Modern Social Imaginaries (Public Planet Books)

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Adams, Suzi. 2011. Arnason and Castoriadis’ Unfinished Dialogue: Articulating the World. European Journal of Social Theory 14(1):71–88. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431010394510. Sheehan J (2010) Whan was disenchantment? History and the secular age. In: Warner M et al (eds) Varieties of secularism in a secular age. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, pp 217–242 Steger, Manfred B., 2008. The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political Ideologies from the French Revolution to the Global War on Terror, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. James, Paul (2019). "The Social Imaginary in Theory and Practice". In Chris Hudson and Erin K. Wilson (ed.). Revisiting the Global Imaginary: Theories, Ideologies, Subjectivities. Palgrave-McMillan. Heidegger, Martin. 1977 (1938). The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York: Harper Torchbooks.

Inquiring into highly diverse ways—both historical and transcendental—in which imagination shapes the sociocultural experience by forming the contours of action, intuition, knowledge, and understanding One of the most influential philosophers in the English-speaking world, Charles Taylor is internationally renowned for his contributions to political and moral theory, particularly to debates about identity formation, multiculturalism, secularism, and modernity. In Modern Social Imaginaries, Taylor continues his recent reflections on the theme of multiple modernities. To account for the differences among modernities, Taylor sets out his idea of the social imaginary, a broad understanding of the way a given people imagine their collective social life. Koschorke, Albrecht. 2004. Codes und Narrative. Überlegungen zur Poetik der funktionalen Differenzierung. In Grenzen der Germanistik. Rephilologisierung oder Erweiterung? DFG-Symposion 2003, ed. Walter Erhart, 174–185. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler. Smith, Philip. 2005. Why War? The Cultural Logic of Iraq, the Gulf War, and Suez. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Alexander, Jeffrey C., and Philip Smith. 1996. Social Science and Salvation. Risk Society as Mythical Discourse. Zeitschrift für Soziologie 25(4):251–262. https://doi.org/10.1515/zfsoz-1996-0401.

The notion of ‘social imaginaries’ is frequently used, across disciplines, but often without sufficient conceptual elaboration and explanation. Moreover, discussions of social imaginaries that we come across as presented in specific disciplines often ignore the discussions of social imaginaries in other disciplines. The journal aims to fill an important gap in contemporary research by offering a platform for cross-disciplinary debates relating to social imaginaries. Originating in the sociological and philosophical thought of Émile Durkheim, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Lacan, and crystallized in landmark works by Cornelius Castoriadis, Paul Ricoeur, and Claude Lefort, the notion of the imaginary refers to the constitution of reality in social, political and cultural life. As a human capacity and activity, the imaginary and imagination allow human beings to creatively grasp reality in a variety of ways. Thought of as plural, ‘social imaginaries’ refers to constellations of power that frame politics, culture, economy, and society on multiple levels in diverse historical and social or cultural contexts. The term points to several interrelated trends in the humanities and social sciences that are concerned with developing a new approach to the question of modernity. First, it reveals the 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 or productive imagination. Second, social imaginaries highlight the phenomenon of collectively instituted meaning and its inter-cultural variations. Third, foregrounding ‘imaginaries’ provides a corrective to a one-dimensional over-emphasis on theoretical reason or rationality 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. Therefore, instead of focusing on the singular ‘imagination’ or ‘reason’ as a faculty of the human individual, it seeks rather to emphasize the constitutive elements of socio-cultural ‘reality’, such as ‘social imaginaries’ and ‘forms of rationality’. In brief, one focus of the journal is the cultural hermeneutic of modernity (and ‘multiple modernities’), a need for which the socio-cultural contexts of worldhood, imagination, reason and civilizational forms point to. In the context of the grounding of modernity that implies a variety of ‘others’, the journal is concerned to elucidate dimensions of of meaning, action and power as the precondition for inter-subjective modes of being-in-the-world. It is concerned with the comparative analysis of civilizations and concomitant elaboration of world histories, which however have yet to fully assimilate the hermeneutical turn. The journal aims to be a forum for contributions to what Johann P. Arnason characterizes as a ‘paradigm in the making’. For this it seeks to foster disciplinary rigor with an interdisciplinary disposition. Arnason, Johann P. 2003. Civilizations in Dispute. Historical Questions and Theoretical Traditions. Leiden/Boston: Brill. The development of this concept allows a better understanding of the close link between the ability to condition and organize exchanges between an experience and its representation, and a procedure based on the rhythmical repetition of one, or several, paradigms in a determined and coherent body, which allows their reproduction and inflection 6.

