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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, Ricoeur, and Taylor; the rethinking of the creative imagination in relation to common sense; analyses of political imaginaries in neoliberal 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.
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.
List 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.
Summary
Offering a field-defining survey of the topic, this is the first book to engage all the key figures in the social imaginaries field. It offers new perspectives on the productive tension between social imaginaries and the creative imagination, providing the first programmatic approach to the field as a whole.
