that whatever
conflictive relations may have existed in the past, those conflicts need to be
‘come to terms with’ and the past ‘settled’, put to rest (Nedimović 2015, for a
recent analysis). The latter view, in contrast, suggests that there is a present sig-
nificance of the past which needs to be taken into account in current action.
Debates over the interpretation of temporality in this sense occur currently
in multiple forms and at numerous places. Many of those, however, can be
captured by a focus on two central and relatively distinct issues: ways of deal-
ing with historical social injustice, widely understood; and ways of dealing
with the current consequences of the instrumental transformation of the earth
in the techno-economic trajectory of modernity.

1a. Contemporary consequences of the recognition of past social injustice: The

centrality of dealing with historical injustice for the self-understanding of
contemporary societies begins today to be widely recognized, much beyond
the so-called ‘divided societies’ to whom only the need for ‘settling the past’
was normally ascribed. This is due to the fact that during the exit from orga-
nized modernity numerous polities re-constituted themselves by some break-
ing with the past – of colonial domination, dictatorship, authoritarianism,
apartheid, Soviet-style socialism – and based their self-understanding on this
rupture. ‘Historical injustice’ is predominantly understood as the collective,
generally institutional and systematic wrongdoing or harm inflicted upon a
group within a society or from one society to the other that occurred in the
‘past’. The aspect that may not be explicated in the definition but is implied
by the dominant practices of reparation and compensation is that the wrong-
doing was committed for the benefit of another group in society, as suggested
by the reminder that apartheid in South Africa had its beneficiaries not only
perpetrators (Mamdani 1996).
 Interpreting the Present – a Research Programme 121

The case of post-apartheid South Africa is particularly significant in this

respect because the new polity is centrally based on the recognition of past
injustice and the need for correcting action. It also embarked on a revelatory
public exposition of past violence, in contrast to the silence that was often
agreed among the post-transition elites elsewhere. However, South Africa is
significant because it was an exception. Much more widespread had been the
notion that a ‘settling of the past’ with a view to enhancing capacity for action
in the future was necessary, such as in the ‘negotiated transitions’ in Spain,
Chile and Argentina. Accordingly, as mentioned above, a political theory be-
came suitable that was based on the abstract freedom of individuals who are
held to reason from behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ (John Rawls) and to privatize
their past experiences. Even though the actual harmful deeds may have been
committed in the – more or less distant – past, however, injustice persists in
social relations and institutions, shaping the outcome of present action. In
more recent years, therefore, it is increasingly recognized that existing demo-
cratic polities are historically constituted and that their constituent moments
keep shaping the societal self-understandings, sometimes even provide their
raison d’être. This is evident, for instance, in the constitutional commitment to
remedy past injustice in Brazil and South Africa, but also in the re-emerging
debates in Spain, Chile and Argentina.
More generally, it is often precisely the introduction of legal equality that
lets the topic of the current consequence of past injustice emerge, both in
intra-polity and in global settings. The end of formal domination necessar-
ily spells the end of the criticism of formal domination. However, the end of
domination does not mean the end of inequality in numerous other respects
beyond rights. Thus, the reasons for current inequality – and thus, arguably,
injustice in the present – are being searched in the present consequences of
past injustice. Two widely diffused such debates are those about gender equal-
ity (e.g., Fraisse 2015) and about the lasting effects of colonial domination.
In particular with regard to the effects of colonial domination, the ar-
ticulation between intra-polity (domestic), spatially confined, and global,
spatially extended debates becomes visible. The effects of colonial domina-
tion, including slavery, are addressed in predominantly domestic contexts
in America, both North and South, in terms of the claims for cultural and
other rights for the indigenous population and for affirmative action for the
African-American population. At the same time, a compelling argument can
be made that the structures of global social inequality today are to a significant
degree a legacy of colonial or neo-colonial domination. Social inequality to-
day, however, is predominantly measured through the Gini-coefficient based
on national statistics. Thus, the rectification of past global social injustice faces
a triple problem of interpretation: the elaboration of a case for attributing cur-
rent unjustified inequality to past actions; the measurement of the degree of
injustice and, thus, the amount of remedial action that is appropriate; and the
122 Peter Wagner

identification of actors that can develop and implement remedial action (for a
recent discussion, see Ypi 2011).

1b. The contemporary consequences of the instrumental transformation of the

earth: The global dimension is immediately central with regard to the con-
temporary consequences of the instrumental transformation of the earth. In-
dustrialism in all its aspects – mass production, mass consumption, transport
infrastructure – is the main cause for climate change and its likely conse-
quences in terms of deteriorating living conditions on the earth. It was devel-
oped by the early industrial powers in Northwestern Europe and later North
America for their own benefit, but dependent on the creation of an Atlantic
division of labour involving African labour and American soil in the European
‘take-off’ of industrialism (Pomeranz 2000). When the environmental effects
of industrialism were recognized from the 1960s onwards, they were seen as
health risks caused by pollution in the vicinity of industrial production and
consumption. Remedial action through environmental policies was effective,
but it stayed close to these sites. In addition, the emerging new global division
of labour from the 1970s onwards entailed the dislocation of heavily polluting
industries as well as nature-transforming extractive industries to other parts
of the world.
Without climate risk, this constellation could largely be analyzed in politi-
co-economic terms, underlining not least that the industrial dislocations were
an important cause for economic growth in the so-called ‘emerging’ societies
and the dangers to the environment a ‘price to pay’ for this growth. In other
words, the instrumental transformation of the earth is not ‘as such’ a tempo-
ral issue; the point, though, is that the current impasse in dealing with it is
strongly related to past domination and appropriation. Therefore, the inter-
pretation of the issue as temporal is what is new in the present. ‘Modernist’
and colonial discourse had relegated the colonized societies to a ‘not yet’, had
denied them coevalness in the present, as anthropological and postcolonial
scholarship has long pointed out (e.g., Johannes Fabian, Dipesh Chakrab-
arty). The argument was displayed in a variety of forms – reaching from im-
maturity to be overcome by education to the missing institutional precondi-
tions for an industrial take-off. It did not normally include the notion that the
‘backwardness’ was induced by the relation of domination between colonizers
and colonized (as dependency theory should underline). But the discourse of
the ‘not yet’ suggested an exit from this situation in the future. The climate
change debate has changed this situation: because of the urgency, so the argu-
ment goes, the benefits of industrialism that were historically reaped by the
‘advanced’ societies need to be denied to the ‘emerging’ societies for the sake
of keeping the earth inhabitable. If so, in this respect, historical injustice could
no longer be remedied in the future.
 Interpreting the Present – a Research Programme 123

2 The reconstitution of spatiality: From the so-called discovery of America

onwards, the emergence of global consciousness has led to attempts at neatly
dividing up the space on the planet, from the treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 to
the ‘scramble for Africa’ in the nineteenth century. Beyond power-political
considerations, these and other similar attempts need to be understood as
key conclusions from world-interpretations, often combining normative and
presumed functional aspects. Thus, the principle cuius regio, eius religio as-
sumed that only people with similar fundamental beliefs could live peace-
fully together and be well-governed, a supposed insight from the European
religious wars. Similarly, the principle of popular sovereignty was often seen
as requiring a ‘people’ sharing the same space, justifying wars over territory,
‘ethnic cleansing’ and forced relocations.
For some time, it was assumed that globalization and individualization en-
tailed spatial processes of migration and re-interpretative moves towards liberal
multi-culturalism so that the alleged spatial pre-conditions of organized social
life would cease to be relevant. By now, however, it is clear that this is far from
being the case. The two main challenges in current re-interpretative moves
are: ways to consider the co-presence of a plurality of world-interpretations once
the attempt that they would be socio-politically organized in separate spaces,
without being entirely abandoned, has been undermined by migration and
the increased extension of numerous social practices, most importantly com-
munication and trade; and ways to re-articulate the relation between democracy
and capitalism once the idea of a political steering, based in territorial states,
of economic activities has been discredited and largely abandoned, at least as
a fundamental principle.

2a. The co-presence of a plurality of world-interpretations: It has long been

assumed that globalization would lead to either cultural homogenization or
hybridization, effectively erasing spatially bound containers of world-inter-
pretations. This view aligned smoothly with the earlier dominance of a formal
and functional understanding of politics and society, with the slightly ambiva-
lent position of ‘comprehensive world-views’ that it entailed, to some extent
subordinated to functionality and procedurality, to another extent to be ex-
pressed within the national containers of polities, a residual of the romantic
world-view according to which each nation provides a specific contribution to
the history of humanity. However, the question towards which spatial separa-
tion was historically seen as the answer does not so easily go away.
There is a persistent diversity of world-interpretations even in an age of
alleged global modernity. The consequences of this diversity for global com-
munication and co-operation are more difficult to assess compared to the
era when spatial separation was the hegemonic notion, but they are no less
significant. Not least since the rise of political Islam, world views and values
are taken more seriously again; and ‘alternative modernities’ (Dilip Gaonkar)
124 Peter Wagner

are discussed in terms of world-interpretations rather than social interest.

The debate about the Christian roots of Europe, as arising over the preamble
to the constitutional treaty; Samuel Huntington’s view of co-existing differ-
ent civilizations; and also the reasoning of Islamic fundamentalists that their
struggle is justified by the invasion of Islamic territory by Western values are
expressions of the same issue: On the one hand, meaning-providing frame-
works (‘world-views’, in a telling common expression), sometimes related to
religion or political ideology and sometimes described as ‘cultural’, appear
as specific and particular, but on the other hand, the degree of proximity,
connectedness, interaction in the contemporary global context requires en-
gagement with the other rather than separation from them. In philosophical
and theological debate, this constellation has led to flourishing interest in
recognition and toleration, and significant proposals have been made, such
as the notion of ‘reciprocal incompleteness’ of world-views (Boaventura de
Sousa Santos, drawing on Panikkar). However, socio-political interpretations
proposed within the current constellation are still in need of analysis, in rela-
tion to such theologico-philosohical reflections.

2b. The relation between capitalism and democracy: Modern democracy

and modern capitalism may have been ‘co-originary’, to paraphrase Jürgen
Habermas, but they have co-existed in a coherently articulated form only in
parts of the world and during short periods, mostly the decades after the
Second World War. More profoundly, there is a general tension between
the expansionist dynamics of the world-economy and the necessary stabil-
ity of democratic political forms, also in spatial terms, as already diagnosed
by Hannah Arendt. The current European situation, in which the incapacity
of governments to address fiscal deficits and unemployment leads to citizen
disaffection, is often diagnosed as a ‘crisis of democratic capitalism’ (Wolfgang
Streeck) from which there is no return. However, the view that there is a glo-
balized, spaceless economic arrangement that generally limits and determines
the range of political options is misleading. It underestimates the existing va-
riety of relations between democracy and capitalism: the European situation is
considerably different from the one in the US, on the one hand, and from the
ones in Russia and China, on the other. Significantly, the current constellation
also witnesses intensifications of political participation and democracy, such
as in many Latin American countries, South Africa and India. These different
regional institutional constellations are supported by different interpretations
of the relation between collective self-determination and the satisfaction of
material needs.
Within the attempts to re-embed economic action into political frame-
works, two components can be distinguished: ‘top-down’ state action and
‘bottom-up’ grassroots initiatives. The former can be rather autocratic, as in
different ways in Russia and China, or ‘social-democratic’, in a broad sense of
 Interpreting the Present – a Research Programme 125

the term, as often in Latin America. There, in particular, and to some extent
in South Africa and India, these statist re-embeddings often occur in parallel
to the ‘bottom-up’ initiatives, and are sometimes driven by such initiatives, in
the form of social movements and political practices reviving the promise of
autonomy as a political category, rather than as a purely individual one, also
for the economic realm.

The Present as a Struggle over World-Interpretation

It may be too strong a claim to say that the history of all humankind hith-
erto has been a history of struggle over world-interpretations. But the present
and the recent past can certainly and need to be analysed from this angle.
Much of this work remains to be done, but some summarizing observations
can be derived from the preceding analysis and reflections.
The thesis about currently co-existing ‘varieties of capitalism’ has gradually
been extended from OECD countries to other parts of the world. Going be-
yond the emphasis on performance, however, it is necessary to consider how
economic and political practices with their different problématiques can be ar-
ticulated under current conditions. Rather than being determined by simple
logics of commodification and democratization, there are highly different re-
gional ‘varieties of articulations between democracy and capitalism’, with speci-
ficities for Europe, Latin America/South Africa, India, the US, Russia and Chi-
na. The notion of a spatially co-existing plurality of world-interpretations may
in general be found more acceptable in immigrant societies of the ‘New World’
(and in Africa), and less so in Asian and European societies in which concern for
a homogenous identity remains strong. Countervailing indications arise from
indigenous claims for cultural rights in Latin America and from pronounced
debates about, and practices of, multi-culturalism in Europe. Furthermore, the
strength of the individualist-liberal world-interpretation with its inclination to-
wards erasing meaningful time and space is highly variable across regions. The
views on the instrumental transformation of the earth depend very much on
past advantage or disadvantage. But again there are specificities: the US had past
advantage but aims at more in the present, even though with a strong divide
between Democrats and Republicans; and strong environmentalism in some
Southern settings, in particular Latin America, also complicates the picture.
The dominant juridical paradigm, of European origin, for ‘transitional justice’
focuses on mass violations of human rights during periods of collective vio-
lence. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission challenged this
paradigm. South America followed with a number of community initiatives to
complement institutional processes of historical justice, and motions to widen
transitional justice with a view to remedying historical injustice have emerged in
North America and Australia. While Asia remains more silent on past injustice
than other regions, it could be argued that injustices generated within societies,
126 Peter Wagner

either due to endogenous regimes or colonial powers, were dealt with through
transformative socioeconomic and political processes and founding of new or-
ders of justice, rather than directly remedying specific injustices. This holds for
China and India, despite the difference in their ideological contexts, but also
for the former socialist (Eurasian) bloc prior to 1989, though with more pro-
nounced punitive aspects.
The firm conclusions at this stage of investigation are few, but they are sig-
nificant enough to set an agenda for further reflection and research. Looking
at the provisional map of interpretations of the present provided in the preced-
ing paragraph, one first of all recognizes clearly that, despite all technology-
induced space-time compression, often called ‘globalization’, the earth does
not at all become a socially homogenous space. Rather, we witness intense
regional attempts at organizing ways of living together according to specific
self-understandings and circumstances, in which the experiences of the past
are of present relevance for individuals as well as for collectivities. At the same
time, those ‘regions’ are not homogenous cultures in which a shared world-
interpretation prevails. In contrast to long prevailing assumptions of the his-
torical and social sciences, ‘space’, as presumed shared territory, and ‘time’, as
presumed common history, are not determinants of collective identity. There
is intense struggle over interpretations within those ‘spatio-temporal enve-
lopes’ (Bruno Latour) that we here call ‘regions’. Rather than determinants of
action, lived space and historical time are conditions as well as resources for
interpretation with a view to enabling individual and collective agency.
Liberation from the determination by the space and time one was born
into, in turn, has long been conceptualized as ‘individualization’. Such idea of
liberation was launched by a mode of critique that does not ‘deduce from the
form of what we are what it is impossible for us to do and to know; but [..]
will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the pos-
sibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think.’ Such
critique has been a major force for the dismantling of organized modernity
from the 1960s onwards, be it in the struggle against colonial domination or
in the Northern ‘1968’. But it has also for too long and too often embarked
on ‘the affirmation or the empty dream of freedom’, leading into miscon-
ceived ‘projects that claim to be global or radical’. These projects are those that
we referred to above as aiming at the erasure of time and space. They come
in a variety of political forms: from the idea of individual enterprising selves
relating to each other through self-regulating markets to the idea of individual
human rights without any notion of the agency that guarantees these rights to
the idea of cosmopolitan democracy devoid of an understanding of forms of
political communication.
The above map of the struggle over interpreting the present, sketchy as it
is, suggests that such an idea of liberation was almost hegemonic for a brief
period, but that it is about to be overcome in attempts at reconstituting specific
 Interpreting the Present – a Research Programme 127

temporality and spatiality. In the words of the author already quoted before, the
‘work done at the limits of ourselves must, on the one hand, open up a realm of
historical inquiry and, on the other, put itself to the test of reality, of contem-
porary reality, both to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable,
and to determine the precise form this change should take’ (all above quotes:
Foucault 1984). The abstract reasoning about freedom and its consequences in
terms of dismantling boundaries and forgetting experience, rather than an ally,
then often becomes the opponent in the struggle over interpretation.
But here we must also note a crucial divide: The struggle against the era-
sure of space and time can be, and often is, a re-constitutive movement aiming
at creating situations in which social life can be freely organized on the basis of
world-interpretations that are created against the background of one’s specific
experiences and thus provide meaning, but it can also be driven by the power
of existing elites who merely resist being dethroned by opposing elites. Today
we often witness a confusion between the two forms of resistance, deliberately
enhanced by existing powers. A careful and nuanced analysis of the plurality
of ways of interpreting the present is essential for making a distinction be-
tween interpretations that are enacting important normative claims and those
that use interpretative fragments for their own interests. The reflections above
are meant as a step in that direction.

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Ypi, L 2011, Global Justice and Avantgarde Political Agency, ISA series ‘SAGE Studies
in International Sociology’, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Author Biography

Peter Wagner is ICREA Research Professor at the University of Barcelona and current-
ly Principal Investigator of the European Research Council-funded Advanced Grant
project ‘Trajectories of modernity: comparing non-European and European varieties’.
His recent and forthcoming publications include: Sauver le progrès (La Découverte,
 Interpreting the Present – a Research Programme 129
2015; Engl. version: Progress: a Reconstruction, Polity, 2015); African, American and
European Trajectories of Modernity (ed., Edinburgh University Press, 2015); The Trou-
ble with Democracy: Political Modernity in the 21st Century (co-ed. with Gerard Ros-
ich, Edinburgh University Press, 2015); The Greek polis and the Invention of Democracy
(co-ed. with Johann Arnason and Kurt Raaflaub, Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). Address:
Carrer de Sant Lluis, 70, E-08024 Barcelona. Email. Peter.wagner@ub.edu.

Notes

1 This reversal became common at the time. Charles Turner was the one by whom
I first heard it in 1998, in debates at the University of Warwick commemorating
the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Communist Manifesto.
2 Work on this article has benefitted from funding by the European Research
Council for the Advanced Grant project ‘Trajectories of modernity: comparing
non-European and European varieties’ (TRAMOD, grant no. 249438). I
would like to thank the members of the TRAMOD research group for repeated
discussions of this theme and extended comments on earlier drafts of this article.
Svjetlana Nedimović, in particular, has significantly contributed to the sections on
historical injustice.
3 The ‘multiple modernities’approach, as pioneered by Shmuel Eisenstadt, which in
a way provides a world-sociological perspective, does not lend itself easily to an
analysis of social transformations.
4 Conceptually, that which is here called the erasure of space and time can be traced
back to the philosophy of the Enlightenment with its notion of abstract indi-
vidual freedom. Already during the nineteenth century, the dynamics of social
transformation was often described in similar terms, most strongly in Karl Marx
and Friedrich Engels’s Communist Manifesto, but also in later classical sociology.
Thus, no claim is made here about the novelty of the themes and concepts as such.
The task is to analyze their current employment in interpreting the ongoing social
transformation.
Social Imaginaries 1.1 (2015) 131-134

Johann Arnason on Castoriadis and

Modernity: Introduction to
“The Imaginary Dimensions of Modernity”
Suzi Adams

The essay published below is a translation of Johann P. Arnason’s “Les

dimensions imaginaires de la modernité: Au-delà de Marx et Weber”, which
he presented at a Cerisy colloquium, entitled Castoriadis et l’imaginaire (6-
10th June, 2003). This is its first publication, for which Arnason has written a
Postscript. “The Imaginary Dimensions of Modernity” can be understood as a
direct companion piece to two other essays on Castoriadis. The first is “Roads
beyond Marx: Rethinking Projects and Traditions” (2006; 2012),1 which Ar-
nason first presented at the Cornelius Castoriadis: Rethinking Autonomy con-
ference at Columbia University (1st-3rd December, 2000). Here Arnason fo-
cuses on the directions that Castoriadis’s thought took after his ‘demolition’ of
Marx. These include an historical perspective that focuses on the relationship
of the ancients and the moderns; the anthropological problematic that puts
the creative imagination as its centre; and the ontological problematic that
begins with the question of the mode of being of the social-historical and, in
later works, reactivates the question of Aristotelian physis to articulate a (ulti-
mately unfinished) philosophical cosmology.2 The second is the much earlier
essay entitled, “The Imaginary Constitution of Modernity” (1989). In that
essay, Arnason argued for the centrality of what he calls the ‘hermeneutic of
modernity’ in Castoriadis’s thought, over and above the ontology of the social-
historical. Castoriadis’s elucidation of the ‘dual institution’ of modernity (by
the social imaginary significations of ‘autonomy’ and ‘the infinite pursuit of
(pseudo)rational mastery’) moved beyond unitary understandings of moder-
nity, such as Habermas’s notion of ‘the unfinished project of modernity’. Ar-
nason expanded on Castoriadis’s understanding of modernity by emphasising
the importance of ‘the nation’/ ‘nationalism’. Interestingly, he did not discuss
the ways in which the cultural currents of Enlightenment and Romanticism
played out in Castoriadis’s thought, although this had been a key thematic in
the development of his own cultural hermeneutic of modernity as a response
to Habermas. More broadly, “The Imaginary Dimensions of Modernity” was
132 Suzi Adams

written at the height of Arnason’s reflections on the interweaving debates on

multiple modernities and civilisational analysis. He published a number of es-
says on multiple and alternative modernities and civilisational analysis at this
time, with his important book, Civilizations in Dispute published in the same
year as the Cerisy conference. Arnason’s more recent work elucidates a world
history – or rather, world histories – from a civilisational perspective with an
increasing emphasis on the religio-political nexus – a term he borrows from
Wilfried Spohn – as the meta-institutional context of society (Arnason 2014).
The accent on the religio-political nexus can be seen in the attention he gives
to Gauchet’s thought in the Postscript.
Arnason pushes his argument further in “The Imaginary Dimensions of
Modernity” than in the earlier “The Imaginary Constitution of Modernity”.
Still taking Castoriadis’s understanding of the dual institution of modernity
by – and as – the central modern imaginary significations of autonomy and the
infinite pursuit of (pseudo)rational mastery as his starting point, in “The Imagi-
nary Dimensions of Modernity” he wants to relativise the polarity between
the two significations, pluralise the institution of modernity beyond a dyad,
and hermeneuticise – and historicise – imaginary significations by emphasis-
ing the plurality of conflicting interpretations that they can always engender.
Like Ricoeur, he does so in an hermeneutically circuitous fashion, by first ad-
dressing Castoriadis’s dialogue with Marx and Weber.
Marx, of course, looms large in Castoriadis’s political-intellectual trajec-
tory, whereas Weber was a more intermittent presence: Castoriadis read and
wrote on Weber very early on while still in Greece, and devoted a further es-
say to him in his Paris years. More broadly, Arnason’s consideration of Marx
and Weber in this essay continues his own ongoing hermeneutical dialogue
with classical sociological thought. In the present context, Arnason singles out
two key themes of importance for Castoriadis’s critique of Marx: the ‘contra-
dictions of capitalism’ and the analysis of ‘labour power as commodity’, on
the one hand, and the revolutionary project, on the other. He first discusses
capitalism. Here, Castoriadis’s (and Lefort’s) particular innovation was to link
their critique of Marx to the Weberian theme of bureaucracy, which became in
Castoriadis’s hands a specific understanding of bureaucratic labour. But more
than this, Arnason shows that Castoriadis’s reformulated problematic on the
contradictions of capitalism becomes effective at the niveaux of instituted and
instituting meaning; that is, at the social-historical level of imaginary signifi-
cations. As Arnason writes: ‘the contradictory dynamic cannot be understood
as a purely structural or institutional phenomenon, it takes form through
cultural orientations’ (2015, p. 138), specifically, in this case, as ‘the infinite
pursuit of (pseudo)rational mastery’ as a core constituent of modernity. For
Castoriadis, the revolutionary project had a meaning only outside the capital-
ist universe. In his road beyond Marx, Castoriadis reformulates the project
of autonomy in the workers’ movement, psychoanalysis and, importantly,
 Johann Arnason on Castoriadis and Modernity 133

ancient Greece (which was accompanied by a more intensive engagement

with the ancient Greek world). Arnason here draws implicitly on Gadamer’s
notion of a ‘fusion of horizons’ to underscore the ‘latent hermeneutics’ of
Castoriadis’s dialogue between the ancients and the moderns.
Arnason’s next step is to contextualise Castoriadis’s interpretation of mo-
dernity within theoretical debates at the turn of the 21st century by identi-
fying four broad perspectives on Castoriadis’s work. The fourth perspective,
which takes Castoriadis’s thought as a road towards a post-Marxist and post-
liberal vision of modernity, and which reflects Arnason’s own perspective on
Castoriadis developed in tandem with other scholars, such as Peter Wagner.
It also involves a reconstruction and rethinking of some of Castoriadis’s key
arguments. For example, Arnason emphasises the historical heterogeneity and
varieties of modern autonomy, and disentangles ‘rational mastery’ from its
‘infinite expansion’ as two interlocking but ultimately separate imaginary sig-
nifications. Although Castoriadis had linked rational mastery to the spirit of
capitalism, Arnason draws on Deutschmann’s notion of capitalism as a ‘prom-
ise of absolute wealth’ to connect it rather to the meaning of ‘unlimited ex-
pansion’, which has affinities with Boltanski and Chiapello’s take on the new
spirit of capitalism. Furthermore, Arnason points to the cross-connections
between rational mastery and autonomy in some modern projects, as a way of
relativising Castoriadis’s polarisation of the two, and argues for the loosening
of the link between ‘rational mastery’ and ‘unlimited expansion’ to make sense
of these interconnections between autonomy and rational mastery.
In his Postscript, Arnason explains that one of his aims in the essay was
to show that Castoriadis’s emphasis on imaginary significations was less to do
with his interest in psychoanalysis and more to do with his critical engage-
ment with the sociological classics. And yet a key classical sociologist is absent
from Arnason’s discussion: Emile Durkheim. As Arnason has noted elsewhere
(eg 2006; 2007), Durkheim’s notion of collective representations and social
creativity was as a key intellectual source for Castoriadis’s elucidation of social
imaginary significations. For Arnason, however, Durkheim’s thought is more
important to a sociological-philosophical anthropology, than to the problem-
atic of modernity. More broadly, this underscores the ongoing need for a soci-
ological-philosophical anthropology of modernity to be more fully developed.

References

Adams, S 2011, Castoriadis’ Ontology: Being and Creation, Fordham, New York, NY.
Arnason, JP 1989, ‘The Imaginary Constitution of Modernity’, Revue Européenne des
Sciences Sociales, vol. 86, pp. 323-337.
Arnason, JP 2006, ‘Roads beyond Marx: Rethinking Projects and Traditions’, in J Ba-
lon & M Tucek (eds.), Chaos a řád ve společnosti (Chaos and Order in Society and
134 Suzi Adams

Sociology), Festschrift for Miloslav Petrusek, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles

University, 2007, pp. 150-164.
Arnason, JP 2007, Imaginary Significations and Historical Civilizations, in C Mag-
erski, R Savage & C Weller (eds.), Moderne begreifen: Zur Paradoxie eines sozio-
ästhetischen Deutungsmusters, DUV, Wiesbaden, pp. 93-106.
Arnason, JP 2012, ‘Castoriadis im Kontext: Genese und Anspruch eines metphiloso-
phischen Projekts’, in H Wolf (ed.), Das Imaginäre im Sozialen: Zur Sozialtheorie
von Cornelius Castoriadis, Göttingen, Wallstein Verlag.
Arnason, JP 2014, ‘The Religio-Political Nexus: Historical and Comparative Reflec-
tions’, in JP Arnason & P Karolewski (eds.), Religion and Politics: European and
Global Perspectives, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, pp. 8-36.
Arnason, JP 2015, ‘The Imaginary Dimensions of Modernity’, trans. S Adams, Social
Imaginaries, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 135-149.

