Toward New Imaginaries: An Introduction

Abstract

The idea of a social imaginary as an enabling but not fully explicable symbolic matrix within which a people imagine and act as world-making collective agents has received its fullest contemporary elaboration in the work of Cornelius Castoriadis, especially in his influential book The Imaginary Institution of Society (1987).1 Castoriadis was drawn to the idea of the social imaginary in the late 1960s as he became progressively disillusioned with Marxism. Reacting against the deterministic strands within Marxism, which he regarded as both dominant and unavoidable, Castoriadis sought to identify the creative force in the making of social-historical worlds. The authors of essays in this issue, while familiar with the work of Castoriadis, are drawn to the idea of the social imaginary for a different set of reasons. Writing more than a quarter century after the publication of The Imaginary Institution of Society, they are responding to a radically different intellectual and political milieu signaled by the cataclysmic events of 1989 and their aftermath. A majority of these authors were brought together in a working group nearly two decades ago by the Center for Transcultural Studies (CTS), a Chicago-based notfor-profit research network with close links to the Public Culture editorial collec-