Article

Philosophy and Social Criticism

2017, Vol. 43(9) 911–931
Neo-liberalism and other ª The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0191453717713808
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Noëlle McAfee
Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA

Abstract
This article looks at how various political cultures and imaginaries occlude the public’s deeply
democratic political role, especially the currently reigning anti-political culture of neo-liberalism.
Even in an era when millions of people the world over take to the streets in protest, dominant
political imaginaries position most of the world’s people as largely powerless. What is needed is a
radical political imaginary along the lines that Cornelius Castoriadis suggests. This imaginary
foregrounds the ways in which all social and political formations are already constituted by human
beings’ ability to create new formations in the absence of foundations. But ignorant of this power,
people are trapped in imaginaries where it seems that power resides elsewhere, only in halls of
state or corporate boardrooms. This article offers an account that identifies where power ori-
ginates and how it can be reclaimed through a more radical democratic political imaginary. The
article proceeds as follows: the first two sections discuss varieties of political culture and how,
despite seeming natural, they are actually products of underlying political imaginaries. Then I
explain the concept of political imaginary and how the current reigning imaginary of neo-liberalism
curiously undercuts the practice of politics itself. Under neo-liberalism, market solutions are seen
as superior to political ones. Yet now even at the time of this writing, there is a backlash against
neo-liberalism: from the right in a search for an older order (which is still anti-political) and from
the left for more public power on the streets. While the latter is, in my view, far better than the
former, it still does not go far enough in imagining politics and power otherwise. In the final section
I draw on Castoriadis to flesh out the idea of a radical political imaginary.

Keywords
Cornelius Castoriadis, democracy, neo-liberalism, radical imagination, Raymond Williams

Corresponding author:
Noëlle McAfee, Department of Philosophy, Emory University, 561 S. Kilgo Circle, Bowden Hall 214, Atlanta,
GA 30322, USA.
Email: [email protected]
912 Philosophy and Social Criticism 43(9)

The self-transformation of society concerns social doing – the doing of men and women in
society, and nothing else.1

When I was a child, my family was given a prize-winning Afghan Hound that was being
retired from competition. The former owner noted that the dog had the power to jump the
8-foot-tall fence that surrounded our back yard. But don’t worry, she said, the dog
doesn’t know she can jump that fence. So there was no danger that she would ever try.
That Afghan Hound, with her potential but unrealized power, has remained with me as an
apt metaphor for a public that fails to realize its own democratic power. Polities’ mem-
bers, trapped by an imaginary of their own powerlessness with respect to the social and
political, do not even try to jump the fence.
Democratic politics is complex and much theorized, but at bottom it could be defined
as a process of collectively constituting and directing public institutions and policies in
the absence of other authorities or foundations – and it also includes ongoing struggles
for participation and inclusion in this very project. The difficulty of democratic politics is
that it invariably occurs in the midst of uncertainty and disagreement and in the absence
of agreed-upon guides for action.2 But we should also note another difficulty: often
democratic power is obscured and covered over by alternative accounts of how decisions
are to be made. These accounts include unconscious imaginaries about how change
happens and power operates, about who has agency and who does not. On their basis,
habits and practices spring up – political cultures – that soon come to seem natural, as
just how things work.
This article looks at how various political cultures and imaginaries occlude the pub-
lic’s political role, especially the currently reigning anti-political culture of neo-
liberalism. Even in an era when millions of people the world over take to the streets
in protest, reigning political imaginaries position most of the world’s people as largely
powerless; they impede the public’s ability to jump the fence. What is needed is a radical
political imaginary along the lines that Cornelius Castoriadis suggests. This imaginary
foregrounds the ways in which all social and political formations are already constituted
by human beings’ ability to create new formations in the absence of foundations. But
ignorant of this power, people are trapped in imaginaries where it seems that power
resides elsewhere, only in halls of state or corporate boardrooms. This article offers an
account that identifies where power originates and how it can be reclaimed, through a
more radical democratic political imaginary.
The article proceeds as follows: the first two sections discuss varieties of political
culture and how, despite seeming natural, they are actually products of underlying
political imaginaries. Then I explain the concept of political imaginary and how the
current reigning imaginary of neo-liberalism curiously undercuts the practice of pol-
itics itself. Under neo-liberalism, market solutions are seen as superior to political
ones. Yet now even at the time of this writing, there is a backlash against neo-
liberalism: from the right in a search for an older order (which is still anti-political)
and from the left for more public power on the streets. While the latter is, in my view,
far better than the former, it still does not go far enough in imagining politics and
power otherwise. In the final section I draw on Castoriadis to flesh out the idea of a
radical political imaginary.
McAfee 913

