Neo-liberalism and other political imaginaries

I Varieties of political culture

In a graduate course on democratization several years ago, I posed the following questions to students. Think about where you grew up or where you live now. When there is a problem, how do people behave? Do they get together? Do they protest, beseech, complain, or even riot? Do they give up? A student from a small town in northern Virginia described how people in his town got riled up over the day laborer issue and descended on the town council meeting to air their grievances, one way or the other. A student from a small town in Florida said that whenever there was a problem in her community people would gather at the local diner and talk it over. A student from a small country in West Africa noted that when there were problems the elders, particularly the male elders, would gather at the village level to talk it through and decide what to do. A woman from the Middle East described a similar sex-segregated form of community, informal discussion and decision. She was clearly not pleased with how women were excluded from the meetings. Finally, a student from another West African country reported that in his village, when there was a problem, such as the government failing to provide education funds, the young people would riot, often with shots fired and people killed. The seminar reflected on these various forms of political culture, or the ways in which people at community levels take up and address problems, and recalled a previous meeting when a woman from Haiti visited the class, reporting that in her village no one ever stepped outside: there was no community public space, much less any ongoing arenas for public problem-solving.

Consider the various situations that the students identified. There are those in which people gather to talk, others where people gather to complain or protest, and yet others where some gather to burn things down. There are some people who talk without doing much of anything, and others who talk with intent to devise a plan of action. There are polities that let only a select portion of the population engage in this political work, yet precious few that are inclusive in talking with the aim of coming up with a plan. These are examples of what I call ‘political culture’. Some political cultures are more effective than others, and whom they empower varies considerably.

‘Culture’ is, as Raymond Williams writes, one of the most complex terms in the English language. A culture can describe an intellectual state, a way of life, or the products of that state and way of life. ³ A political culture shapes a polity’s response to matters of shared concern. ⁴ It is composed of the beliefs and ways of thinking as well as the habits, associations and institutions that condition collective decision-making and action. The term ‘political culture’ is not meant to describe political ideology but rather habits and patterns of participation in how polities are organized. Along with practices of participation and civic engagement, political cultures also include shared sets of practices and ideals, which further cultivate forms of associated life, habits and actions.

Though he did not use the term, Alexis de Tocqueville provides a striking comparison between France and America in the 19th century that helps explicate political culture. He noted that Americans are peculiar, writing: ‘Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite…Everywhere that, at the head of a new undertaking, you see the government in France…count on it that you will perceive an association in the United States.’ ⁵ In France when there is a problem, people start knocking on the magistrate’s door, demanding that the magistrate do something. In America when there is a problem, people form an association to do something about it themselves. If Tocqueville was right, in the 19th century the French and the Americans had distinctly different political cultures, different habits and norms about what to do when problems happen. Where the Americans had more of a culture of civic initiative, the French tended to look to government to solve problems. Each has different advantages and disadvantages. During the 19th century, the French may have been better at trusting the government and the Americans, for better or worse, less so. At the same time, Americans might have been better at harnessing civic resources for change and the French less so. Americans’ ‘civic entrepreneurship’ was a characteristic of the political culture of the time, but as cultures change, so do behaviors.

As Theda Skocpol has documented, during the 19th and early 20th centuries, voluntary organizations of farmers, workers, veterans, women and other citizen groups spread throughout the United States. ⁶ These groups were run by the voluntary efforts of their members. But by the 1960s, this situation had changed dramatically. In the intervening years, voluntary associations began to hire professionals to run the organizations. Instead of donating their own time and labor, members donated funds to hire staff. Ultimately these voluntary associations became professionalized and had little space for member involvement. Moreover, during the 20th century various professionally run advocacy groups sprang up with the mission to speak and act on behalf of groups that had been historically marginalized. Instead of their organizing and speaking for themselves, others organized and spoke for them. Additionally, as women entered the workforce, fewer were available for voluntary associations. Over the course of the century, Americans lost their habit of civic engagement. Instead of being what the public engages in, politics became what governments and politicians do.

Skocpol’s is mostly an account of the change in political culture of the white and middle-class majority. But other political cultures have also flourished in 20th-century America, including different movements of those largely disenfranchised, among them women, blacks, sexual minorities, farmworkers and others, who created organizations and movements for social change. If one were in search of the lost power of the American revolution in 1960s America, as many were, one could hitch a ride with the freedom riders. Here and elsewhere we find stories of the creation of horizontal power through collective organizing, in the fields with farmworkers, in the barrio of San Antonio, in the nightclubs of San Francisco. While such pockets of horizontal political culture have flourished, the dominant one of vertical power – where elites rule and the masses go along or drop out – has remained firmly in place.

