The primary focus of my research is on the concept of the “political imagination” and the roles played by imagination in politics and the history of political thought. The imagination is one of the most basic human mental faculties. I argue that just like reason and emotions, the imagination is crucial for our understanding of politics and of key political concepts such as justice, freedom, legitimacy, and stability. I am working on two book projects that recover the historical meaning of this concept and show how it can enrich our study of past and present democratic practices. Alongside these projects, I am currently co-editing a special issue of Polity dedicated to the “political imagination,” aiming to increase awareness of and engagement with this concept among political theorists and across the discipline of political science more generally.
Project I: The Democratic Imagination
My first book manuscript, Democratic Phantasies: Political Imagination and the Athenian Democracy, offers a new theoretical account of the “democratic imagination”—that is, the potential role of imagination in democratic politics. It is motivated by the current global crisis of liberal democracy and the challenges posed by new forms of populism and authoritarianism, polarization, and misinformation. Traditional models of democratic theory tend to put a heavy emphasis on the rational capabilities of democratic citizens and the importance of rational deliberation grounded in public reason. But recent threats to liberal democracy, from citizens storming capitals to the global rise of autocratic populism, call into question some of these ideals and their applicability to our divided political world. How can citizens rationally deliberate and reason with each other when they disagree about what constitutes basic facts or live in separate epistemic realities? How can they find common ground on questions of school curriculum or reproductive rights when they are so deeply divided about the fundamental values that should guide society? In many ways, the current crisis of liberal democracy reveals the limits of reason and rationality in politics, thus undermining a central political ideal that goes back at least to the Enlightenment. We need an alternative.
Democratic Phantasies offers that alternative by recovering the importance of imagination for democratic politics and citizenship. The imagination provides the creativity and improvisation democratic citizens need to meet the demands of a changing world and motivate collective action. Simultaneously, the imagination supports numerous beliefs, norms, and institutions— founding myths, national identities, and even the ideas of “the people” or popular sovereignty—which help to maintain stability and continuity in pluralistic societies. Democratic Phantasies introduces the idea of a ‘democratic imagination’: a form of collective envisioning that strikes a balance between these different functions of the imagination, promoting both innovation and stability, diversity and unity, persistence and change. I argue that a democratic imagination is born out of the shared activities of democratic citizens. It contributes to the collective agency of a democratic demos and maintains the effective capacity of that demos to do things together. It reproduces the minimal unity that makes collective agency and action possible, including a shared identity centered around civic partnership and a commitment to a project of collective self-governance. At the same time, the unity of a democratic imagination remains compatible with the autonomy and freedom of the members of the community and allows—indeed, even encourages—diversity of viewpoints and beliefs and experimentation with different ways of life.
In this book, I focus on one of the most creative and imaginative moments in human history: the ancient Athenian democracy. I show, first, that we find in classical historiography, prose, drama, and philosophy essential resources that can enrich our modern understanding of the imagination and its political functions. The modern separation of reason and imagination and the exclusive focus on the latter would have been unthinkable for the ancients. Indeed, for the ancient Athenians, imagination, perhaps even more than reason, governed much of human activity. It is hard to overstate the degree of imaginative creativity and innovation found in classical Athens: from art, poetry, painting, drama, and literature to oratory, science, speculative thought, institutional design, and military tactics. The book considers how ancient resources can enrich our modern understanding of the political functions of the imagination. Working with ancient theories of the mind—in particular, with Plato and Aristotle—the book develops a nuanced conception of the political imagination, thus contributing to contemporary debates on the role of aesthetics and imagination in political life, enriching our political epistemology, and providing fresh insights into individual and collective political behavior.