Poovey, M. "The Liberal Civil Subject and the Social in Eighteenth-Century British Moral Philosophy." Public Culture 14.1 (2002): 125-45, p. 132 Koschorke, Albrecht, Susanne Lüdemann, Thomas Frank, and Ethel Matala de Mazza. 2007. Der fiktive Staat: Konstruktionen des politischen Körpers in der Geschichte Europas. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Alexander, Jeffrey C., and Philip Smith. 2010. The Strong Program. Origins, Achievements, Prospects. In Handbook of Cultural Sociology, ed. John R. Hall, Laura Grindstaff, and Ming-Cheng Lo, 13–24. London/New York: Routledge. A crucial illustration of multidimensionality lies in debates around the Anthropocene, which highlight the intense impact of productivist industrialism and consumerism derived from the capitalist imaginary on the non-human world. The patterns are complex, as shown in the Earth sciences. There are, however, also many ways of interpreting, understanding, arguing about, and acting on it, and the sociocultural maps of meaning they draw on, including scientific reason, are multiple. The concept of the Anthropocene, as an abbreviation for the age of escalated impact of human productivity, reflects heightened doubt about progress and unlimited growth into the domains of the natural world. Such doubts reflect a crisis of progress in modernity—a subject of debate in an issue of our predecessor on Peter Wagner’s sociology. 2 The International Journal of Social Imaginaries will be a forum for laying out further perspectives and debates on this and other crucial questions. We also anticipate that it will be a bigger and more effective platform for critical scholars, human rights advocates, occupational professionals, and social movement activists undertaking research on the interrelated domains of the Anthropocene and ecology. Binder, Werner. 2016b. Magma und Scholle. Das soziale Imaginäre und die Wissenssoziologie. In Wissensforschung – Forschungswissen. Beiträge und Debatten zum 1. Sektionskongress der Wissenssoziologie, ed. Reiner Keller, Jürgen Raab, 533–543. Weinheim/Basel: BeltzJuventa.Peter Olshavsky has analyzed the imaginary in the field of architecture. Based on the work of Taylor, the imaginary is understood as a category of understanding social praxis and the reasons designers give to make sense of these practices.

The imaginary (or social imaginary) is the set of values, institutions, laws, and symbols through which people imagine their social whole. It is common to the members of a particular social group and the corresponding society. The concept of the imaginary has attracted attention in anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and media studies. Steger, Manfred B.; James, Paul (2013). " 'Levels of Subjective Globalization: Ideologies, Imaginaries, Ontologies' ". Perspectives on Global Development and Technology. 12 (1–2): 17–40. doi: 10.1163/15691497-12341240.

Mosco, Vincent (2005-01-01). The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace. MIT Press. ISBN 9780262633291. Kliebard, H. (2004). The struggle for the American curriculum 1893–1958 (3rd ed.). New York: Routledge Falmer. Alexander, Jeffrey C., Dominik Bartmanski, and Bernhard Giesen. 2012. Iconic Power. Materiality and Meaning in Social Life. New York/Houndmills: Palgrave. John R. Searle considered the ontology of the social imaginary to be complex, but that in practice 'the complex structure of social reality is, so to speak, weightless and invisible. The child is brought up in a culture where he or she simply takes social reality for granted....The complex ontology seems simple'. [19] He added the subtle distinction that social reality was observer-relative, and so would 'inherit that ontological subjectivity. But this ontological subjectivity does not prevent claims about observer-relative features from being epistemically objective'. [20] Technology [ edit ]

Arising out of phenomenological, psychoanalytic and sociological thought, the interdisciplinary field of social imaginaries has burgeoned in the last two decades and spread internationally. From primary traditions of thought in philosophy, and especially phenomenology and hermeneutics, the field has grown to also include contributors from sociology, history, psychoanalysis, urban studies, cultural and social geography, political theory, legal studies, as well as its established domain of social theory. Philosophically, The International Journal of Social Imaginaries draws on the resources of phenomenology and hermeneutics. The growth in the field since the turn of the century has incorporated key challenges facing contemporary society. Charles Taylor’s renowned book Modern Social Imaginaries (Duke University Press, 2004) is a landmark widening the appeal of the field, by applying conceptual and theoretical suppositions to societies, politics, and culture in Western societies. In its wake, scholars have discussed global, feminist, ecological, capitalist, humanitarian, constitutional, populist and religious imaginaries, and increasingly, non-Western imaginaries. Seeking to capture this vitality, The International Journal of Social Imaginaries aims to investigate social imaginaries from theoretical, comparative, global, historical, interdisciplinary and inter-civilizational perspectives. The journal’s objective is to foster challenging research on the growing and diversified field of social imaginaries, on the one hand, and the related field of the creative imagination, on the other.Essai sur les Mœurs et l’Esprit des Nations (Essay on the Customs and Spirit of Nations). London: J. Nourse (1759 edition). Alexander, Jeffrey C., and Philip Smith. 2003. The Strong Program in Cultural Sociology. Elements of a Structural Hermeneutics. In The Meanings of Social Life. A Cultural Sociology, ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander, 11–26. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bringing new dimensions and insights to existing debates, such as currently in constitutional law and theory (‘constitutional imaginaries’), human rights law (‘human rights imaginary’), democratic theory (‘democratic imaginaries’), and populist politics (the ‘populist imaginary’). Alexander, Jeffrey C. 1988. Culture and Political Crisis. ‘Watergate’ and Durkheimian Sociology. In Durkheimian Sociology. Cultural Studies, ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander, 187–224. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. In 1975, Cornelius Castoriadis used the term in his book The Imaginary Institution of Society, maintaining that 'the imaginary of the society ... creates for each historical period its singular way of living, seeing and making its own existence'. [4] For Castoriadis, 'the central imaginary significations of a society ... are the laces which tie a society together and the forms which define what, for a given society, is "real"'. [5]