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This article discusses successive positions of the Frankfurt School, contrasts them to the unfolding ideas of Castoriadis and argues for a critical theory centred on a concept of autonomy, but aware of the obstacles and complications inherent in social–historical reality and its modern configuration. To clarify this perspective, we need a concept of society that distances itself from the Parsonian paradigm, more so than recent theorists of the Frankfurt School have done. The critique of over-integrated images of society, developed by various sociologists in the 1970s and 1980s but not properly assimilated by the mainstream of the discipline and never taken on board by Frankfurt theorists, is an important source of reference, and it can be taken further in the light of Castoriadis's reflections on the social–historical. The result is a definition of autonomy as a capacity of explicit and unlimited interrogation, confronted with its own hubristic temptations in the context of a multidimensional social world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite its ground-breaking character, Castoriadis’s theory of society remains, in some respects, caught up in conceptual difficulties common to social theory generally, particularly the problem of conceptualizing social unity without resort to an understanding of society that downplays heterogeneity and over-emphasizes the homogeneous. Unlike many other theoretical approaches and traditions, Castoriadis’s work also offers a possible path out of this dilemma in the form of philosophical innovations which could enable us to conceptualize social unity without flattening the heterogeneous characteristics of the social. Castoriadis sometimes fails to recognize the full implications of his own rejection of ontological determinism, and so ends up proposing a far too deterministic and homogeneous model of social types. This essay aims to show how this might be remedied by drawing on Castoriadis’s own fundamental insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The broad purpose of this article is to explore the theoretical conditions for understanding the new individualist configurations of imagination and identity in contemporary culture and critical discourse.  The article begins with a sketch of recent debates in social theory on identity, individualization and new individualism, focusing on the work of Giddens, Beck, and Bauman, as well as Lemert and Elliott.  The second part of the article turns to consider, in some detail, the path breaking contributions of Cornelius Castoriadis on the demise of the social imaginary in conditions of advanced capitalism or what he termed the spread of ‘generalized conformism’.  Whilst making the argument that the notion of ‘generalized conformism’ is of key importance in grasping the subjective and cultural dynamics promoted by the global electronic economy, the article also underscores the limitations of Castoriadis’s psychoanalytic and political position.  The third section of the article offers a pathway beyond such constraint by examining the recent social-theoretical contributions of Julia Kristeva on ‘new maladies of the soul’.  Like Castoriadis, Kristeva focuses on the atrophy of imagination in contemporary times, but does so from a more complex psychoanalytic prism.  The article concludes that the work of both Castoriadis and Kristeva are essential to grasping contemporary shifts in the new individualism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Among the many parallels between Hannah Arendt and Cornelius Castoriadis is their shared interest in the kind of politics that is characteristic of the council movements, revolutionary moments and the political democracy of ancient Greece. This article seeks to elucidate how the two thinkers fill out and complement each other’s thought, with special attention to political creation—an ambiguous theme in Arendt’s thought. While critical of the notion of ‘making’ in the political field, Arendt also emphasizes the importance of building institutions. To take this seriously means that her analyses of the nature of politics must be modified and, in this respect, Castoriadis’s understanding of politics as institution-building can serve as a guideline. However, Arendt’s concept of ‘plurality’ in the public sphere represents a level of political analysis that is under-developed in the work of Castoriadis. Taken together, their thought highlights many important aspects of political creation in a radical sense. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article reconstructs the unfinished dialogue between Arnason and Castoriadis, with a particular emphasis on the problematic of world articulation. Arnason’s thought is situated as reconfiguring classical sociological constellations, especially as they pertain to the revitalization of the civilizational problematic and the emphasis on the philosophical dimension of sociological investigation. His interpretative framework is located within the nascent field of post-transcendental phenomenology, which he elaborates via the overlapping problematics of cultural articulations of the world as an inter-cultural horizon, and the human condition as various modes of being-in-the-world. Arnason’s encounter with Castoriadis is considered. Despite the many points of fruitful contact, Castoriadis’ neglect of the phenomenological question of the world as a ‘shared horizon’ is, in Arnason’s view, too great to overcome; Arnason looks instead to Weber, Merleau-Ponty and, more recently, Patočka for interpretative resources. Although Castoriadis’ elucidation of the world proceeds ‘in fragments’, the article contends that hermeneutical reconstruction of his thought reveals openings onto the problematic of elemental world orders that can further the dialogue with Arnason. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Every theory of modernity must at least presuppose an implicit ontology of the social-historical. Castoriadis is one of the few who makes these presuppositions explicit. Castoriadis's socio-cultural ontology reveals that the essentially indeterminate nature of the social-historical entails ontological plurality, in the face of which monological or unilinear theories of modernity collapse -- leaving us with a fragmented field of tensions. Castoriadis's exposition of the ontological plurality of the social-historical is one of his most important contributions to social theory -- but when he turns his attention to modernity, he immediately polarizes the field. The aim here is to offer some correctives to Castoriadis's polarized depiction, primarily by teasing out tensions in his work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]