What Is an Imaginary?

Over the last few decades, the neologisms social imaginary and political imaginary have become ubiquitous in the jargon of the humanities and the theoretical social sciences. And yet, despite the pervasive use, there is remarkably little convergence on what these terms mean. How have they captivated the vernacular of contemporary social, cultural, and political theory? Tracing the sources of the idiom imaginary to phenomenological studies of psychology in 1940s France to the present, this article examines two key historical junctures: the moment when imaginary morphed from an individual to a collective category in 1960s French philosophy and its translation and insertion into anglophone cultural and political theory in the 1980s and ’90s. In contemporary anglophone theory, imaginary has become a proxy for the concepts of ideology and utopia in the wake of the culturalist turn of the 1990s and 2000s. As such, the sprouting of imaginaries is inseparable from an increasingly consensual cultural idealism that dominates contemporary cultural and political theory.