Author Biography

Suzi Adams is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Flinders University (Adelaide), and

External Fellow at the Central European Institute of Philosophy, Charles Univer-
sity (Prague). Address: Sociology, Flinders University, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide, SA,
5001, Australia. Email: Suzi.adams@flinders.edu.au

Notes
1 Arnason amended and expanded the essay for the 2012 publication.
2 See also, Adams 2011.
Social Imaginaries 1.1 (2015) 135-149

The Imaginary Dimensions of Modernity:

Beyond Marx and Weber1
Johann P. Arnason
Translated by Suzi Adams

Abstract This paper discusses the formation of Castoriadis’s concept of imagi-

nary significations and relates it to his changing readings of Marx and Weber.
Castoriadis’s reflections on modern capitalism took off from the Marxian un-
derstanding of its internal contradictions, but he always had reservations about
the orthodox version of this idea. His writings in the late 1950s, already criti-
cal of basic assumptions in Marx’s work, located the central contradiction in
the very relationship between capital and wage labour. Labour power was not
simply transformed into a commodity, as Marx had argued; rather, the insti-
tuted attempt to treat it as a commodity was a contradiction in itself, between
the subjectivity and the objectification of labour. Castoriadis then moved on
to link this claim to Weber’s analysis of the interconnections between capital-
ism and bureaucracy. The main contradiction of modern capitalism, whether
wholly bureaucratised as in the Soviet model or increasingly bureaucratised as
in the West, now seemed to be a matter of incompatible systemic imperatives:
the need to control and to mobilise the workforce. Finally, difficulties with this
model – and with the revolutionary expectations based on it – led to a more
decisive break with classical theories and to the formulation of a bipolar image
of modernity, where the vision of an autonomous society is opposed to the
logic of calculation and domination, embodied in capitalist development. On
both sides there is an imaginary component, irreducible to empirical givens or
systemic principles. In this regard, Castoriadis remained closer to Weber than
to Marx, but he also anticipated, in a distinctive way, later emphasis on the
cultural dimension of modernity, and more specifically the notion of moder-
nity as a new civilisation.

Key words: Social imaginaries – modernity – Castoriadis – Marx – Weber –

autonomy – rational mastery

During the last quarter of a century, sociological theories of modernity

have – not uniformly, but in a significant and decisive way – increasingly put
136 Johann P. Arnason

the accent on cultural presuppositions or horizons. The most radical expres-

sion of this tendency is the interpretation of modernity as a specific civilisa-
tion founded on an ensemble of new cultural orientations and characterised
by conflicts of interpretation and antinomies of a particularly radical type.
This is an argument that one finds notably in the writings of S.N. Eisenstadt
(2003). As the discussions around his work have shown, the case of modernity
illustrates the more general idea that civilisations ought to be understood in
terms of shared problematics, divergent perspectives and rival interpretations,
rather than coherent codes or programmes. These questions require more
thorough research and debate. For the moment I propose to discuss a more
specific point: as I will attempt to demonstrate, Castoriadis’s oeuvre (and
most particularly his reflections on the modern imaginary and the ‘dual
institution of modernity’) can be understood as an original and penetrating
approach to the problems in question. To anticipate the following discussion,
I will examine the implications of the concept of imaginary significations for
our understanding of modern cultural orientations, and argue that the con-
cept can serve to develop a more detailed theory; and on the other hand,
I will attempt to show that such a theory must commence with some fur-
ther differentiations to the most central themes to an analysis of Castoriadis,
most particularly those of ‘the unlimited expansion of rational mastery’ and of
the revived and universalised vision of autonomy. In brief, I will suggest that
these two poles of the modern imaginary – according to Castoriadis – are less
clearly separated, less exhaustive of the modern path of cultural orientations
and more open to contradictory interpretations than Castoriadis’s analyses
suggest.
But before tackling these problems, it seems to me that a detour would be
useful. The way in which Castoriadis approached the problematic of moder-
nity can and must be understood in light of his intellectual biography, and
most particularly in the context of his road beyond Marx. His conception of
the bipolar modern imaginary and dual institution of modernity was born
from his critique of the Marxian idea of the ‘contradictions of capitalism’. I
will commence therefore with a quick examination of this background.
It is not necessary to detail the changing conceptions of the ‘contradic-
tions of capitalism’ that one finds in Marx. Let us say only that this notion
was always essential to his theoretical project, in as much as he wanted to
reconstruct a systemic self-destructive logic which would lead to a social revo-
lution. But it seems to me also clear that he went through – or experimented
with – several ways to understand and apply this idea; the most refined ver-
sion is found in the Grundrisse. In any case, the Marxian tradition has since
simplified the theoretical model in a manner which had led it further away
from its roots in Hegel’s philosophy (and more generally in German Ideal-
ism). The central contradiction of capitalism has been understood as a clear
separation between a progressive pole and a regressive pole: the progressive
 The Imaginary Dimensions of Modernity: Beyond Marx and Weber 137

dynamics of the forces of production that become more and more social, and
the regressive blockage due to the persistence of private property. This distinc-
tion was then translated into a scenario of social polarisation, that is to say
class struggle which would result in a revolutionary reversal of the capitalist
order. Such was therefore the theoretical model with which Castoriadis found
himself confronted, and which he criticised during the Trotskyist phase of
his intellectual biography; and this critique was animated above all by an au-
tonomous reflection on historical experience – much less by a new reading of
Marx’s texts (in particular, it seems that Castoriadis read the Grundrisse after
the formulation of the main lines of his critique of Marx). It may nonetheless
be useful to observe some parallels between his approach and those of other
thinkers which have attempted to reconstruct Marx’s framework of reference
more systematically. During the phase summarised in the well-known text on
modern capitalism and the revolutionary movement (Castoriadis 1988) he
arrived at the conclusion that the Marxian analysis of labour power as com-
modity had been very badly understood: labour power was not and could not
be a commodity like the others. More precisely the capitalist project aiming to
transform the labour power was contradictory in itself, that is to say incapable
of surmounting the conflict between living work and the institutional logic
which treats it like a calculable and controllable thing. There was, in other
words, a ‘contradiction of capitalism’ much more internal and fundamental
than the confrontation between technological progress and institutionalised
class domination. This point had been underlined – and developed through
a very sophisticated interpretation of Marx’s Capital – by one of the most
original schools of Japanese Marxism (Uno 1980). One could suggest another
parallel with the description of labour, land, and money as ‘fictitious com-
modities’2 in Karl Polanyi; in fact, one can understand this idea, which relates
to the very foundations of the capitalist economy, as a step towards the recog-
nition of the imagination as a constitutive socio-cultural force. But Polanyi’s
oeuvre remained underdeveloped on the conceptual plane, and is not really
suitable for a comparison with Castoriadis.
The new understanding of the value-form, applied to labour power, de-
stroyed the orthodox version of the ‘law of value’. But Castoriadis combined
this idea with a more specific innovation: he linked the critique of the theory
of value to a new synthesis of Marxian and Weberian themes. Weber had not-
ed the connections – and the threat of a tighter symbiosis – between capital-
ism and bureaucracy, but his analysis did not lead to any form of conceptual,
systematic integration. Castoriadis saw the ‘subsuming of labour power under
capital’ (to use a forgotten Marxian concept) as a particular case of a more
general logic which manifests in the organisation and division of bureaucratic
labour. This logic was contradictory in a stronger sense than the orthodox
model of capitalist development: to put it in a language that Castoriadis did
138 Johann P. Arnason

not use, but which can serve to clarify the implications of his ideas, it followed
the incompatible imperatives of control over subordinate workers – at all so-
cial levels – and mobilisation of their capacities.
The idea of the ‘contradictions of capitalism’ is therefore redefined in a
more rigorous sense, and in a way which combines Marxian and Weberian
perspectives – in fact the model presented in Modern capitalism and the revolu-
tionary movement seems to be inspired more directly by the Weberian analysis
of bureaucracy than the Marxian analysis of commodities. But it is also neces-
sary to see another aspect of the problematic such as it is reformulated by Cas-
toriadis. The contradictions become effective – they are temporarily defused
and then reproduced in new contexts –through a project, or in other words,
at the level of instituting and instituted meaning. The core of this project, the
aim of the unlimited expansion of rational mastery, can be described as a ver-
sion of what Merleau-Ponty called ‘articulations of the world’ [mise en forme
du monde]; but it is a levelling and self-negating version. To put it in a more
sociological way, the contradictory dynamic cannot be understood as a purely
structural or institutional phenomenon – it takes form through cultural orien-
tations. From this perspective Castoriadis reformulates also the problematic of
‘the spirit of capitalism’: the spirit in question here being the objective spirit.
In other words, it is an immanent and effective meaning of the economic
domain, rather than an external ideological elaboration (the argument is in
this sense closer to Werner Sombart than Max Weber); and in contrast to the
well-known thesis of The Protestant Ethic, there is from the beginning an elec-
tive affinity – perhaps an underlying identity – with the spirit of bureaucracy.
Here a brief digression on the Soviet model seems useful. With Castoria-
dis, the critique of the Soviet model as an alternative modernity has always
accompanied the critical reflection on capitalism, and the rupture with the
Marxian frame of reference reflects some new perspectives relevant to both
sides. Castoriadis came – progressively – to understand the Soviet model as
total bureaucratic capitalism in contrast with the fragmented version pre-
dominant in the West; in this sense, the Soviet experience was also a key to
understanding the Western one. But this did not mean conflating logic with
history: it does not follow that the Soviet Union, as a more perfect incarna-
tion of a common logic must trump the Western bloc. The perfecting of a
bureaucratic-capitalist model could be a source of weakness as well as of power
[puissance]. If Castoriadis envisaged – at the beginning of the 1980s – the
possibility of a Soviet victory in the cold war, he did so on the basis of a more
specific analysis outlined in Devant la guerre (1981) (surely not his best book,
and today generally ignored, but it may merit a more serious discussion). Ac-
cording to Castoriadis, the insoluble problems of total bureaucratic capitalism
lead to a regression, a slide towards more openly barbaric forms of power,
and as this militant regression coincided with a paralysing crisis of Western
 The Imaginary Dimensions of Modernity: Beyond Marx and Weber 139

societies, a victory of the Soviet ‘stratocracy’ was not excluded. The diagnostic
was therefore founded on an historical contingency, not on a meta-historical
logic; and one should perhaps admit that it drew attention to real tendencies
of the time, even if it ignored some other factors which proved decisive.
The reinterpretation of capitalism – as a constituent of modernity – was
only one aspect of Castoriadis’s road beyond Marx. It was also concerned to
rethink the revolutionary project. According to Castoriadis, Marx and the
Marxists had badly understood not only the dynamics of capitalism, but also
the connection between this dynamic and the alternative which was supposed
to transcend the established order. The revolutionary project, properly under-
stood, had a meaning external to the capitalist universe. Even if the tension
between control and mobilisation gives birth to aspirations and demands for
self-determination in specific contexts, there is no immanent necessity which
would drive the mutation into a radical alternative. Castoriadis identifies this
surplus of meaning with a vision of autonomy. Classical Marxism had wanted
to align this aim with the so-called ‘natural laws’ of capitalism, and to demon-
strate – on this basis – the superiority of scientific socialism over its utopian
versions, but the practical result had been a general disorientation and an in-
strumentalisation of revolutionary movements by their historical adversary – a
reabsorption into the capitalist universe.
The first step towards a restoration of the meaning of autonomy is a kind
of demythologisation: a retreat from the phantasms of absolute abundance
and unlimited control over nature. These phantasms had, in a previous phase,
counted for something in the attractivity of the socialist movement, but they
were, on closer examination, extrapolations of the capitalist imaginary. They
were, in other words, the principal reasons for describing classical Marxism as
a capitalist counter-culture. A new commitment in favour of self-limitation
was essential to the redressing of the revolutionary project. But this was only
a prelude to a more positive reaffirmation of autonomy. This other part of the
argument could begin with a new interpretation of the history of the working
class, concentrated on the aspirations and episodes which had gone beyond
the framework of capitalism. But it was necessary to find other points of ori-
entation. It seems clear that it is in this context that Castoriadis discovered
psychoanalysis: he thought – and it seems that he did not change his mind on
this point – that the new turn given to human self-understanding by psycho-
analysis also announced a new model of autonomy, characterised by a more
reflective equilibrium between realism and radicalism.
If one searches for articulations of autonomy in places as distant from each
other as psychoanalysis and the workers’ movement, one admits – implicitly
– that the modern quest has been fragmented. In order to find a unifying
perspective, it was necessary to go elsewhere. Castoriadis found it in ancient
Greece. I will not try to reconstruct in detail this rediscovery; suffice it to
140 Johann P. Arnason

say that even if one can suppose that the connection to the Greek tradition
has always been integral to his thought, it seems clear that a more intensive
engagement began with his research into historical antecedents of the mod-
ern aspirations to autonomy. The result was, to use well known language, a
tentative integration or synthesis of the freedom of the ancients and the lib-
erty of the moderns – not, as has sometimes been maintained in critiques of
Castoriadis, a simple reaffirmation of the liberty of the ancients. But the rela-
tion between the two traditions is quite complicated. On one side, the Greek
vision of autonomy found – during the democratic phase of the Athenian
polis – a more concentrated and radical expression than any modern project;
its formative impact on all the whole of society went further than any compa-
rable modern transformation. By comparison, the interpretation of modern
variations on the theme of autonomy must bring together a whole range of
fragments. There is, as we have seen, a psychoanalytic and a revolutionary
project; but there are also philosophical constructions of autonomy, in par-
ticular the Kantian (recognised and critiqued by Castoriadis); and one finds
a less developed version of it in a certain interpretation of aesthetic creation.
When Castoriadis insists that the idea of autonomy must be tied to cultural
creation and more particularly to the creation of works of art, he alludes to
a branch of the modern discourse on autonomy – that is to say the idea that
the subordination to the immanent laws of the work of art is a more elevated
expression of self-legislation.
To sum up, it thus seems legitimate to speak – on the one hand – of an
integrative primacy of the ancients: the connection with experience allows
us to understand the project of autonomy in a totalising sense which would
otherwise have no foundation. But there is also an interpretative primacy of
the moderns: Castoriadis founds his account of the Greek quest for auton-
omy on a resolutely modernist reading of a particular current of the Greek
tradition, that is to say a part of the Sophistic movement, represented above
all by Protagoras, not at all identical with the movement as such, and surely
not decisive for the impact of Greek civilisation on the European tradition.
But for Castoriadis, this current, more than any other, incarnates the Greek
Enlightenment.
In other words, with stronger emphasis put on political intentions, accord-
ing to Castoriadis, autonomy – understood as the foundation of a revolution-
ary project – combines the radicalism of the ancients with the universalism
of the moderns (or more precisely, of some of the ancients and some of the
moderns), and as each side is essential to the comprehension of the other, it is
tempting to appeal to the hermeneutic idea of a ‘fusion of horizons’. As will
be seen, it is only one aspect of a larger problem: the need to more explicitly
articulate what I will call the latent hermeneutics of Castoriadis’s work.
 The Imaginary Dimensions of Modernity: Beyond Marx and Weber 141

To conclude this part of the argument, let us reflect briefly on the role of
imaginary significations in the interpretation of modernity. When one in-
troduces the creative imagination into the theory of culture and society, it
becomes possible to comprehend the autonomy of culture in a more radical
way. This point is already evident in The Imaginary Institution of Society where
Castoriadis defines the imaginary dimension of meaning as irreducible to em-
pirical givens, rational principles or functional imperatives. One could add
that it is also irreducible to projects or specific perspectives of social actors; it
transcends social determinants, whether they are defined according to action
theory or systems theory. On the other hand – and here again we encounter
latent hermeneutics – the imagination requires interpretation; more precisely:
imaginary significations are open to divergent and potentially contradictory
interpretations. In this sense, the autonomy of culture is inseparable from its
internal conflicts.
The implications for the theory of capitalism are obvious. According to
Fernand Braudel, the most serious misunderstanding of capitalism is that it
is taken for a kind of economic machine which functions – in other words,
to theorise it as an independent economic system. The analysis of the cultural
orientations constitutive of capitalism is therefore the most effective critique
of the economic illusion, and all the more so if one understands the cultural
aspect as an expression of the creative imagination. Furthermore, the interpre-
tative potential of imaginary significations allows for ambiguities and differ-
entiations of the type rendered familiar by the recent debates on ‘the spirit of
capitalism’ (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005). This spirit is neither immutable
nor unequivocal: it undergoes transformations and it interacts with the cri-
tique of capitalism, in a mutually formative way.
But if the role of imaginary significations in the revised conception of
capitalism is incontestable, their relation with the project of autonomy seems
more questionable. Some of Castoriadis’s formulations suggest a radical re-
flexivity which would have detached from the domain of the imagination: for
example, when he speaks of: [r]eflective and deliberative subjectivity. Such
subjectivity is critically and lucidly open to the new; it does not repress the
works of the imagination (one’s own or that of others) but is capable of receiv-
ing them critically, of accepting them or rejecting them (Castoriadis 1997, p.
112).3 But closer examination shows that this interpretation must be rejected,
or at least modified. If – as Castoriadis evidently thought – a fully devel-
oped project of autonomy presupposes a corresponding interpretation of the
world – an interpretation which accepts human finitude, rejects all versions
of sacred authority, and understands or implies an ontology which takes ac-
count of human creation – we are back in the domain of the imagination.
The imagination is the means and the milieu of interpretation. One can think
– as Castoriadis – that interpretations associated with autonomy are more
142 Johann P. Arnason

plausible than those of the opposing side; but that does not change the fact
that the imagination is also at work in the constitution of the world open to
autonomy. It may be more open to reasoning, but it is still irreducible to any
rational or empirical foundation.
There remains the need to say a few words on the contrasts – and the
historical conflicts – between the two components of modernity. Why should
the pursuit of rational mastery be incompatible with the quest for radical
autonomy? It seems that Castoriadis saw four principal reasons for the con-
flict: First, the unconditional attachment to the pursuit of power constitutes
itself a fundamental limit to autonomy, given that it blocks the reflexive self-
questioning of society. Second, this orientation – heteronomous in a more nu-
anced sense than that of traditional societies – is completely inseparable from
a whole model of the human condition, a vision of history, and a notion of
progress, all adding up to constitute something like a secular religion. Third,
the unlimited expansion of rational mastery results in a global organisation
of social power, a constellation of power structures – those of the capitalist
order – which impose some massive constraints on the constitution of society.
Fourth, finally, these power structures entail forms of inequality and domina-
tion which exclude a large part of society from effective participation, and
therefore from equal access to collective self-determination, which is essential
for an autonomous society.
Let us now sum up the main directions of what I have called the road be-
yond Marx. The classical Marxist perspective centred on a divided modernity
on the way towards reconciliation with itself: the forces which contest really
existing modernity carry in themselves an alternative modernity, and their vic-
tory was supposedly ensured by an underlying economic logic, independent
of cultural orientations. The critique of Marxism, formulated by Castoriadis,
resulted in the decomposition of this model: it is now a matter of a radical in-
ternal division of modernity without any unifying logic of development, and
without an historical necessity which would lead to the victory of one compo-
nent over the other. Furthermore, the link between modernity and tradition
is rethought from a very different point of view from classical Marxism. As we
have seen, the reference to an anterior historical breakthrough is fundamental
for the self-understanding and the theoretical interpretation of the vision of
modern autonomy. The connection is perhaps less evident in the case of the
other imaginary signification, rational mastery; but when Castoriadis speaks
of an unlimited expansion, it seems clear that he thought of premodern no-
tions of infinity, reoriented and instrumentalised by the new historical forma-
tion. The most interesting observations in this vein are found in the essay on
rationality and development (Castoriadis 1984-5).
The Castoriadian interpretation of modernity can therefore be understood
and situated as the result of a particularly thoughtful and radical rupture with
 The Imaginary Dimensions of Modernity: Beyond Marx and Weber 143

the Marxist tradition. But how to situate it in the context of theoretical de-
bates at the present turn of the century, and in an historical conjuncture where
Marxian ideas have been marginalised? It seems useful to me to approach this
question through a brief survey of current perceptions of Castoriadis’s work. If
I am not mistaken, one is able to distinguish four perspectives – it is not per-
haps always easy to identify them with particular authors, but they are clearly
reflected in the ongoing debates.
The first perspective seems to me characteristic of the German response to
Castoriadis – and it explains perhaps why the German reception of his work
has not progressed very far. It is the image of Castoriadis as the ‘last Western
Marxist’– I found this expression in an obituary written in 1998, and it re-
flects without doubt a more widespread view. In this context, the project of
rethinking the social-historical has also been characterised as ‘rescuing the
revolution through an ontology’. I think that I have said quite enough to jus-
tify the observation that this claim must be rejected: even if it is true that the
road beyond Marx is at the centre of Castoriadis’s intellectual biography, he
questions – and in the end demolishes – the Marxist tradition in such a way
that it is impossible to dismiss his work as a kind of ultimate defence. It can
be argued that his thought remains to some extent ‘Marxomorph’, that is to
say it carries traces of a prolonged encounter with Marx, and of the need to
engage this adversary on his own ground. But there is, in any case, a tension
between this aspect – the backward glance, so to speak – and the conceptual
innovations of a non-Marxist problematic.
The second approach seems preferred by those who speak of Castoriadis’s
‘radical hellenocentrism’. His interpretation of Athenian democracy would
be a new strategy for the defence of the ancients against the moderns. This
thesis could be combined with a more general criticism. In returning to clas-
sical antiquity, Castoriadis presumably brought to light a hidden truth of the
entire revolutionary tradition: its essentially pre-modern character, the tra-
ditional foundations of the critique of modernity. In this discursive universe
the Greek polis would thus constitute the most attractive option. But once
more, the above argument should show that this critique is not convincing:
when a thinker traverses and synthesises the intellectual universes of Marx
and Weber, as did Castoriadis, one can no longer speak of antimodernism or
radical hellenocentrism. Furthermore, his interpretation of ancient Greece is
not a reaffirmation of a historical model. In one of his texts on this topic, he
spoke – metaphorically – of Greek democracy as a ‘germ’; this is misleading, as
are all biological metaphors applied to the social-historical, and surprising in
an author who has always insisted on the need to think of the social-historical
without recourse to biological models. But it seems more pertinent to note
that Castoriadis takes a specific current of Greek thought as the most adequate
interpretation of the historical Greek experience, and that his understanding
144 Johann P. Arnason

of this current is evidently inseparable from his simultaneous effort to un-

derstand modern problems on their own level. Castoriadis did not propose
another return to classical antiquity; he posed the question of the connection
between the classical and the modern in a new way.
The third position is, if I am not mistaken, quite widespread among French
commentators on Castoriadis’s work. One could define it as an attempt to an-
nex Castoriadis to the ‘mainstream’4 liberal renewal: his intellectual trajectory
appears as an incomplete and unrecognised rediscovery of liberalism. More
precisely, his analysis of the conflict between capitalist development and the
project of autonomy must be understood as a detour towards the more con-
ventional idea that capitalism and democracy are the twin pillars of moderni-
ty. Castoriadis had begun to theorise modernity from this point of view, but as
he came from the revolutionary tradition, and remained so attached to what
he took it to be the most important part of his program, he overestimated
the potential for a conflict between capitalism and democracy. If one sees this
conflict as a phenomenon of crisis, rather than a manifestation of institutional
principles, one can still maintain different interpretations of the coexistence
of capitalism and democracy; but if one maintains that these two components
of modernity are, the one as the other, founded on the idea – if you like,
the imaginary signification – of the sovereign individual, they are ipso facto
reconciled on the most fundamental plane. And if one takes for granted the
economic determinism which has often functioned as the common ground
of Marxist and liberal conceptions of modernity, it is tempting to see capital-
ism as a stable foundation and democracy as source of instability, periodically
giving rise to aspirations which disrupt the connection. To mention just one
example, this seems to me to be the view which emerges from the introduc-
tion to François Furet’s well-known book, The Passing of an Illusion (1999).
If we want to defend Castoriadis against a liberal takeover – and to show
that his work can still be useful as a corrective to the liberal vision of moder-
nity – it is necessary to outline a fourth and (in this context) final perspective.
I have sketched some arguments in this vein in some previous articles on
Castoriadis; a similarly approach has also been proposed by Peter Wagner,
above all in his important book, A Sociology of Modernity (1993). In brief, this
fourth perspective takes Castoriadis’s work as a path – a particularly important
path – towards a post-Marxist and post-liberal conception of modernity. At
the same time, this reading involves greater emphasis on what I have called
Castoriadis’s latent hermeneutics.
To begin, let us return to a point already outlined concerning the vision of
autonomy: the internal plurality of central imaginary significations. As I have
suggested, the Castoriadian interpretation of the modern project of autonomy
represents a selective synthesis in a larger field. One could add other models or
notions of autonomy, which have taken form in various socio-cultural spheres,
 The Imaginary Dimensions of Modernity: Beyond Marx and Weber 145

and emphasise that in each case, there is a self-absolutising tendency which

in turn provokes criticism from other points of view. To briefly mention an
important case, the history of the idea of autonomy within the socialist move-
ment would be incomplete if one forgot the theme of the ‘free development of
human potentialities’ as ultimate criterion of progress. And if one wants an ex-
ample of limitless absolutisation of this objective, there is no better illustration
than Trotsky’s reflections at the end of his book on literature and revolution.
Briefly, it seems appropriate to start with the observation that there is a
modern field of heterogeneous and divergent visions of autonomy, each of
which is accompanied by specific absolutising versions; that the attempts to
unify the field lead to rival models of synthesis; and that, at the second level,
the continuous conflict between individualist and collective projects plays a
particularly important role. One can – and Castoriadis did so in a more vig-
orous way than any other author – argue for the ultimate complementarity
of individual and collective autonomy; but one must then add that the other
side of the coin is that on each side there are – and there will be – recurrent
attempts to absorb the whole field. If we are currently traversing an historical
period characterised by a triumph of individualist models, it is necessary to
explain this turn in a context which also encompasses the other side of the
modern imaginary. As I have emphasised, Castoriadis saw the push towards
the expansion of rational mastery as the common cultural horizon of capital-
ism and bureaucracy. If one wants to do a more detailed historical analysis, it
is necessary to differentiate.
As we have seen, Castoriadis defined the central imaginary signification
of capitalism in a manner which accentuates affinities with bureaucracy. Even
more: for him, the expansion of rational mastery was also the key to under-
stand the totalitarian phenomenon, which was thus aligned to a more general
and invariant tendency of the modern world. But there is another aspect of
capitalism, more important for its self-perpetuation and self-legitimation; one
can grasp it in the light of an underdeveloped Marxian idea. Marx described
money as a ‘social symbol of wealth’, or as ‘abstract wealth’, and capitalism
represents the unlimited accumulation of this abstract wealth; the reduction-
ist turn of his theory of value prevented him from developing this insight.
The most interesting variation on this theme is found in the work of German
sociologist Christoph Deutschmann on capitalism as a ‘promise of absolute
wealth’, and as such, a kind of secular religion (Deutschmann 1999). His
argument is very complex; I cannot summarise it here, but I would like to
emphasise some points. The promise of absolute wealth, the perspective of
enrichment without intrinsic limit, is easily compatible with the individual-
istic version of the spirit of capitalism – more easily than rational mastery, as
portrayed by Castoriadis; in this sense, it is congenial to what Boltanski and
Chiapello have called the new spirit of capitalism. Besides, the promise of
146 Johann P. Arnason

absolute wealth perhaps translates in successive cycles of more specific myths,

of which the myths around information technology and the ‘new economy’
are the most recent examples. This aspect of capitalism is important for the
attempts to legitimise it as an alternative to the pursuit of power, as ‘a civilis-
ing machine’; as Albert Hirschman has shown in a classic book, this argument
played a prominent role in the transitional phase to modernity, and as we
know too well, it has been used with success during the triumph of capitalism
at the end of the twentieth century. And in conclusion, it is necessary to add
– following Deutschmann – that a more thorough analysis of these problems
ought to combine Marxian and Schumpeterian perspectives.
In this way, we can – so to speak – pluralise from within the two sides of
the modern imaginary. The same applies to their mutual connection. It is not
evident that it would be necessary to draw a clean line of demarcation between
autonomy and rational mastery. On the contrary: one can easily show that
models of autonomy have often incorporated the idea of rational mastery,
and this combination renders them more appealing. The history of modern
philosophy attests to this possibility, as does – at the other end of the spectrum
– the history of capitalism during the last quarter of a century. The ‘great leap
forward’ at the end of the twentieth century is still badly understood, but as
the debate on the ‘new spirit of capitalism’ has shown, it has something to do
with the capacity to exploit the aspirations to autonomy, and to adapt it to
the dynamic of accumulation. Another example is the current controversy on
genetic manipulation and bioethics: here the notion of rational mastery takes
a turn which seems to give a new meaning to the idea of the ‘self-defining
subject’, as Charles Taylor calls it.
These cross-connections are most easily understandable if we attempt to
loosen the connection between rational mastery and unlimited expansion.
These two significations are not invariably linked in a narrow way as they were
during the golden age of industrial capitalism and of the belief in progress.
During the first centuries of modernity, innovative models took shape in sev-
eral domains of social life (Castoriadis discussed some of them in his essay on
the rationality of capitalism); it would be less easy to demonstrate that they
had been bound to the vision of unlimited expansion. This aspect then be-
comes more pronounced, with the transformation known as ‘industrial revo-
lution’, and the institutionalisation of permanent technological progress. The
respective roles of cultural and structural factors in this transition are now a
very controversial subject amongst economic historians.
The next step would be an examination of the multiple significations of
democracy, but I cannot take on this question here. I close therefore with a
more general observation. The modern imaginary is a field of multiple signi-
fications, interconnected and conflictual; the specific polarisation that Casto-
riadis has so accentuated can be situated in this field. And it is necessary to
 The Imaginary Dimensions of Modernity: Beyond Marx and Weber 147

emphasise another point: these imaginary significations are problematics [pro-

blèmatiques], in the sense defined by Peter Wagner, that is to say, contexts of
interpretation, and the meanings articulated in these contexts are incarnated
in institutional complexes. Once more a latent hermeneutic imposes itself.