II De-naturalizing political culture

Political cultures and conceptions of political agency vary dramatically over time and, eventually, come to seem to be natural. These taken-for-granted norms shape the prevailing sense of how problems should be addressed and whose input matters. Some of these conceptions have elements that are more conducive to democratic life, that is, life in which all who are affected by common matters have a real opportunity to help shape them. But others severely limit citizenship to some and not to others. Hence, from a democratic point of view, it is vital to be clear-eyed about the prevailing culture so as, if needed, to change it.

To begin to see how political cultures develop and change over time, I borrow Raymond Williams’ conceptions of dominant, residual and emerging phenomena. Even as things gradually change, Williams noted, each era will have residual phenomena from a previous era, dominant features of its own time, and emerging inklings of what will come. ⁷ If we follow Skocpol’s account, we can demarcate the following periodization of political cultures in the United States; (1) during the 18th and 19th centuries, America’s thick associational life made the revolution and the civic life that Tocqueville saw possible; (2) during the 20th century this associational life atrophied (except for pockets noted above) and in its stead rose a dominant political culture of a professionally managed society along the lines that Walter Lippmann had called for; ⁸ and (3) beginning in the 1980s, critics began to notice and lament the loss of associational life while new movements began to create a resurgence of it – not so much a repetition of the earlier sort but of a new one that takes advantage of new technologies and means for fuller public participation across borders and boundaries. Using Williams’ language, I could say that the first of these periods is now a residual political culture; the second is still the dominant political culture (along with, since the 1980s, a neo-liberal bent); and the third is only now emerging. I can also see examples of this periodization across the globe, as the United States, becoming the world’s major superpower during the 20th century, exported its dominant political culture abroad through its assistance programs and international monetary policies; and so its norms and practices became standard. So, too, in a transnational globalized era, political cultures with new kinds of associational life are emerging throughout the world.

Nonetheless, the dominant political culture treats emerging ones as inconsequential and retains much of its ability to define what is real and normal. This is a problem because, in thinking of politics only in terms of what governments do, for example, it reduces political power to matters of control and violence. Or, under neo-liberalism, political processes are sidelined altogether in favor of economic mantras. Both aspects of the dominant political culture miss another dimension of power; pace Hannah Arendt, there are at least two kinds of political power: power-over, such as the power of coercion, force, money and control; and power-with, which is the power of associations, civic movements and collective will. ⁹ The institutions and mechanisms of government are invested with vertical power, and, in fact, political theory is often defined solely as the study of them.

Associational life can produce something quite different: horizontal power. When people come together and create a plan to address a problem, they create this power. As Arendt put it, power is a potentiality; it springs up between people ‘when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse’. ¹⁰ There is also a communicative power that emerges in associational life, quite distinct from the manipulative power manifested in advertising and what Jürgen Habermas calls ‘strategic action’. ¹¹ As Arendt put it: ‘Power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities.’ ¹² This is the kind of power that people create when they come together and create a plan to do something together.

Yet in the dominant political culture power seems to be seen as vertical, vested in official arenas of government and the market, which exert power over those under their sway. As a result, for instance, as we are reminded over and over again, the dominant political ways of life in North America today involve a struggle between two political parties for the steering of local, state and federal bureaucracies. Since people see their voting or lobbying as their only chance to do something, many are apathetic about such means of change. Reformers seek to improve government transparency and to reduce the impact of corporate interests on the decisions of politicians. The taken-for-granted assumption is that the average citizen’s role is primarily a matter of voting and little more. If people are unhappy with the outcome they might write letters to the editor of their local paper, start an online petition, contact their representatives, join an interest group that will press for change, march on City Hall, or stage a protest.

Notice that the options range from (1) authorizing others to choose and act to (2) complaining about how others do so. However, if taking to the streets is seen as a way of creating new, horizontal power, then it can be powerfully political. The dominant view holds these actions to be exceptional and transgressive rather than a vital part of a well-functioning democracy. In the dominant political culture, there is little space for citizens to choose and act, other than choosing their representatives or choosing someone else the next time. There is little if any space for positive action for collective action or social change.

Through most of the 20th century most theorists have followed Max Weber in focusing on state power, ‘power-over’, and the state’s coercive institutions, and have been largely blind to the phenomenon of horizontal power. (I will discuss notable exceptions below.) Defining the state as ‘a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’, Weber may well be correct about the origins of the state but not about what might give its laws any legitimacy thereafter. ¹³ Throughout much of the 20th century, at least among theorists in the liberal and realist traditions, political power was theorized largely as a matter of vertical power, whether that of the state over the people or the possibility of the people overthrowing the state. Political power came to be seen as something that ran up and down a political society, not laterally throughout civil society. Power was about control. Gone was the understanding of power as an energy or ability to make something new happen. Political power was simply the ability to control or divvy up an existing bundle of goods and distribute scarce resources. Legitimacy, then, was a matter of justifying state power. Elitist and market-based political theories, such as those put forward by Walter Lippmann and Joseph Schumpeter, justified state coercion on the basis of the knowledge of enlightened rulers or the mechanisms of free exchange. They said little about how state institutions might present barriers to collective action or how people could better engage in collective decision-making. Pluralist theories, such as those forwarded by Robert Dahl and implicitly held by most political scientists, require a balance of power, but these interests do not have to be reflectively endorsed. Nor do they require much of citizen participation except in the form of lobby groups. Even where broader forms of civic action exist, theorists tend to theorize them according to how well they steer states, not how much they strengthen associational life or create horizontal power. ¹⁴

