Imagined Democracies
Necessary Political Fictions

In our era of mass electronic communications, political realities are produced by believable fictions that echo popular desires.

Yaron Ezrahi (Author)

9781107025752, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 15 October 2012

340 pages, 3 b/w illus.
23.4 x 15.6 x 2.2 cm, 0.7 kg

'This book offers an original revisionist, theoretically eclectic approach that takes on the postmodern problematisations of contemporary democracy. In the vein of other contemporary theorists of social imaginaries like Charles Taylor and Benedict Anderson, Ezrahi's book … moves beyond these thinkers to offer a unique approach.' Bryant W. Sculos, Political Studies Review

This book proposes a revisionist approach to democratic politics. Yaron Ezrahi focuses on the creative unconscious collective imagination that generates ever-changing visions of legitimate power and authority, which compete for enactment and institutionalization in the political arena. If, in the past, political authority was grounded in fictions such as the divine right of kings, the laws of nature, historical determinism and scientism, today the space of democratic politics is filled with multiple alternative social imaginaries of the desirable political order. Exposure to electronic mass media has made contemporary democratic publics more aware that credible popular fictions have greater impact on shaping our political realities than do rational social choices or moral arguments. The pressing political question in contemporary democracy is, therefore, how to select and enact political fictions that promote peace and how to found the political order on checks and balances between alternative political imaginaries of freedom and justice.

Part I. Necessary Fictions of the Political and the Reality of Political Fictions: 1. The contest over the rightful domain of the imagination
2. The revival and contemporary legacy of Giambatista Vico (1668–1744) as a modern theorist of the political imagination
3. Modes of imagining: elements of a theory of the political imagination
4. Naturalization and historicization as strategies of the political imagination
Part II. Modern Common Sense and the Rise of Modern Political Imaginaries: 5. The historicity of common sense and the role of scientism in the modern political imagination
6. Empiricism, induction, and visibility: the moral epistemology of democratic political power
7. The performing arts and the performance of politics: the dialectics between the transparent and self-concealing imagination
Part III. Modern Imaginaries of Democratic Political Agencies and Causality: 8. Voluntary action, the fear of theatricality, and the materialization of the political
9. Animated fictions: self (as) fulfilling prophecy and the performative imaginaries of democratic political agencies
10. Individuals between liberal and illiberal corporations
11. The impact of culture, the cultivation of the individual interior in literature, painting, and music
Part IV. The Postmodern Turn and the Return of Political Theatricality: 12. Mass media and the refictionalization of agency and reality
13. The ethics and pragmatics of the democratic political imagination: on choosing the imaginaries we want to live by.

Subject Areas: Political science & theory [JPA], History of ideas [JFCX]