Postscript (January, 2015) This paper was written for the 2003 Cerisy col-
loquium on Castoriadis’s work; the argument is limited to themes that could
be discussed within the prescribed format. My main purpose was twofold: to
show that Max Weber (whom Castoriadis had read as a student in Athens and
discussed in his earliest writings) was, together with Marx, a significant point
of reference when the relationship between capitalism and modernity had to
be re-theorised, and that the emphasis on imaginary significations is a logical
outcome of Castoriadis’s critical engagement with the two classics. His turn
to the imaginary is therefore less decisively related to psychoanalysis than he
tended to suggest.
Further reflections along these lines focused on ways of historicising the
distinction between capitalism and autonomy, and ended with an indica-
tion of similar approaches to democracy and autonomy. Here I cannot de-
velop that line of argument. But I would at least like to note an important
contribution that will now have to be taken into account. Marcel Gauchet
(2007-; three of four volumes have been published) has produced a theo-
retically grounded history of modern democracy, clearly indebted to Casto-
riadis’s idea of autonomy but at the same time giving it a significant twist.
Gauchet stresses the historicity and the temporal dimension of autonomy
more than Castoriadis ever did:

The transition to history, that is the global reorientation of activities towards

the future, is in fact the most unexpected and the most unsettling aspect of the
autonomisation of human communities (2007, p. 49).

But this opening to history is also a reinforcer of historical processes that

develop their own logic, and whose autonomisation may overshadow or un-
dermine the initial vision of autonomy. In other words, the modern move
towards autonomy gives rise to multi-dimensional dynamics and recurrent
changes of framework. Antecedents to this view are easily found in classical
sociology; Weber’s reflections on the paradoxes of rationalisation are a case
in point. Gauchet’s specific innovation is to treat the vicissitudes, reversals
and revivals of autonomy (including the twentieth-century rise and fall of
totalitarianism) as stages on the road from religious to political modes of in-
stituting society, the latter being the decisive affirmation of human autonomy.
He traces this path in some detail, with surprising and often convincing re-
sults. But one noteworthy shortcoming is the virtual absence of capitalism
from his account; he seems to take the adaptability of capitalist economies to
148 Johann P. Arnason

democratic institutions for granted. At this point, it becomes clear that he has
adopted and vastly expanded a part of Castoriadis’s argument (the fundamen-
tal but problematic relationship between autonomy and democracy) but left
another one (the orientation of capitalist development) out of the picture. A
critical reference to Gauchet’s magnum opus, acknowledging its strengths as
well as its weaknesses, seems the most fitting context for further discussion of
Castoriadis’s views on the democratic side of modernity.

References

Boltanski, L & Chiapello, E 2005, The New Spirit of Capitalism, Verso, London.
Castoriadis, C 1981, Devant la Guerre, Fayard, Paris.
Castoriadis, C 1984-5, Reflections on ‘Rationality’ and ‘Development’, Thesis Eleven,
vol. 10/11, pp. 18-36.
Castoriadis, C 1988, Modern Capitalism and Revolution, in Political and Social Writ-
ings (Vol II), trans. DA Curtis (ed.), Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis,
pp. 226-315.
Castoriadis, C 1997, Anthropology, Philosophy, Politics, Thesis Eleven, vol. 49, pp.
99-116.
Deutschmann, C 1999, Die Verheissung des absoluten Reichtums: Kapitalismus als Re-
ligion, Campus, Frankfurt.
Eisenstadt, SN 2001, ‘The Civilizational Dimension of Modernity: Modernity as a
Distinct Civilization’, International Sociology, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 320-40.
Eisenstadt, SN 2003, Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities, Brill, Lei-
den & Boston.
Gauchet, M 2007-2010, L‘Avènement de la démocratie, Vol. 1, La Révolution moderne;
vol. 2, La crise du libéralisme; vol. 3, A l‘épreuve des totalitarisme, Gallimard, Paris.
Hirschman, AO 1973 The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguemtns for Capitalism
Before its Triumph, Princeton University Press, New Jersey.
Uno, K 1980, Principles of Political Economy, Harvester Press, Brighton.
Wagner, P 1993, A New Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline, Routledge, London.

Author Biography

Johann P. Arnason is emeritus professor of sociology at La Trobe University, Melbourne,

and professor at the Faculty of Human Studies, Charles University, Prague. His research
interests focus on historical sociology, with particular emphasis on the comparative anal-
ysis of civilizations. Recent publications include Nordic Paths to Modernity (co-edited
with Björn Wittrock), Berghahn Books 2014, and Religion and Politics: European and
Global Perspectives (co-edited with Ireneusz Pawel Karolewski), Edinburgh University
Press 2014. Address: Fakulta humanitních studií, Univerzita Karlova v Praze, U Kříže
8, 15800 Praha 5, Czech Republic. E-mail: J.Arnason@latrobe.edu.au
 The Imaginary Dimensions of Modernity: Beyond Marx and Weber 149

Notes
1 This text was translated from the French. The Postscript to the essay was written
by the author in English in January, 2015, as was the abstract and key words. The
reference to Gauchet in the Postscript has been included in the main reference list.
2 The English term ‘fictitious commodities’ appeared in parentheses after the French
equivalent term ‘marchandises imaginaires’ in the original text.
3 The quotation given here is taken from the English translation of ‘Anthropologie,
Philosophie, Politique’ that was published in Thesis Eleven.
4 The term ‘mainstream’ appeared in English in the original text.
Social Imaginaries 1.1 (2015) 151-161

Introduction to Marcel Gauchet’s

Democracy: From One Crisis to Another
Natalie J. Doyle

Considered to be one of the most significant intellectuals in France today,

Marcel Gauchet is as yet little known in the English-speaking world.1 Amongst
other things, Gauchet is chief editor of the leading intellectual journal Le Dé-
bat and holds a prominent research position in political philosophy at the
École des Haute Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in the Centre de recher-
ches politiques et sociologiques Raymond Aron (CESPRA), where he conducts a
widely followed seminar. He has in recent years become more prominent as
a public intellectual, commenting in the French media on a range of issues
from schooling to European politics. The following text, ‘Democracy: From
One Crisis to Another’, was first published as a booklet in 2007, to coincide
with the release of the first two volumes of his projected four volume account
of the historical genesis of liberal democracy: L’Avènement de la démocratie
(Gauchet 2007a, 2007b, 2010).2 It presents a succinct overview of this ma-
jor intellectual project, which constitutes an overarching synthesis of insights
gathered over three decades in books and articles. In this respect ‘Democracy:
From One Crisis to Another’ offers a useful entry point into his recent work.
Gauchet’s philosophical history of liberal democracy has a strong underly-
ing thesis: contemporary liberal democracy is in crisis but it is a paradoxical
crisis due to its having prevailed over other types of sociopolitical regimes and
its success having upset the balance that evolved in the post-World War Two
period between its political, legal and historical dimensions. Liberal democra-
cy is a mixed political regime and a historical analysis of its evolution is needed
to understand the tensions which characterize it and motivate its contempo-
rary crisis.3 The theoretical premise of this thesis goes back to the argument
first put in The Disenchantment of the World: modern democracy constitutes
a disengagement from the religious imaginary structuring previous types of
societies and defining the legitimacy of their institutions by reference to an
otherworldly order, imaginary which concealed their historical character.4 It is
the outcome of a process unfolding over centuries and culminating in the late
18th century with what Gauchet calls the ‘liberal inversion of value’ (l’inversion
152 Natalie J. Doyle

libérale), which ushered in a new relationship to history predicated on the

‘discovery’ of society’s historical creativity and the reversal of its traditional
subservience to the state. 5 Following this, religion—in the role it played in
both instituting and ordering society—was replaced by what Gauchet calls
‘the political’ (le politique) which has now acquired a purely symbolic func-
tion, abandoning the task of directing society to the autonomous sphere of
politics characterized by its elective/deliberative processes (la politique).6
‘Democracy: From One Crisis to Another’ presents the essential points
of Gauchet’s analysis of the historical genesis of liberal democracy and of-
fers a diagnosis of its contemporary evolution. This evolution has in the last
decades been one of growing de-politicization, encouraged by its liberal com-
ponent and with it, by an acceleration of history, most visible in the role
played by technology in driving social change. This de-politicization is shown
to have been associated with the hegemony of an economistic discourse on
society and to have facilitated the reappearance of oligarchic rule. The text
thus sketches a prescient critique of what it defines as the contemporary ideol-
ogy of neo-liberalism, whose dominance was paradoxically strengthened by
the global financial crisis, the onset of which in 2007 coincided with the text’s
publication. This critique constitutes the overarching objective of the yet to be
published final volume of L’Avènement de la démocratie.
Gauchet’s analysis of contemporary neo-liberalism—already partially pre-
sented in some of his seminars from 2007 to 20117––challenges the percep-
tion prevalent in some sectors of the intellectual Left, that he is essentially a
champion of liberalism and that his thinking on democracy is totally alien to
the socially progressive tradition.8 Whilst it is true that from the late 1960s
Gauchet distanced himself from the extreme left and the belief in revolution-
ary transformation, his thinking belongs to a ‘post-Marxist’ strand of socio-
political theorization attached to the goal of popular sovereignty, a goal whose
emancipatory objectives cannot be dissociated from those of social justice
commonly used to define socialism.9
Gauchet’s reflection on democracy thus builds on the work of Cornelius
Castoriadis, whom he met thanks to his former university lecturer Claude
Lefort, whose political philosophy was also seminal for his intellectual devel-
opment.10 It relies on a specific understanding of democratic praxis in terms
of autonomy which is indebted to Castoriadis’s analysis of the historical in-
novation which Greek democracy represented and which was extended with
modernity: pioneered in Athens, democracy departed from an anthropologi-
cal norm by abandoning the traditional heteronomous framework of social
life with its reference to an external authority (the ancestors, the gods etc.) and
made society institute itself autonomously by taking conscious responsibility
for its own laws.11
Autonomy, conceived by Castoriadis as a program of radical politics, has
both individual and collective dimensions: the development of a form of
 Introduction to Marcel Gauchet’s Democracy: From One Crisis to Another 153

subjectivity capable of putting into question both itself and social bound-
aries; the establishment of a new relationship to social institutions that al-
lows societies to transform themselves. This concern for democratic praxis
has made Gauchet develop in parallel with his writings on liberal democracy
a political philosophy of education. His reflection on the historical trajec-
tory of pedagogy discusses its recent departure in practice from a hierarchical
transmission of knowledge, the tensions this has engendered, and the way the
contemporary evolution of pedagogy has eroded the commitment to equality
(Gauchet 2002a, 2002b, 2008, 2014). For Castoriadis, psychoanalysis, poli-
tics and pedagogics (paideia) were the three social practices contributing to
individual and collective autonomy. Gauchet has also written about the indi-
vidual dimension of autonomy and on psychoanalysis but it is in his concern
for the central importance of paideia in democracy that he remains most faith-
ful to Castoriadis’s line of thought. At the same time, whilst Gauchet’s discus-
sion of modern autonomy likewise stresses its fulfilment of human historical
creativity and identifies the roots of this creativity in the social imaginary,
it rejects Castoriadis’s belief in the possibility of radical historical creation
by the social instituting imaginary (1994). This cannot be dissociated from
Gauchet’s rejection of the belief in revolutionary change to which Castoriadis
remained attached despite his strong critique of Marx (Doyle 2012). This
rejection becomes apparent in his very different understanding of European
history, which posits a much closer historical relationship between capitalism
and democracy than Castoriadis was willing to concede and, as we shall see,
in a different definition of modern historicity.
This distance separating Gauchet from Castoriadis appears most starkly
in his assessment of liberalism ‘Le Socialisme en redéfinition’ published in
2004 in Le Débat.12 In this article Gauchet stresses the historical significance
of liberalism as the political doctrine which presided over the transition to
modernity. This special status of liberalism makes it necessary to distinguish
between two phenomena fused in the very notion of liberalism: firstly ‘le fait
libéral’, the new social configuration liberal political ideas contributed to cre-
ating; and secondly the ideological role played by liberal ideas once liberal
principles were entrenched in social reality. The liberal political doctrine con-
stituted only one possible response to the new problems the modern social
configuration engendered but it has benefitted from its close original links
to the new dynamics of modern societies. This explains the ambiguity of the
notion of liberalism. It is simply used, first of all, to designate the institutional
arrangements of modern democratic societies derived from one basic prin-
ciple: the separation of state and civil society. This separation incorporates the
freedom of individuals to associate as they please and with it the acceptance of
limits placed on public power. Liberalism as a form of society thus incorpo-
rates the protection of individual rights and of fundamental public freedoms
(including that of expression). As individual rights include the right to own
154 Natalie J. Doyle

property and, one of the fundamental freedoms, that of forging contractual

relationships between individuals, liberalism has an essential economic di-
mension which makes it impossible to dissociate personal freedom, economic
and political freedom, no matter how they might in fact come into conflict
with one another in social reality.
For Gauchet, the ultimate unity of these three interconnected freedoms
can only be understood with reference to the new relationship to history char-
acterizing modern societies. Liberalism as a doctrine cannot account for this
relationship, trapped as it is in the individualistic premises of natural law, nat-
ural law having been used in its historical battle against state power (Gauchet
2004, 2005b). Gauchet argues that it is necessary to look beyond the juridical
language of liberalism as political ideology and identify the underlying logic
behind the new type of society this language promoted: its essential orienta-
tion towards the future, predicated on a specific mobilization of collective
authority that empowers civil society by liberating its creativity. Modern so-
cieties are self-consciously historical and with the advent of this historicity,
contrasting with the pre-modern understanding of historical change, came
a redefinition of the role of the state. The state’s primacy used to be justified
through its capacity to guarantee social order but with the greater recognition
of the role played by civil society in producing its own future, a new ideal ap-
peared in the course of the 19th century that re-defined its function: that of
representative politics which now required the state to serve society’s needs.
This diminished status of the state gave the economic dimension of liberal
freedom more impetus and with it, even greater legitimacy to individual free-
dom, the advent of the market economy then engendering capitalism and
consumerism.
The triumph of the new socio-political configuration of liberalism had
perverse consequences which clashed with its own basic principles. Because of
the power imbalance between its two contracting parties, the new wage labour
market saw the reappearance of forms of domination within a new industrial
and financial form of feudalism, whose influence was accompanied by a loss
of collective political authority. Around the turn of the 20th century, when the
principles of liberalism became entrenched in Western societies, two ideologi-
cal orientations then developed to challenge the political doctrine of liberal-
ism. At one pole, conservatism sought to defend continuity with the past,
trying to uphold the traditional forms of social order (religion, hierarchy, au-
thority, community). On the opposite side, socialism formulated a critique of
modern liberal society and its failure to live up to its emancipatory promises
through its neglect of equality. Caught between the two, the political doctrine
of liberalism upheld the status quo and its capacity for progress, through its
insistence that time would allow liberal society to fulfil its fundamental capac-
ity to deliver harmonious relations between social groups and to empower in-
dividuals. After World War I liberalism’s failure to fulfil its promises installed
 Introduction to Marcel Gauchet’s Democracy: From One Crisis to Another 155

socialism in a position of ideological dominance, allowing illiberal political

projects to gain ascendency in the form of totalitarianism which Gauchet
(2010) defines through two notions: secular religion and ideocracy.
This reappraisal of the historical significance of liberal ideas does not lead
Gauchet to jettison his commitment to socialism whose objectives, he argues,
are the fullest expression of democracy and cannot be ‘dissolved’ in those of
liberalism.13 Whilst socialism is equally attached to the value of individual
freedom, the common specificity of its different variants lies in the way it sees
the individual always in society whereas the liberal political doctrine rests on
an individualistic fiction. Whilst individual freedom is the goal, society and
its institutions are identified as the indispensable means of this freedom, lead-
ing socialist doctrines to stress the value of equality as a condition of freedom
and the notion of justice over that of right. Consequently a central dimension
of Gauchet’s theory of democracy is its critique of the way contemporary
neo-liberalism has given an hyper-individualistic interpretation to the original
principles of liberalism grounded in the artifice of natural law and radicalized
the notion of right in a profoundly depoliticizing fashion. Gauchet, like Cas-
toriadis before him, attacks this artifice by stressing the fact that the goal of
individual autonomy is essentially dependent on the affirmation of collective,
democratic power. This has led him to denounce the ‘cult’ of human rights to
which the commitment to democracy has increasingly been reduced.14
Whilst Castoriadis saw in the model of Greek democracy the antidote to
the depoliticizing consequences of the individualism empowered by liberal
values, for Gauchet this model is compromised by its attachment to a non-
modern definition of social community, a question he has dealt with indirect-
ly, in his analysis of the political debates of the French Revolution of 1789 and
the influence of Rousseau’s ideal of direct democracy (1995). This dimension
of his work extends Claude Lefort’s pioneering analysis of the new symbolic
representation of political power which emerged in the Revolution. Drawing
on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, Lefort (1964) argued that the political is
what gives the social dimension its ‘flesh’ or visibility. This understanding of
the political led him to lay great emphasis on the significance of the concept of
politeia or regime which refers both to a type of government and more broadly
to an overall mode of collective being (Lefort 1988b).
The notion of regime and, with it, the belief that the political is what deter-
mines the very possibility of social existence underpins Gauchet’s discussion
of modern liberal democracy although it has come to refine the notion quite
considerably.15 It retains Lefort’s definition of the way modern democratic
sovereignty makes of the seat of power, which used to be occupied by a sacred
eternal substance incarnated by the monarch, an empty space occupied only
temporarily and opened up to the contest of election.16 It also maintains the
contrast which Lefort (1986) established between the liberal state and the to-
talitarian state, the latter constituting an attempt to re-establish in secularized
156 Natalie J. Doyle

fashion the perfect coincidence between state and society (‘la Figure de l’Un’)
that was guaranteed by the sacred dimension of the pre-modern state .
Gauchet’s theory of liberal democracy goes further, however, in the way it
ties this definition of democratic sovereignty to a broader understanding of
modern historicity.17 Here lies the essential paradox of Gauchet’s understand-
ing of modern democratic power and its contemporary crisis. For Gauchet,
modern historicity is not solely defined by the invention of politics. It also
incorporates economic modernity and capitalism, that is, the capacity for hu-
mans to transform the very material conditions of their existence. These two
dimensions are constantly in tension. Awareness of this tension explains the
recurrence throughout his work of the theme of ‘dispossession’ (dépossession),
which superficially has some affinities with the Hegelian notion of alienation
but in fact departs from it in so far as it rejects the teleological belief in its ulti-
mate overcoming. The ‘liberal inversion of values’ has liberated the capacity of
humanity to produce its own world from the subservience to sacred Otherness
and from the hierarchical principle this Otherness established. In the process,
however, the historical creativity thus unleashed threatens to make it subservi-
ent to a new sacredness, which robs it of its capacity to exercise political sover-
eignty over the direction taken by history, through reflective and deliberative
democratic politics.18
Socialism for Gauchet is then not just about equality and social justice.
It is also fundamentally to do with the aspiration to steer historical change,
rather than surrender to it in acceptance of a liberal fiction, the fiction of
society’s capacity for self-regulation. The mastery over history which Gauchet
advocates is poles apart from the belief, on the one hand, in any deterministic
laws of history and, on the other, in the possibility of alienation ever being
transcended. This mastery goes through the mechanism of liberal political
representation and its acceptance of the fact that society can never coincide
with itself. It cannot, in other words, be separated from the acceptance of divi-
sion: the separation of state and society mirrors the inner division of society,
division which is at the heart of its socio-historical creativity. The logic of
heteronomy which underpins the role played by religion in the institution of
pre-modern societies is to contain that division and the conflicts it gives rise
to, by projecting it on another plane: as the division between the sacred Other
and the human world. Through liberal democracy the modern ‘exit from re-
ligion’ paradoxically makes of this division—and, by extension, of individual
autonomy—the very principle of social cohesion, creating ‘societies of indi-
viduals’ which rest upon a complex and fragile balance between three dimen-
sions: political, historical and juridical. Whilst this balance was found in the
decades that followed the trauma of World War Two, ‘Democracy: From One
Crisis to Another’ argues that it was lost from the mid-1970s onwards and
now needs to be reconstructed.
 Introduction to Marcel Gauchet’s Democracy: From One Crisis to Another 157

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G Robinson & J Rundell (eds.), Rethinking Imagination, Culture and Creativity,
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mocratie contre elle-même, Gallimard, Paris, pp. 1-26.
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Démocratie contre elle-même, Gallimard, Paris, pp. 326-385.
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Condition Politique, Gallimard, Paris, pp. 405–32.
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tique, Gallimard, Paris, pp. 505–57.
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Gallimard, Paris, pp. 45–90.
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limard, Paris.
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limard, Paris.
158 Natalie J. Doyle

Gauchet, M 2010, L’Avènement de la démocratie III – À l’Épreuve des totalitarismes,

Gallimard, Paris.
Gauchet, M, Blais, MC & Ottavi, D 2002, Pour Une Philosophie politique de
l’éducation: Six questions d’aujourd’hui, Bayard, Paris.
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Gauchet, M 2014, Transmettre, Apprendre, Stock, Paris.
Lefort, C 1964, ‘Postface’, in M Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l’invisible, Paris, Gal-
limard, pp. xi-xxxiii.
Lefort, C 1978, ‘Société ‘sans histoire’ et historicité’, in Les Formes de l’histoire, Gal-
limard, Paris, pp. 46–77.
Lefort, C 1986, ‘The Logic of Totalitarianism’, in The Political Forms of Modern Soci-
ety, trans. JB Thompson, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK, pp. 273–91.
Lefort, C 1988a, ‘The Question of Democracy’, in Democracy and Political Theory,
trans. D Macey, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK, pp. 9–20.
Lefort, C 1988b, ‘Introduction’, in Democracy and Political Theory, trans. D Macey,
Polity Press, Cambridge, UK, pp. 1-6.
Lefort, C 1988c, ‘The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?’, in Democracy and
Political Theory, trans. D Macey, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK, pp. 213-255.
Sohet, V 2007, ‘La Sociologie et l’institution du Social. Réflexions épistémologiques
à propos de l’œuvre de Marcel Gauchet’, in La Démocratie À Bout de Souffle ?, A
Braeckmann (ed.), Institut Supérieur de Philosophie Louvain-la-Neuve, Louvain,
pp. 65–94.

Author Biography

Natalie J. Doyle is Senior Lecturer in French Studies and European studies at Monash
University and deputy director of the Monash European and EU Centre. Address:
School of LLCL, Faculty of Arts, Monash University, Clayton, Vic 3800 Australia.
Email: Natalie.Doyle@monash.edu

Notes
1. With the exception of the landmark book, The Disenchantment of the World
published in 1997, Gauchet’s publications have not been translated into English
save for a few of articles. The publication of The Disenchantment of the World
came about thanks to the efforts of its translator and the support of the journal
Thesis Eleven, which throughout the 1990s published translations of some of
Gauchet’s articles and interviews. The Disenchantment of the World then paved
the way for the publication in English of Gauchet’s first book, co-authored with
Gladys Swain, Madness and Democracy (1999 [1980]). It must be noted that some
aspects of the translation of The Disenchantment of the World are problematic.
André Cloots (2007) draws attention to the incorrect statement made by Charles
Taylor in his introduction that The Disenchantment of the World was written by
 Introduction to Marcel Gauchet’s Democracy: From One Crisis to Another 159
an atheist. He believes that Taylor’s false assumption was encouraged by the
incorrect translation of one sentence in Gauchet’s preface. The phrase translated
as ‘if this book was written by a non-believer convinced that it is possible to go
beyond the age of religion’ seems to imply that Gauchet’s definition of religion
of disenchantment is motivated by his atheism. The context in which the phrase
appears however shows how Gauchet does not reduce ‘the age of religion’ to the
age of religious belief. He includes the civil religion of secularism in what he calls
the age of religion and is critical of the lack of understanding of (or respect for)
religious belief shown by many contemporary advocates of secularism (especially
French). A full bibliography of Gauchet’s publications can be found at http://
www.marcelgauchet.fr/blog/?page_id=647.
2 The first two volumes, La Révolution moderne and La Crise du libéralisme: 1880-
1914 were followed in 2011 by a third one, A l’Épreuve des totalitarismes: 1914-
1974. The fourth and final volume is yet to appear.
3 I come back later to the specific meaning conferred upon the term ‘regime’.
4 Gauchet’s argument on ‘modern disenchantment’ draws on Max Weber’s original
discussion of the role played by monotheism in the rationalization of European
societies and the disenchantment of the world but inserts it into a new framework
informed by Emile Durkheim’s discussion of primitive religion, which makes it
look at the relationship between monotheism and the genesis of the state.
5 This question was first explored in ‘De l’avènement de l’individu à la découverte
de la société’ first published in 1979 and reprinted in 2005 alongside a new essay
‘Les tâches de la philosophie politique’ which develops a broader analysis (Gauchet
2005a; Gauchet 2005b) .
6 Gauchet uses the term ‘le politique’ largely in the same way as Castoriadis (1991)
but in its contrast with politics, as I show below, he also draws on Lefort’s discussion
of the ‘empty space’ of political sovereignty in liberal democracy (Lefort 1988a).
To this contrast Gauchet adds the distinction between infrastructural political
power and super-structural political power (Doyle 2013).
7 Over the academic years 2007-2008 and 2008-2009 in seminars entitled ‘Les voies
du néo-libéralisme’ Gauchet started by examining the historical circumstances which
from the mid-1970s facilitated the return, in radical form, of liberalism, an analysis
which attacked the idea that this return can primarily be explained by economic
phenomena. Over the years 2009-2011, in seminars entitled ‘La signification du
néo-libéralisme’ he presented his own analysis of the strength of this ideology and its
resilience despite the financial crisis: it is due to its synthesis of right and left wing
political ideas, of the belief in the market as the sole engine of innovation in the
historical sphere and of the promotion of human rights in the juridical one.
8 In France this view has been mostly articulated outside the academic world
in reaction against Gauchet’s strong critique of the ‘pseudo-radical’ legacy of
Foucault’s and Bourdieu’s works. It is also shared by the post-Marxist left in the
English speaking world. See for example Jacob Collins’s review (2012a) of the
third volume of L’Avènement de la Démocratie published in New Left Review or
his discussion of the ‘anthropological turn’ of contemporary French thought,
published the same year in the same journal (2012b).
160 Natalie J. Doyle

9 For a brief overview of the development of this strand of post-Marxist thought

see Warren Breckman (2013). Whilst useful in its presentation of the intellectual
collaboration between Castoriadis, Lefort and Gauchet, Beckman’s discussion of
the latter’s work replicates the misunderstanding of Gauchet’s theory of democracy,
making of it a conservative celebration of liberal democracy. This can be explained
by the limited bibliography the discussion of Gauchet’s work is based on and the
lack of attention to the specific phenomenological epistemology which informs
this theory. This epistemology fundamentally counters accusations of historical
determinism and also explains Gauchet’s rejection of the radical conceptions of
democracy inspired by Marxism. On this point, see Gauchet (1988) and Sohet
(2007).
10 Gauchet’s publications provide few indications of this debt to Castoriadis and
Lefort, a matter complicated by the fall out between him and Lefort, his erstwhile
teacher, over issues of intellectual property. The intellectual collaboration between
Gauchet and Lefort was so close that there are many cases where it is almost
impossible to attribute authorship: some ideas were in a sense developed by both
of them, in parallel (see also note 16).
11 For a sustained discussion of the way Gauchet engages critically with Castoriadis’s
notion of democratic autonomy, see my ‘Autonomy and Modern Liberal
Democracy: From Castoriadis to Gauchet’ (2013).
12 This article was published as part of a debate on Monique Canto-Sperber’s book
on liberalism Les Règles de la liberté.
13 I borrow the chemical metaphor from the title of the debate mentioned in note
10, ‘La Démocratie est-elle soluble dans le libéralisme ?’.
14 Gauchet’s sustained critique of the role played by human rights in the discourse
of contemporary democracy goes back to the publication in 1980 of ‘Les Droits
de l’homme ne sont pas une politique’ (2002b). It was developed more recently in
‘Quand les droits de l’homme deviennent une politique’ (2002c) and ‘Les Tâches
de la philosophie politique’ (Gauchet 2005b).
15 Whilst Lefort defined the notion of a regime with reference to Strauss’s political
philosophy as both a form of political organization or ‘constitution’ and ‘a way of
living’, Gauchet uses the term in a way that combines its traditional meaning, as
the way the different parts of the body politic hold together (meaning apparent in
the way the French revolutionaries came to refer to the ‘ancient régime’), and its
modern meaning which concerns the way power is organized. See also note 3 of
‘Democracy: From One Crisis to Another’. This clarification was communicated
through personal communication with Marcel Gauchet.
16 The analysis of the symbolic dimension of monarchy by Ernst Kantorowicz was
central to Lefort’s discussion in ‘Permanence du theologico-politique?’ of the
significance of the French Revolution and of the innovation marked by the liberal
state (Lefort 1988c). This article argues that religion and the political are the two
means through which societies can institute a collective identity subsuming their
divisions, an idea explored in much greater complexity by Gauchet through his
reflection on monotheism and Christianity specifically (1981a; 1981b; 1997).
Whilst Gauchet’s political history of religion owes much to Lefort’s pioneering
 Introduction to Marcel Gauchet’s Democracy: From One Crisis to Another 161
discussion of the sacred dimension of monarchical power, it also elaborates
a theory of primitive religion which was already foreshadowed in an essay
first published in 1977 (1994). This illustrates the difficulty of identifying the
intellectual genealogy of some of Gauchet’s key ideas, something not helped by
the fact that Gauchet’s Disenchantment of the world was published with minimal
bibliographical references.
17 Here again Gauchet’s thinking can be said to have developed ‘symbiotically’ with
that of Lefort as a key text by Lefort first published in 1952 (1978) develops the
contrast between modern historicity and the denial of history in primitive society
which Gauchet then built on in his discussion of primitive religion.
18 The term sovereignty is sometimes used by Gauchet to convey his understanding
of democratic power in so far as he sees in the advent of the concept of state
sovereignty a first assertion of modern historicity (Gauchet 2010). His writings
however show how the civil religion of nationalism tied this assertion of political
sovereignty to a conception of national society that was originally incompatible
with the acceptance of modern pluralism but increasingly lost its ideological
content in the second half of the 20th century. Gauchet’s sovereignty is not only
an empty space. It is an imaginary which works as a kind of operative myth.
This links in with his analysis of the evolution of the state towards a purely
‘infrastructural’ symbolic role, a point which ‘Democracy: From One Crisis to
Another’ touches upon but does not develop. One has to turn to an earlier book,
La Condition politique or to the third volume of L’Avènement de la démocratie
published subsequently to find the idea elaborated upon as a discussion of the two
representative functions of political power: whilst the infrastructural power of the
state gives a representation of society’s purely political identity, politics allow the
representation (and contest) of different interests.
Social Imaginaries 1.1 (2015) 163-187

Democracy: From One Crisis to Another

Marcel Gauchet
Translated by Natalie J. Doyle1

Abstract: Democracy is in crisis. This crisis is the paradoxical outcome of its

triumph over its erstwhile rivals. Having prevailed over the totalitarian proj-
ects of the first half of the 20th century it has developed in such a way that it
is now undermining its original goals of individual and collective autonomy.
Modern liberal democracy – the outcome of an inversion of the values of
tradition, hierarchy and political incorporation – is a mixed regime. It in-
volves three different dimensions of social existence, political, legal, historical/
economic, and organizes power around these. A balance was achieved after
the upheaval of World War II in the form of liberal democracy, on the basis
of reforms which injected democratic political power into liberalism and con-
trolled the new economic dynamics it had unleashed. This balance has now
been lost. Political autonomy, which accompanied modern historicity and its
orientation towards the future, has been overshadowed by economic activity
and its pursuit of innovation. As a result, the very meaning of democracy has
become impoverished. The term used to refer to the goal of self-government,
it is now taken to be fully synonymous with personal freedom and the cause
of human rights. The legal dimension having come to prevail over the political
one, democratic societies see themselves as ‘political market societies’, societ-
ies that can only conceive of their existence with reference to a functional
language borrowed from economics. This depoliticisation of democracy has
facilitated the rise to dominance of a new form of oligarchy.