If one understands political culture in this way, that is, as a climate that cultivates certain expectations and actions for how political matters should be addressed, then a number of new questions open up. How do people recognize political problems, and what makes for effective problem-naming? What constitutes public will, and are there means of fostering or dampening it? When can we say that people have made a collective choice, and what does legitimate decision-making look like? What are some forms of collective action? How can complementary action be coordinated by multiple agents? In short, what is democracy, deeply understood and not simply as a form of government, and can we provide any advice for fostering it?

III Political imaginaries

A key aspect of any given political culture is its set of presuppositions about how problems should be addressed and who has the authority to address them. These sets of expectations are found in the ‘political imaginary’ of a polity. Nancy Fraser understands this as the ‘taken-for-granted assumptions’, mind-sets, attitudes, catchphrases and images about how politics works. ¹⁵ These assumptions inform the ways in which social problems are named and debated and, as Fraser puts it, they ‘delimit the range of solutions that are thinkable’. Often they are ‘distilled in catch phrases and stereotypical images, which dominate public discourse. Taken together, such catch phrases, images, and assumptions constitute the political imaginary.’ ¹⁶ Charles Taylor, drawing on Wittgenstein, uses the term social imaginary to point to ‘the way ordinary people “imagine” their social surroundings’; it is ‘that common understanding that makes possible common practices’. ¹⁷ It includes expectations we have of each other, common understandings of how to carry out collective practices, and a sense of our relationships and ways we fit together:

Such understanding is both factual and normative; that is, we have a sense of how things usually go, but this is interwoven with an idea of how they ought to go, of what missteps would invalidate the practice. ¹⁸

Fraser and Taylor are describing the mostly conscious features of a political imaginary, but to these we must add its unconscious aspects, namely those involved in developing and perpetuating identities of individuals, groups and all those ‘othered’. Various processes are at work in the normal development of an individual’s identity, from its early bond with the primary caregiver to increasingly social relations with others in the immediate family, larger kinship networks, ethnic and religious communities, and larger political communities. Even in the most normal development though, the task of constructing an integrated identity is betrayed by unintegrated bits, both positive and negative, that either get repressed or externalized through primitive defense mechanisms such as denial, splitting and projection.

Vamik Volkan describes the way externalization works in the formation of individual and then ethnic identity, namely, ‘in externalization, remnant black and white fragments are deposited in people or things outside oneself’ that come to serve as reservoirs. ²⁰ Positive conceptions of one’s own ethnic identity form thanks to having reservoirs that are shared with others of one’s own group, such as ‘a Cuban lullaby, a Finnish sauna, a German nursery rhyme, and matzo ball soup’. ²¹ Likewise, unintegrated bad parts and feelings can be externalized onto other things and people, whether the child’s own aggression onto the absent ‘bad’ breast or, in the case of stranger anxiety (at about age 8 months) onto anyone who is not the mother. Out of a need to ‘master and channel angry impulses’ that might otherwise ‘threaten to cause the loss of the mother’s love’, children ‘quickly learn how to displace their anger onto someone else’, creating the foundation of prejudice. ²²

In very early childhood development, encouraged by the adult community, other ethnic groups can become reservoirs of unintegrated bad parts. Volkan gives the example of a Turkish Cypriot child raised in Cyprus alongside Greek Christians before the island’s division in 1974. Like Jews but unlike Christians, Muslims are forbidden to eat pork. Taught that pigs are ‘dirty and foreign’, Turkish children unconsciously split off their own bad parts onto pigs and those associated with them. Volkan describes how ‘eating or even petting a pig would have been unpleasant’ because in doing so the child would risk losing his family’s and his group’s love. So for the child, along with the group, the pig and by extension the Greek Christians become the reservoir for all that is dirty and foreign. ²³ The partition of the island in 1974 served to create a border that would prevent one group from defiling another. Likewise, Volkan notes, physical borders often become psychologized, representing a ‘symbolic thick skin that protects large groups from being contaminated’, ²⁴ just as the USA–Mexico border is seen in Donald Trump’s anti-immigration script as needing to be fortified against criminals and ‘bad hombres’ bent on rape and murder.

