Written by members of the Social Imaginaries Editorial Collective, these programmatic essays showcase new critical interventions in understandings of social imaginaries and the human condition. They include a new comparative approach to theorizing Castoriadis, Ricoeur, and Taylor; the rethinking of the creative imagination in relation tocommon sense; analyses of political imaginaries in neoliberal and constitutional contexts from perspectives drawing on Gauchet and Lefort; and the taking up questions of historical continuity and discontinuity in civilizational worlds. In addressing pressing questions concerning social imaginaries, the book advances the field as a whole. The book includes a Foreword by George H. Taylor.

This book is a must-read for all scholars interested in social and political imaginaries and will appeal to researchers and graduate students working across a wide variety of disciplines in the human sciences.

Suzi Adamsis a Senior Lecturer in the College of the Humanities and Social Sciences (Flinders University), Permanent External Fellow of the East-Central Institute for Philosophy (Charles University), inaugural Senior Research Fellow at the new Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies "Futures of Sustainability: Modernisation, Transformation, Control" (University of Hamburg), and a co-ordinating editor of theSocial Imaginariesjournal and book series. She has published widely on the social imaginaries field. She has recently edited the English language publication of the Ricoeur-Castoriadis radio encounter from 1985, with accompanying essays (Rowman& Littlefield International, 2017) and is currently writing a monograph entitledCastoriadis and the Imaginary Element(Rowman& Littlefield International).

Jeremy C.A. Smith is in the School of Arts at Federation University Australia. Currently Program Coordinator, Bachelor of Social Science, he held the positions of Deputy Head of School (2016-2018), Associate Dean Learning and Teaching (2011-2014) and Deputy Head of School (2007-2011). He has published his research inEuropean Journal of Social Theory,Critical Horizons,Journal of Intercultural Studies,Atlantic Studies andPolitical Power and Social Theory.He is the author ofEurope and the Americas: State Formation, Capitalism and Civilizations in Atlantic Modernity (Brill, 2006) andDebating Civilizations: Interrogating Civilizational Analysis in a Global Age (Manchester University Press, 2017), as well as a co-editor of two other edited collections. He is also a Coordinating Editor of the international journalSocial Imaginaries (Zeta Books) and theSocial Imaginaries book series (Rowman& Littlefield International). His current research work revolves around civilizational analysis and social imaginaries.

Foreword George H. Taylor

1. The Social Imaginaries Field: Overview and Introduction Suzi Adams and Jeremy C.A. Smith

2. Clarifying Social Imaginaries: Castoriadis, Ricoeur, and Taylor in Discussion Suzi Adams

3. Rethinking the History of the Productive Imagination in Relation to Common Sense John W.M. Krummel

4. History, Civilizations, Imaginaries Jeremy C.A. Smith

5. Political and Constitutional Imaginaries Paul Blokker

6. The Political Imaginary of European Hypermodernity: Marcel Gauchet and Contemporary Neo-Liberal Democracy Natalie J Doyle

Index