Key Words: Democracy – crisis – liberalism – law – historicity – economics –

oligarchy

The following reflections constitute a risky yet indispensable exercise: try-

ing to shed light on the set of historical circumstances we are currently im-
mersed in and finding one’s sense of direction in the obscurity of what is yet
to emerge. These thoughts aim at formulating a concrete analysis of the crisis
which democracies are presently experiencing. With this in mind, I propose
164 Marcel Gauchet

to place the crisis into perspective by relating it to a previous one. The parallel
thus established allows me to highlight the original features of the contem-
porary context against the background of the issues the two crises have in
common.
This is not the place to debate the obvious difficulties inherent in such an
enterprise. They are obvious. I can only stress the necessity of such a reflec-
tion which is, to my mind, inadequately perceived by many. How can we go
forward without knowing where we are at? How can we act with no analysis of
what motivates us? No matter how great the risks associated with such an ex-
ercise, we cannot afford to run away from them. This is so much the situation
that in fact we ceaselessly engage in it, as if in spite of ourselves – with shame
and rather surreptitiously – we could protect ourselves against the dangers this
crisis poses, by indulging in it reluctantly almost without knowing it. On the
contrary, let us conduct the exercise in full consciousness of its limitations and
with the understanding that not doing so cannot be contemplated.
The ambition of this enterprise is not only civic – it aims to do more than
simply alert citizens. It is an ambition that is fundamentally much more philo-
sophical as it postulates that such an analysis of the contemporary situation
opens up a deeper understanding of democracy. This was the case with the
totalitarian phenomena of the recent past which were the major symptoms
of the first great crisis of democracies. We owe to totalitarianisms, a revived
understanding of the contrasting democratic phenomena. It is the same for
this latest test which is essentially different from the former one and is one in
which democracies are confronted as a result of their evolution. The current
crisis makes evident – but only if we know how to decipher it – that there are
some dimensions of the ‘liberty of the moderns’ which until now we have only
very imperfectly grasped.2
My comments will be structured around three main arguments that:
1. what we are confronted with is a growth crisis of democracy, a growth
crisis that is not the first of its type but is, in fact, the second;
2. the defining feature of this crisis is the self-destruction of democracy’s foun-
dations; and
3. this crisis corresponds to a crisis of composition of the dimensions of
modern liberal democracy which is fundamentally a mixed régime.3

Which Crisis?

A growth crisis of democracy? What does this mean?

The notion is far from self-evident. I am well aware of that. It can be
perceived to be a very poor figure of speech, a vague analogy in the best of
cases, one associating the over-used word of ‘crisis’ with the inadequate word
of ‘growth’.
 Democracy: From One Crisis to Another 165

The constant use, in various forms, of the term ‘crisis’ has undeniably erod-
ed its strength. Indeed, what today does not constitute some form of crisis?
The notion has been reduced to being a rather lazy way of designating those
changes whose meaning escapes us. Moreover, the application of the word
crisis to democracy, it is true, presents a particular difficulty since democracy,
by definition, is a form of a government in which discord, protest and the
questioning of what has been established cannot ever cease. When does a crisis
begin and end when it comes to the conflict of opinions, the antagonism of
interests, the instability of elected powers, the questioning of the systems of
representation or the demands for the independence of individuals from the
claims of the collective order, all of which are inherent in the operation of a
system based upon liberty? There has been no shortage of clever people4 to
conclude from this that the term ‘crisis’ should be banned altogether, as the
so-called crisis is in fact the ordinary condition of democracy.
These very real obstacles should only be seen as prompts to further intel-
lectual rigour. A concept is needed if we are to grasp the imbalances that can
affect the functioning, if not the very existence, of those organisations which
constitute human collective bodies. Such organisations are by definition un-
stable: their ontological principle is defined by their being structured around
diversity and contradiction. To respond to this need, there is no other notion
but that of crisis. From this point its use, in every case, can only be justified
on the basis of the severity of the disruption at play and the specific character
of the factors involved. To take the example of the first crisis previously used,
one is fully justified in speaking of a ‘crisis of democracy’ when a substantial
proportion of citizens come to reject the principle binding its institutions and
to support parties whose ambition is to establish an alternative system, as was
the case in the age of totalitarianisms. This is not the ‘normal’ state of democ-
racy—something we should learn to live with. No it is rather that the task is
to untangle the frustrations and expectations provoked by the development of
the democratic world that crystallised, at a given moment, into such projec-
tions of radical rupture.
Point taken, you might say but how can one speak today of a crisis when
similarly adverse forces are no longer present, when democracy no longer pos-
sesses enemies within, when the spirit of the time, what is more, is defined by a
general endorsement of its principle? Here I must clarify my concept of ‘crisis’
which does not correspond to the paralysing presence of outright expressions
of opposition or the existence of mere dysfunctionalities. The fact that democ-
racy no longer possesses any self-proclaimed enemies does not prevent it from
being challenged by an internal form of adversity, which, although it is largely
unconscious, is no less formidable in its effects. Just because no one proposes
any more to overthrow democracy does not prevent it from facing the insidi-
ous threat of losing its effectiveness. Moreover, if its very existence is safe from
challenge, the way its actors perceive it tends to dissolve the foundations of its
166 Marcel Gauchet

operation. This is truly a crisis in the strictest definition of the term, that is, a
challenging of democracy from within, proceeding from the very conditions
that preside over its advance. The difference lies in the fact that the process un-
folding is considerably more subtle than the attacks to which democracy was
subjected in the past and thus its workings are much more difficult to analyse.
Why, speak more precisely of a ‘developmental crisis’ in the present? The
term is an analogy which I admit possesses connotations that are dangerously
close to an old, no longer acceptable theoretical notion, that of ‘social organ-
ism’. Despite this easily avoidable risk, the figure of speech in question seems
to me to have the merit of drawing attention to the type of historicity we are
confronted with. We are not dealing with the trials and tribulations of de-
mocracy across time, with its external history; we are dealing with its internal
history, with the progressive affirmation of its very principle, with the unfold-
ing of its formula; put simply, with its development. A development clearly,
that has nothing to do with the growth of an organism but nevertheless relates
to an endogenous process of expansion and clarification whose logic must be
grasped. In the absence of a suitable word belonging to the social register,
‘growth’ seems to me to provide us with an acceptable approximation. The
transformations of democracy amount to something like a form of growth,
and this growth, precisely because it is not organic, sometimes provokes deep
imbalances that threaten its existence, in one form or another.

Modern Autonomy
This dynamic essence of the democratic phenomenon can only be fully
grasped if one relates it back to its origin. The democracy of the moderns as
opposed to that of antiquity can, in the last instance, only be understood as
the expression of a disengagement from religion, that is to say, of the pas-
sage from a human-social institution structured through heteronomy to an
autonomous form of organisation. To be totally precise, democracy represents
the putting into political form of the autonomy of the human-social institu-
tion.5 This definition is both the most extensive and the most precise one may
offer. Except for the fact that this autonomy is not an abstract idea one could
consider as acquired once and for all. It is in fact an essentially concrete way
of being which took form and asserted itself over a long duration, in tandem
with humanity pulling away, over the course of centuries, from the religious
structuring of the world. Matters would be quite simple if only a principle
were involved but autonomy is much more fundamentally a mode within
which unfolds a being-together. The exit from religion is a process character-
ised by the materialisation of autonomy through a fundamental rethinking
of the organising parts that form human communities. The unexpected, as
a result, is a constant feature of the venture. Even if we know by heart the
principles, the form these effectively come to assume, never cease to confound
 Democracy: From One Crisis to Another 167

us. For the very same reason, in the course of this advance, problems regularly
arise with respect to exercising mastery over the instruments of our freedom.
The paradox lies in the fact that the incarnations of autonomy constantly
threaten to escape our grasp.
To measure the difficulties that the progress of democracy encounters on
its path one must turn to this process of realisation. As a precondition, it is
necessary to understand what autonomy, as a mode of being in human com-
munities, actually means in practice.
To use only a few sentences to summarise five centuries—this materialisa-
tion of autonomy concomitant with the leaving of religion was realised in
three stages and it was carried out successively by three different drivers: the
political, the law and history.
First of all, it translated into the advent of a new type of power, one that
replaced the old mediating form of power which had fused the here-below
and the beyond and brought the human order into subservience to its foun-
dations in religious transcendence. This new power became known as The
State, its originality residing in the fact that increasingly it came to function
as the instrument of the divorce between heaven and earth and as the vehicle
of the immanent earthly reasons that now commanded the organisation of
the political body. The essential significance of modern politics resides in this
concentration of the here-below’s self-sufficiency that is provided by the State.
Secondly, the exit from religion involved the invention of a new type of
bond between human beings in the framework of the emergence of a new prin-
ciple of legitimacy at the heart of the political body. This new bond replaced
the hierarchy that had linked human beings on the basis of their inequality,
on the basis of a dissimilarity by nature – hierarchy that refracted at all levels
of the social body the dependency of nature upon a supernatural dimension –
with the equal rights of individuals and the contract these established amongst
themselves on the basis of their equal freedom. This redefinition of the basis
of relationships between human beings fits into a bigger reorganisation of the
foundations of the law in general. The source of the law used to be found in
God: it now slides towards nature, or more precisely towards the state of na-
ture, that is, towards the idea of a right originally possessed by individuals as a
consequence of their primordial independence. Consequently, the legitimacy
of public authority and the organisation of the body politic ceased to be tran-
scendental. It could now only proceed from the permanent consent of the in-
dividuals that compose the body politic and who contractually pool the rights
they naturally have at their disposal. Such was the revolution in the origin and
nature of the law and through which modern law became one of the drivers of
autonomy, the law being transformed in essence into individual rights.
Thirdly and finally, the process that saw humanity leave religion was char-
acterised by the reversal of the time orientation that had hitherto defined
collective action. Running counter to the unconditional obedience owed to
168 Marcel Gauchet

a foundational past and to the dependency on tradition, modern historicity

projects humanity into the invention of the future. It replaces the authority
conferred on origin, defined as the source of the immutable order designed
to rule amongst humans with the self-constitution of the human world over
time, a self-constitution that is being re-directed towards the future. Here
lies what we can designate as the historical orientation, which constitutes the
third driver of autonomy in so far as through it, humanity purposely comes to
produce itself across time.
Deep down, the history of modernity is the history of the successive un-
folding and progressive combination of these three drivers of autonomy. Quite
obviously, with none of these points are we dealing with an instantaneous ap-
pearance, but with an emergence that took shape little by little, with a slow
expansion that displaced and gradually broke up the powerfully constructed
mechanisms of the heteronomous structure of collective existence. Thus the
immanent logic of the State came to override that of sacred monarchy with
which it was originally associated, to the point where the abstract dimension
of the res publica ended up dethroning the royal personification of power.6
Similarly, little by little, the redefinition of the law within the political body,
on the basis of the rights of individuals, came to reveal its democratic import:
the liberty of the state of nature can only prevail in social life. In parallel, the
historical orientation was deepened in the course of an ever more pronounced
swing in favour of the future and the widening of action conditioned by its
perspective. This phenomenon is commonly referred to as ‘the acceleration of
history’, a clumsy expression that nevertheless conveys an accurate perception.
As the hold as loosened, as exercised by the ancient model of organisation and
predicated on the power of the gods, the authority of the collective whole and
the dependency on the past, a form of growth is involved if one takes that
to mean the ever expanding expression of the new articulations of collective
experience as discussed before.
From the outset, this dynamic inventory of the components of modernity
defined as the materialisation of autonomy, allows us to highlight what came
to differentiate, at a fundamental level, the democracy of the Moderns from
that of the Ancients. Modern democracy hangs on three givens or dimensions
that are foreign to the shared power of the city of antiquity: it is mediated by
the State; it rests upon the universal right of individuals; and it casts itself into
collective self-production. Three givens or dimensions that add a range of new
problems to those experienced by the men of Antiquity.
It is in the light of the establishment of these three drivers of autonomy
that the development and problems of modern democracy must be analysed.
In their very principle these problems boil down to the question of how to
govern an autonomous society or, to put it differently, how to master the three
drivers of autonomy. For such mastery is far from self-evident. The State pro-
vides the human community with the means to achieve its autonomy; but
 Democracy: From One Crisis to Another 169

there remains the need to know how to use these means; how to control them
and not be directed by them. The notion of individual rights gives shape to
the autonomous foundation of the human community; but there remains the
need to establish the form of power that matches this contractual freedom
of individuals, as against the dispersion and dissolution of collective power.
There is only a narrow path that separates the tyrannical return of the liberty
of the Ancients and the anarchistic impotence of private freedoms; history,
that is, the orientation towards the future, makes of autonomy much more
than just the capacity to determine one’s own laws. This orientation elevates
autonomy into a form of concrete self realisation. But there remains the need
to control self realisation which can lead to a most frightful form of disposses-
sion. To realise oneself whilst remaining ignorant of what one does, is it not
the height of alienation, of becoming a stranger to oneself? Yet this is the peril
to which humanity subjects itself once it launches into the conquest of the
future: it runs the risk of losing its way.
To shift to the practice of democracy, the problems that characterise the
democracy of the moderns essentially boil down to a matter of adjusting,
of articulating, of combining these three dynamics of autonomy, political,
juridical and historical. This is a task that is spiked with difficulties for these
three dimensions each define a self-sufficient vision of collective life and tend
to function for their own sake, to the exclusion of the other two. This is why
I earlier alluded to the re-birth of the problem of what is called a mixed re-
gime. This problem arises in terms which no longer have anything to do with
those associated with the combination or balance of monarchy, aristocracy,
democracy, the question having been settled, as we know, in the modern age,
through the emergence of contractual reasoning and the establishment of the
political body on the basis of the rights of individuals. All the same, modern
democracy is a mixed regime, whose life revolves around the problematic as-
sociation of its component parts. It is arduous indeed to keep together the
requirements of the political form, the demands of the individual endowed
with rights and the needs of future-oriented self-creation, to make them work
in unison. Discord is more common than harmony. Here lies the dilemma
and the locus of permanent tension for our regimes.

Liberal Reality7
Among these three drivers of autonomy, historical orientation – the third
and the last to emerge – is the most spectacular because it has a capacity to
propel society. It is also the driver that brings about the most rapid and most
directly perceptible changes as its very nature is to confer value upon change.
The historical orientation set in between 1750 and 1850, from the first
breakthrough, which the perspective of progress represented, to the mo-
ment when the outcomes of the industrial revolution became all powerful. It
170 Marcel Gauchet

underpins the establishment of that most familiar dimension of our regimes,

their liberal character.
It is admittedly possible to conceptualise democracy on an exclusively ju-
ridical basis. The principles of modern law, whose birth I have defined, are
sufficient to provide it with a full definition. Democracy was, incidentally,
the driving force of the natural law revolutions of the end of the 18th century,
in the United States and in France, with which our regimes possess a direct
genealogical link. This perspective, however, is partially misleading in so far
as it conceals the efforts at re-interpreting natural law in the light of the his-
tory which directed the formation of the representative regimes we know. The
historical orientation is what conferred its specificity on the liberal political
organisation that we practice.
The swing to the future indeed imposes a complete overhaul of the way
our societies are organised. To start with this reorganisation induces a dis-
covery of society as the locus of the collective dynamic and as the source of all
change. In the process, it legitimates the emancipation of civil society with
respect to the state; at the same time it inverts the values in the relationship
between power and society. The viewpoint of humanity’s self-creation across
time reveals itself to be conducive to a politics of freedom. Its first principle
stipulates that one must keep society free in so far as it constitutes the true
engine of history; the second one, that within societies individuals must, for
the same reason, be kept free as they are the actors of history. Within such
a framework, power can no longer be considered as the cause of society, no
longer as the authority with the charge of making society exist by giving it its
order, be it through its inverted reflection of a transcendent order or by virtue
of its management of its inner requirements. Power must be considered as an
effect of society. Power can only have been a secretion of society and the only
role it can have is to fulfil the missions society imparts to it. In short, the only
purpose of power is to represent society – a task of representation that power
will fulfil all the more successfully if the task is explicitly acknowledged and if
power is freely designated by the collective body.
This redefinition of the relationship between power and society which
gives birth to representative government in its modern sense, I propose to call
liberal inversion. Here it is no longer a matter of linking power with what was
viewed as the superior part of the political body, as was the case with medieval
representation. The issue is to transform power into an expression of society
in so far as the latter is the source of collective creativity.
Similarly, this practical recognition of the independence of civil society,
this recognition of the power of initiative possessed by the actors of civil so-
ciety or, to give it an expression that does greater justice to its revolutionary
character, this recognition of the preeminence and primacy of civil society over
political government – a recognition that consequently implies a principled
 Democracy: From One Crisis to Another 171

acceptance of the representative essence of political legitimacy – I propose to

call liberal reality.
It must be considered as a social fact because this primacy of society objec-
tively constitutes the central axis of a new type of society, la société de l’histoire
(history based society).
By this I mean a type of society that not only perceives itself as historical
but organises itself on the basis of its historical character. The liberal ideology
is but one interpretation, among many other possibilities, of this reality and
of the political consequences that must be drawn from it. To put it differently:
our societies are endowed with a liberal structure, a function of their histori-
cal orientation, of their pursuit of autonomy through the medium of their
unceasing efforts to transform and produce themselves.

The First Crisis of Democracy

It was under the auspices of liberalism that democracy, in the course of
the nineteenth century, came, little by little, to penetrate European societies,
according to a process that can be summarised as the democratic broaden-
ing of representative government thanks to universal suffrage. Representative
government basically adapts itself to an elite version that restricts the formu-
lation of the collective interest to the deliberations of the most responsible
and enlightened. But in terms of its premises, the liberal regime of history is
destined to develop into democratic liberalism, each actor being recognised
as being the best judge of his own interests and political representation being
judged as all the more efficient for being that of the greatest number of those
who are the authors of the common history. This irresistible democratisation
of representative regimes in effect took place around 1900.
At the same time, this emergence of liberal-democratic government was
accompanied by a crisis which we can recognise as the first developmental
crisis of democracy, with distinctive characteristics to do with the fact that
this crisis concerned its establishment. The crisis was in a state of incubation
and first revealed itself in the course of the transitional period 1880-1914; it
erupted in the wake of the First World War, reaching its climax in the 1930s.
It was a developmental crisis because on the one hand democratic legiti-
macy won, came into effect and imposed the rule of the masses whilst on the
other hand, this theoretical advance of autonomy, guaranteed by a mode of
power based on universal suffrage, far from leading to actual self-government
led in reality to a loss of collective mastery. The parliamentary system revealed
itself to be both deceptive and impotent; society stressed by the division of
labour and the antagonism between the classes, gave the impression of coming
apart; historical change, as it became widespread, accelerated, intensified and
escaped all control. Thus, humans, at the very moment they could no longer
ignore the fact that they were the ones that made history, found themselves
172 Marcel Gauchet

forced to admit to themselves that they did not comprehend the very history
they were making. They had won the most complete freedom of actors only to
plunge into chaos and powerlessness with respect to themselves. A suspicion
crept in, the suspicion that the move away from religion had perhaps given
birth to an unruly society.
The two great phenomena of the 20th century – the eruption of totalitari-
anisms and the formation of liberal democracies – must be understood as two
responses to this immeasurable crisis.
The alternative, to present it as a clearly defined choice – which it clearly
never actually was – can be formulated as follows: either re-conquer demo-
cratic power and construct it anew, as capacity for self-government in the
framework of a society geared towards history and its liberal structures or
else break with these liberal structures to rediscover the mastery of collective
destiny, a power over oneself which is incompatible with those catalysts of
disorganisation and anarchy that represent the freedom of civil society and
within it, that of individuals.
In response to society’s opening up to the future, totalitarianisms proposed
the establishment of a definitive regime; for the uncertainties associated with
the representation of society, they substituted the restoration of the ordering
primacy of the political; and in the place of disconnected individuals they in-
stalled the compactness of the masses or of the people’s community. In effect,
they came back, or attempted to come back, in secular language, to religious
society, to its coherence and the full convergence of its parts. This suggests
that this model of society remained, despite its official repudiation, strongly
implanted in the minds of people and that it continued sufficiently to leave
its stamp on the working of communities to offer itself as a possible recourse,
if needed.
The history of the battle waged by these two options is very familiar, but
acquires a new intelligibility if approached from the perspective outlined
above. In the 1930s, totalitarianisms held the lead in this competition, to the
point that for a while it seemed that the bourgeois liberal era was coming to
a close, overtaken on both its left and right hand sides. After 1945, liberal
democracies managed to transform themselves in a sufficiently significant way
to overcome those ills that hitherto had wrongly been thought incurable. Thus
arose over a period of thirty years that was also one of exceptional growth, a
phase of reforms and consolidation of the regimes that had been democratised
through universal suffrage which transformed these into the liberal democra-
cies we now know. A phase characterised by reinforcement and stabilisation
which in the end allowed them to prevail over what remained of their old re-
actionary and revolutionary adversaries. In 1974, with the so-called ‘carnation
revolution’ in Portugal, what political theorists have termed the ‘third wave of
democratisation’ started to unfold.8 It proved fatal to the dictatorships left-
 Democracy: From One Crisis to Another 173

over from fascism in Southern Europe, before it reached Latin America, then
reached its apex with the collapse of the regimes of so-called ‘real socialism’.
In parallel with this global expansion and starting roughly on the same
date, the regimes of stabilised liberal democracy entered a phase of consider-
able internal transformations, transformations which partook of that general
movement, since they correspond to an additional step in the penetration of
the democratic spirit and in its deepening. Except that the advance of democ-
racy is never without difficulty, this can be confirmed one more time. Indeed,
just as democracy had imposed itself as the insurmountable horizon of our
time and the sole legitimate regime imaginable this metamorphosis in the
1990s opened up a second developmental crisis, in its principle very similar to
the first one but, in fact, very different in its manifestations. This similarity
and these disparities are what we now need to explore.

The Liberal-Democratic Synthesis

This elucidation has a pre-condition which is the need to have a clearly
defined idea of the starting point, of the reforms which, in the period after
1945, produced the stabilisation of the political formula of liberal democra-
cies. This whole set of reforms constitutes a systematic response to the crisis
of liberal regimes from which emerged the wave of totalitarianisms. When
brought back to their essential features, they represent an injection of demo-
cratic power into liberal society. As would need to be demonstrated in detail,
this was due to a subtle intertwining of the political, the socio-historical and
the law. What in the terminology of regimes appears as a combination of the
liberal and democratic regimes rests upon a sophisticated and complex inter-
mingling of the three elements of autonomous modernity. This is what allows
me to designate our liberal-democratic synthesis as a mixed regime.
These reforms unfolded along three principal directions. I will limit myself
to recalling their general inspiration in order to highlight the issues at stake.

1. They first comprised political reforms intended to address parliamentary

impotence and imperfect representation, in particular though the reevalua-
tion of the role of executive power within the representative regime. Ulti-
mately this power is the one that best accounts for the enigmatic function of
representation. By putting it forward, one not only increases the efficacy of
public power; one also provides citizens with the possibility of recognising
themselves in its action.
2. They were then carried out through a series of administrative reforms
which, through a set of public services, established a regulatory and forecast-
ing apparatus to avoid liberal states navigating blindly in the dark in the face
of anarchic markets. From then on the states were able to rely on powerful
manifestations of social knowledge, of the organisation of collective existence
174 Marcel Gauchet

and of leadership over its process of transformation. Change, with its innu-
merable sources, was made intelligible and controllable from the perspective
of the political community.
3. Finally, and this is their best known manifestation, the reforms were
social reforms that one can summarise as the construction of welfare states.
This undertaking was a double pronged one: the social State is not only an
instrument for the protection of the actual independence of individuals as
against the hazards liable to threaten them (sickness, unemployment, old age,
poverty), it also constitutes an instrument that allows society to be understood
in its entirety and its structure to be directed from a perspective of justice. It
does not claim to be able to create a just society instantaneously, but offers a
framework within which its realisation can be debated in concrete terms.
The overall result of these vast transformations was to marry history’s dy-
namics with regenerated state power and with individual rights redefined in
their concrete depth. Liberal freedom was respected. It was even amplified,
through the means put at the disposal of both personal freedoms and the
freedom of invention and self-creation conferred upon civil societies. But this
time it was endowed with a political expression capable of giving an incarnate
form to the self-government of the historical community, thus being acknowl-
edged as its creative force. In this, liberal freedom truly rose to the level of
democratic freedom. The transition was made from democratised liberalism
to liberal democracy in its fullest sense.
The reality is that these great reforms, implemented in the wake of the
Second World War, revealed themselves as a middle course that was remark-
ably effective at gathering the support of different populations. They slowly
diffused the fears and rejections which, in the heat of the 30s’ turmoil had,
for a while, appeared destined to overwhelm the liberal regimes, condemned
by what seemed insurmountable weakness. They provided the conditions for
a rallying around of democracy that were profound enough for it to keep
following its course from the mid-1970s onwards, in the midst of a severe
economic crisis. The crisis that followed the crash of 1929 exacerbated revolu-
tionary protests. By contrast the crisis following the petrol shock of 1973 was
characterised by the abandonment of revolutionary hopes and the discrediting
of totalitarianisms.