Another important element of the unconscious political imaginary is the way in which trauma and loss can be passed down over generations. Volkan describes the ways that a collective trauma can sear itself into the imaginary of a group, becoming a ‘chosen trauma’ that is central to its identity, chosen not because the trauma was chosen but because the shared pain of it united those who suffered.

Additionally, the psychoanalysts Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok describe the unconscious transmissions of traumas or secrets too shameful to utter, a phantom transmission from one generation to another. ‘The “phantom” is a formation in the dynamic unconscious that is found there not because of the subject’s own repression but on account of a direct empathy with the unconscious or the rejected psychic matter of a parental object.’ ²⁵ This may happen because the child unconsciously can read between the lines of what the parent does not say, or it can decipher unconsciously the meaning of its parent’s symptoms. In any case, secrets and trauma that are not worked through in one generation may be inherited by the next.

While Torok and Abraham are describing a phenomenon that can occur within the lineage of a single family, Esther Rashkin has observed how this also occurs as a result of a collective trauma such as the Holocaust or Argentina’s Dirty War or any variety of social catastrophes. Children and grandchildren of both survivors and perpetrators can harbor ‘shameful traumas…concealed as secrets and unknowingly transmitted transgenerationally as phantoms’. ²⁶ Rashkin looks at the effects felt on individual children, such as the anorexic whose parent had been starving in a concentration camp, though not the effects on a collective, not a collective unconscious. But coupled with Volkan’s observations of how unmourned losses can be passed down through generations over hundreds of years, waiting to be ignited by the likes of Slobodan Milošević, it is easy to see that phantoms are also at work in the political unconscious.

To those who want to distinguish sharply between psyche and society, there is another view in which the two realms are interrelated without being either (1) discontinuous or (2) reducible one to the other. They cannot be discontinuous because each individual psyche is at the same time a ‘fragment of the world’; and they cannot be reducible because there is always a remainder. ²⁷ I see a collective political unconscious forming analogously to bird formations. Each creature individually picks up on cues from others, and a collective formation occurs. This formation is neither a group above and beyond individuals nor individuals distinct from a group; it is a third formation, a relation, where all partake in creating something with its own specificity. Likewise a political unconscious forms via cues from the environments, whether unconscious transmissions of affects, secrets, or crypts. A related phenomenon is what Hardt and Negri call the multitude as opposed to the older delineation of ‘the people’. Unlike a monolithic people, a multitude is made up of communication among singularities, with the parts retaining their specificities. The political unconscious is composed of parts, cues and signals that are passed down, passed around, taken up, sedimented and circulated, all the while shaping and reverberating in common life.

Unconsciously, political imaginaries delineate who the key actors, groups and deliberators are; the norms according to which agents interact; the grievances they have; and the kinds of power they employ. A political imaginary will rarely be recognized as such. Rather, it will be taken as ‘just the way things are’; ‘the ways politics work’; and ‘how things get done’. Even unconsciously, political imaginaries constitute our place in a political world, simultaneously constituting our own political subjectivity, our political relationships to others, and our political culture.

Any given political community might have more than one – even several – political imaginaries. Recall Raymond Williams’ notion of residual, dominant and emergent phenomena. While the dominant political imaginary may be taken for granted as the norm, other imaginaries might emerge in response to particular traumas and group formations, literally as new ways to imagine how political change can happen. When an alternative view of things addresses conscious and unconscious phenomena better, others may begin to adopt this new view of things. Though initially seen as a special approach to a special set of circumstances, as others adopt these ways of imagining the political scene, the political imaginary may take hold in other venues and for other circumstances. ²⁸

Political cultures and practices supervene on political imaginaries, on implicit expectations about who the legitimate political actors are, who belongs and what kind of power exists, though the reverse is also true. If people expect that power is of a particular form and provenance, then it would seem irrelevant for unauthorized others to deliberatively engage or act. If people think that political power is solely a matter of the power of the gun, the purse, or the law, owned by some and not others, then they are unlikely to realize their own potential power or involve themselves in tending to matters of common concern.

Even in more inclusive societies, in much of the modern world today – in both developed and developing countries – the dominant political imaginary holds that the state is the site of politics. (Those on the left would add that the state has been a proxy for capitalist and market forces.) In this view, politics is what governments, politicians and other official political actors do, whether for their own elitist inclinations or on behalf of power and market elites. In any case, deciding and acting on matters of public consequence are seen as tasks carried out by the officials of states, by bureaucracies, by legislative, judicial and executive processes. This ability to act, a.k.a. power, is seen primarily as vertical, as what one party wields over another, and since the state has a ‘monopoly on violence’, it is seen as the political domain.

