This paper discusses the formation of Castoriadis’s concept of imaginary significations and relates it to his changing readings of Marx and Weber. Castoriadis’s reflections on modern capitalism took off from the Marxian understanding of its internal contradictions, but he always had reservations about the orthodox version of this idea. His writings in the late 1950s, already critical of basic assumptions in Marx’s work, located the central contradiction in the very relationship between capital and wage labour. Labour power was not simply (...) transformed into a commodity, as Marx had argued; rather, the instituted attempt to treat it as a commodity was a contradiction in itself, between the subjectivity and the objectification of labour. Castoriadis then moved on to link this claim to Weber’s analysis of the interconnections between capitalism and bureaucracy. The main contradiction of modern capitalism, whether wholly bureaucratised as in the Soviet model or increasingly bureaucratised as in the West, now seemed to be a matter of incompatible systemic imperatives: the need to control and to mobilise the workforce. Finally, difficulties with this model – and with the revolutionary expectations based on it – led to a more decisive break with classical theories and to the formulation of a bipolar image of modernity, where the vision of an autonomous society is opposed to the logic of calculation and domination, embodied in capitalist development. On both sides there is an imaginary component, irreducible to empirical givens or systemic principles. In this regard, Castoriadis remained closer to Weber than to Marx, but he also anticipated, in a distinctive way, later emphasis on the cultural dimension of modernity, and more specifi cally the notion of modernity as a new civilisation. (shrink)

It could be conceivable that society is not an organism, that it has no structure, that it functions only temporarily or seemingly. The most obvious analogies are not the best. The Human Province, p.245 True, he [man] wants to “preserve” himself, but he also simultaneously wants other things which are inseparable from this.Crowds and Power, p. 293 The planning nature of man is a very late addition that violates his essential, his transforming nature.The Secret Heart of the Clock, p. 119 (...) Man, regarding himself as the measure of all things, is almost unknown. His progress in self-knowledge is minimal, every new theory obscures more of him than it illuminates. The Conscience of Words, p. 111. (shrink)

The idea of negative Platonism, first formulated by Jan Patočka in the early 1950s, can be understood as an interpretation of the history of philosophy, with particular reference to its Greek beginnings, as well as a strategy for critical engagement with the metaphysical tradition and a reformulation of central phenomenological themes. Patočka reconstructs the Greek road to metaphysics as a shift from a non-objectifying comprehension of the world as a totality to a quest for systematic knowledge of ultimate reality. In (...) light of this reclaimed background, he then proposes a new reading of Plato: the realm of ideas, separate from empirical reality, becomes a symbol of human freedom, understood as an ability to transcend the world and in so doing grasp it as a totalizing horizon. The concept of freedom thus links a submerged theme of metaphysics to more explicit concerns of contemporary thought. (shrink)

The notion of a ‘clash of civilizations’, which now seems to have become a fashionable cliché, should be discussed in the context of a broader set of questions: the problematic of intercivilizational encounters. This is an important but very underdeveloped part of the research programme now known as civilizational analysis. The article begins with a brief survey of the Indian experience. Indian history includes a long succession of intercivilizational encounters, both those initiated from the West (by Greeks, Muslims and Europeans) (...) and those that brought Indian influence to bear on other regions (as did the spread of Buddhism to East Asia and the ‘Indianization’ of Southeast Asia). These examples serve to sketch a phenomenology of encounters. For a more theoretical approach, the article turns to the work of Benjamin Nelson, who first introduced the concept of intercivilizational encounters. His analyses focus on the encounters that involve contacts or conflicts between the basic ‘structures of consciousness’ that define different civilizations. Such interactions can lead to fusion or to prolonged internal conflicts, but they may also be instructive because of the very absence of significant effects: in the latter case, fundamental blockages to intercivilizational borrowing or engagement are built into the structures of consciousness. For Nelson, the early modern encounter between China and the West was a prime example of that kind. The last part of the article takes the question beyond Nelson’s historical cases and relates it to the advanced phase of modernity, where the dominant type of encounters is three-cornered: it involves Western and non-Western civilizations as well as the new (modern) civilizational patterns adumbrated in the West but open to redefinitions in other contexts. (shrink)

This important new book by a major voice in the Social Imaginaries movement offers the most systematic attempt to establish conceptual and historical links between the idea of modernity as a new civilization and the notion of multiple modernities. Arnason demonstrates a theory of globalization that is still compatible with the emphasis on unity and diversity of modernity as a civilization.

