Political imagination and its limits
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Political imagination and its limits Avshalom M. Schwartz1 Received: 13 April 2020 / Accepted: 23 October 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract In social and political theory, the imagination is often used in accounting both for creativity, innovation, and change and for sociopolitical stagnation and the inability to promote innovation and change. To what extent, however, can we attribute such seemingly contradictory outcomes to the same mental faculty? To address this question, this paper develops a comprehensive account of the political imagination, one that explains the various roles played by imagination in politics and thus accounts for the promises and limits of the political imagination. This conceptualization of the political imagination allows us to account for the simultaneous presence of its seemingly contradictory roles—such as promoting stability and order on the one hand while generating creativity and critical innovation on the other. Keywords Political imagination · Social imagination · Creativity · Conservatism · Criticism
1 Introduction Recent years saw a growing interest in the imagination among social and political theorists. The work of Castoriadis (1987, 1997) and Ricoeur (1986, 1994), for example, has offered detailed investigation of the role played by imagination in social and political life. Others, such as Taylor (2003), Frank (2010, 2013), Bottici (2007, 2014), and Ezrahi (2012), have established the imagination as a central analytical category in their study of various social and political phenomena, both contemporary and historical. Most commonly among such studies, the imagination has been used in explaining social and political innovation and accounting for the kind of radical creativity that allows for collective action and large-scale mobilization and change (Arendt 2006; Castoriadis 1987; Ezrahi 2012; Frank 2010, 2013). At the same time, however, the imagination has been evoked in accounting for the opposite phenomenon, and in
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Avshalom M. Schwartz [email protected] The Department of Political Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
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explaining the overall stability and rigidity of social order and the non-occurrence of change (Bottici 2011; Castoriadis 1997; Ricoeur 1986). To what extent, however, can the imagination account for these seemingly contradictory phenomena? Can the same mental faculty be responsible both for socio-political creativity and innovation and for societal order, stability, and the prevention of such innovation and change? Philosophers of mind have faced similar challenges in their study of the imagination. Kind (2013), for example, has observed that the imagination is often viewed as responsible for so many distinctive mental processes to the extent that it might be reasonably viewed as a “heterogenous” mental faculty. Recently, Kind and Kung (2016, p. 1) have identified what they call the “puzzle of imaginative use,” which corresponds well to the contradiction identified above. According to them, “imagination is put t
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