Collective Dreams: Political Imagination and Community

Abstract

Collective Dreams: Political Imagination and Community, Keally D. McBride, University Park PA: Penn State University Press, 2005, pp. 157.Political imagination is greatly underrated, not least because there is so little of it in what passes for “official” politics these days. But it is also understudied by political theorists whose domain encompasses the many imagined but rarely realized versions of the “good society” handed down from the past. And yet political imagination is arguably central to every vision of an alternative political order. Plato never lived in his Republic; Hobbes never wandered through the state of nature; and Marx never knew the rule of the “associated producers.” But, all of them may have felt that they had glimpsed elements of these alternate futures in their own time. Hobbes, after all, lived through the English Revolution which he may have thought resembled a “war of all against all” and Marx witnessed the heady days of the Paris Commune. This is surely as true today. Social conservatives may espy the glimmerings of a heavenly utopia in their local church group. Progressive social activists may see a new social order prefigured in their food co-op or trade union. Political imagination, in other words, is just as much a part of the world we inhabit as it is of those we dream of inhabiting. However, as Keally McBride observes, “Imagination itself, as opposed to its products, is generally not studied in political science. But it is our best tool for changing the world” (1).