IV Neo-liberalism’s anti-politics

Having described the political cultures and the conscious and unconscious imaginaries that underlie them, I now turn to what has been the most dominant political imaginary of the past few decades, though as I write it seems to be nearing its own end: neo-liberalism which arose as something to rival the previous dominant political culture: representative government. Where representative government rests on a political imaginary where citizens do little more than vote, in neo-liberalism, even that meager level of political participation is unnecessary because in a neo-liberal political imaginary all that is political melts into economics. Rather than the forum, the space for decision-making becomes the boardroom or the closed-door meeting of leaders with economists whispering in their ears. As Habermas laments, to find out what is happening in Europe, he has to turn to the business pages. Under the spell of neo-liberal reason, political decision-making is being usurped by those schooled in right-wing, laissez-faire economics sprinkling free-market fairy dust about the room. ²⁹

Curiously, my first brush with the idea that there was a conflict between economic decision-making and political decision-making occurred in a public policy graduate seminar at Duke University in the mid-1980s, taught by conservative economist Malcolm Gillis, the author of Reagan’s second tax reform plan. I remember clearly one lecture where he warned us that economists might be able to ascertain what would be the most efficient solution to a political problem but that economists should never be allowed to usurp this political function of deciding what we ought to do. He seemed to want to instill this in us far more than the classical microeconomic principles of the course: the question of what we ought to do is a political one to be decided by the people, not an economic one to be decided by economists or invoked by leaders in lieu of public deliberation. To my mind, Gillis was anticipating what Wendy Brown would write 30 years later: ‘[I]f democracy stands for the idea that the people, rather than something else, will decide the fundamentals and coordinates of their common existence, economization of this principle is what can finally kill it.’ ³⁰

Keynesian economics, coupled with political will following the Great Depression to protect the people from the callousness of capitalism, created in the mid-20th century a public policy steered by elites with the aid of a more egalitarian economic policy. Mid-20th-century politics still was very much representative, with political scientists trying to explain away the public’s lack of interest or involvement in the political process. (John Dewey entered the debate firmly on the public’s side.) By the late 1970s, representative liberal governance was solidly entrenched in the West as the dominant political imaginary. In the years between the Great Depression and the late 1970s, ‘we were all Keynesians’ and it was common practice in developed countries to regulate business and trade, from the US Glass–Steagall Act 1933 that separated banking from venture capital to the trade barriers that benefited domestic products and labor. ³¹ But already in the early 1970s, Keynesianism began to fissure, first with the end of the Bretton Woods system, then divisions within Keynesian economic theory, ³² and decidedly when Margaret Thatcher helped put an end to Keynes’ hold, privatizing the public sector, dismantling regulations, lowering trade barriers. Leaders of other countries (from the USA to China to Argentina) followed suit. Today, supposedly, we are, if not all neo-liberals, definitely either suffering or benefiting from neo-liberalism. Those at the very upper echelons of the income distribution keep getting richer while the poor are as poor as ever. ³³ The financial collapse of 2008 managed to further transfer funds from the very poor and the middle class to the ultra-rich.

As David Harvey puts it, neo-liberalism ‘is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade’. ³⁴ It is, as Wendy Brown writes, ‘an ensemble of economic policies in accord with its root principle of affirming free markets’, reducing all forms of life to economic ones, converting ‘every human need or desire into a profitable enterprise’. ³⁵ Neo-liberalism is both a set of ideas and a practice, the first pristine, if heartless, and the second pragmatically sullied. ³⁶ Ideally, according to neo-liberalism, markets should function without government interference, but in practice markets fail and governments come to the rescue – not so much to save the citizenry but to save the bankers and chieftains of business. ³⁷ During the post-Depression era of regulation, economies the world over were relatively stable, and so neo-liberals began arguing that crises were behind us and it was time to deregulate and unfetter the market (Stiglitz, 2010). But it was the regulations that led to stability, as Stiglitz notes, and without them the world has experienced one economic crisis after another. ³⁸

Now it seems that neo-liberalism has become hegemonic. World leaders, rather than wrestle with these problems on their own terms, defer to neo-liberal measures as technocratic solutions to social and economic problems. For example, European leaders have insisted on austerity measures to deal with the economic crises in Spain, Portugal and Greece, despite evidence that austerity measures only aggravate matters – and that the problems were effects of neo-liberal policies. ³⁹ Worse, these decisions were not made through the democratic process afforded by the European Union, that is, in the European Parliament, but rather behind closed doors by a few select heads of state. Rather than be led by public will formed in a democratic process, they invoked technocratic market solutions. Commenting on this development, Jürgen Habermas told a reporter, ‘For the first time in the history of the EU, we are actually experiencing a dismantling of democracy.’ ⁴⁰

Neo-liberalism depoliticizes. If politics is the practice of a collectivity deciding what to do in the midst of uncertainty and disagreement, then neo-liberalism is the antithesis of politics. Where politics engages uncertainty, neo-liberalism ignores it. Democratic politics tries to find a way for all those affected to come to some kind of agreement about what ought to be done in the midst of all this uncertainty and disagreement. But neo-liberalism denies any uncertainty. It offers up a seeming truth: that unfettered markets create more prosperity for all. So when political leaders turn to neo-liberal ‘solutions’ rather than admit to uncertainty and the need for public deliberation and choice, in the rich Aristotelian sense, ⁴¹ they are depoliticizing these very political matters.

