Bellah RN (2005) What is axial about the axial age? Eur J Sociol 46:69. doi: 10.1017/s0003975605000032 Milbank J (2009) A closer walk on the wild side: some comments on Charles Taylor’s a secular age. Stud Christ Ethics 22:89–104

David Macey, "Introduction", Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (London 1994) p. xxi Berenstein R (2008) The uneasy tensions of immanence and transcendence. Int J Polit Cult Soc 21:11–16. doi: 10.1007/s10767-008-9035-7Steger, Manfred B., 2008. The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political Ideologies from the French Revolution to the Global War on Terror, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. The notion of ‘social imaginaries’ is frequently used, across disciplines, but often without sufficient conceptual elaboration and explanation. Moreover, discussions of social imaginaries that we come across as presented in specific disciplines often ignore the discussions of social imaginaries in other disciplines. The journal aims to fill an important gap in contemporary research by offering a platform for cross-disciplinary debates relating to social imaginaries. Originating in the sociological and philosophical thought of Émile Durkheim, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Lacan, and crystallized in landmark works by Cornelius Castoriadis, Paul Ricoeur, and Claude Lefort, the notion of the imaginary refers to the constitution of reality in social, political and cultural life. As a human capacity and activity, the imaginary and imagination allow human beings to creatively grasp reality in a variety of ways. Thought of as plural, ‘social imaginaries’ refers to constellations of power that frame politics, culture, economy, and society on multiple levels in diverse historical and social or cultural contexts. The term points to several interrelated trends in the humanities and social sciences that are concerned with developing a new approach to the question of modernity. First, it reveals the concern with—and emphasis on—the imagination as creative and no longer only reproductive, or fictive; as such, forms of social creativity are seen as the workings of the creative or productive imagination. Second, social imaginaries highlight the phenomenon of collectively instituted meaning and its inter-cultural variations. Third, foregrounding ‘imaginaries’ provides a corrective to a one-dimensional over-emphasis on theoretical reason or rationality as the central tenet (or promise) of modernity. Finally, the elaboration of ‘social imaginaries’ underscores the ongoing, albeit incomplete, hermeneutical turn in the human sciences. Therefore, instead of focusing on the singular ‘imagination’ or ‘reason’ as a faculty of the human individual, it seeks rather to emphasize the constitutive elements of socio-cultural ‘reality’, such as ‘social imaginaries’ and ‘forms of rationality’. In brief, one focus of the journal is the cultural hermeneutic of modernity (and ‘multiple modernities’), a need for which the socio-cultural contexts of worldhood, imagination, reason and civilizational forms point to. In the context of the grounding of modernity that implies a variety of ‘others’, the journal is concerned to elucidate dimensions of of meaning, action and power as the precondition for inter-subjective modes of being-in-the-world. It is concerned with the comparative analysis of civilizations and concomitant elaboration of world histories, which however have yet to fully assimilate the hermeneutical turn. The journal aims to be a forum for contributions to what Johann P. Arnason characterizes as a ‘paradigm in the making’. For this it seeks to foster disciplinary rigor with an interdisciplinary disposition. Frank, Thomas, Albrecht Koschorke, Susanne Lüdemann, and Ethel Matala de Mazza. 2002. Des Kaisers neue Kleider: über das Imaginäre politischer Herrschaft; Texte, Bilder, Lektüren. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Krummel, John W.M. 2016. Introduction to Miki Kiyoshi and his Logic of the Imagination. Social Imaginaries 2(1):13–24. https://doi.org/10.5840/si2016212. Steger, Manfred B. 2008. The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political Ideologies from the French Revolution to the Global War on Terror. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Anderson, Benedict R. 2006. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Editorial Collective. 2015. The Social Imaginaries. Social Imaginaries 1(1):7–13. Editorial. https://doi.org/10.5840/si2015111. John R. Searle uses the expression "social reality" rather than "social imaginary". [3] Castoriadis [ edit ]

Project MUSE Mission

Vries, Imar de. Tantalisingly Close: An Archaeology of Communication Desires in Discourses of Mobile Wireless Media. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012. "Tantalisingly Close".