Abstract
The concept of the ‘social imaginary’ is often invoked and rarely used with any precision or clarity. It still suffers from association with the earlier concept of the ‘spirit of the times,’ or zeitgeist, which carries a lingering cosmological sense that such a spirit is also metaphysical. This essay traces the genealogy of the concept from Jacques Lacan to Charles Taylor. It lays out the case for the approach developed by Manfred Steger as a patterned convocation of the social whole through which people express their social existence. The concept thus provides an elegant way of analyzing social meaning. It best works in relation to and across an integrated set of levels of analysis focusing on ideas, ideologies, imaginaries, and ontologies.
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Notes
- 1.
Here I am reading Jaspers through Jürgen Habermas’s volume Observations on the Spiritual Situation of the Age (1985). Jaspers (1951, p. 98) developed the concept of the Axial Age to encompass the period 800–200 BCE, variously an interregnum between empires in China, India, Persia, Judea, and Greece, when in different places at the same time, ‘the spiritual foundations of humanity were laid.’
- 2.
The distinction between Volksgeist or national spirit and Weltgeist or world-spirit is associated with Hegel.
- 3.
See Lutz Niethammer (1992) on the way in which such a heroic or monstrous embodiment of the world-spirit took a series of writers from Hegel and Alexander Kojève to Michel Serres and Francis Fukuyama to an end-of-history position.
- 4.
This was one of the animating bases of the formation of Imago: A Journal of the Social Imaginary, to contest the separation of the imaginary and the real.
- 5.
This makes the path taken by the rise of the global imaginary unprecedented. As Steger documents, rather than becoming public predominantly through intellectual projection, philosophical debate, and avant-garde activism, as was the case with a national imaginary, the global imaginary begins to emerge before its cognoscenti have time to name the processes of globalization as ‘globalization.’ That is, the concept only receives marginal analytical purchase prior to the 1980s, and then explodes into common usage in the 1990s at the same time as the cognoscenti are grappling with its meaning and debating with each other over how to understand its various dimensions.
- 6.
Earlier I called this Louis Althusser’s unspoken issue because in his famous ISAs (Ideological State Apparatuses) essay, he seeks a theory of ideology in general through the following thesis: ‘ideology represents the imaginary relation of individuals to their real conditions of existence’ (1971, 162).
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James, P. (2019). The Social Imaginary in Theory and Practice. In: Hudson, C., Wilson, E. (eds) Revisiting the Global Imaginary. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14911-6_3
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