Not only are neo-liberal policies often unsound and anti-democratic, they are blind and deaf to the suffering of those they harm. And the parties that created the problems are often rewarded while the innocent suffer. Moreover, neo-liberal policies reaffirm the status quo, and the presuppositions of neo-liberalism go unexamined. Those in power come to take it as ‘natural’ and ‘just the way it is’, and because they are largely personally unaffected, they cannot see what is amiss with the dominant order.

But those adversely affected can see the harm first hand, as the Greek people have seen during the Greek debt crisis, especially once they have joined together with others likewise affected. Enrique Dussel describes the process by which those who are victims of a dominant system can become critically conscious of its failings and able to imagine new alternatives. ⁴² These victims become socio-historical actors able to articulate and chart a new direction. But because what they are calling for can sound so alien and unnatural to the norms of the dominant order, they can be dismissed as irrational, strident, or even dangerous. In another idiom, we can call these critical communities of victims protesters, dissidents, activists and social movements. They are the people of Occupy Wall Street and Puerta del Sol. They are the ‘Dreamers’ in the United States, young undocumented immigrants who dared to march in public. They are the advocates for the plight of women, gays, transgender people, animals, ecosystems and other others. If they manage to capture the public imagination, they can put new items on the public agenda, which may then be taken up by a political process that will then deliberate on a much wider and far-reaching range of alternatives than it would have otherwise. As a result policies that might have been previously barely thinkable by the body politic can become a reality. A perfect example is the movement in the United States for marriage equality.

Social movements have made great strides in many countries. Yet they are still largely limited by an imaginary that sees people on the streets as observers, critics and beseechers rather than as actors and political agents. Chants like ‘Hey, hey, ho, ho, xxx has got to go’ reiterate a message that power resides within halls of government and not the streets. Better is a recent chant, ‘This is what democracy looks like.’ That chant positions power in the street. But still it fails to connect the street to a self-legislating public. Those on the street protesting also need to enter deliberative spaces for deciding what ought to be done, not merely beseeching others to decide according to the demands of the street but taking part in the deliberations and trade-offs themselves. Fortunately, many activists are connecting the street to the forum, seeing a need for engaging with local legislative politics, including showing up to talk with their representatives, and others taking a further step of running for local office. But there is still a further need for creating a political imaginary that sees political power as residing in the street and informal forums, not just formal bodies of politics.

Moreover as neo-liberalism escapes national borders, as it becomes globalized, the challenges multiply. The globalization of the economy alienates and angers workers in the American rust belt, English citizens living in rural areas, struggling people in the Global South. If a rising tide lifts all boats, then those without a boat are left to drown. Increasingly, there are fewer ways for political processes, including both social movements and deliberative bodies, to hold globalized neo-liberal forces accountable. Moreover, there is much tension between social movements and deliberative bodies, with the latter accusing the former of being uncivil and the former accusing the latter of being beholden to the dominant order. The still-dominant imaginary of neo-liberalism is beginning to splinter. Whether it does so from left or right is yet to be seen.

V The imaginary institution of the political

On the heels of the Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements, we see unrest in the West against immigration, including the election of authoritarian governments and the votes for Brexit and Donald Trump. These are largely reactionary movements, idealizing and romanticizing a past before neo-liberalism, calling on strong leaders to restore an old order. On the left, there is an opposite but parallel rejection of neo-liberalism’s anti-politics. If there is anything common to these two reactions it is a rejection of how neo-liberalism alienates and dismisses the experiences of those who have been harmed, in one way or another.

To avoid a purely negative, idealizing and reactionary course, people need to reclaim politics and the power that they have to make a difference. We cannot wait for leaders to give power back to the people; collectively people need to create their own power, first by seeing the power they already have.

The dominant political imaginary is already beginning to fray and alternative political imaginaries are emerging as a result of many disparate phenomena, but often as a result of the holes created by states’ inability to solve intractable problems and the successes of local knowledge, community organizing and other civic – political but not necessarily governmental – practices in so doing. On the dark side there are those who hold out hope that a more authoritarian government can fix all problems. Those who support authoritarian regimes are willing to gamble away freedom for a promise, likely false, of security.