The Expansion of Autonomy

Beyond the disruption of economic mechanisms, this crisis would, bit by
bit, end up revealing itself, as the signal of a changing world, including in
the ordinary sense of the word, a change in global geography, a change in
the material basis of our societies, of capitalism, of industry, of their techni-
cal systems. From the economic sphere, change spread to public institutions
with powerful consequences. The balance in the synthesis of the democratic
 Democracy: From One Crisis to Another 175

and liberal dimensions that with great difficulty had been painfully acquired
by the beginning of the 1970s came to be destroyed in favour of a reactivated
hegemony of the liberal dimension.
This rebirth of liberalism after a long eclipse, both practical and ideologi-
cal, is the most visible aspect of the shake-up experienced at that time by the
collective environment. But the significance of the phenomenon is in fact
far more profound. The change of ideological direction is but the emergent
part of an overall mutation that has its origin in the re-launch of the process of
disengagement from religion.9 Only the perspective of the latter makes it pos-
sible to recognise the mutation’s manifold dimensions. The pulling away from
religion and the role of religion in giving the social world its structure was far
from fulfilled. Although when it came to the explicit rules that governed col-
lective life it might have the appearance of having been secured this was not so
with respect to the actual workings and tacit presuppositions of life in society.
Totalitarian religiosities had exploited this hidden reserve. The spectacular re-
sults achieved in the concretisation of autonomy – results obtained as a result
of the phase of consolidation going from 1945 to 1975 – established the
conditions for another step forward. They established the foundations for, and
accumulated the means of, a new phase of expansion for social organisation
directed towards autonomy. This new phase translated into new developments
for the three drivers of autonomy, developments which upset the combina-
tions and compromises previously established between them. One of the driv-
ers – the law – seems to prevail over the others and to be able to dictate in a
hegemonic fashion. In part, this is an optical illusion. In reality, intensification
occurred simultaneously in the political, the juridical and in history. But the
status and appearance conferred upon the political and the historical, as they
gained greater depth, virtually removed them from sight. The Nation State
has remained as structurally important as ever but in a purely infrastructural
mode and in the context of the disappearance of the imperative transcenden-
tal authority conferred upon it by religious structural underpinnings. This
is so much the case that the retreat of its competences appears like a defeat
(even though having ceased its command over the economy makes it serve
even more as its mainstay). But so it is: the more important the role of the
nation state, the less visible it is. Likewise, never has the perception that his-
tory is accelerating been so widespread, and justifiably so, no matter how
inadequate the words used to convey it. The amplification of historical action
is indeed conspicuous. Except that this deepening of the productive orienta-
tion towards the future has the consequence of making this future impossible
to grasp at the same time as it obscures the past. As this deepening severs the
ties that unified time it imprisons us in a perpetual present. At the very mo-
ment when the historical orientation rules to a degree as yet unequalled, all
happens as if history has ceased to exist. In the collective environment only
the juridical dimension remains visible. By contrast, with pride, the juridical
176 Marcel Gauchet

dimension occupies the centre stage. Its visibility confers upon it an increased
predominance. It is the master authority of today’s social configuration. It
confers its political tone upon the liberal offensive, by laying almost as much
emphasis on the exercise of individual rights as on civil society’s capacity for
initiative. One can debate for a long time which of the two, in the end, ex-
ercises more influence among the forces which shape our world: economic
freedoms or the politics of human rights. For our purpose, suffice it to note
their interdependency.
One of the most striking manifestations of the change in direction that
contrasts with the great after-war period of organisation is indeed the reactiva-
tion of the process of individualisation. Whereas before it was all about masses
and classes, the individual being viewed through his group affiliations, mass
society was subverted from within by a form of mass individualism, which de-
tached the individual from his or her group membership. This phenomenon is
illustrative of the way the new period’s discontinuity stands in continuity with
the former period. This generalised disassociation would have been incon-
ceivable had it not been for the way the social state worked to construct the
concrete individual. Disassociation is the direct legacy of the social state’s pro-
tective and fostering provisions. Disassociation gives these provisions a twist
which leads in a totally different direction. It reinstates the abstract individual
on the basis of what the concrete individual has acquired. The securing of
real rights extends into a reassertion of the so called formal rights as they are
reactivated by the demands formulated in their name.
Over time the individual as defined by rights became sovereign and in the
course of the 1980s human rights were elevated to a position of majesty. A
special historical date was there to lend the support of symbolism to this coro-
nation. Nineteen eighty nine will remain as an ironic confirmation that the
gains of the bourgeois revolution, which had taken place two centuries earlier,
could not be transcended. This was demonstrated by the collapse of what was
claimed to supersede the revolution. Naturally, this does not mean that noth-
ing happened in the course of those two centuries, nor that the individual
seen as a citizen endowed with rights, when making his comeback on the
public stage, was identical to the citizen of 1789. Far from it. Our challenge
is to understand how the ground covered since 1789 changed the operating
conditions of democracy, to the point that it turned its natural support base
into the source of our problems.

The Democracy of Human Rights10

The historical ramifications of this consecration cannot be overempha-
sised. As a consequence of this return of the individual defined by rights,
democracy becomes what it had never truly been, (beside the brief inaugural
attempt made with the French Revolution), a democracy of human rights.
 Democracy: From One Crisis to Another 177

Admittedly it invoked them; it worked to protect them, negatively, that is,

as personal guarantees in the juridical sphere. But one thing was clear from
the emergence of an authoritative role acquired by history in the nineteenth
century: in their abstraction from another age, human rights represented a
venerable but simultaneously inoperative principle. It was taken for granted
that political action, if it wanted to be effective, had to be guided by a con-
crete knowledge of society and of its dynamics. This had been convincingly
illustrated within the framework of the Welfare State by the advance of per-
sonal rights in the form of social rights. It is in the context of this two century
eclipse of human rights that it is necessary to evaluate the significance of the
resurgence we have just witnessed. This time democracy has returned to its
foundations in order to learn and to turn them into a positive reality. This
re-appropriation is made possible by a transformation in the status of human
rights, which has slowly made them descend from the realm of ideals back
into practical reality, following a subterranean history whose eruption into
visibility represents a landmark in the long history of natural law. All this is
happening as if the fiction of a state of nature became reality, as if the primor-
dial norm, defined with reference to the time before society was, is at one with
the social condition. Nothing, therefore stands in the way of rights which man
possesses as a consequence of his nature prevailing and being applied, without
any obstacles left in their way.
Such is the origin of the enigmatic turn of Democracy Against Itself 11 as I
have proposed to call it, which makes democracy simultaneously regress and
progress, which empties it of its substance just as it gains greater depth. For
the political consequences of this renewed juridical understanding of democ-
racy are considerable. In this context the notion of a ‘State of law’ acquires
a depth which significantly exceeds the technical meaning to which it was
restricted. It tends to fuse with the very idea of democracy, assimilated with
the safeguard of private freedoms and compliance with those procedures that
preside over their public expression. Revealingly, the spontaneous understand-
ing of the very word of democracy has changed. In its every day usage, it now
accounts for something else than what it did in the past. It used to designate
the power of the collective and the capacity for self-government. It now only
refers to personal freedoms. Whatever increases the place given to personal
freedoms and the role of individual prerogatives is seen as going in the direc-
tion of greater democracy. A liberal vision of democracy has now replaced its
classical definition. In this respect, the touchstone no longer is the sovereignty
of the people but that of the individual, defined by the ultimate possibility, if
necessary, of defeating collective power. Hence, step by step, the promotion of
the democratic system of law leads to the political incapacitation of democ-
racy. In brief, the more democracy rules, the less it governs.
The consequences of this profound contradiction, if one tries to explain
them in detail, can be understood at two levels. On the surface, they manifest
178 Marcel Gauchet

themselves through a self-restriction of the political domain of democracy.

At a deeper level, they translate into a questioning of the basis on which the
exercise of democracy rests.

A Minimal Democracy
In reality, the overshadowing of popular sovereignty by individual sover-
eignty inexorably steers us in the direction of minimal democracy. It is not a
matter of suggesting some naïve opposition between the two notions. They
are interconnected through a subtle link which constitutes the cornerstone of
our political regimes and justifies our ability to speak of ‘liberal democracy’, in
the strict definition of the expression. As its wording suggests, this expression
possesses two associated but distinct aspects: it rests on the fundamental rights
of people on the basis of their personhood and on public freedoms which
extend these rights and involves the exercise of collective power, that is, in the
metamorphosis of individual freedoms into the self-government of the whole.
This is a form of government which can only be carried out in a way that fully
respects those freedoms, since it is meant to express them, but which repre-
sents a distinct and superior power. Individual freedoms are fulfilled through
this power not only because it confers dignity upon them, that of being the
constituent parts of a whole, but because it also confers a responsibility, that
of a common destiny. The problem of liberal democracy, an essential and
permanent one, resides in the fact that it must guarantee a balanced, hybrid
mix of the two hierarchies of demands. It is as if the second dimension, the
power of all, is erased in favour of the first, the freedom of each person. This
dimension is no longer understood as a necessary extension of individual self-
determination, if only through the perspective of the protection it can provide
(this explains how the broadening of the demands placed upon the social state
can go hand in hand with a reduction of the political prerogatives conferred
on governments). The ambition of mastering and leading the social whole
tends to be rejected because of its external authoritative character. The general
command of the law itself comes to be seen as inimical to the irreducible
character of individual rights. With everything that is happening, it is as if
only the least possible amount of social power is needed to obtain maximum
realisation of individual freedom.
This inflection is perhaps nowhere more visible than in France, because
the Republican regime took roots on the basis of a particularly demanding
ideal of collective sovereignty. On the one hand this was due to the legacy
of an old tradition of state authority and on the other, to the confrontation
with the Catholic Church which, as against the counterexample of theocracy,
pushed the regime to develop an extreme vision of democratic autonomy.
These factors led to a particularly marked hierarchical separation between
the sphere of public citizenship and the sphere of private independence. The
 Democracy: From One Crisis to Another 179

swing which marked the transition from a definition of democracy centred on

the public dimension to one focused on the private one was thus experienced
more acutely in France than elsewhere. The inversion of priorities which ren-
ders the public sphere dependent on the private one, by depriving it of its
predominant status, is perceived as destabilising with respect to a powerfully
entrenched representation of politics.
The new operational ideal of democracy, which does not need to be ex-
plicit to function, amounts to a procedural coexistence of individual rights.
How can one guarantee the regulated compossibility of private forms of inde-
pendence so that they can be taken into account, in the engineering of public
decisions, on an equal basis? Here lies the question. In the context of this new
operational ideal of democracy more rights for every one would mean less
power for all. If one only rigorously seeks the fulfilment of everyone’s rights,
ultimately there remains no power for the collective whole. Given what is en-
tailed in respect to the recognition of the whole, the very possibility of such a
power is excluded from the start and the political community ceases to govern
itself. It becomes, stricto sensu, a political market society. By this I do not mean
a society where economic markets dominate the political choices made, but
a society whose very political operation borrows its market model from the
economic sphere and generalises it, with the whole configuration appearing
as a consequence of the initiatives and claims of different players, at the end
of a self-regulated process of aggregation. There follows a metamorphosis in
the function of political rulers. They are there only to preserve the rules of
the game, to guarantee that the process works smoothly. It falls upon them
to arbitrate between competing demands and to facilitate the forms of com-
promise called upon by the dynamics engendered by the plurality of interests,
convictions and identities. The now fashionable term of ‘governance’ attests
to this shift away from the classical idea of government. Behind its apparent
modesty the term governance hides a great ambition: no less than that of
politics without power. This ambition cannot be disassociated from a loss of
similar magnitude, the loss of what power allows, the capacity to shape the
human community across time through the use of reflection and will. What
cannot be certain is whether or not this loss was accepted consciously or un-
consciously. In reality, given that power does not disappear at will, as there is
still nevertheless a government, even if limited and restricted in its capacity to
direct and – considering that individuals and groups of civil society only have
themselves in sight, and their own preoccupations, whilst they abandon to the
political class the perspective of the collective whole, even if it is reduced to
being that of functional coordination – the consequence is a growing oligar-
chisation of our regimes. This oligarchisation is at first sight paradoxical since
it has developed among an effervescence of protest fuelled by the inexhaust-
ible defence and showcasing of sets of particularistic interests. Closing in upon
180 Marcel Gauchet

oneself does not in any way imply passivity in front of authorities; to the con-
trary, its spirit is fundamentally one of protest. Structurally, closing in upon
oneself goes hand in hand with demanding that the particularity one is de-
fending is given a legitimate place, within the social whole, for which the elites
are given responsibility. Social activism operates within this renunciation. This
explains how, when it comes down to it, this permanent mobilisation, far
from threatening the ruling oligarchy, ceaselessly strengthens its position, be-
yond the circumstantial obstacles it puts in its path. This is not to say that
the elites possess a comprehensive vision to any greater degree. Beyond the
fact that cumulatively the decisions they end up making ultimately work as a
substitute for such a vision, what guides them in the context of globalisation is
solidarity with their peers and the technical consensus it engenders. This is the
other dimension of governance; choices are made on an international scale,
converging and silently trickling out from the conniving ruling circles. So
much so that when all is said and done, this cosmos of societies that would ap-
pear to be ungovernable in fact reveals itself to be quite firmly governed. This
cosmos is well and truly controlled by a set of choices that affects the overall
configuration of the political communities and their future, but whose essen-
tial characteristics elude public discussion as well as the attribution of respon-
sibilities. Hence the generalised feeling of being dispossessed that haunts life
in a rights based democracy. Its logic exacerbates the divide between the elites
and the people; inexorably it erodes the trust of people in the very oligarchies
it pushes them to rely upon. The populist reactions such logic provokes ends
up reinforcing the situation they denounce. Minimal democracy is a form
of democracy that is all the more insecure and unhappy with itself for being
trapped in a circle that deprives it of the means to self-correct.
This explains how an undeniable deepening of democracy can lead to it
being emptied of its substance.

A Crisis in the Foundations of Democracy

That is not all there is to it. There is a second, even deeper level to the dis-
order of democracies, which does not so much concern their internal logic as
their operational framework. It is here that the notion that democracy works
against itself has its greatest reach.12
In some respects, it is not unreasonable to think that we are witnessing a
process of corrosion that is affecting the foundations underpinning democra-
cy’s operation. Beyond the self-restriction it imposes on itself, democracy is in
the grip of a form of mild self-destruction, which leaves its principle untouched
but which tends to deprive it of its effectiveness.
 Democracy: From One Crisis to Another 181

The foundational universalism which shapes democracy leads it to dis-

sociate from the historical and political framework within which it was con-
structed in brief – the Nation-State – but in truth and, more generally, from
whatever operational framework that is, by definition, restricted. It tends to
see itself ideally without any territory or history. The very logic of the law
encourages it to refuse to acknowledge that it is located in a space, whose
boundaries are an insult to the universality of the principles it lays claim to.
In the same vein it thus rejects its insertion in a specific history which would
put it under the dependency of a particularity it finds just as insufferable. Put
differently, democracy is brought to the point where it is unable to accept the
circumstances that gave birth to it. In essence it categorically rejects even the
idea that it may at some stage have come into existence. It reaches the point
where it sees itself as a natural arrangement next to which geography and his-
tory are incomprehensible scandals. How could democracy not have existed
forever and prevailed everywhere? The past of humanity and its civilisational
diversity are thrown back into a uniform barbarity which is seen as valueless
by dint of its unintelligibility. In fact this rootlessness enables democracy to
survive by drawing on the legacy of a genealogy it does not want to know any-
thing about and whose achievements it no longer cares to transmit.
Similarly, and with even more direct consequences, democracy ends up
turning its back on the instrument capable of translating collective choices
into reality. In the light of the conception of the law to which it wants to
conform it becomes suspicious of any kind of power. By a supreme paradox,
it becomes anti-political. Historically, modern democracies were built on the
basis of an appropriation of public force by the members of the political body.
They assumed the form of an unprecedented type of state, in which the com-
munity of citizens could recognise itself and project its aspirations, and whose
legitimate force it could put at its service. Their new ideal is to neutralise
power in whatever form in order to protect the sovereignty of individuals
from any attack. Here lies the deep reason for the erosion of the states and of
the principle underpinning their authority in today’s democracy. This involves
much more than the retreat of their economic prerogatives. It is associated
with their nature and their role being blurred in the minds of the different
peoples. In truth, their function is no longer understood, that of being the
operative vehicle of common government. The action of the states is burdened
by a diffused illegitimacy as a result of the suspicion of their arbitrary nature
which is a structural feature of contemporary democracy.
Human rights based democracy has a strong tendency to reject the prac-
tical instruments which it needs to become effective. Hence it is constantly
confronted with the painful discovery of public impotence. Democracy itself
in fact exudes this impotence. It probably also comes in part from the out-
side; to a certain extent it probably depends on those much touted ‘external
constraints’. But for the greater part, it proceeds from within. The perception
182 Marcel Gauchet

which democracy has of itself forbids it from accepting the tools of its material
realisation: condemning it to escape into a virtual realm.
The present crisis thus deserves to be called a crisis in the foundations of
democracy. A crisis of foundations whose essence is the promotion of democ-
racy’s juridical foundations: its juridical foundations as against its historical
and political foundations. Such is the remarkable internal struggle which once
more renders problematic the regime of liberty, by making autonomy poten-
tially impossible to govern. The broadening and deepening of the principle of
autonomy that structures the human-social world have engendered a human
rights based democracy which, in the way it currently functions, tends to ne-
gate, even dissolve the practical conditions of its operation. This, it seems to
me, is the way the source of the mysterious stagnation affecting our political
regimes – torn as they are between a new affirmation of the principles that
must guide them and an unprecedented uncertainty as to their implementa-
tion—must be understood.
The crisis can be analysed in other terms when it is seen through the longue
durée of modernity’s transformation. It typically presents as a problem of com-
position between the elements that define societies in the era after religion. It
is a crisis of what is our mixed regime.
The latest advance in the modern revolution has propelled the law into a
dominant and driving position, disqualified politics and overshadowed the
social-historical dimension. It has obfuscated both the political dimension,13
without which the law remains an ideal without incarnation, and the socio-
historical one, outside of whose control the law reigns in ignorance of its real
effects.
Hence the permanent complications in which this unilateralism ends up
being caught. For what the dominant perspective does not take into account
exists, even for those would prefer to remain ignorant of it, in an uncon-
scious mode. In spite of themselves, the most vehement zealots of the law
never cease to appeal to that political dimension from which, in other ways,
they aspire to free themselves. The zealots are thus obliged to note that these
norms, which they think they understand, can result in very unexpected con-
sequences in the context of the actual social developments in which they are
operating. In concrete terms what this means is that the economy, under the
banner of rights, imposes its rules and, in the process, changes to a very large
extent the powers and freedoms of the individual. This constant dissonance
consolidates the feeling that society is destined to be oblivious to itself, that
the collective cannot be seized and, in the last instance, that democracy is
impossible in the fullest sense of that word. How could this political commu-
nity, supposing it even still exists, and which cannot be controlled because it
is being pulled by incompatible demands, be capable of making choices that
affect the whole? Through different paths this returns us to the idea of a mini-
mal democracy. In an environment which definitely escapes our control, the
 Democracy: From One Crisis to Another 183

concept of democracy can only retain one plausible meaning, the protection
of the freedoms of the private individual. When it comes to the unconditional
legitimacy of personal prerogatives skepticism towards collective power shifts
into dogmatism.

Towards Recomposition

The value of these reflections resides in the way they reveal the fundamen-
tal instability of the contemporary situation. They highlight the magnitude of
contradictions that are visible within what is a dominant tendency – a tenden-
cy that is neither the whole reality of our societies nor the only one amongst
the many different tendencies acting upon them. The unilateral hegemony
of the legal element is not the end of the story. It is but one moment in the
course that has been taken by autonomous society, a moment of imbalance
calling for the reestablishment of equilibrium between the three elements that
must work together for democracy to function coherently. When it comes to
finding a way out of the current crisis, the parameters of the problem we face
are clear. They boil down to the possibility of negotiating a compromise, with
the reciprocal limitations that this presupposes, between the logic of the in-
dividual as legal subject, the social-historical dynamic, and the political form
of the nation-state (a form, which as a result of the advent of a federation of
nation-states in the European arena has experienced a profound metamorpho-
sis that has too easily been mistaken for its disappearance).
We will not revisit the latitude acquired by individuals. Similarly, there
is a large degree of irreversibility in the emancipation of civil societies (and
of economic societies in their midst). Finally, we have no other foundations
available to us but human rights. It is not a matter of criticising human rights
or even individualism. It is a question of shedding light on such rights. It is a
question of showing individuals that their freedom acquires its true meaning
only within the framework of a common government whose foundations and
conditions are well understood. This pre-supposes that this freedom is contex-
tualised within a political order recognised as such and that public delibera-
tions has at its centre a reflective mastery of history-making.
There is no need to look very far for the engine capable of pulling forward
such an evolution. Where else would we find it but in the feelings of intense
frustration provoked by the current situation amongst those individuals who
are supposedly its greatest beneficiaries? What good is it to see oneself en-
throned as sovereign actor, if it means one is ignorant of one’s identity such as
it has been shaped by history, if it means one finds oneself tossed around by
a future whose direction one does not understand, or by a future where one
cannot see by which means it could be changed? Collective impotence is hard
to experience, even for the most fanatically individualistic and perhaps, even
184 Marcel Gauchet

more so for them, as it is combined with a loss of personal control.14 In the

end the paradox of freedom without power is intolerable.
Sooner or later, it can only lead back to the idea that common government
is the sole agency that can confer the full meaning of individual independence.
To those factors of subjective mobilisation associated with the purely in-
ternal contradictions of democracy’s current functioning one must, of course,
add the real challenges faced by our societies, challenges which will ensure that
the need for collective mastery is given an urgent focus.
Suffice it to mention the environmental head on collision towards which
the acceleration of the economy is driving us. It gives us an idea of the painful
revisions that are taking shape in regard to the current dominant faith in the
magic of automatic regulation.
In truth, the environmental constraint, with all it implies, regarding our
obligation to produce what we call nature, is but the most vivid illustration of
a general constraint whereby the entirety of our living conditions which we
used to consider as given will need to be secured through our will. A situation
in which none of the resources of collective human intelligence and power
will be superfluous.
All this offers us reasons both to be pessimistic in the short term and opti-
mistic over the long run. If I can use a catchphrase that needs to be clarified, in
all probability, in the short term, at the stage of evolution we are at, the crisis
can only get worse. We have not yet reached the end point in the breakdown
of the old forms of equilibrium or in the momentum acquired by new factors.
In the long term, however, there are solid grounds to believe that the present
growth crisis is likely to be overcome. The example of the past speaks to us
in favour of this. Moreover, there are numerous signs that the work of recon-
struction is already well under way, even if only in embryonic form.
We have reasonable grounds to consider that democracy as we know it at
the beginning of the twenty first century is superior to democracy as it existed
throughout the twentieth century. To me it is not unreasonable to believe that
democracy in the twenty second century could be a substantially enhanced
democracy when compared with the one we now know.
Achieving that is up to us.

References to Translator’s Notes

Gauchet, M 1981a, ‘Des deux corps du roi au pouvoir sans corps. Christianisme et
politique I”, Le Débat, no. 14, pp. 133–157.
Gauchet, M 1981b, ‘Des deux corps du roi au pouvoir sans corps. Christianisme et
politique II”, Le Débat, no. 15, pp. 147–168.
Gauchet, M 1985, Le Désenchantement du monde: une histoire politique de la religion,
Gallimard, Paris.
Gauchet, M 1989, La Révolution des droits de l’homme, Gallimard, Paris.
 Democracy: From One Crisis to Another 185
Gauchet, M 1995, La Révolution des pouvoirs. La Souveraineté le people et la représenta-
tion (1789-1799), Gallimard, Paris.
Gauchet, M 1997, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion,
Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
Gauchet, M 1997, ‘Benjamin Constant: l’illusion lucide du libéralisme’, in M Gau-
chet (ed), Écrits politiques, Gallimard, Paris.
Gauchet, M 1998, La Religion dans la démocratie, Presses Universitaires de France,
Paris.
Gauchet, M 2002, La Démocratie contre elle-même, Gallimard, Paris.
Gauchet, M 2005, ‘Constant: le libéralisme entre le droit et l’histoire’, in La Condi-
tion politique, Gallimard, Paris, pp. 277–304.
Gauchet, M 2007a, La Démocratie d’une crise à l’autre, Cécile Defaut, Nantes.
Gauchet, M 2007b, L’Avènement de la démocratie II– La Crise du libéralisme, Gal-
limard, Paris.
Gauchet, M 2007c, L’Avènement de la démocratie I – La Révolution moderne, Gal-
limard, Paris.

Author Biography

Marcel Gauchet (1946 –) is a French philosopher, historian and sociologist, who has
written widely on politics, the relation between religion and democracy, and globali-
zation. Gauchet is chief editor of the leading intellectual journal Le Débat. He holds
a prominent research position in political philosophy at the École des Haute Etudes en
Sciences Sociales (EHESS), in the Centre de recherches politiques et sociologiques Ray-
mond Aron (CESPRA). In recent years, he has become increasingly prominent as
a public intellectual, commenting in the French media on a range of issues from
schooling to European politics and religious fundamentalism. His major work  Le
Désenchantement du monde: une histoire politique de la religion (1985) was translated
into English in 1997, as The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Reli-
gion (translated by Oscar Burge). It was followed in 1990 by Madness and Democracy
(La pratique de l’esprit humain. L’institution asilaire et la révolution démocratique, co-
authored in 1980 with his now deceased partner Gladys Swain  and translated by
Catherine Porter).  Address: Directeur d’études, École des Haute Etudes en Sciences
Sociales (EHESS), Bureau 46, 105 boulevaard Raspail, 75006 Paris. Email: C/o: de-
lanne@ehess.fr

Notes
1 Translator’s note: The text was originally published in 2007 as La Démocratie
d’une crise à l’autre. The abstract and keywords were added by the translator.
The translator wishes to thank the author for having generously granted her the
copyright over the English translation and responded to a number of requests for
clarifications. She also wishes to thank Susan Méra for her skillful and sensitive
186 Marcel Gauchet

editing.
2 Translator’s note: The expression refers to the text by the Swiss-French liberal
political philosopher Benjamin Constant, The Liberty of the Ancients Compared
with that of the Moderns based on a lecture given in Paris in 1819. Gauchet has
published two studies on Constant, one originally published in 1986 Constant: le
libéralisme entre le droit et l’histoire (2005), the other in 1980 Benjanin Constant:
l’illusion lucide du libéralisme, an introduction to Constant’s Essays (Constant
1997).
3 Translator’s note: Gauchet uses the term ‘mixed régime’ in a way that combines the
traditional meaning of the term which refers to the social groups which composed
the body politic and the modern one which designates the way power is organised
to suggest that modern societies are no longer arranged around groups but more
generally according to three dimensions, political, juridical and historical. The
question of organisation then concerns how these dimensions interact and
function together.
4 Translator’s note: The term used by Gauchet translated here as ‘clever people’ is the
ironic ‘demi-habile’ coined by the philosopher Pascal in his Pensées.
5 Translator’s note: The author uses the term ‘autonomy’ in the way Cornelius
Castoriadis defined it but gives it a broader sense which incorporates economic
modernity as well as democracy.
6 Translator’s note: This sentence draws on the line of argument first pursued by the
author in an article published in two parts in Le Débat in 1981 Des deux corps du
roi au pouvoir sans corps. Christianisme et politique.
7 Translator’s note: In the French text Gauchet uses the expression ‘fait libéral’. The
word ‘fait’ alludes to the use made by Emile Durkheim of the notion of ‘social
fact’ to define the object of sociological research. Through this expression Gauchet
stresses the fact that liberalism is not essentially or primarily an idea but that it is
in fact a structural parameter of modern democratic societies.
8 Huntington, Samuel, The Third Wave. Democratization in the Late Twentieth,
Century, Norma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991. (For Huntington, the first
wave runs from 1918 to 1926 and the second from 1943 to 1962. One could
limit these to the regime changes that ensued from the two world wars).
9 Translator’s note: This refers to the central thesis of Gauchet’s work first put in
The Disenchantment of the world, then refined in La Religion dans la démocratie,
that the advent of modern democracy was synonymous with the dissolution of
the principle of social and political organisation predicated on heteronomy, with
its values of tradition, hierarchy and incorporation of society in the political
authority of monarchy.
10 Translator’s note: This title alludes to the title of the author’s first book on the
significance of the French revolution of 1789 published in 1989, La Démocratie
des droits de l’homme, a study of the debates surrounding the writing of the
Declaration of the Rights of Man. The book was followed in 1995 by La Révolution
des pouvoirs. La Souveraineté le people et la representation (1789-1799), which looks
at the tension existing between the commitment to Rousseau’s conception of
popular sovereignty underpinned by an idea of direct democracy and the need to
 Democracy: From One Crisis to Another 187
establish a government based on parliamentary representation.
11 Translator’s note: The author is here alluding to the argument put forward in a
book of essays published in 2002 and summarised in the book’s title: La Démocratie
contre elle-même. Together with La Condition Politique published in 2005 (another
book of essays), La Démocratie contre elle-même established the parameters of the
history of liberal democracy presented in L’Avènement de la démocratie, whose
first two volumes appeared in 2007, the same year as Democracy: from one crisis to
another.
12 Translator’s note: Gauchet is again alluding to La Démocratie contre elle-même.
13 Translator’s note: In the French text the author uses the contrast between le politique
(the political) and la politique (politics). This contrast is also prominent in the
work of Gauchet’s erstwhile intellectual collaborators Cormelius Castoriadis and
Claude Lefort. I have here chosen to use the terms ‘the political dimension’ and
‘politics’. See the introductory essay of this issue for a discussion of the significance
of this contrast.
14 Translator’s note: I have translated by ‘loss of personal control’ the author’s
expression ‘dépossession intime’. The term ‘dépossession’ appears in many of
Gauchet’s writings with a slightly different meaning, to refer to both individual
and collective phenomena. Here it suggests an experience which is not a form of
alienation (so largely unconscious) but in fact involves awareness on the part of
individuals of what they are lacking.
Social Imaginaries 1.1 (2015) 189-224

Modern Social Imaginaries:

A Conversation
Craig Calhoun, Dilip Gaonkar, Benjamin Lee,
Charles Taylor, and Michael Warner
Edited by Dilip Gaonkar

Abstract: The conversation seeks to extend and complicate Charles Taylor’s

(2004) account of three constitutive formations of modern social imaginaries:
market, the public sphere, and the nation-state based on popular sovereignty
in two critical respects. First, it seeks to show how these key imaginaries, espe-
cially the market imaginary, are not contained and sealed within autonomous
spheres. They are portable and they often leak into domains beyond the ones
in which they originate. Second, it seeks to identify and explore the new in-
cipient and/or emergent imaginaries vying for recognition and demanding
consideration in the constitution (as well as analysis) of contemporary social
life, such as the risk-reward entrepreneurial culture.

