Conflicting imaginaries: antagonism and the sociology of utopian aspirations
Abstract
This article provides a re-reading of Karl Mannheim’s founding treatise on the sociology of science, Ideology and Utopia (1929), against the backdrop of current invocations of a ‘crisis of truth’ as well as a ‘crisis of political imagination.’ Mannheim’s own historical diagnosis shows many lines of connection to the present, as he assumes both a radicalization of political conflict and an exhaustion of utopian forces, which makes emancipatory alternatives to the status quo increasingly inconceivable. Mannheim offers resources for rethinking the conflictual, antagonistic character of political imagination and gives way to elaborating a heuristic conception of antagonistic political imaginaries.
References
Arendt, Hannah (1939), Schreib doch mal hard facts über Dich: Briefe 1939 bis 1975. Beck, Munich 2016.
Boghossian, Paul (2006), Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism. Clarendon, Oxford.
Castoriadis, Cornelius (1991), Power, Politics, Autonomy, Oxford UP, New York-Oxford.
Castoriadis, Cornelius (1997), «Democracy as Procedure and Democracy as Regime» in Constellations, n. 4(1), pp. 1-18.
Dyk, Silke van (2017), «Krise der Faktizität? Über Wahrheit und Lüge in der Politik und die Aufgabe der Kritik » in Prolka n. 188(47): 347-367.
Gabriel, Markus (2015), Fields of Sense: A New Realist Ontology, Edinburgh, Edinburgh UP.
Gantner, Gösta (2021), Möglichkeit: Über einen Grundbegriff der praktischen Philosophie und kritischen Gesellschaftstheorie, transcrip, Bielefeld.
Habermas, Jürgen (2011), «Between Naturalism and Religion», in International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, n. 70, p. 179.
Hampe, Michael (2016), Donald Trump: Die Katerstimmung der pubertären Theoretiker. Die Zeit, December 15.
Hendricks, Vincent F., Vestergaard M. (2019), Reality Lost: Markets of Attention, Misinformation and Manipulation, Springer Open, Cham.
Latour, Bruno (2004), «Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern» in Critical Inquiry, n. 2(30), pp. 225-248.
Lepore, Jill (2016), The Age of Facts Is Over, The New Yorker, March 14.
Mannheim, Karl (1929), Ideology and Utopia, Routledge, London 2016.
Mannheim,Karl (1970), Freiheit und geplante Demokratie, VS, Wiesbaden.
Marchart, Oliver (2018), Thinking Antagonism: Political Ontology After Laclau, Edinburgh UP, Edinburgh.
Müller, Jan-Werner (2017), Fake Volk?: Über Wahrheit und Lüge im populistischen Sinne, Kursbuch.
Musil, Robert (1930), The Man without Qualities, Secker & Warburg, London 1961.
Ricœur, Paul (1986), Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, Columbia UP, New York.
Sargent, Lyman Tower (2008), «Ideology and Utopia: Karl Mannheim and Paul Ricœur» in Journal of Political Ideologies n. 13, pp. 263-73.
Sattler, Barbara (2014), «Contingency and Necessity: Human Agency in Musil’s ‘The Man Without Qualities’» in The Monist n. 97, pp. 86-103.
Schaal, Gary S., Dannica Fleuß, and Sebastian Dumm (2017), «Die Wahrheit über Postfaktizität» in bpb.de., October 27.
Schmitt, Carl (1932), The Concept of the Political, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2007.
Seitz, Sergej (2023), «Widerstreit im Imaginären. Karl Mannheim und die Zukunft Radikaler Demokratie», in Transformationen des Politischen. Radikaldemokratische Theorien für
die 2020 er Jahre, eds Lucas von Ramin et al., transcript, Bielefeld, pp. 59-86.
Vogelmann, Frieder (2018), «The Problem of Post-Truth: Rethinking the Relationship between Truth and Politics» in Behemoth n. 11, pp. 18-37.
Vogelmann, Frieder (2019), «Should Critique Be Tamed by Realism? A Defense of Radical Critiques of Reason» in Le Foucaldien n. 1(5), pp. 1-34.
Williamson, Timothy (2019), «In the Post-Truth World, We Need to Remember thePhilosophy of Science», in New Statesman, January 28.
Williamson, Timothy (2021), «Politics, Truth and Self-Reference», in IAI TV, https://iai.tv/articles/politics-truth-and-self-reference-auid-1758 [23.02.2021].
Works published in RIFL are released under Creative Commons Licence:Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