A more democratic alternative imaginary has been emerging slowly for the past few decades in the academy, largely in opposition to the reigning political imaginaries, as theorists grew weary and disenchanted with the positivist and emotivist temper of political ‘science’. Among these were theorists on the right as well as the left of the political spectrum, including Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, Benjamin Barber, Jane Mansbridge. ⁴³ More recently, theorists such as Wendy Brown, Judith Butler and Jacques Rancière, have been calling for a more radically democratic politics. Liberalism, which had long focused on the state and the limits of its power, has been under attack from communitarians for its lack of attention to civic life and from feminists who criticized its patriarchal, universalist assumptions. ⁴⁴ What emerged from these disparate phenomena was a new imaginary of politics that is not centered on the state. This imaginary notices the ways in which problems are named, framed and deliberated throughout many regions of society, and it attends to the kind of power that is created horizontally among people in association. It sees the world in a way in which politics is not just what governments do but what citizens and sectors throughout society engage in. Though it has been making its way into political consciousness for nearly 30 years, this emerging political imaginary is still often subterranean, and so part of the task here is to bring it to light.

Where before most radical and reform movements focused on changing or improving the state, by the 1980s efforts began to subtly shift to changing political cultures. (Exceptions might be the protests of May ’68, which Lyotard argues was a deeply democratic project, along with the Italian Autonomia movement, to the extent that they were aimed at changing not just types of rule but society itself.) Or, as Genaro Arriagada, director of the ‘No’ campaign that ultimately ousted Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, reportedly said of his group’s aims, ‘We are not trying get rid of a dictator; we are trying to change the country – to make it a country that will not accept a dictator.’ Such a focus requires a new imagination of how power and change can happen, and some of that occurred at a very particular moment in the late 1980s when, in the course of a few months in eastern Europe, the state lost its purchase on vertical power (Soviet tanks were nowhere in sight) and activists working in new civic associations began to organize more visibly and make plain a new kind of horizontal power. And in one stunning week, two formidable authoritarian governments stepped down as a result of these new civic organizations, announcing that their governments were illegitimate. ⁴⁵ In short, political imaginaries have the power to shape expectations, to signal whether or not public action can make a difference.

VI Radical imaginaries

The dominant political imaginary is vertical, with power emanating from entrenched political institutions. When those governments are relatively benign, life can carry on for most, though not all, members of society. But when they are taken over by authoritarian leaders, then this verticality can quickly become authoritarian. When they are taken over by big banks and their henchmen, then life for ever more of the world’s peoples becomes precarious, their basic needs denied, their dreams entirely deferred. Then an urgent need arises to change the imaginary that underlies the political culture of letting governments and markets rule, occasionally beseeching them, and waiting for them to do the right thing. In authoritarian times, the imaginary itself needs to change.

Where a dominant political imaginary guides people’s expectations and actions, an emerging one can herald change. This is the matter that Cornelius Castoriadis took up for much of his life. Along with others, as I discussed earlier, he used the term imaginary to describe this mental model of how things are, but he also used it to signify the human capacity for creation. ⁴⁶ And, with the adjective radical, to describe how people are able to change themselves and their societies, to imaginatively construct something new. ⁴⁷ Our radical imagination is our capacity to question our current laws, institutions, representations of the world and to create new ones. In this sense it calls into question current institutions and practices and helps create new ones. In other words, the radical imagination is an instituting imagination.

Both Williams and Castoriadis see the constitutive power created through human meaning-making activities, through culture, relationships and imagination. Though both come from Marxist backgrounds, both reject deterministic, mechanistic and even causal models of history. With the terms ‘residual’, ‘dominant’ and ‘emergent’, Williams offers an alternative to what had been the prevailing Marxist account of historical change, wherein one dominant form (e.g. feudalism) suffered contradictions and was replaced by another (e.g. mercantilism or capitalism) wholesale. Williams wanted to show that even in a society dominated by one particular form one could locate uneven development, differentiation, including residual features of older forms and emergent features of what might become new ones. His materialist account could see these elements as being largely determined by the economic base or mode of production, though they could also be somewhat free-floating cultural features.

Dominant elements of a culture are those that express the current modes and relations of production and hence are often hegemonic, pervasive and taken as unproblematically true – such as in the current political imaginary with the ideas that citizens are akin to consumers who choose their representatives; that power runs vertically from top to bottom; that citizens’ modes of action are primarily buying, voting, protesting, acquiescing, profiting, or associating. In keeping with Marx’s base / superstructure distinction, dominant cultural elements are expressions of the economic base. But Williams’ genius was to see differentiation, to see that change does not happen monolithically, that even in a dominant culture, alongside elements that express the base are those left over from earlier ones and others presaging new ones.