Key Words: Democracy – demonstrations – entrepreneur – publics – risk –

social change – identities

This conversation took place on the morning of August 24, 2014 at the Taylor farm
house in Harrington, about 100 kilometers NW of Montreal, in the Laurentians.1
The same group, except for Craig who was away but consulted, had met 15 years
earlier in the summer of 1999 to formulate a statement on New Imaginaries that
launched a collective project involving several other scholars under the sponsor-
ship of the Center for Transcultural Studies. The ensuing meetings and discussions
resulted in a special journal volume of Public Culture in 2002, entitled New
Imaginaries, which includes essays from everyone present here.2 That volume, along
with Taylor’s better known 2004 book, Modern Social Imaginaries, provides the
key points of departure for this conversation.3 However, in the course of nearly three
decades of intellectual fellowship, both before and after those publications, this
group has met with other scholars on a regular basis to discuss a variety of issues and
topics: modes of secularism and religious responses, the democratic movements and
190 Craig Calhoun, Dilip Gaonkar, Benjamin Lee...

agendas, alternative modernities, nationalism and national form, globalization of

civil society and the public sphere, the cultures of risk and risk taking, new media
and modes of attention, norms and normativity and much else. The residues and
echoes of those discussions inevitably surface in this conversation.

MW: One thing I’ve noticed in the reception of that 2002 special issue,
and that term social imaginaries, as it’s been circulating since you (Charles)
introduced it, is that when people pick it up they often pick it up in a very
one-dimensional way, so it just means something like ‘an ideal picture of so-
ciety, or an imagination of what society is’ and that’s a real flattening of the
concept, particularly of the insight that these understandings of the social are
immanent to practice, or implied by practice, and there are background un-
derstandings that very often don’t enter into consciousness, or CAN’T. There’s
something about the nature of the social imaginary that they just can never be
fully explicated and made available for discussion.
CC: And it’s constantly being mobilized in forms of practice that aren’t
what it’s explicitly about so the impact of, say, the market imaginary isn’t just
on market activity, it affects our understanding of democracy, the way that we
conceptualize individuals in relation to large groups, the way we conceptualize
the public interest as majority interest rather than simply common interest,
and all of this is influenced by it. And I think that each of the ones Chuck
outlined, or the rest of us outlined, they are portable into domains beyond the
ones that they explicitly come from.
DG: Your notion of the social imaginary, as I understand it Charles, has a
double optic. On the one hand, it is a symbolic matrix within which people
make sense of their lives collectively. One of your key phrases is ‘what goes
with what’, that is practical knowledge of how to do particular things, such
as how to buy a book, call a cab, go to a restaurant and all of those kind of
things, and basically how to live with and among other agents. On the other
hand, there is also a kind of third person view embedded in entities such
as market economy for exchanging goods and services to promote mutual
benefits, the idea of the public sphere as a deliberative space among strangers
on issues of mutual concern, and finally, the idea of a self-governing people
capable of “founding” acts in a purely secular time and fashion. For you, these
two perspectives are interconnected in a social imaginary. However, it is often
used one-dimensionally as an interpretive term for how people make sense of
and get along in life; and, it is seen as more flexible and productive term than
“ideology” for mapping the social. So one keeps falling back into a narrower
conception of social imaginary as a habitus or as a symbolic matrix made up
of stories, images, myths and legends, while you have always emphasized their
interconnectedness and also their links to enabling entities like market and
the public sphere. As Michael says, this layering of connections and embed-
dings gets lost in a flattened notion of social imaginary. Similarly, as Craig was
 Modern Social Imaginaries: A Conversation 191

saying, a conception of a market or market imaginary impinges and shapes

our behavior well beyond the market.
MW: And this embedding escapes awareness partly because what it em-
beds us in is a conception of persons as self-standing, preformed, so that the
social is imagined as the aggregation of individuals. That’s not just the market;
it starts in market thinking, or gets a major lift from market thinking, but, as
Craig says, it appears in lots of domains.
BL: Market thinking consists of a continuum of practices and discourses,
ranging from the formalized rational component to the behavioral finance,
and whatever is beyond that. The behavioral finance stuff is still very cogni-
tive—it’s not embodied practices or sensibilities, and perhaps the question is
how these different levels get organized and interlocked.
DG: I am afraid the gap might be widening between the two ends of the
spread; the objectified entities like the market and its formal properties as
opposed to the embodied practices. The latter strand has a greater existential
traction. Social imaginary here means the ways and means by which a people
make sense of their lives and their practices, how they co-exist with other
people.
CC: I agree, but not just to make sense, to make possible. The concept
signals both something available to a retrospective understanding, and some-
thing available to the lived enactment of these things. I think that’s part of
what Chuck (in a sense, if you will, methodologically - that is to say, consider-
ing the mixture of different strands of thinking about this, in ontology and so
forth) is trying to get at: the way in which modes of understanding like this
make it possible to do things. So the reproduction isn’t in a purely symbolic,
purely cognitive realm, but is in practice, and it keeps being reproduced be-
cause you can’t do various things without being a part of it, and that inside
perspective of the actor is, I think integral to the concept. It tries to overcome
an action-structure or a material-ideal dichotomy by suggesting that many
things are real precisely because of this capacity to organize and be reproduced
in action.
CT: A good example I like to take is our practice at demonstrations for
some cause, because that’s going to be a very delicate line, it’s got to be very
adversarial, sometimes very aggressive, and yet it has to be this side of breaking
into violence. It requires a social imaginary in which largely unconsciously we
know how to do certain things, and call everybody together, march and so on,
but we also have this sense that it has to remain within certain limits.
MW: It’s got a rhetorical relation to an audience.
CT: Yeah, a rhetorical relation to an audience which is partly appeal, partly
threat, but it all has to be kept within certain limits. Now, unless you have
that kind of understanding of demonstration and protest, including what jus-
tifies it, and how it is carried out, adversarial but peaceful and so on, unless
you have a sense of that you can’t do it. If you try to in societies where that
192 Craig Calhoun, Dilip Gaonkar, Benjamin Lee...

understanding isn’t yet developed, you call people out, and it ends up very bad
for everybody, and that is where, as Craig was saying, making sense of it is a
condition of actually being able to carry it off.
BL: One question I had for our discussion is how far should one move
from the explicit articulation of social imaginaries that we talked about to
their rhetorical or aesthetic components. Although we didn’t focus on these
dimensions, they seemed to be implied in our original conception of social
imaginaries. There is also a question of the nature of what has been called
“boot-strapping performativity” such as in the contract-model of society,
which doesn’t seem to be present in all social imaginaries but is a relatively
contemporary form of social imaginary.
DG: That tension was already signaled in Ben and Ed LiPuma’s essay in
the 2002 volume.4 What Craig is calling an ‘insider point of view’ was richly
articulated in your (Charles) essay and in the remaining essays in the volume.
Naturally that insider point of view has seen a lot of uptake. There were also
other things going on at that time. Your ideas about modern social imaginar-
ies were formulated at a specific historical conjuncture: everybody was talk-
ing about globalization and we felt that media was rapidly internationaliz-
ing everything. There were other essays of yours, prior to the one on social
imaginary, especially those on the public sphere, civil society, and alternative
modernities that we had discussed extensively in our group. When four of us
got together here in Harrington in the summer of 2001, Craig was away, we
composed a brief statement on “new imaginaries’ with five key points. In my
introductory essay, there is a summary of those five points: the tension and
the alignment between the “third-person” objective point of view and the
“first-person” insider point of view, the stranger sociability and mass media-
tion, the national people as a paradigmatic case of modern social imaginary
and its representations as a “we”, other modern social imaginaries ranging
from market and public to ethnos and the humanity, and finally, secular tem-
poralities. Those were the issues in play when this project was launched. At
that point, we thought the insider point of view was relatively closely aligned
to the objective, or the outsider point of view. And yet, there was a palpable
sense of tension. We felt the national form was fraying as the public sphere
was becoming more and more internationalized; civil society was becoming a
global civil society, not just an extension of the national model. I don’t know
to what extent the two perspectives—insider and outsider, were sutured by
our implicit adherence to the national form. The gap between the two per-
spectives has now widened and continues to widen. Ben and Ed’s essay on the
financialization of the market and derivatives had already signaled this. The
conception of market was becoming such that there were many things hap-
pening behind the backs of the agents, in terms of how the market functions.
Given the conjuncture at which we’re meeting today, here are some questions:
what is the status of or strategy for aligning the two perspectives? If the gap
 Modern Social Imaginaries: A Conversation 193

is widening between the two perspectives, should we be rethinking, may be

revising, our notions about social imaginaries to some extent?
CT: You can, yeah, particularly when you look at democratization in the
world today. People look at models of what a democratic society is: everyone
has equal rights, everyone votes, the decisions come out of that, etc. And then
you say, introduce it into another scene. Well what can make that impossible
is the way people can make sense of themselves operating within such a so-
ciety, as against just having the blueprint, and that’s a wonderful idea, right?
So again, take as the example demonstrations, that the kind of action which
is rhetorical, which you address to friends but also adversaries, that which
remains within certain limits - how to do that, can that be in your repertory
or not, and you can say ‘yeah, that’s a great idea, let’s introduce this,’ but if
people haven’t got in their repertory how to link this, knowing how to act with
that picture, if they don’t have it in their repertory it just doesn’t work out that
way. (laughter)
CC: The idea of a repertory is familiar to social movement scholars.
Charles Tilly and others talk about the repertoire of tactics and mechanisms
that people use - carry signs or whatever it might be. This gets part of what we
are on about, but is very easily vulnerable to reduction to instrumentalization.
(CT: affirmation) Instrumentalizations and a rule-governed approach are two
things by which that insight gets limited by in most of the work. The idea that
it is always conscious instrumental action, and that it amounts to following
rules. And so if you’re going to introduce democracy somewhere, and it comes
with elections, and demonstrations and social movements, and all these differ-
ent components, free press… that those could be rendered as a series of rules
for having democracy. I think what you were doing with the social imaginary
concept was in part contesting that reduction to the instrumental and the
rule-followed. So in addition to the proximate jumping off points that Dilip
was offering about public sphere and civil society, there’s something pretty
deeply integrated into your work about how to understand behavior, about
the role of language, the way in which performativity works, and the very
nature of action. All of which is also present in this because it gains its power
from being able to show the role of the socially-produced picture. Instead
of just norms, this involves thinking and acting in a not-instrumental, not
rule-governed way, the same way that you’ve written about Wittgenstein and
rule following in language, and the way in which language is used to mobilize
people by people. (affirmations)
CT: Absolutely. So it crosses a lot of categories, instrumental and non-
instrumental, conscious planning and knowing how to act and so on. All
these have to be tied together, in a certain way.
CC: Tied together is a good phrase, because the instrumental element
doesn’t go away. People do things instrumentally, but that’s never the whole
story, and it won’t work if you make it the whole story (CT: affirmation)
194 Craig Calhoun, Dilip Gaonkar, Benjamin Lee...

BL: The question of how things “tie-together” is very interesting because in

the case of social imaginaries it seems to require some degree of self-reflexivity.
For example, the question of the issue of environmentalism—at what point
could that discussion create a social imaginary? Some of the interesting phe-
nomenon that we are talking about such as maker-culture in Brooklyn or
Berlin, or eco-consciousness seems to have some awareness of an imaginary,
but you wouldn’t necessarily call it a social imaginary yet. So the question is
at what point does a self-reflexivity beyond instrumentality organize practices
in such a way that it has the extra-dimension that we’ve been talking about?
MW: Well, you mentioned the kind of eco-green sensibility, but would
anybody recycle if they weren’t thinking about millions of other people recy-
cling?
BL: That’s precisely the question I’m asking—at what point—you could
imagine a set of issues where you’re thinking about them with lots of other
people, yet it doesn’t seem to have the requisite self-reflexivity to constitute a
social imaginary. Is there always an embedded social totality in a social imagi-
nary?
MW: It’s aggregative. These are practices that require an understanding of
their aggregation, in order to get off the ground. A beautiful illustration of
what you were just talking about.
CC: But that’s one way of imagining. There are things that fit it well. The
aggregative notion is like voting, in that sense. Recycling is very analogous
to that. And we might suggest that in response to environmental concerns,
climate change and so forth, it’s easier for people to participate in responses
which are aggregative of individual actions.
MW: If you persuade them that other people are doing it.
CC: Well yes, but that’s the aggregative, right, but it’s just a number. So
I know that right now only five percent of the population is doing it, I’m in
the vanguard, but it is in principle something that could spread. I’m in the
minority; we could become the majority. This is all familiar to us from a vot-
ing analogy and a market analogy. But, it’s much harder to get off the ground
the things that require different kinds of understandings of the social. So part
of the impact of the market imaginary, and even more the voting imaginary,
is on the way in which the social is understood. The social is the aggregation
of individual actions that you can do yourself, and what the social imaginary
idea brings out is that we also rely on other kinds of social understandings that
are not aggregative (MW: That are collective or...) gestalts. But in our society,
after a couple hundred years of elections and I’ll bet in a market context we
are more immediately adept, right. So the imaginary channels how we are able
to move into a different arena. If we relate it to the Rosanvallon book, one of
the things we see him exploring is the impact of different ways of imagining
equality, imagining the person, commonality and solidarity, and how they
provide the capacities to respond.5
 Modern Social Imaginaries: A Conversation 195

MW: Yeah, exactly.

CT: I can take this example of the demonstration again. In order to work
it has to be really shared understanding that we’re bonded in a society, but that
bonding allows for a limited and contained conflict, right? It’s no good if you
the demonstrators have that understanding but the government doesn’t. (CC:
The police don’t!) Yeah. ... (MW: The media!) Right. But we’re always running
up against that.
DG: Ben’s question and Craig’s response about self-reflexivity that goes
beyond instrumentality and whether that sort of reflexivity is integral to mak-
ing of an incipient new imaginary makes me wonder if this has something to
do with the scrambling of the three interrelated strands in social imaginary as
initially articulated by Charles. There is a simplistic way of reading the three
strands- theory, symbolic forms, especially narratives, and the habitus-based
embodied practices. A new imaginary begins with a theory or an incipient
theory, but theory by itself has little traction till it is translated into more ac-
cessible narratives, myths, images and other symbolic forms, and then it gets
inscribed in the behavior of agents in something like a habitus. Of course,
these things are happening simultaneously rather than sequentially. But the
ability to locate a theory, however incipient, itself seems to make some differ-
ence. For instance, Charles says how the Locke-Grotius theory was central to
the way people began to conceive of society primarily as an economy orga-
nized to promote and secure mutual prosperity. Soon that idea caught on and
got elaborated in countless narratives and became codified in and through
embodied practices. This might be too neat, but the three strands are legible,
sequentially or simultaneously. As for the new imaginaries we are now consid-
ering—Ben’s Berlin-Brooklyn artisanal scene or what Charles has been saying
about demonstrations and the Maidan movements all over the world—the
three strands are scrambled, and may be sequentially reversed. The occurrence
of demonstrations and embodied practices and stories that accompany them
are just too numerous today. Similarly, the artisanal scene has its own stories
and a repertoire of practices. But there is no framing theory, even an incipient
one. But there is lots of aggregative behavior: demonstrations are erupting
all over the place, sometimes demonstrators don’t have clear goals, they seem
frustrated and fed-up, the governments are usually clueless about how to re-
spond or manage, media tries to come up with stories but often misrecognizes
the motives and sensibilities of demonstrators. So the question is how to we
move in reverse direction: going from a people’s embodied practices to their
narrative representations and further into theoretical articulations. Maybe we
are now in a world where there’s a much greater invention at the level of
practices, and theory seems to be lagging way behind. We don’t have anything
the equivalent to Charles’ three clearly delineated strands. So we are kind of
groping in the midst of rather legible practices, and with the way they’re ag-
gregating, I think such is the case with the Maidan movements, even more so
196 Craig Calhoun, Dilip Gaonkar, Benjamin Lee...

in the case of locally motivated riots and mob activities in the global south,
especially in South Asian countries.6 There is nothing new about the riot-like
scenes and activities. Now they’re acquiring a different kind of legibility due to
their frequency and ubiquity. But they still do not have compelling narrative
representations, let alone a theoretical account. We are still clinging to older
theories of crowd behavior and social movements, no longer very viable. With
Ferguson, that phenomenon has arrived now in the US.7
CC: So, I’m not sure there’s nothing resembling it, but there’s nothing
that takes hold and unifies the conversation. We’d have to ask it, in a way
historically, whether we really thought Locke took off at the moment. Was the
Locke-Filmer debate on whether society is like a family immediately popular
in this sense? I think there is, implicit in what you’re saying, something about
the extent to which we integrate our ideas about what it means to have a
society, to be a society, through theory, whether popular-practical theory, or
theory by famous theorists. The various manifestations of social connection
and social practice, reproduction of social order and disorder- that you’re talk-
ing about- we have some trouble aligning and connecting, right? This is your
(Dilip) theme, and it’s important. It’s not simply that there was a consensus
behind Filmer, then it changed and there was a consensus behind Locke or
something. It’s rather that there could be, and were plausible accounts of the
whole that were fairly readily available. For a lot of our history there have been
various accounts of the whole, and they’ve been plausible to various people as
accounts of an integrated whole. But now we have a lot of trouble generating
accounts that deal with the nature of modern finance, the nature of groups
and identities, the nature of demonstrations, and riots that aren’t quite dem-
onstrations, and all of these other things in the same picture, so that we suffer
a challenge in the social imaginary department, because the sense of the social
that we have doesn’t as automatically connect the different components as one
might wish.
CT: And there’s also a generalized theory of democracy in the sense of
what you need to have a democracy, with elections and rule of law etc. Which
can be applied anywhere, I mean we would apply it anywhere, but if it ever
does take off, really, it does through forms of social imaginary which are cul-
ture-specific, rather different, I mean that’s why we always connected the so-
cial imaginary concept to the issue of alternative modernities, and now think
alternative forms of democracy. And that means you have to move down from
the level of general theory, to an ethnographic level where you can see how
this is working its way out.
CC: And there’s both the theory-ethnography distinction and the role of
narrative in this. So I think one of the trails that led us into this, led Chuck in
the foreground leading us into it, was a reading of Benedict Anderson, and the
reading of the way novels participate in and help create a national imaginary.
Not because the novels are necessarily nationalist, but the particular form of
 Modern Social Imaginaries: A Conversation 197

narrative, with intertwined characters not always present in each other’s lives
except in background ways, and connecting that to
MW: Coordinated simultaneity ...
CC: Exactly... so the path includes that, and it includes the debate between
Benedict Anderson and Partha Chatterjee over portability, modularity, and
how that works.8 You (Charles) have entered into this especially with regard to
publics and civil society, but it’s also about nations. In addition to ethnogra-
phy and theory, this involves the identification of practices, which are vital to
this, and are organized at a level between, if you will, culture, and individual
understanding. And I thought part of the power of the conceptual framework
came from saying, ‘well, social imaginaries aren’t just culture, there’s a reason
for this concept rather than just using the term culture, and they aren’t just
available to individuals to manipulate instrumentally or politically; they’re in
between the two and work in a different way’.
BL: The narrative dimension of social imaginaries was very much in the
forefront of our group thinking, especially with Michael’s The Letters of the Re-
public, because narration created a different notion of participant that would
include stranger sociability, the sort of semi-distanciation of the buffered self.9
What is interesting about some of the things we’re trying to deal with right
now is that it’s not clear what the ‘narrative’ is. Even after the publication of
Peter Schneider’s book Berlin Now, Berlin doesn’t have a story yet.10 When I
was interviewing people, you would get parts of a narrative—so you discover
Brooklyn is huge in Berlin right now—and you get a sense that something is
emerging, but there’s no narrative about it. There are parts—as Craig was say-
ing, there are a lot of aggregated overlaps, and I’m wondering, at this point in
our discussion, how big is the narrative component because some of the phe-
nomena we would like to include don’t have the same narrative component.
DG: We might want to turn to the reception of Michael’s essay from 2002
volume.11 In that essay, which has been very influential, Michael offers a con-
ceptualization of the public sphere in terms of its seven quasi-formal features.
While I can’t easily recall all seven, I do know that two of those features have
been widely discussed: first, “a public is a relation among strangers”; second,
“a public is constituted by mere attention”. We have been already referring the
first in terms of “stranger sociability”, the interpretive value and importance
this concept keeps growing as we to try think of public, the public sphere,
and civil society in a transnational or global frame. However, I want to ask
Michael about the second feature—“a public is a product of attention”. How
would you go about rethinking, I mean expanding and refining, this feature in
the light of that vast and somewhat nebulous thing we call the “new medias”?
MW: The problem of attention is really fascinating, and I can’t fully unfold
it, but I can tell you that it’s got several interesting dimensions. One of them
is the role of uptake, so all of these actions that we’re talking about that are
based on an aggregative social imaginary require that the value of the action be
198 Craig Calhoun, Dilip Gaonkar, Benjamin Lee...

staked on its potential uptake. So there is then, an expectation and an interval,

while you wait to see: how many copies your book sold, or how many people
respond to your op-ed piece, or how many people show up at the demonstra-
tion, or how the media picks it up. One is constantly in expectation of an
uptake that is a mark of this aggregation. And that has transformed religiosity
as well; denominations appeal for adherents and keep the numbers on their
own adherents. This is something you talk about in the secularism book, but
wasn’t part of our original understanding of social imaginaries: the shift from
parochial understanding of belonging to a denominational understanding of
adherence introduces uptake as a central problem in religious belonging. It
saturates almost every form of life now, in the modern world, this waiting for
uptake, and this attempt to measure and predict uptake. But new media have
changed the temporality of uptake; we speak of things going viral when they
undergo a rapid, unpredictable, and unmanageable uptake. So, whatever the
mediated form, and whatever the practice, there is some temporal interval
necessary to the meaning of the action, in the anticipation of uptake, but that
interval of temporality has really changed with digital media and electronic si-
multaneity. People talk about time compression in modernity all the time; this
has been a theme since Vattimo at least.12 But I think there’s something more
going on than speeding up or compression. One sees increasingly an idea of
simultaneity rather than this having to wait. And the cycles of distribution
and circulation have a material, institutional infrastructure that constrained
the temporality of uptake. The 18th century newspapers were weekly. That
was a very important fact about the pace of politics and the nature of social
mobility in that kind of media environment. And now we’re in a very differ-
ent world where the old-news cycle suddenly feels archaic. Publications that
used to have this cyclical appearance are now updating on a rolling basis. The
New Yorker still puts out a weekly print magazine, but the website changes all
the time. The New York Times cannot figure out the temporality of its own
publication, so some stories, depending on what section they’re assigned to,
will stay on the website for over a week, while others will disappear the next
day. What is in the New York Times is a continually morphing question. So
people are having to adjust.
DG: Do you think all this might have something to do with what Ben is
saying about the lagging storyline? Are these public and quasi-public practices
aggregating at varying scales, all of them vying for attention, awaiting uptake
and circulating at dizzying speed are creating obstacles to some sort of narra-
tive closure?
CC: We could turn Ben’s question the other way around: why do we have
the desire that there should be ‘the Berlin story’ in this way today? (MW: And
when have we ever had that kind of narrative?) Did people sit around in the
early 18th Century saying ‘Where’s the St. Petersburg story? “I hear some-
thing’s going on over there, the Czars are building this city.” I’m not sure.
 Modern Social Imaginaries: A Conversation 199

No doubt there was interest from those who heard about it. And certainly St.
Petersburg emulated European capitals like Vienna and Paris. But there seems
today both a strong desire for the latest new thing, and a specific expectation
that at any moment someplace will be the new hot city (or neighborhood).
BL: I was thinking about this idea of constantly updating—you’re really
aware because of things like the New York Times, that other places are being
constantly updated, and you should be able to just tap into it... but you don’t
really have access to it, but you kind of get the feeling that you do. That’s the
kind of thing I was thinking about—yeah, I’ll just take a plane, just hop over!
I can’t tell you how many times I heard this over the summer, ‘why don’t we
just hop over!’ and then – hop over? where to? And then I get a list of places:
Berlin, Hong Kong, and it’s always because it’s happening there and the idea
that you could instantly access it. I think it does come from things like the
New York Times, where this information is constantly accessible, where it’s
not just a point, it’s a spread of points and places and the whole spread was
being constantly updated.
CC: Well we might ask what the ‘it’ is, so in this notion that there are cool
cities, it’s not just alliteration that links Brooklyn and Berlin, they’re on a list
of widely discussed places that have certain attributes from artists to startup
companies. (MW: generation-specific...) And so what is it that is producing
this kind of partially generation-specific culture? They’re both actually slightly
aging out of the identity they’re famous for. Either that or the property values
are becoming too expensive to sustain the identities they’re famous for.
MW: That’s the thing about these storylines, is that once they congeal,
they’re out of date! Then there are incentives for people to change the story-
line.
BL: And are these really social imaginaries? I don’t think they really are.
CC: I don’t think these are social imaginaries. That’s why I wondered
where that shift came from when we went off talking about the two cities,
though I think there are imaginaries that overlap the phenomenon that you’re
talking about. For example, there is sort of a startup social imaginary that a
lot of people participate in. It’s like the demonstration, which Chuck makes
an example. Startup ecologies are propagated partly through a social imagi-
nary that gives people ideas not just of how to start a company, but how to
inhabit a zone marked by startup culture and practices. Entrepreneurship’s
been around a long time, but there is now a culture promoting the idea that
you have to do this for lots and lots of young people. There are problems with
conventional job markets that make it more and more important, and there
are quasi-normatively structured notions of what to do. Will you find you
have your USP [Unique Selling Proposition] or your selling-proposition, you
have an angel investor? You do things that demonstrate this and if you are
lucky your startup takes off and you begin to make something new happen –
but in line with an imaginary. The imaginary then gets attached to places with
200 Craig Calhoun, Dilip Gaonkar, Benjamin Lee...