Second, I draw from these materials to develop a new concept of a democratic imagination. Through close studies of ancient resources, I argue that classical Athens’ democratic culture and institutions fostered imaginative creativity, providing an engine for remarkable innovation and growth in all aspects of life. While the creativity of imagination was crucial for Athens’ democracy, ancient critics of democracy—like Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle—warned that such a degree of creativity and innovation would inevitably lead to anarchy and total collapse of social order. Despite these anxieties, the Athenians were able to balance this creative spirit with the stabilizing functions of the imagination, utilizing their traditions, customs, and shared identity to tame the restless and boundless inclinations of the creative imagination. I argue that understanding this delicate balance provides us with new insights into how the ancient Athenians succeeded in combining stability and continuity with innovation and change and maintaining their democracy against external threats and internal factions.
The book is currently under consideration for the Philosophy of Memory and Imagination series at Oxford University Press (ed. Amy Kind) and is scheduled to be sent out for review by August 2024. To date, this project has generated several stand-alone papers. “Political Imagination and its Limits” (Synthese, 2022), proposes a new conceptual framework for the “political imagination,” outlining the roles imagination plays in politics. In “Political Phantasies: Aristotle on Imagination and Collective Action” (American Journal of Political Science, 2022), I offer an original account of the political implications of Aristotle’s theory of imagination. I show that a “shared imaginary” is a precondition for collective action, thus establishing the importance of imagination for any successful political partnership. Finally, “Towards a Democratic Imagination” (forthcoming, Polity) extends this theoretical framework to account for the specifically democratic potential of the imagination—that is, the unique roles played by imagination in democratic politics and citizenship.
Taken as a whole, this book project generates novel theoretical insights into the role of imagination in past and present democratic politics. At the same time, it also seeks to inform democratic citizens who are facing tremendous challenges, from climate change and racial justice to populism and democratic backsliding. Addressing these challenges requires not only a great amount of ingenuity and innovation. It also demands that we reimagine the meaning and practice of democratic citizenship today and utilize our political imagination to promote a more stable, just, and diverse collective life.
Project II: Imagination in the History of Political Thought
Alongside my work on the democratic imagination, I study the role of imagination in the history of philosophy. Pre-modern philosophers had very different conceptions of imagination than we have today. They attributed important political roles to the imagination and were often concerned with the potential threats it poses to political stability. My second book project, The Catching of Beelzebub: Thomas Hobbes’s Philosophy of Imagination (in progress), uncovers this history, focusing on the relationship between imagination, knowledge, and authority in the history of ideas.
Early modernity and the Enlightenment are often described as the age of reason. Yet, they were also the “age of imagination,” or rather the struggle between reason and imagination. Like many of his contemporaries, Hobbes sought to ground political authority in objective knowledge of the world. Yet, Hobbes recognized that the struggle over authority is often determined on imaginary grounds. The events of the English Civil War proved to him that prophets and religious leaders pose a political problem because of their ability to enrapture citizens, to hold their imaginations captive and thus undermine their rational acceptance of political authority. In this project, I argue that Hobbes’s natural and civic science are deeply motivated by his concern with the imagination, a concern that can speak to our current crises of authority and legitimacy. We know the difficulty of advancing public policy by appealing solely to scientific and empirical reasoning. The recent global response to the Covid-19 pandemic illustrates it all too well. The recovery of imagination from the age of reason helps us identify imagination’s capacity to supplement our reason-based political discourse while highlighting the need to guard against the dangers of inflamed imagination.
In a series of published papers, I show that understanding the unique threats posed by the imagination sheds new light on some of the most puzzling aspects of Hobbes’s political theory. In “Leviathan Versus Beelzebub: Hobbes on the Prophetic Imagination” (History of European Ideas, 2023), I contextualize Hobbes’s theory of imagination to reveal his unique intervention in the scientific debates of the seventeenth century. I argue that Hobbes’s theory of imagination illustrates a fundamental tension between his scientific and political commitments. Hobbes’s theory of imagination remains loyal to the leading ideas of the “new science.” Nonetheless, it makes several important interventions. These are designed, I argue, to rule out any potential use of imagination in the scientific explanation of prophecy, a practice that Hobbes viewed as posing severe threats to political order. In “The Sleeping Subject: On the Use and Abuse of Imagination in Hobbes’s Leviathan” (Hobbes Studies, 2020), I further investigate the political implications of Hobbes’s theory of imagination, focusing on his solution to the threats posed by imagination to political stability. This interpretation reveals how some of the most controversial aspects of Hobbes’s political thought—such as his insistence on strict censorship—can be viewed as part of his solution to the pervasive dangers of the imagination.