Residual cultural elements are those that may have been dominant in an earlier formation but were not entirely superseded by new formations.

The residual, by definition, has been effectively formed in the past, but (unlike what is archaic) it is still active in the cultural process, not only and often not at all as an element of the past, but as an effective element of the present. Thus certain experiences, meanings and values which cannot be expressed or substantially verified in terms of the dominant culture, are nevertheless lived and practised on the basis of the residue – cultural as well as social – of some previous social and cultural institution or formation. ⁴⁸ A good example today is the persisting strength, in the United States, of conservative Christianity, which is only sometimes compatible with secular capitalism, and certainly not at all compatible with the central position of science in modern societies. To the extent that modernity is an advance over blind faith, the residues of conservative Christianity are antagonistic to the dominant order, and certainly to doing anything meaningful about climate change.

Williams described emergent cultural formations as ‘new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationships’ that ‘are continually being created’. But, he wrote, ‘it is exceptionally difficult to distinguish between those which are really elements of some new phase of the dominant culture (and in this sense “species-specific”) and those which are substantially alternative or oppositional to it: emergent in the strict sense, rather than merely novel’. ⁴⁹

Both residual and emergent elements of a culture can be identified as such only in relation to the dominant culture. To be considered residual or emerging, phenomena need to stand in some kind of alternative or oppositional relation to what is dominant, otherwise they are just variations on the prevailing order and not anything that might unsettle it.

VII Imagining otherwise

Castoriadis’ thought provides the linchpin that we need to see how decidedly new phenomena are imagined and emerge. For one, Castoriadis understands all existing political imaginaries and institutions as products of previous human creations, that is, they were in the first place self-instituted, both (1) through the work of particular psyches in releasing themselves from previous given meanings in order to free themselves to new possibilities and (2) the ways these psyches collectively instituted new formations. Recall my discussion of bird formations: here the entities known as psyche and society are not opposite each other but mutually imbricated and productive. Second, while they may have become dominant as what he calls social imaginary significations, they are also liable to be interrogated and changed. However powerful and dominant they are, they are still vulnerable to the human power of imagination that can create alternatives. Imagination has revolutionary capacities, indeed, imagination (not violence) is at the real engine of change.

‘Imagination is the capacity to make be what is not in the simply physical world and, first and foremost, to represent to oneself and in one’s own way – that is, to present for oneself – that which surrounds the living being and matters for it and, undoubtedly also, its own being.’ ⁵⁰ The linchpin here is the ability to imagine something that is otherwise than what is. A familiar word for this radical imagination, that is, the ability to constitute something new through imagination, is autonomy, which Castoriadis borrows from Kant but uses in a very new way, for Castoriadis’ autonomy can put everything in question. There is no universally ‘right’ answer to what should be. For Castoriadis, autonomy does not mean purging all that is heteronomous, including our own unconscious desires and phantasies, but drawing on them. A society is autonomous when it sees itself engaged in a continuous process of self-instituting, that is, when it does not forget its mode of founding (with no truth or foundation other than its own imaginary creative capacity) and when it sees this as an ongoing activity. Hence, ‘what is important in ancient Greek political life’, Castoriadis writes, ‘is the historical instituting process: the activity and struggle around the change of the institutions, the explicit (even if partial) self-institution of the polis as a permanent process. This process goes on for almost four centuries.’ ⁵¹ This is a movement of ‘explicit self-institution’. ⁵²

The radical imagination of one era may create the instituted status quo that a radical imagination of another era may overthrow. Nothing is sacred. Moreover, Castoriadis focuses on the collective capacity to create a new world, very much as Arendt did, that is squarely focused on the political. But like Kant’s idea of autonomy, it is undetermined, that is, it is not a causal effect of material or other circumstances. In fact, the very meaning of it is that it is a capacity to imagine things being radically otherwise than they are now. Moreover, every social and political formation in the world today originated from some past imaginary. There is no other source. Likewise, all politics even today is profoundly shaped by the people’s collective imaginaries – and in grasping this fact the public can begin to have a far more profound effect on political developments than simply what it does by taking to the streets. The public also continuously creates and recreates the legitimacy – or illegitimacy – of all public institutions.

In other words, Castoriadis’ radical imaginary prepares us for a deeper practice of politics: deciding what ought to be done in the absence of any authority or certainty. But, curiously, it is not possible to attain this radical imaginary without embarking at the same time on a democratic journey: a journey without a map of the stars that will call on people to identify problems, create their own power, work through their idealizations and demonic externalizations, grieve for what they cannot have, encounter difference and surprise, and make judgements with others whom they may not like or even know. But if the public fails to grasp the political power of its constituting imaginary, it will be like the Afghan Hound trapped by ignorance of its own power.