high clusterings of that kind of activity. So that people know, in Europe, that
Copenhagen and Berlin and London are entrepreneurial. But entrepreneurial
gets reinforced by ‘gee, they also all three have big art scenes, and what’s going
on with that?’ It’s not that entrepreneurs and artists are the same people, but
there’s something mutual or shared that binds them, and our imagining and
reproduction of these ecologies and practices is shaped by that. People keep
going to these places to participate in that with certain ideas about how to do
it already formed, and then they join a culture, and do more things. So it’s all
about the new, and of creating and inventing the new, except we have a social
imaginary which is reproduced and elaborated. It’s partly how the new gets
produced in these settings, how people know to go about doing that.
MW: But riding the wave of the new is a central feature of this society built
around uptake. (CC: Sure, absolutely) and what Berlin and Brooklyn have in
common is the spread of the narrative that that’s where things are happening,
that’s where the new is emerging, and we’re totally committed to producing
the new. Think about how many devices in media technology have been ad-
vertised as ‘the next big thing,’ and there is no longer suspense about whether
there will be a “next big thing,” because the research and design end of media
devices is now predicated on this whole narrative of turnover.
BL: The social imaginary of the new, the way you and Craig have articu-
lated it, is actually quite interesting. It has within it certain entrepreneurial
characteristics and it has certain requisite narrative like novels, graphic novels,
and they are loosely organized. So our notion of a social imaginary is some-
thing that takes hold of certain practices and aggregates them into some. The
question, then, is what form does that take?
CC: The Benedict Anderson point about novels was just that every na-
tion has a story. The point was about a kind of narration that was helpful
in producing the sense of belonging to nations, even though it wasn’t about
that. Nations might not be the topic, but novels that weave together many
themes and actors and plotlines facilitate a national consciousness of history
woven together in an analogous way. I think we should not confuse the mode
of narration with generally having stories. It’s not the necessarily the com-
mon topics that matter most, but the entwining of different story-lines. This
is conducive to being able to imagine one’s own distinctive autobiography
as part of a much more complex national story. We could analyze what gets
integrated into the stories of cities, which could be very interesting, and ask
how they are different from the stories of nations (often perhaps less deeply
invested in history).
DG: Wouldn’t you say right now we have multiple narrative protocols
about the “new’ that vary from the entrepreneurial culture to the artisanal
scene to demonstrations and so on? I think, what Michael is saying about “rid-
ing the wave of the new” means riding it in multiple ways narratively.
CC: But when was that not true?
 Modern Social Imaginaries: A Conversation 201

MW: It’s been true very widely for the last couple of centuries but it doesn’t
describe, let’s say for example, if you take Berlin and Brooklyn in the pres-
ent moment, did not have the same kind of meaning that say, London and
Glasgow had in the 18th century where you had a pretty stable polarity of city
and country.
CC: Sure, so there are various things going on at once. How we imagine
the world - that is, the social imaginary in the biggest macro sense - is shaped
by the way we imagine locations in it. Cities or nations, and the relative im-
portance of cities and nations, figure in a more global story. Different scales as
well as places are woven together, and themes or motifs recur: like the idea of
Bohemia, which informs both Brooklyn and Berlin now as an older notion of
how to be innovative and push cultural boundaries. It’s not an infinitely older
notion, it has a history, but it’s not a new notion. Very little, it seems to me,
is all new in these things. Like in Brooklyn and Berlin, and I don’t mean just
that there are people engaged in nostalgic reproductions of the 19th century,
in each of those places, which (MW: which they are!) it’s true, but they partici-
pate in social imaginaries. So even in producing this high uptake, accelerated
notion, they do it in part with imaginaries that exist. So the reworking of the
notion of Bohemia that shows up in the high start-up density, high artist den-
sity settings draws on a social imaginary of what to do when you’re young and
want to be creative, and things like that, that have been established already.
MW: Yeah. The storyline can have what appear to be wildly contradic-
tory dimensions. So, on the one hand the people who are moving into these
entrepreneurial zones of interconnection very often have an idea of creative
disruption and disruptive economies; on the other hand they find each other
and identify each other through a common culture that revolves around very
nostalgic notions of artisanal production and localism.
BL: And yet it’s global, that’s the peculiar thing. And that’s the part I’m
trying to think about: whether you want to be in Shanghai or some other city.
Our older notions of social imaginaries were more nationally based, and all
that. There does seem to be this formation emerging, I don’t know whether it
constitutes an imaginary, that’s what I’m asking. I don’t know what it is, but
I’m certainly hearing from my young design students, they’re quite aware that
something is afoot. They are thinking of a range of cities that I never would
have thought of for getting a job in. And it’s all about looking for overlapping
characteristics, and they have all these networks of contacts, they are track-
ing certain things. I know the fashion students the best, and what they are
aware of, and this is the interesting thing about the fashion students is, they’re
aware of the supply chains. Because they can’t get buttons made in New York
anymore, and they know that they’re made in China. They know where to
go, which cities are hot, and what it would take to live in Tokyo, for instance,
rather than New York.
202 Craig Calhoun, Dilip Gaonkar, Benjamin Lee...

MW: But they’re not willing to make infinite sacrifices, so they are looking
for places like Bali, where they can have a nice life and also get locally-sourced
leather. (BL: That’s right, or cotton.)
CC: They’re looking for friendly permissive environments. China is a
mixed bag, you can get certain things done but it’s not the easiest place to
be an entrepreneur. There are multiple co-existing imaginaries everywhere.
How one becomes dominant – like the art-entrepreneurship imaginary in
Berlin and Brooklyn is a question. Cities and nations are complex enough that
any can be imagined in several registers. We identified the Berlin-Brooklyn
imaginary as generational but it would be wrong to think all young people
participate in it. There is an equally large imagining of people’s future in terms
of “I want to get a job at a big investment bank and I may want to go to
Hong Kong, or I may want to go to New York, but I want a job at HSBC,
or Deutsche Bank, or one of these.” People have social imaginaries of what
constitutes a good life, informing their ideas of how much money they need.
So there are these co-existing things, so you could have an account of the way
in which people imagine themselves making their lives and a key question
becomes how different imaginings are (or aren’t) knit together. To what extent
and for whom is that national? I would suggest that for people who are go-
ing to international universities to get education, that’s your design students
(Ben), my LSE students, it’s kind of predictable that it will turn out to be a
not-entirely-national story, but that doesn’t mean that everybody’s stories are
like that. There are a lot of people whose ways of imagining are (or seem to
us) more limited: they will go to the big city nearest to where they live already,
and that produces the huge growth of most cities in the world. The interna-
tional circulation of elites who are engaged in the imaginaries we were talking
about before is somewhat class specific. For many, moving to a city is a much
more regional phenomenon. Ways of imagining the future, and the social
imaginaries by which this gets produced, have limited ranges of circulation.
Employment, rights, corporations, startups, apps and all these things, you
know, are available, culturally, in various ways, and to various degrees trans-
portable, but they’re also very differentially distributed, and there are people
who participate in really different ways of imagining the future, of imagining
cities, of imagining mobility.
MW: People imagine mobility—both geographic mobility and socio-eco-
nomic mobility—much more than they actually experience it. (Affirmations)
The possibility of mobility is a background understanding of even very fixed
ways of living.
CC: How many novels have somebody living near a train that passes every
day that they contemplate could take them to the city. Whether it does or not,
this sort of thing is a part of the social imaginary – the possibilities not just the
actualities. It seems to me just noting that everybody imagines things doesn’t
get at what’s social about this, and the role of social imaginaries in social
 Modern Social Imaginaries: A Conversation 203

reproduction. The value of the concept, it seems to me, comes importantly

from the times when there is some kind of stabilization, reproduction, circula-
tion, spread of a way of imagining that constitutes part of a forms of life.
DG: There is a shared quality, right? I think this concept of shared-ness is
at stake to some extent. Take the term ‘bohemian’, for instance. The people in
the artisanal Brooklyn could imagine themselves as successors to a Bohemian
lifestyle, and that would indicate or entail an insider view about what they
think of their own localism, about their own entrepreneurial aspirations, their
expectation of mobility. Whether that would mean there is a shared under-
standing among them, I don’t mean necessarily completely explicitly shared.
It may be actually tethered to some other meta-description, such as, the coun-
tryside and the city or the bohemian and the bourgeois, which are in circula-
tion for uptake. I am not sure these things, the different levels or registers of
an insider view are aligned in any significant way these days.
CC: I think they are, at least a lot of the time, but I agree that for many this
may be historically attenuated. But there are two different kinds of questions.
One is how a social imaginary – voting, demonstrations – gets reproduced
and mobilized. The other is how different practices and contents cohere in
producing an understanding of a locality or a country or a contrast like city
and country. Most of the work Charles and our group have done has focused
on the former: the social imaginary as vehicle of reproduction of a type of
activity. Through that, of course, modern social imaginaries shape what it is to
be modern. Imagination is also important to how a particular instance - one
country rather than nation as such, one corporation rather than the corpora-
tion as a type – is understood and works. And here alignment becomes a big
issue, especially for the larger ‘macro’ cases. For the young participants in this
particular kind of Brooklyn culture that we’re alluding to, I think the align-
ment is strong. That’s what constitutes an insider culture. In Brooklyn there’s
the foodie culture, which is tied to a nostalgic, artisanal notion of production
as well as an idea of sophisticated taste and of experiment. I suspect these are
well-aligned, even though they may in some tension with each other. But the
foodie culture also co-exists with Manhattan, so that the people running retro
shops and restaurants can depend on customers who come from Manhattan,
but then understand themselves as different. Here there is a stronger tension
and perhaps a repression. But there would still be lots of consensus about the
signifiers. Giving an account of ‘the local’ and how this is particular will draw
on imaginaries. I think there is enough cultural commonality, around certain
parts of Brooklyn to be able to get an account that makes sense, and there is
an alignment in that part of what we mean by Brooklyn which has this mean-
ing. There’s an alignment of components of identity and narrative that is not
a simple description - because of course when Ben raised Brooklyn in relation
to Berlin we all immediately knew he meant the hip parts of the Borough. The
vast majority of Brooklyn isn’t a part of that. So the imaginary helped us pick
204 Craig Calhoun, Dilip Gaonkar, Benjamin Lee...

out the symbolically salient parts of what’s going on in the trendy Brooklyn of
artists, hipsters, and entrepreneurs. The imaginary encourages and facilitates
the reproduction of certain practices. But the alignment question becomes
much more challenging when we turn to a larger scale and ask about what you
called ‘meta-descriptors’ for understanding the world (like the country-city
contrast). I don’t know that the macro question: ‘In our world do these things
align?’, is the same as the question: ‘How do people become able to imagine
their lives together?’ and thus their interrelationships in such a community. A
key question is what is portable from one context to another. That’s a differ-
ent question from what makes understandings of one context cohere. Voting,
market, and public are portable imaginaries, distinct from the package into
which they are integrated in any one place. There’s sharing and mutual rec-
ognition in each case. And in every setting we can ask all of (a) whether these
social imaginaries are widely shared, (b) whether they align with each other,
and (c) whether different ways of imagining the local context align with them
and with each other. I suppose ‘alignment’ may mean compatibility without
actual, complete sharing. But I agree that it is a big question whether there is
much coherence and compatibility in imaging the world at large scale – and
without them it must be hard to coordinate action. Charles has focused less
on ‘whole societies’ than say Castoriadis. In a sense this returns us to the
Rosanvallon book we were discussing yesterday. He asks, I think, what kind of
social order could also be a democratic order, recognizing that the imaginar-
ies of voting and publics, helpful though they are, can’t be enough without a
coherent social substrate.
CT: Yeah, I think we may be too fixated on the national frame, both in
all these levels of the public sphere, and the national consciousness, because
what makes sense of my action in that case is an imaginary that is shared by
everybody who - I have to suppose - is reacting to it. There has to be, not just
our group which is demonstrating but there has to be the system that allows
us to demonstrate. So it has to be shared by the whole group. And you get
something like the Brooklyn-Berlin phenomenon which is very interesting
because there, what makes sense of their actions is certainly, among them, a
shared idea of entrepreneurship, how they can help each other and so on. But
their whole action only makes sense if in some way it’s completed by total
outsiders who can be their market. But these outsiders don’t share their social
imaginary, so here the notion of social imaginary makes sense of how they are
operating together, with each other. But there’s a vast assumption they have to
make about uptake outside.
MW: And there’s also a great deal of differentiation within, so think about
Brooklyn. There was a story in the Times yesterday (or today—it’s still on the
web!) about people being priced out of Brooklyn now.13 If you read the de-
tails of that story, it’s not all of Brooklyn, it’s about the northwest corridor of
Brooklyn that abuts Manhattan. The still largely black neighborhoods that are
 Modern Social Imaginaries: A Conversation 205

underserved by public transportation are not part of this. So there’s a kind of

red-lining between the geographies where people can act on the idea of riding
the wave of the new, and those that are simply left out of the story. Brooklyn
means both those things.
CC: Exactly, but Brooklyn when used in a certain way. We knew that Ben
meant one of those things, right, and so it’s in circulation... (MW: That’s right
because he coupled it with Berlin!) Because he coupled it with Berlin, and
because there is, if you will, a notion of how trendiness, the new, cool, worlds
of design and worlds of entrepreneurship work, and we have a map, in a sense.
That’s not the mechanism of producing the map, they aren’t imaginary, neces-
sarily, it’s the map. I loved in that article—somebody quoted in it introduces
the notion of “Deep Brooklyn” (laughter) “Deepest, darkest Brooklyn...”
BL: Well you know, we also saw this in the ’60s with the rise of communes
and hippie culture. I am just trying to figure out under what the categories
we want to put certain phenomena. They’re certainly dependent, to a certain
degree, on defining themselves away from the rest of society.
CC: Well, I think there’s a useful truism here, which is that it takes imag-
ination to do almost anything. But the social imaginaries that Chuck was
elaborating when he wrote ‘modern social imaginaries’ were more specific
and reproducible. Our modern way of having society is constituted by some
highly widespread imaginaries, and one of them might be that there are highly
particular locations in it that matter, such as the places where the new is hap-
pening. Throughout this modern era various cities have been the ‘Capital of
the Modern’ as Benjamin put it.14
MW: There’s a very uneven distribution of the new.
CC: Yeah, and that’s part of it, but looking for the shared and portable
things that make the whole happen, that raises a different question of align-
ment.
DG: If you just look at the Brooklyn pricing mechanism, if you price
cheese $12 a pound or more, then you are already assuming that there is
another world, not necessarily analogous to yours in shared lifestyle, but will-
ing to and capable of sustaining your prices and your world. For whatever
reason an artisanal culture emerges (and the insider view that accompanies
it), it is dependent on a particular kind of economy operating outside, like
we have been saying Brooklyn on Manhattan. I wonder how New York, and
Germany, and the whole of the world some ways figure within Brooklyn and/
or Berlin imaginary. The artisanal scene itself might be global in its eruptions,
but does the Brooklyn artisan really think globally or more locally in terms
of Brooklyn-Manhattan nexus, certain parts of Manhattan for that matter?
Once we were, probably still are, so prone to think or see everything in a
national frame—voting and demonstrations and much else; more recently,
we are rather quick, almost mechanically, to deploy an international frame.
May be neither is appropriate. Brooklyn-Berlin is neither national, nor has it
206 Craig Calhoun, Dilip Gaonkar, Benjamin Lee...

simply gone global. It is something else, altogether. The other example about
the students, Ben’s students at the New School and Craig’s students at LSE,
they are not simply international or simply from the elite, although they are
both. How is their imaginary constituted? Who is their addressee, who is their
public so to speak?
BL: We focused on ones that had democratic overtones, what Rosanvallon
talked about, with certain participatory political overtones. I was actually try-
ing to understand whether or not we wanted to include artistic movements,
for instance. We talked about movements, and there are artistic movements,
right? When I’m in China, we meet a lot of artists these days. They have a
very, very clear sense of what world they want to participate in. Now it’s par-
tially buttressed, and Craig is right, by these schools! For example, it might be
CAFA (Chinese Academy of Fine Arts) in Beijing, a set of schools in Beijing
that they want to go to, they’re all internationally linked, they have a very clear
sense of what constitutes the avant-garde in art, and they also have a lifestyle,
right, which in China is very distinctive, from the rest. They try to align with
what they think people in New York or other places are doing. I don’t know
whether we’re talking about that dimension or not. It’s just that none of the
writings that we look at tend to touch on those particular aspects of social
practice, and I don’t know how far we want to carry that dimension.
CC: I’m not sure about that dimension, but why not? We could ask by
what social imaginary are works of art, or artists, recognized as such and on
what social conditions does it depend (like schools). So there’s a presentational
thing, like if you put a frame around it and you hang it in a gallery, then it’s
art. But there is also a prior imaginary that there is such a thing as art in the
world, and that there are artists for whom that is a calling, and a lifestyle and
all that. This seems much more basic to me.
MW: We’ve been talking at a couple different levels in this conversation,
and it’s important to recognize that what is meant by imaginary in this context
is the background formation, and so we have these storylines about Berlin,
and Brooklyn artisanal production, and international art scenes, and so on,
but those are storylines we follow very consciously, and the problem with
social imaginaries is, what is the background picture that allows us to have
those stories?
CC: And allows us to make those stories, to participate in them.
MW: Participate in them, exactly. The background being not just that so-
ciety is formed, aggregatively, which allows a different repertoire of individual
action, and mobility, but also this, the temporality of emergence being so
critical.
DG: Is this something shared?
MW: Well, shared in some ways, and not in others. The other dimen-
sion of the social imaginary is that because it is a background, conflicting
manifestations (CC: are possible) are possible, exactly. So in the 18th century
 Modern Social Imaginaries: A Conversation 207

period that I’m looking at, you have these zones of life that are not yet called
secularism but that have very ambiguous relations to previous forms of reli-
gious belonging; and at the same time you also get evangelicalism. They are
mobilized through the same media, with the same imaginary of voluntary
aggregative adherence with the same idea of progressive emerging history, and
with the same idea of meaningful activity being oriented to uptake. So Ben-
jamin Franklin and Jonathan Edwards at some level inhabit the same social
imaginary, but with completely different stances.
CC: It’s also worth noting that some of the things that are new in certain
dimensions are made possibly by old social imaginaries. The art worlds and
particularly the shading of art into design, which is in some ways a new, hot
phenomenon now, which Ben pointed to, are deeply shaped by market imagi-
naries. In fact, there is an expansion of the shaping of some of these by market
imaginaries. So that it’s not all new imaginaries,
BL: That point is well-taken. We have a global art market where the sales
are now larger in Asia than they are in Europe, that’s relatively recent. So that’s
the market imaginary that we could locate as what, in some sense, provides a
basic structure.
CC: Yeah, but we could also locate the change. The imaginary of many of
these would-be artists includes a lifestyle, it doesn’t necessarily include starv-
ing in a garret room, and so there was an imaginary of Bohemian artists life-
styles and things that may have shifted in this, and shifted partly by the speed
of connection to the market, and the fact that selling your work successfully
doesn’t count as a disqualification for being a serious artist the way that to
some extent it has in the past. So that there’s a shift in art worlds that has to
do with the speed of market uptake, and a positive valorization of the market
rather than the construction of the art world as the other to the market in
the classic Bourdieusian kind of example, that these sort of art-design builds,
and why people will talk about fashion and art together, something that an
earlier kind of artistic community would have said ‘Absolutely not! I’m not
doing anything fashionable! This has nothing to do with that world of com-
merce. “Yes—they draw pictures of dresses before they make them, but that’s
not art, that’s not what I do as an artist.”’ We’ve now got this more marketized
world and now commercial design claims more of the mantel of art. That’s an
interesting change that we see, but it’s—the change is partly in the way that
a long-standing market imaginary has continued, and extended its reach, its
capacity to structure.
DG: May be we could turn towards Charles’s more recent work on Secular
Age, in the context of what Michael was just saying about the religious public
sphere. To some extent we have discussed the aggregative feature of political
practices as they surface in what Rosanvallon calls the society of equals, espe-
cially in the Maidan movements and the crowd episodes. A lot of this is also
208 Craig Calhoun, Dilip Gaonkar, Benjamin Lee...

related and motivated by religious issues. In the 2002 volume, the religious
dimension is not very salient, as it has become in recent years…
MW: Well, there are lots of conversations we could have. I realize we don’t
want to go on forever about this, but people who are interested in social theo-
ry might think about the relation between the Canguilhem-Foucault problem
of normativity, and the social imaginaries we’re talking about. Once you get
to the modern period there is an idea of the norm as immanent to a field of
distribution.15 So there’s a new kind of normativity laid over on other kinds
of normativity that exist constantly in everyday interaction and in older tradi-
tions, but all these kinds of normativity that depend on distributional varia-
tion, (affirmations) are very powerful and very pervasive in the modern world.
So people I think increasingly are willing to occupy a long tail position in a
field of variation, rather than simply clinging maniacally to what they imagine
it to be; they are still thinking within the terms of a normative range.16
CC: I agree, and, but then extend that, if the imaginary institution of soci-
ety, of course, Castoriadis brings us back to that, now includes the legitimacy
of being unusual in long tail distributions. Is that what we’re thinking about
here, so that the imaginary notion of what is normatively viable has changed?
MW: That’s right, but again as we’re talking about two different manifesta-
tions of a common background imaginary because you could only be mania-
cally normal in that 50s American kind of way, or deliberately eccentric in a
long-tail variational kind of way, if you got this background picture.
CC: But you could also have a telic notion of democracy, as Chuck says,
underwriting the same thing. My seeming oddity in this long-tail distribution
is in fact a telic expansion of democracy’s inclusivity.
MW: Right. Then you could have a global-scale narrative of the signifi-
cance of your own private variation. A lot of these concepts are interesting that
way for how they suture individual actions to these very big storylines. But
another thing we haven’t talked about is the state, and here is where Foucault
is very useful because all the material in the lectures about governmentality is
a kind of flip side of what we’ve been talking about social imaginaries. There
are two points that are relevant here. One is that governmentality refers to
something like the background picture of governing practices so you make
these little interventions, you aspire to various ways of governing the behavior
of others, in order to realize some background picture of the social. Foucault’s
other point is that that background picture changed in a very dramatic way,
in the modern period that resulted in new practices of governing, and it in-
volved institutions of a wide variety--things that looked unrelated to this sort
of problem—like death certificates.17 Why did governments issue death cer-
tificates? Well that sort of defines the place of governing in the whole institu-
tionalization of the social. Here we have another one of Rosanvallon’s themes.
CC: And of course it also takes up the expansion and scale, which is related
to all these things generally but the importance of death certificates is that
 Modern Social Imaginaries: A Conversation 209

it’s not enough for your neighbors to know you’re dead (MW: That’s right!)
The state needs to know you’re dead and it has to be made accessible in a very
large-scale distribution to people who don’t know you, who have reason, po-
tentially, to know that you’re dead.
MW: That’s right, and who can mine the statistical information of your
death, for public health reasons.
CC: And this goes back to the earlier theme, the alignment theme, that
is, the growth in the existence of an experience-distant set of data that help
to constitute large-scale phenomena, so markets are these places where people
trade, but markets are large-scale phenomena accessible only through their
residue in various kinds of big data, and the state and all such things.
MW: Right, that brings us back to attention and uptake, because now
every time you’re online your acts of attention are themselves the object of
economic strategies. The web is full of click-bait. (CT laughs) No I didn’t
make it up! Anyone who works in internet-related businesses now is con-
stantly thinking about ways of maximizing the clicking of untold numbers of
people, and then tracking them, so attention in that sense has a whole new
technical infrastructure and a new centrality to the emergent economy.
BL: This is interesting. Given that we had proposed a finite number of
social imaginaries in the original work, we might ask whether there are other
new social imaginaries that have emerged. Could we come up with examples
and open up the package we had initially presented? The ones that we talked
about earlier like the Brooklyn-Berlin scene clearly don’t seem to fit.
MW: Well maybe they wouldn’t be flagged by novelty. It might be a kind
of feature of our own social imaginary that we look for those that are new.
BL: It doesn’t have to be marked by novelty, does it?
CC: Well let me offer a candidate, and ask Chuck about it. So, in the Secu-
lar Age, one of the concepts that emerged, the supernova idea, seems to me to
participate in an imagining of infinite expansive possibility, which isn’t located
only in the zone of spiritual life, but this is one of the notions that people try
to make sense of, and inhabit, in the modern world, including in these entre-
preneurial startup zones in Berlin, or whatever; the infinite-expansive possibil-
ity. And the notion of inclusiveness of the seemingly heterogeneous is part of
that. So is that an example of an increasingly-prominent imaginary, whether
it ultimately works, and how being different matters.
CT: Yeah, I think it works, and I think that you can see that if you ask
the question ‘how does my life in this or that department, fit in to everyone
else’s life around me. So in the religious-spiritual department, I think you
could say, exaggerating a bit, in Europe—from you could say, Reformation,
especially maybe Westphalia on, it was the model of the confessional state.
You find that, a Swede, what does that mean, it has a certain culture and
language, I’m under a king, but I’m also a member of the Swedish Lutheran
Church, it just goes without saying, that’s what it is to have a religious life.
210 Craig Calhoun, Dilip Gaonkar, Benjamin Lee...

That’s already inflected in the US’s moving toward denominationism, but let’s
just take the European case: It’s inconceivable, except to be an outsider, a
rebel. “OK, I’m gonna convert to Catholicism in Sweden, put me in jail if you
want!” But I mean, for sort of normal religious life that’s not how it works.
Now in vast parts of the West today, it’s this supernova thing: each one of us
is on some kind of spiritual search; we may be atheists, but we still want to
work out what life is about, and we’re in a world of other such searchers, and
that’s the normal thing, and we should have some kind of good relations with
people, accept and have communication with these people. That’s the perfectly
normal way to be. So what you get in the big parts of the West, and we’re
just getting through that, as this new social imaginary expands, it enters into
profound conflict with the old version, so that it looks to people who strive
to inhabit the old ‘everyone’s in the same big confessional boat together’, like
a deep threat. Benedict XVI says that this is the rise (dictatorship) of relativ-
ism and you get these very strong reactions.18 Even to some extent outside
the West you get something analogous to, as it were, moving toward more of
this personal religion on one hand and the reaction against that on the other
hand, and the reactions are terribly powerful. They involve another kind of
religious life, which connects up to, very often national social imaginaries,
where the discourse is: ‘our way of life is being threatened, and we have to all
pull together to stop this’. And then this gets woven into anti-Western reac-
tions in certain parts of the world: ‘you guys are introducing homosexuality,
and breakdown and so on, and we have to stop this’ and then we get of course
Putin, who’s trying to create an international alliance around this reaction. So
that’s a characterization of our world, where you get these two very conflicting
social imaginaries that are in some cases battling it out, in some cases one has
won out over the other, but both of which shatter the original unspoken un-
derstanding that if you are a Swede you’re a member of the Swedish Lutheran
Church, if you’re a Hanoverian, you’re a member of that Lutheran Church, if
you’re a Italian, you’re Catholic. Both these contemporary imaginaries shatter
this earlier understanding totally.
CC: So the earlier understanding participates in an imaginary, in Dilip’s
phrase, of alignment, in which there will be these strong overlaps among na-
tion, mode of religiosity, and in fact we could go into things about economies
and other sorts of things. The change is not just that the packaging dissolves—
or loosens its grip—but that there’s a new imaginary used to locate ourselves,
and participate in the world, which is for some an imaginary of ‘the world is
out of control and I have to defend.’ We could develop, in a way, that sort of
paranoid imaginary of the world, or something, but it’s also an extension of
orthodoxy, as orthodoxy developed in various zones, including the religious,
that is, it has authoritative spokespeople who define what is the right way to
be something, and that imaginary includes the idea of authoritative spokes-
people and the idea of being a follower.
 Modern Social Imaginaries: A Conversation 211

CT: And it touches sexual morality, very strongly.