The recognition of capitalism as a core component of modernity has often led to conflation of the two categories; this happens to critics as well as defenders of capitalism, and it reflects their shared but only partly acknowledged premises. A tendency to interpret capitalism as a self-contained system has strongly affected the debate on its historical significance; this reductionistic approach could be adapted to different ideological stances as well as to changing views of capitalism's long-term trajectory. The notion of a (...) `spirit of capitalism', in the sense of cultural sources essential to the constitution (and arguably also to the continuity) of the capitalist order, has been one of the most important correctives to economic determinism and reductionism, but it has proved difficult to link this dimension to other aspects of the problematic. The article surveys the contributions of Weber, Sombart, Castoriadis and - most recently - Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello to this debate. The last section then discusses the work of Fernand Braudel and suggests that it could serve to reformulate the problematic of capitalism in more multidimensional terms. (shrink)

The historical unity of the East Asian region - defined as made up of China, Korea and Japan - is based on three successive phases: the longue durée of the traditional Sinocentric order, the ear of imperialist conflicts from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, and the post-war developmentalist turn. The idea of a Confucian tradition or region is best understood as an attempt to superimpose a more emphatic conception of cultural identity on this historical constellation, and to rebuild bridges (...) between past and present. For a critical and comparative analysis of the claims made in relation to Confucianism and its modernizing potential, it is essential to move from the issue of capitalist development to a broader civilizational framework. (shrink)

The idea of entangled modernities is best understood as a complement and corrective to that of `multiple modernities': it serves to theorize the global unity and interconnections of modern socio-cultural formations in a non-reductionist and non-functionalist way. But it can also help to highlight complexity and divergence behind the outwardly uniform or parallel patterns of development. This line of thought seems particularly relevant to the history of Communism. The interdependent but divergent trajectories of the two imperial revolutions, Russian and Chinese, (...) exemplify the multiple patterns of entanglement in unusually instructive ways. In both cases, imperial legacies and traditions interacted with modernizing imperatives and geopolitical constraints, as well as with the revolutionary projects proposed as solutions to the imperial crises. The Sino-Soviet entanglement was highly asymmetric; although the Chinese connection seems to have been important at several critical junctures in Soviet history, the impact of the Soviet model on Chinese Communism was incomparably more formative. But the Chinese metamorphoses of the Soviet model deviated from the original in various ways; they were too complex and sometimes too self-destructive to be explained in terms of an adaptive logic. Rather, the transfigurations that took place at various stages - from the beginnings of Chinese Bolshevism to the aberrations of Maoism in power - can be understood as changing patterns of entanglement, combining radicalizing twists to the Soviet model with selective reactivation of Chinese traditions. (shrink)

This article argues that a civilizational perspective is central to Castoriadis’s interpretation of ancient Greece, even if he does not use the language of civilizational analysis. More specifically, his line of argument has clear affinities with Eisenstadt’s definition of the ‘civilizational dimension’ in terms of connections between cultural interpretations of the world and institutional forms of social life. Castoriadis has less to say about geocultural and geopolitical structures of the Greek world, which would also be important topics for a balanced (...) civilizational approach. His distinctive variation on the civilizational theme rests on the idea of social imaginary significations; in the ancient Greek case, this starting point leads to the reconstruction of a ‘primary grasp of the world’, an imaginary core that conditions further developments and innovations. This core component of Greek culture centres on the human condition as the existence of mortals in a world characterized by imperfect order and underlying chaos. The Homeric poems are Castoriadis’s main source for the contents and directions of this original Greek imaginary. He understands the Homeric world as a framework within which the transformation of the polis towards autonomy could be initiated. Thus, the result is a strong emphasis on the archaic period as a formative phase of the whole Greek civilizational trajectory. (shrink)

The recognition of capitalism as a core component of modernity has often led to conflation of the two categories; this happens to critics as well as defenders of capitalism, and it reflects their shared but only partly acknowledged premises. A tendency to interpret capitalism as a self-contained system has strongly affected the debate on its historical significance; this reductionistic approach could be adapted to different ideological stances as well as to changing views of capitalism's long-term trajectory. The notion of a (...) `spirit of capitalism', in the sense of cultural sources essential to the constitution of the capitalist order, has been one of the most important correctives to economic determinism and reductionism, but it has proved difficult to link this dimension to other aspects of the problematic. The article surveys the contributions of Weber, Sombart, Castoriadis and - most recently - Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello to this debate. The last section then discusses the work of Fernand Braudel and suggests that it could serve to reformulate the problematic of capitalism in more multidimensional terms. (shrink)