I Varieties of political culture

In a graduate course on democratization several years ago, I posed the following ques-
tions 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, com-
plain, 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 dis-
cussion 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 prac-
tices 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
914 Philosophy and Social Criticism 43(9)

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, volun-
tary 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 Amer-
ican 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 pre-
vailing 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
McAfee 915

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 inter-
national 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, polit-
ical 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.
916 Philosophy and Social Criticism 43(9)

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 focus-
ing 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 mono-
poly 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 legiti-
macy 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 over-
throwing 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 Lipp-
mann 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
McAfee 917

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 under-
stands 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 Witt-
genstein, uses the term social imaginary to point to ‘the way ordinary people “imagine”
their social surroundings’; it is ‘that common understanding that makes possible com-
mon practices’.17 It includes expectations we have of each other, common understand-
ings 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

In these views, a social imaginary is both a shared mental image of how a particular
society does work and is a blueprint to keep it working that way.19 Yet it is not, as we will
find below with the work of Cornelius Castoriadis and others, a doorway to imagining a
different arrangement.
Fraser and Taylor are describing the mostly conscious features of a political imagin-
ary, but to these we must add its unconscious aspects, namely those involved in devel-
oping 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 con-
structing an integrated identity is betrayed by unintegrated bits, both positive and neg-
ative, 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
918 Philosophy and Social Criticism 43(9)

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 bor-
ders 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 trans-
mission 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 transge-
nerationally as phantoms’.26 Rashkin looks at the effects felt on individual children, such
McAfee 919

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 obser-
vations 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 uncon-
scious forms via cues from the environments, whether unconscious transmissions of
affects, secrets, or crypts. A related phenomenon is what Hardt and Negri call the multi-
tude 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 delib-
erators 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.
920 Philosophy and Social Criticism 43(9)

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 conse-
quence 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 polit-
ical melts into economics. Rather than the forum, the space for decision-making
becomes the boardroom or the closed-door meeting of leaders with economists whisper-
ing 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 sprink-
ling 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 Mal-
colm 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, econo-
mization 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
McAfee 921

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 imagin-
ary. In the years between the Great Depression and the late 1970s, ‘we were all Key-
nesians’ 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 frame-
work 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 govern-
ments 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 lead-
ers 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
922 Philosophy and Social Criticism 43(9)

politics. Where politics engages uncertainty, neo-liberalism ignores it. Democratic pol-
itics 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 vic-
tims 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, ecosys-
tems 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 besee-
chers 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.
McAfee 923

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 move-
ments and deliberative bodies, to hold globalized neo-liberal forces accountable. More-
over, 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 polit-
ical 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 polit-
ical ‘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 Mans-
bridge.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
924 Philosophy and Social Criticism 43(9)

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 orga-
nizations, 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, repre-
sentations 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 imag-
ination is an instituting imagination.
McAfee 925

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 develop-
ment, 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, acquies-
cing, 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 Christian-
ity, 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 cre-
ated’. 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,
926 Philosophy and Social Criticism 43(9)

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 origi-
nated 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
McAfee 927

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.

Acknowledgements
The author acknowledges the following: Zachary Vanderveen for collaborating on an earlier
iteration of this project, an anonymous reviewer for insightful suggestions and the Fox Center
for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University for a research fellowship during the 2016–17
academic year.