CC: Exactly, exactly, and there’s another imaginary of embracing hetero-
geneity, and infinite possibility, and all of this, which is an imaginary, so the
change has imaginaries in a way fairly analogous to the ones that you outlined
in Modern Social Imaginaries, and they help to structure the changed circum-
stance. And we might ask: which of them is dominant in the world today and
where and what’s the distributional variation.
CT: Yeah. And benign diversity is a name for the second imaginary.
CC: Right, benign diversity, fine. Though it seems to me implicit in that
way of inhabiting the world, it is a non-static view, an expansive view. And
the supernova notion, that metaphor captures it, but benign diversity doesn’t,
in itself, because there could be a world of settled benign diversity and part
of what’s…
CT: Totally static. No, it isn’t that.
CC: That’s why I used the word ‘expansive’ to include it. Let me ask you
another question, Chuck. In the Modern Social Imaginaries book, there’s no
substantial engagement with affect, even though you’re not denying that there
are affectual engagements, and people are outraged when their sense of the
right way of doing something is violated, or whatever. In The Secular Age, you
have more engagement with emotion and affect and attachments and desire,
and how they work in relation to the social imaginaries.19 The Castoriadis
conception is of course grounded much more in the psychoanalytic notion of
the way in which affect is tied into the institution of society. How do you see
this issue of cathexis, of the affectual engagement in and attachment to, and
need for, imaginaries?
CT: Yeah, because I think in this particular example we’re talking about
that you can see it very powerfully, that on one hand people are either in the
process of inventing, or happily inhabiting benign diversity, but also benign
diversity under change. Imagine you have a very strong desire for a certain
kind of spiritual life, in a very general way. There’s an American sociologist
who talks about ‘seekers and dwellers’20—that’s one way of defining it. The
social, the spiritual life of the seeker: I’m on a journey, I’m trying to move
somewhere, I’m trying to get closer to God, trying to understand the nature
of Nirvana, or whatever, and you get this, of course, in spiritual practices like
meditation and suchlike. That’s their very strong cathexis to that. In the other
case you have a very strong cathexis to something else by dwellers: this is an
established house, this is a structure in which we and our lives have meaning,
have purpose, have nobility, have moral backbone and so on, and we have
to see that it’s disappearing and we have to get that back again. So there’s a
tremendously powerful desire to recover a fading order. Think of people who
have, for instance, converted to Catholicism in the 20th century, with the
idea that they are defending Western Civilization, people and law and more,
right—that this is the only way of keeping the whole thing together, the value
212 Craig Calhoun, Dilip Gaonkar, Benjamin Lee...

of our old culture! It’s disappearing! It must be put together again! So there’s
a kind of spirituality, a belonging to the age-old, continuing structures which
terribly powerfully draws certain people. And that’s why these two outlooks
can’t just happily live along side, each other.
MW: Well we could pursue your question about affect in a lot of different
domains and directions (CT: Yeah, sure). Remember the London conversa-
tion we had at Craig’s apartment. We had a really wonderful discussion of the
viscerality of effervescence in these modes of demonstration, which Chuck
has been alluding to. One could also think about Joan Scott’s work on why
people react so strongly, in a secular society like France, to the problem of the
veil.21 It’s partly because we have these deeply incorporated expectations about
the visibility of our bodies to others, and the visibility of others’ bodies to us.
This is partly because we’re in a fashion system that is entirely predicated on
mutual witnessing and display. It’s partly because we’re in a social imaginary
where sexuality is part of this field of benign variation, and a variety of other
dimensions of this society create in us a visceral expectation of visibility that
we don’t even know we have until we see it broken.
CC: Right, and we feel outraged (MW: Absolutely outraged!) because it’s
also linked to the way in which we valorize transparency, as a central part of
the democratic imaginary, the market imaginary, the scientific imaginary. In
all sort of veins we have valorized a notion—an actually quite illusory no-
tion—of transparency that gets violated.
DG: It is also pertains to one’s sense of belonging, right? One might dwell
in a cosmopolitan situation or inhabit a cosmopolitan imaginary, but not be
fully aware of it. Our sense of belonging, as Michael was saying, suddenly be-
comes salient when we see somebody wearing a veil, and our embodied discom-
fort at that instance serves as an index of our belonging, which we feel violated.
These affective reactions were never fully articulated in one’s imaginary.
MW: I think the sense of violation and disturbance is probably intensi-
fied by the fact that we don’t even know that we have that sense of belonging
(DG: Exactly) So we don’t think of it in the sense of belonging in the sense of
parochial belonging, or caste belonging, or anything like that; the minor form
of belonging is manifested as adherence.
CT: Well, and this comes out in both France and Quebec, in the sense
that ‘these people are making a statement against our society.’ That’s the whole
concept of “signes ostentatoires.” That is super visible signs both in Quebec
and France, it’s seen as signs that are directed against us: These people are de-
liberately saying ‘Your way of life stinks.’
CC: So I agree with the general thrust of this, Michael. But I think it’s not
just that we don’t know (and here I think ‘we’ isn’t ‘we moderns’, but rather
‘we participants in a cosmopolitan imaginary’ because that’s not everybody in
the world). The cosmopolitan imaginary includes the reproduction of the no-
tion that there are, or at least were, these old parochial identities, and at least
 Modern Social Imaginaries: A Conversation 213

national identities, and we’ve transcended them, somehow. So it’s participa-

tion in an imaginary of transcendence, and leaving behind—we’ve left behind
that imprisonment in local-cultural norms which other people suffer. And we
embrace the benign diversity and the expansive-world notion, and all of that,
and so when we confront Islam, (DG: The return of the repressed) Exactly,
the return of the repressed, we find out that there are these prejudices against
it, and we’re outraged by these practices, and that we feel it bodily, it’s—the
affectual confusion is considerable because we have been invested, and we see
this in the Dutch accounts of how it’s almost in the genetics of being Dutch to
be tolerant, and ‘those Muslims aren’t like that, therefore we can’t be tolerant
of them!’ (laughter).
MW: They have to be reconstructed at the border.
CC: So I think the zone of the imaginary is how it is that we think of our-
selves, as cosmopolitan; we construct and imagine this cosmopolitan world,
and part of what that example reveals is that of course there can be a mis-
match, an illusion in the self-production. That we can produce all of this, so—
right within the imaginary we think we are majoritarians, we settle everything
by majority opinion. Of course we don’t! That blinds us to a whole series of
ways in which things work, including things that never come up to a vote,
therefore they don’t get settled by any majority opinion, but we reproduce the
notion that we’re a democratic society in which everything is done by majority
opinion. So there can be this distance between reality and imaginaries. On the
one hand the imaginary is making possible a form of reality, on the other hand
it’s mis-describing, always, something that it imperfectly creates.
DG: I guess historically there is always some sort of mis-match in each
case, (CC: Of course!). The question is: what is the level of mis-match, today
as opposed to before, given the velocity of change today? We are alluding to
the sheer speed at which everything around us is changing when we refer to
riding the wave of the new constantly, or imagining oneself as belonging to
new cosmopolitan orders, always in flux. Not everyone, to be sure. Different
segments of society negotiate this wave of the new differently, radically dif-
ferently.
CC: I agree, and occasionally I too participate in the view that there are a
lot of ways in which the world seems to be coming unstuck, and all of that,
but I would want to say always, it’s a distribution, to use the Foucauldian
expression that Michael introduced. That it’s not that simply everybody today
experiences this equally, it’s that there’s a distribution of participation in that
way of understanding the world.
BL: Michael, you have been thinking about risk and risk-taking for some
length of time, as I have been too. Is there a social imaginary we could build
around risk and uncertainty? We have Beck’s risk society idea, and I think
Castoriadis certainly partakes in some of this risk discourse.22 Is there some-
thing that we can locate and make explicit? It does seem to cut across several
214 Craig Calhoun, Dilip Gaonkar, Benjamin Lee...

registers, whether it’s market risk, whether it’s environmental risk, it is always
there. Besides, risk certainly has a narrative, a theoretical portion and a habitus
sensibility.
MW: Yeah, it’s a very complicated subject. I was very impressed with the
Bernstein book, Against the Gods, because of the way it tracks the surprisingly
recent development of the concept of risk.23 (Ben: very recent) Pascal is still
in its emergent phase. New techniques of probabilistic quantification, starting
in specialized spheres such as maritime insurance and gradually expanding to
everything, transformed basic existential considerations: how one faces dan-
ger, how one manages oneself. Risk management looks to its practitioners like
a response to objective conditions, but one might say that our internalization
of probabilistic techniques, at some level always quantifying, produces a new
sense of futurity.
BL: That’s what I was trying to figure out. Again, you also see attempts
to actually locate it within some area, create a distinct zone. Basically they’ve
invented a kind of folk theory, a folk theory of our folk theories! (affirmations)
It’s really very interesting. It’s as if this sensibility, as soon as we try to do some-
thing we seem to be exposed to risk, now on constant basis.
MW: Well this, this is a great illustration of a familiar problem of ideology.
So it’s a historically specific, technically mediated concept that suddenly seems
always to have been there. (BL: That’s right.)
CC: And that enters the reproduction of all manner of actions. It is the
social imaginary, (MW: It had a nova effect…), presenting both risks and
yourself managing them is an imaginary.
MW: And it has reconstructed everything. It has for example reconstruct-
ed what masculinity is, so the old warrior ethos is now available in a form for
market managers. (laughter)
BL: Well and also there is a constant preoccupation with hedging your
risk, right, hedging the downside. So you get people really scared politically, so
they want to hedge and protect themselves. They sell and basically give up the
upside. You let someone else take the upside, you just want to be protected.
Maybe Craig’s right, there is a social imaginary here.
DG: But it is not only social imaginary. We have sought to create a society
in which risk can be institutionally minimized, as for instance, in a welfare
state society. Besides, there are countless other ways and devices for managing
risk in a modern civil society.
CC: I don’t think ever just minimized, because it was always equally about
profiting. The risk imaginary or the chance imaginary is one that allows the
entrepreneur that takes risks and is rewarded. Risk minimization mechanisms
works in the same way, they are an integral part of a risk imaginary.
BL: That’s the theme of Bernstein’s book, the discovery of the risk-return
relationship. The other idea that I find really interesting is this idea of diver-
sifying, which is simply that when you’re not sure, you diversify. These ideas
 Modern Social Imaginaries: A Conversation 215

are based upon things that are almost intuitive, right? That is the “no pain, no
gain” formula.
CC: And the intuitive is very important. I’m disagreeing with Dilip, I
agree there’s a huge risk management/risk minimization side to this, but there
is that alternation in subjectivity side to this in which people begin to think of
themselves as taking risks (MW: exactly) and that’s a good thing to do.
MW: Rather than, let’s say daring a hazard, it’s got a new inflection be-
cause of the quantification, and because of the production of futurity out of
data. So there is a question of whether we could ever have had this whole
social imaginary if we hadn’t reconstructed our idea of the future on the basis
of risk-quantification.
CC: Or risk objectification, quantification being its most important mani-
festation, but essentially the objectified risk.
DG: Isn’t the modern risk-taker already operating within the social frame-
work of risk management? There is a vast edifice of insurance from life insur-
ance to public health care to workman’s compensation and so on. We are now
talking about risk-taking in a very specific zone, the high risk-reward zone of
finance and entrepreneurship, with its own strategies for calculating risk.
CC: I disagree. I think it is in that specific zone but I don’t think it’s just
there. I think we’re talking about the way of being a person, and understand-
ing your insertion into the world in which you take risks
MW: Why does one eat a sensible diet now? It’s risk management.
CC: You insure yourself against risk, and do risk-management—in the
way a sensible diet might be risk-management. Then you say, well I’m going to
have bacon anyway. You take risks, but I think there is also a shift, as Michael
put it, you don’t just endure, you don’t just bear a hazard, or something like
that. Well—you calculate and choose.
BL: You choose—the innovator—the capitalist innovator—
CC: Like the migrant, who moves to the city may not be able to quantify
the risk but has some kind of notion, like ‘I might just be sleeping on the
street in the city instead of sleeping in my hut in the village, but I might get
rich, I might do this and that’.
DG: The point I was trying to make, say in the case of a migrant from
a village to a city in India, is that such a migrant moves from a traditionally
secured place to a risky place without access to a risk-management system. He
just goes there individually and is fully exposed. As for me, I may choose to eat
bacon or not, choose to smoke or not, I am protected by my health insurance
coverage. My choices and risk-taking occurs under that coverage.
CC: Indeed. And I assume the individual migrant usually puts some effort
into trying to achieve security even when it’s incredibly hard. For many, the
sense of risk may coexist with hope or even with an idea of escape, having got-
ten away from a risk-management system that was constraining. In any case,
insurance doesn’t take away risk. People with insurance may be even more
216 Craig Calhoun, Dilip Gaonkar, Benjamin Lee...

governed by the idea of risk, even if actually less vulnerable to catastrophe.

And people may not choose insurance even when it is available in some forms.
MW: That defines the problem of the uninsured...
CC: Exactly, it creates the problem of the uninsured. In migrations rela-
tively seldom is there just someone on their own, even if they experience it
that way. Often they have insurance systems in family terms, and things like
that, but they’re losing them, because the migration is actually undermining
some of those. And this may be more severe if they are refugees. Through the
modern era we have a constant process of undermining old institutions that
provided security in social relations and of producing risk-taking as an orien-
tation, necessitating it, because in fact simply staying home in the village looks
worse and worse as the village economy runs into problems (affirmations)
and yet, with a lag, and with a very unequal distribution of producing what
I would call objectified but just large-scale systems for risk-management, like
insurance markets and welfare states.
MW: That has become one of the central tasks of governing now. That’s
what governmentality is, increasingly.
CC: Exactly, and so people who move into the city, into unplanned com-
munities—slums—have ways of managing risk, because they are taking risks
and have ways of managing risk. But these are likely to be less formalized, less
explicitly quantified, and they are likely to rely less on either state or corporate
structures, that is either the welfare state or insurance companies, but, that
doesn’t mean that migrants don’t do things like go where they have kin. Or,
join churches—consider the Latin American phenomenon of people who be-
come evangelical Christians in the course of migrating to the United States, or
whose Catholicism has changed into a much more localized, service-provid-
ing church function which does material, not only spiritual, risk-management
for them. So that I think there is something really widespread. We’d have to
look at lots of different versions of it, but part of what connects it to the social
imaginary discussion is that, like each of Chuck’s original three, and many
others that we’ve introduced into the notion, it connects a mode of subjec-
tively inhabiting the world to the production and reproduction of the world,
to making things true, to the more macro way of understanding the world.
BL: Yeah, I mean it certainly has an affectual component and it also veers
into other areas. You could certainly get artistic representations of it, you cer-
tainly have sport representations all over the place—as you said, masculine
and feminine versions of sports now. Here it seems like we are proposing
something different than Beck, I mean, it overlaps—Beck has this idea that
it’s the risks of modernity, modernization that produces risks, not just natural
catastrophes, but environmental things that we have to react to. That seems a
little bit restricted compared to what Craig is talking about. How do you open
it up so that you can make the connection between the environmental and
the economic. So you can actually say to someone like Jeremy Grantham24
 Modern Social Imaginaries: A Conversation 217

or someone like that, say “Look, there’s a deep social science issue here that
you’re really familiar with, let’s try to understand what that connection is be-
cause it has a real practical, political outcome.” That’s, as you said, one way
you mobilize support for thinking of things like environmental issues is not
just to focus within it, but to make the lateral links, because that’s the way,
when the situation arises, you’ll be able to respond. So you have to be able—
and I think the language of social imaginary helps to do that because it allows
you to see clearly larger points of connection that you wouldn’t have normally
seen with discourses that are already out there. But what you’re doing is you’re
interpreting them in a way that allows a grasp into something else.
CC: I agree, and to be fair to Beck, something like the notion of a com-
munity of fate, of the people who recognize that they are exposed to a risk in
common, is a kind of commonality, discussion, that is very critical for…
MW: Climate change.
DG: I think both Michael and Craig are trying to point out, quite em-
phatically, that the culture of risk-taking and the subjectivities associated with
risk-taking has become a very strong component of the modern social imagi-
naries.
MW: There’s a deep structure here, a subjectivity in which what we all are
is the internal manager of ourselves (affirmations).
CC: And this is something that was true of the earlier examples, right, so
that voting is not just about politics. If we say, ‘is it time to break for lunch,’
we all sort of implicitly vote, and so in a whole series of contexts we mobilize
the electoral or the market imaginaries, to do work that isn’t the economy or
isn’t the political...(MW: Exactly)
DG: Actually this word “entrepreneurial” barely does justice to the wide-
spread phenomenon and ethos of risk-taking. That is the point you’re trying
to press, right Craig?
CC: Yeah, and the recognition—and this links it up to the sort of action
at a distance thing, so the complexities—that we who think in terms of these
large-scale systems and objectified data and knowledge, have a certain way of
understanding the world at large, beyond our communities, beyond our na-
tions, beyond what’s immediately visible to us face-to-face and so forth, and
we have—and there are other ways of imagining that, I mean, religions have
had ways of imagining this before, but it assumes a kind of reality to us, which
is mediated by a notion of certain kinds of abstract actors; states and corpora-
tions, for example, and certain kinds of transaction systems, like markets, but
also potentially the transactions with nature, and we use a market metaphor
to understand, some of us—people in that mode—use a market metaphor to
understand—the climate change problem, or other environmental problems,
and so we have a... our lives are heavily influenced by this kind of... abstractly
produced and reproduced knowledge, knowledge-systems.
218 Craig Calhoun, Dilip Gaonkar, Benjamin Lee...

MW: You know, this question of risk-taking subjectivity and the ques-
tion of how far the modern social imaginary does or does not explain things
is interestingly illuminated by Lauren’s great essay about obesity, where the
argument is that obese people are a kind of moral scandal in a public-health
imagination.25 We really have a visceral reaction about other people’s obesity;
well, why? Because they’re not viewed as sufficiently managing their own risk,
taking care of their own risk. But Lauren points out, well maybe they’re not
thinking about their eating as risk management, maybe they’re thinking about
it as sociability or filling the time, or what she calls lateral agency—finding a
way to move on in the world. It could mean all those other things.
CC: We’re offended because it is a breach of what we would require of
ourselves.
CT: Also people say, they’re going to start using the medical services, which
we’re all paying for,
MW: You’re going to have to pay for their diabetes clinic, right? That’s how
deeply we’ve incorporated the perspective of public health in our own relation
to our bodies.
DG: We are talking about the risk-taking subjectivity at multiple levels:
first, how such subjectivity might disrupt the concept of the ‘we’; and second,
how it might reconfigure the concept of background understanding. To be
embedded in social imaginary means that one acts or performs unreflectively
relying on lots of taken for granted assumptions. But the risk-taking activity
with its intuitions as well as calculations heightens one’s self-consciousness.
Risk-taking is not just doing something with the taken for granted back-
ground understanding. One is in a distinct affect state, a state of heightened
consciousness. In the case of Lauren Berlant’s fat person, I would imagine that
eating is not simply a routine or a taken–for-granted activity, it is something
else, something more, a very conscious activity.
MW: Yeah, maybe one that’s covered with shame.
CC: What’s interesting to me about Lauren’s analysis, it seems to me, is the
heightened consciousness of the not-fat person. So there is this question about
how do the obese people understand or imagine themselves as agents and are
they covered in shame, and are they marked out or do they find a pride in be-
ing and acting differently and all this, but the Lauren’s is about those people
who aren’t fat, for whom this is so salient..
MW: So salient that we forget about all the reasons why people eat, other
than risk-management.
CC: Exactly. And in less-dramatic ways, throughout our lives I think there
are these ways in which we take offense at others for falling short of our ideals
that we incorporate into our self-management. One of Chuck’s themes, in a
way another pervasive sort of imaginary, I mean Chuck’s discussed—at least as
it looks to me lots of these things, under various labels, at various times. But
in thinking about the idea of always wanting, or potentially wanting to have
 Modern Social Imaginaries: A Conversation 219

better wants. Wanting to match ourselves, right, I was thinking about, that is
not a locatable social imaginary quite the same thing, though I think it’s vari-
able how much people think they can change themselves, how much people
think they should manage themselves, he’s entering very much into the same
space as Foucault, thinking about the production of selfhood, and for people
who engage a lot in wanting to have better wants, people who seem to not be
wanting to have better wants are problematic. And it goes into fashion or any
of the hundred other arenas, not just obesity.
DG: I wonder what might be your take, Michael, about how the concept
of risk reflects on the concept of the mutual. Charles uses the word ‘mu-
tual’—for both characterizing economy and the public sphere: the former as
the space where people to freely engage in activities for mutual benefit; and,
the latter as the space where people partake in deliberation about mutual con-
cerns. The concept of risk might now be seen as inflecting the concept of the
mutual in a very interesting way.
MW: That’s true. And it’s very minimally recognized in Rosanvallon,
where he’s trying for an account of commonality. One of the big features in
our world is that we understand the world of being together significantly as a
world of risks.
BL: Remember, Greg Urban had a paper based upon the analysis of the
first person pronoun in Jonathan Schell.26
MW: God. That was a long time ago.
BL: A long time ago, right. And it was basically the argument that nuclear
threat creates this concept of the ‘we’—that he was trying to invoke. Now, it’s
the archaic-ness of that paper that struck me, because you guys are all like,
Jesus, we’ve come a long way since then! Because, at least what we’re discussing
now, we’re not concerned with that kind of nuclear risk now, because that’s
so definable in some sense, right? I mean it’s...it was the Cold War threat, of
bygone era. And yet…
CC: The world had changed a lot in terms of the overall kinds of risks,
and not just the specific risk. But indeed there are certain less-definable, more
nebulous risks, and a general background sense of anxiety. We’ve noted that
one modality of being together is signaled by the notion of ‘we the people’
that is so enabling of democracy. This is one of Chuck’s classic examples. But,
today one version of ‘we the people’ is produced as ‘we who belong in the
same discussion because we confront the same risk, the same challenge.
BL: That’s our repertoire...
CT: It’s a community of fate. Climate change links us all. But at a less
global level, being African-American is in part shaped by a sense of facing
certain risks (as the horrible events in Ferguson remind us).
MW: Yeah, because the police may get you.
CC: And that’s part of the imaginary, and that’s part of the imaginary for
black Americans, in a way that it isn’t for white Americans. White Americans
220 Craig Calhoun, Dilip Gaonkar, Benjamin Lee...

might objectively know, or not, that the police are excessively violent, or they
target people, or they use military gear, but for black Americans it is in an
everyday awareness of the risk you take going into public places.
MW: The more you are incorporated into this risk-taking subjectivity and
its social imaginary the less meaning the concept of fate has for you.
DG: Concept of fate?
MW: Yeah, you don’t hear people invoke fate.
CC: You do, you hear ‘fate’ invoked, I think, when the risk is more distant
and cataclysmic, and the more it seems beyond management. So, when people
talk about what would ensue with climate change, they echo Jonathan Schell
on the fate of the earth, right?27 There are these moments for the very large,
cataclysmic, and distant events or eventualities when we are drawn into the
orbit of fate. In the past, fate used to be invoked in personal terms—’my fate’,
‘your fate’ and that’s what’s changed.
MW: Right, and the other thing that’s changed is that simply to invoke
fate is to identify a stand-alone problem for management.
CC: Right, one that has exceeded management.
MW: And therefore calls for more management, or new management.
CC: Right.
MW: The idea of a kind of fate structuring of our subjectivity before we
even get off the ground, is something that we can’t have a language for. Ber-
nard Williams is really good about this.
CT: Moral Luck?
MW: Moral Luck, but also Shame and Necessity.28
CC: Though people- again I think who the ‘we’ is is significant—there
are lots of people participating in lots of fate-like discussions: astrology, or
whatever it might be, that is, lots of discussions of a more or less determined
order that they can only in limited ways manage, and one of the subjectivities,
by which people deal with this world, of all these risks, is to get themselves off
the hook by invoking all the things they can’t do. And genetics gets used this
way. Right, genetic determinism: It’s fate. A lot of the invocation of genetics in
the health world, even though it’s both, in a management world, if you know
you have a propensity for this disease you can do something, but it is also fate,
it’s also a reappearance of fate. Indeed, I wonder if there is a social imaginary
at work in how we think about these clusters of unseen forces that we don’t
completely understand but which we believe are determining our lives.
MW: But you could take the Adorno line on these forms of imagining
fate—astrology in particular (I’m thinking about his book The Stars Down to
Earth)—as a mark of the mystification of society for people who don’t stand
in the managerial class.29
CC: By that, I think he is both right and as too often disrespecting of the
subalterns and the common people. (MW: of course he is…)
 Modern Social Imaginaries: A Conversation 221

CC: Superstitious, mystified, yeah, what else? That’s why I think the ge-
netic example is interesting, because the uptake is very large, among elite
risk-managing people. People who go and get themselves scanned (MW: Se-
quenced)—sequenced, right, that’s the word I was looking for, and find out
their whole—those are the risk-management people, right, the people who
spend money getting their genes sequenced, wanting to know if they might
have a propensity to Parkinson’s when they get old, or whatever it is, are very
much in the risk-management mode, and yet there is this re-inscription of
fate, and determinism, into the discourse of the genetic, and the constant de-
sire to find a simpler path from genetic potential to actuality than ever is going
to be the case. Everybody wants to find The Gene that causes This Outcome,
and it’s never that simple, and that reveals the desire for the fate-like, off-the-
hook solution to it even in the midst of the managerialism, and even for the
class of people who are managers foremost in the Adorno sense.
BL: This could also tie into the norm discussion beautifully. I’m just saying
you saw in the Bernstein book that in the beginning of the development of
finance there was the difference between thinking in terms of a normal distri-
bution, and thinking in terms of odd or fat-tailed distributions, Mandelbrot
fractals and Levy processes. And the latter just gets dropped. Finance gives up
on the Mandelbrot direction because it would mean giving up too much of
the statistics they were familiar with, and they continue with the presupposi-
tion of normal distribution, which, in some sense overlaps with ‘the normal’
because it’s the central tendency.30 So there is something here that touches our
work and calls for further discussion. We could certainly do another meeting
on it because we’ve already reviewed some of the literature. Let us try figure
out…
CC: There’s the end for our conversation, Ben, so we could do another meet-
ing on it. (laughter)

References

Adorno, TW, 1994, Stars Down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture,
Routledge, New York, NY.
Anderson, B, 1991 [1983], Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism, Verso, London, UK.
Anderson, C, 2008, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of
More, Hyperion, New York, NY.
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 Modern Social Imaginaries: A Conversation 223

Author Biographies
Craig Calhoun is Director of the London School of Economics. Previously he served
as President of the Social Science Research Council and taught at New York Uni-
versity, where he was founding director of the Institute for Public Knowledge. Ad-
dress: Director of LSE, 1st floor, Columbia House, London School of Economics,
Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom. Email: c.calhoun@lse.
ac.uk

Dilip Gaonkar is Professor of Rhetoric and Public Culture and the Director of
Center for Global Culture and Communication at Northwestern University. He is
a co-director of Center for Transcultural Studies, an independent scholarly network
based in Chicago and New York. Address: Department of Communication Studies,
Northwestern University, Annie May Swift Hall, 1920 Campus Drive, 3rd Floor,
Evanston, IL 60208, United States of America. Email: d-gaonkar@northwestern.edu.

Benjamin Lee is Professor Anthropology and Philosophy at The New School. He is

a co-director of Center for Transcultural Studies, an independent scholarly network
based in Chicago and New York. Address: Philosophy Department, The New School
for Social Research, 6 East 16th Street, Room 1015A, New York, NY 10003, United
States of America. Email: leeb@newschool.edu

Charles Taylor is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at McGill University and the

author of numerous volumes including, Modern Social Imaginaries (2004). Address:
Philosophy Department, McGill University, 855 Sherbrook St West, Montreal, QC
H3A 2T7. Canada. Email: cmt1111111@aol.com.

Michael Warner is Seymour H. Knox Professor of English and Professor of American

Studies at Yale University. Address: English Department, Yale University, 63 High St,
New Haven, CT 06511-6642, United States of America. Email: michael.warner@
yale.edu.

Notes
1 The conversation was transcribed by Eli Nadeau, a Master’s candidate in Politics
at The New School. The participants in the conversation would like to thank her
for ably transcribing a rather difficult and freewheeling conversation.
2 ‘New Imaginaries’, a special issue edited by Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar and
Benjamin Lee for Public Culture. See: Lee & Gaonkar, 2002.
3 Taylor, 2004.
4 Lee, & LiPuma, 2002.
5 Rosanvallon, 2013.
6 Gaonkar, 2014.
7 This refers to a continuing series of protests and civil disorder that began after
the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by a police man on August 9, 2014, in
Ferguson, Missouri.
224 Craig Calhoun, Dilip Gaonkar, Benjamin Lee...

8 Anderson, 1991 [1983]; Chatterjee, 1986.

9 Warner, 1990.
10 Schneider, 2014.
11 Warner, 2002.
12 Vattimo, 1987.
13 Higgins, 2014.
14 See essays titled ‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century (1935)’ and ‘Paris,
Capital of the Nineteenth Century (1939), in: Benjamin, 1999.
15 Machery, 1992, 1998.
16 Anderson, 2008.
17 Foucault, 2003, 2007, 2010.
18 Ratzinger, 2005.
19 Taylor, 2007.
20 Wuthnow, 1998.
21 Scott, 2007.
22 Beck, 1992.
23 Bernstein, 1996.
24 Jeremy Grantham is a British financier and co-founder and chief investment strat-
egist of Grantham Mayo van Otterloo, a Boston-based asset management firm.
25 Berlant, 2007.
26 Urban, 2001.
27 Schell, 1982.
28 Williams, 1981, 1993.
29 Adorno, 1994.
30 Mackenzie, 2006.