Additional Research and Collaborations
In addition to these two long-term projects, I have several stand-alone papers that further explore questions of political authority, legitimacy, and stability. The first, “Divine Epiphany and Political Authority in Plato’s Republic” (History of Political Thought, 2023), offers a new interpretation of Plato’s theological principles in the Republic. The philosophers are meant to be the sole source of political authority in the ideal city. Ancient Greek theology, however, espoused a model of epiphany in which any individual, in principle, could experience an encounter with the divine. In the absence of a central religious organization, such individual epiphanic experiences often conferred significant moral and political authority on those who experienced them. I argue that Plato seeks to undermine this potential threat to the authority of the philosophers, calling into question the possibility of an individual encounter with the divine. At the same time, Plato appropriates the language and concepts of divine epiphany in the service of his new, philosophical model of epiphany, thereby further establishing the philosophers’ authority and legitimacy in his ideal city.
Second, “Revisiting the Meaning of syllogos at Thucydides 2.22” (working paper), contributes to the longstanding debate on the nature of Pericles’ leadership during the Peloponnesian War. Was Pericles a devoted democrat, or was he establishing a de-facto monarchy? I offer a new interpretation of a key passage in the History, where Thucydides describes Pericles’ decision not to call an assembly during a Peloponnesian attack on Athens. I argue that this passage should be read as demonstrating Pericles’ attempt to prevent not only an assembly meeting at a crucial moment but also any kind of public debate and deliberation that may contradict his executive decision. This new interpretation provides additional evidence in favor of the monarchic or un-democratic tendencies of Thucydides’ Pericles and new insights into Thucydides’ understating of collective action.
I have an active interest in collaborations across the different subfields of political theory and political science. In “Du Bois’ Platonic Egalitarianism” (in preparation), Desmond Jagmohan and I offer an original account of the underlying Platonic themes in W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk. Understanding Du Bois’ appropriation of Plato’s doctrine, we argue, sheds new light on some of the most controversial aspects of this work, revealing deeply egalitarian intentions within ideas that are normally considered elitist and paternalistic. This collaboration illustrates what I take to be the broader potential uses of classical political thought today and the applicability of the history of political thought to a wide range of contemporary topics and debates. It provides resources for innovative teaching in political theory, drawing new connections between different authors, and engaging undergraduates in the study of the history of political thought by relating it to topics they deeply care about today.
In two other projects, I combine my broader interest in both contemporary normative theory and in the potential intersections and collaborations between political theory and empirical political science. In “Disagree to Agree: Forming Consensus Around Basic Income in Times of Political Divisiveness” (in Political Activism and Basic Income Guarantee, 2020), Olga Lenczewska and I examine a variety of historical and contemporary justifications for Universal Basic Income and identify the conditions under which such policy may become the object of a Rawlsian “overlapping consensus” among different individuals and activist groups. In “Hobbes and Locke on Regulation of the Religious Economy and Civil Disorder” (working paper), Abby Fanlo and I engage in an innovative collaboration between political theory and empirical political science, offering a theoretical-empirical examination of the relationship between religious toleration and political instability. We turn to Hobbes and Locke to formulate a set of opposing theoretical expectations regarding the nature of the relationship and provide a robust empirical evaluation of these hypotheses. This analysis allows us not only to reevaluate the position of two influential thinkers in light of the relevant empirical evidence but also to draw lessons for contemporary liberal democracies in dealing with questions of diversity, toleration, and religious pluralism.