Notes
1. Castoriadis (1987: 373).
2. See Barber (1984) and Rancière (1999).
3. Williams (1983: 90).
4. See also Goldfarb (2012).
5. Tocqueville (1945: II, 2.5).
6. Skocpol (2003).
7. Williams (1977: 121–7).
8. Lippmann (1922).
9. Arendt (1958).
10. Arendt continues, writing:
What keeps people together after the fleeting moment of action has passed (what we
today call ‘organization’) and what, at the same time, they keep alive through remain-
ing together is power. And whoever, for whatever reasons, isolates himself and does not
partake in such being together, forfeits power and becomes impotent, no matter how
great his strength and how valid his reasons. (1958: 201)
11. Habermas (1987).
12. Arendt (1958: 200).
13. Weber (1946: 78).
14. See, for example, Verba, Schlozman and Brady (1995).
15. My use of this term is connected with Jacques Lacan’s tripartite distinction between what he
called the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic realms. I borrow Lacan’s notion of the
Imaginary in a very loose and metaphorical manner. Lacan’s notion of the Real is of that
which is refractory to expression, something that can never be articulated but is something that
we ‘trip over’ as we try to make sense of things. The Imaginary is the field of identification,
our fantasy of who we are that begins to constitute our sense of self and desirous relations to
others. The Symbolic is the realm of language, rules and a ceaseless attempt to have our
928 Philosophy and Social Criticism 43(9)

desires satisfied. For much of his career Lacan thought that once we entered the Symbolic we
left the Imaginary behind; but later he understood it as part of a Borromean knot (a set of three
linked rings that would come apart if one were removed) and so, he argued, we need to attend to
its continued influence throughout life. What is interesting here is that in Lacan’s terms the
Imaginary is not merely a fiction but is a way of seeing that situates us in a world, that gives us a
place even though there clearly is no ‘real’ objective place and picture of the whole that we can
count on. The Imaginary produces a sense of meaning and belonging. One’s Imaginary does not
‘pick out’ reality any better than another does. Its function is to produce a sense of self.
16. Fraser (2009: 493).
17. Taylor (2004: 23).
18. ibid.: 24.
19. Perrin (2006) discusses democratic imagination as a creative capacity of citizenship, but here I
am focusing on the democratic imagination about politics and power, that is, how democracy
is constituted, not just what democratic citizens can produce.
20. Volkan (1997: 89–90).
21. ibid.: 90.
22. ibid.: 103–4.
23. ibid.: 104–5.
24. ibid.: 105.
25. Abraham and Torok (1994: 181).
26. Rashkin (1999: 433–53).
27. Castoriadis, ‘Done and to Be Done’, in The Castoriadis Reader, pp. 361–417 (1997b: 377).
28. How exactly the political imaginary of a polity can shift is an empirical question that may be
answered, at least in part, by recent research in complex adaptive systems. If polities can be
understood using complex adaptive system modeling, this suggests that the process of change
should be understood neither as a system-wide shift in norms that are then assimilated by
individuals nor as the result of a conscious thought process on the part of a majority of citizens.
Instead, change – if it occurs – will be a result of a series of complex interactions between
various agents in their dealings with different problems. According to complex adaptive
systems theory, it is through the many small opportunities for transformation that global
phenomena may emerge. See Miller and Page (2007) and Sawyer (2005). Note also Deleuze
and Guattari’s language to describe such change, especially their distinction between the
‘molecular’ and the ‘molar’ (1987: 64–5). The democratic ideal draws upon experience of
many ‘molecular’ shifts and is meant to guide others. Its value, of course, must be shown in the
changes – both molar and molecular – it makes possible.
29. There are two harms at work: (1) economic truisms usurp the place of deliberative politics; and
(2) the economic ‘truisms’ are hardly true at all. To the contrary, they are based on a free-
market, anti-regulatory, pro-austerity bias that is not at all backed up by data. See, for exam-
ple, Paul Krugman, ‘The Austerity Delusion’, The Guardian (29 April 2015).
30. Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos (2015: 209).
31. See Time Magazine’s cover story on 31 December 1965: ‘The Economy: We Are All Key-
nesians Now’, accessed 22 February 2014, accessible @: http://content.time.com/time/maga
zine/article/0,9171,842353,00.html
32. See Thomas I. Palley, ‘From Keynesianism to Neoliberalism: Shifting Paradigms in Econom-
ics’, in Foreign Policy in Focus (5 May 2004).
McAfee 929

