Imagined Democracies : Necessary Political Fictions (Hardcover)

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.