Abstract

In social and political theory, the imagination is often used in accounting both for creativity, innovation, and change and for sociopolitical stagnation and the inability to promote innovation and change. To what extent, however, can we attribute such seemingly contradictory outcomes to the same mental faculty? To address this question, this paper develops a comprehensive account of the political imagination, one that explains the various roles played by imagination in politics and thus accounts for the promises and limits of the political imagination. This conceptualization of the political imagination allows us to account for the simultaneous presence of its seemingly contradictory roles—such as promoting stability and order on the one hand while generating creativity and critical innovation on the other.