Social Imaginaries: Critical Interventions(Social Imaginaries)

Written by members of the Social Imaginaries Editorial Collective, these programmatic essays showcase new critical interventions in understandings of social imaginaries and the human condition. They include a new comparative approach to theorizing Castoriadis, Lefort, Ricoeur, and Taylor; the rethinking of the creative imagination in relation to common sense; analyses of political imaginaries in neo-liberal and constitutional contexts from perspectives drawing on Gauchet and Lefort; and the taking up questions of historical continuity and discontinuity in civilizational worlds. In addressing pressing questions concerning social imaginaries, the book advances the field as a whole. The book includes a Foreword by George H. Taylor and an Afterword by Craig Calhoun. This book is a must-read for all scholars interested in social and political imaginaries, and will appeal to researchers and graduate students working across a wide variety of disciplines in the human sciences.

Table of Contents:
Foreword, George H. Taylor / The Social Imaginaries Field: Editors' Introduction, Suzi Adams and Jeremy C.A. Smith / 1. Social Imaginary Worlds and Counter-Worlds: Castoriadis, Lefort, Ricoeur and Taylor in Dialogue, Suzi Adams / 2. Rethinking the History of the Productive Imagination, John W.M. Krummel / 3. Political, Legal, and Constitutional Imaginaries, Paul Blokker / 4. The Political Imaginary of European Hypermodernity: Marcel Gauchet and Contemporary Neo-liberal Democracy, Natalie J. Doyle / 5. History, Civilizations, Imaginaries, Jeremy C.A. Smith / Afterword, Craig Calhoun / Index

About the Author :
Suzi Adams is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Flinders University, Australia. She is the author of Castoriadis’s Ontology: Being and Creation (2011), and editor of Cornelius Castoriadis: Key Concepts (2014) and Cornelius Castoriadis: Critical Encounters (a special issue of the European Journal of Social Theory, 2012, co-edited with Ingerid Straume). Jeremy C.A. Smith is Associate Professor and Deputy Head of the School of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Federation University Australia and is a Visiting Fellow at the University of Victoria, Canada. He has published in European Journal of Social Theory, Critical Horizons, Journal of Intercultural Studies, Atlantic Studies and Political Power and Social Theory and is the author of Europe and the Americas: State Formation, Capitalism and Civilizations in Atlantic Modernity (2006) and Debating Civilizations: Interrogating Civilizational Analysis in a Global Age (2017). He is also a Coordinating Editor of the international journal Social Imaginaries.

Review :
This is a masterful work that shows the contemporary turn to social imaginary studies in its best light. This original intervention into the field brings theoretical rigour and deep insight to the vital empirical and normative research undertaken. The productivity and power of the imagination, and its constitutive role in the imaginaries of politics, law, economics, gender, and democracy, are compellingly dissected. An inspiring read! This book moves the concept of “social imaginaries” into the centre of critical inquiry in the humanities and the social sciences. The contributors trace the multiple origins of the notion in philosophy, political theory, history, and sociology, and they connect the strands to demonstrate the emergence of a powerful paradigm for comparing civilizations across history as well as for understanding our current socio-political constellation. This collection provides an illuminating account of the multiple origins of the contemporary term “social imaginary”, as well as some very interesting examples of the many uses to which it is now being put. It helps clear up some confusions and opens new avenues of reflection on contemporary society. How we imagine the world shapes the world. The study of social imaginaries is accordingly vital to social science and the humanities. Social Imaginaries: Critical Interventions helps both to articulate the history on which current work is developed and to press scholarship forward.