33. See the Economist’s story, ‘The Rich Get Richer’ (12 September 2013), accessed 25 February
2014, accessible @ http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2013/09/daily-chart-8
34. Harvey (2005: [e-book] 18 of 710).
35. Brown (2015: 28).
36. This distinction between ideal and sullied neo-liberalism may map on to Albena Azmanova’s
between the Stepmother and the Daddy State (Azmanova, 2010: 397). Briefly she charts the
following stages of capitalism: (1) 19th-century entrepreneurial capitalism; (2) organized
capitalism that emerged in the 1930s with regulations and policies aimed at economic growth;
(3) the emergence of neo-liberal ‘disorganized’ capitalism which coincided with post-
industrial knowledge economies; and (4) what she sees as an emerging stage of reorganized
capitalism triggered by the need to attend to the consequences of globalization, namely the
emergence of winners and losers. The state-overseeing stage 2 capitalism, a.k.a. regulatory
and the Welfare State, she calls the Nanny State; disorganized neo-liberal stage 3 has a
Stepmother State; and stage 4 a DaddyState. I would say that as soon as deregulation began,
Daddy has been waiting in the wings to bail out capital when it fails (e.g., is ‘too big to fail’).
Neo-liberals demonize the state (as a stepmother) when it threatens to regulate; but then turn to
Daddy as soon as they need to be rescued. These are not two separate stages but two oscillating
moments within a neo-liberal era, though it is true that social justice claims in response to neo-
liberal globalization are still developing.
37. Both David Harvey and the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz point out this
hypocrisy. See Harvey (2005) and Stiglitz (2010).
38. In the USA alone we can count the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, the housing bust of
2006–12, the dot.com bust of the 1990s, and the recession of 2008.
39. Herndon, Ash and Pollin (2013).
40. Diez (2011).
41. As Aristotle noted, we do not deliberate about what is the case; we deliberate about what we
might bring about: ‘What we do deliberate about are things that are in our power and can be
realized in action’; about things that are inexact and whose outcomes are unpredictable, about
matters of action rather than matters of science. And ‘when great issues are at stake, we
distrust our own abilities as insufficient to decide the matter and call in others to join us in
our deliberations’ (1990: 1111a32, 1112b3–10). Ultimately, ‘the object of deliberation and the
object of choice are identical’ because what we are doing in our deliberation is trying to decide
what to do. Aristotle went to great pains to make sure his students understood that deliberation
is not aimed at matters of fact but is aimed at indeterminate matters of choice and action. This
is a lesson missed by those who may think of deliberation as ascertaining moral truth. We
deliberate about what we should do, and on questions of great consequence we bring others –
different others – into our deliberations so that we have a better chance of making a better
choice that will work for the community as a whole.
42. Dussel (2008, 2013).
43. See, in particular Mansbridge (1983), Barber (1984), MacIntyre (1984), Sandel (1998), and
the later Rawls (1993).
44. See Walzer (1983), Jaggar (1983).
45. http://www.nytimes.com/1989/11/28/world/clamor-east-malcontents-power-brokers-civic-
forum-takes-hold-prague.html
46. Rendtorff (2008).
930 Philosophy and Social Criticism 43(9)

47. Castoriadis (1987: 369–73).

48. Williams (1977: 122).
49. ibid.: 123.
50. Castoriadis (1997b: 356).
51. ibid.: 274–5.
52. ibid.: 275.

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