The Background and the Vanishing Point: From Ideologies to the Imaginary
Why ideology is not the imaginary, and why the difference matters for understanding contemporary political ideas
“Imaginary” has had a good decade. We speak of the illiberal imaginary, the geopolitical imaginary, the populist imaginary, the imaginary of globalization, and the word usually earns its place. It captures what the older language of doctrines and manifestos tends to miss: the images, myths and half-formed hopes through which most people actually encounter politics. Yet it has become a little too accommodating. It is now often used as a softer way of saying “ideology,” as if the two were interchangeable. They are not. If we want to understand how political ideas are lived today, rather than simply catch the mood of the moment, the difference is worth holding on to—all the more so because the two are so closely entangled.
Claude Lefort put it more neatly than anyone: the imaginary is the thought of society; ideology is thought about society (Lefort 1986). The first is what a society thinks without quite realizing it. The second is what a group thinks on purpose, with something in mind.
The notion of a social imaginary is largely a French, post-Marxist inheritance. The Annales historians gave us the history of mentalities—of how past societies feared, hoped and measured time. Cornelius Castoriadis took the idea much further. The imaginary, he wrote in The Imaginary Institution of Society, “is not an image of. It is the unceasing and essentially undetermined (social-historical and psychical) creation of figures/forms/images, on the basis of which alone there can ever be a question of ‘something’” (Castoriadis [1987] 1997, p. 3). It is not a picture of the world, in other words, but the condition for there being a world we can recognize at all.
Political culture is a near relation. Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, in The Civic Culture (Almond and Verba [1963] 2015), described it as the beliefs, attitudes, norms and perceptions a population holds in common. Like the imaginary, it overlaps with ideology: all three are made of beliefs and symbols. But there is one decisive difference. Political culture and the imaginary are objective and potential. Think of them as a reservoir of symbols, beliefs, images and ways of acting from which groups can draw. What they lack is intention. An ideology works with much the same material, but puts it to use on behalf of a particular group and its aims.
Ideology is not the reservoir. It is what a group takes from it, how it arranges what it takes, and what it wants.
Linguistics offers a useful parallel. Ferdinand de Saussure distinguished langue, the whole system of a language— everything a dictionary could record—from parole, the moment someone actually speaks, choosing and combining words to say something to someone (Saussure 2006). The imaginary is the langue of politics; ideology is its parole. Two people who share a language can say opposite things, and two groups can share a political culture and an imaginary while holding ideologies at daggers drawn. Peronists and anti-Peronists in Argentina, Chavistas and their opponents in Venezuela, the French right and left quarrelling over the Republic: in each case both sides dip into much the same reservoir of heroes, anniversaries, wounds and promises. What divides them is not this reservoir, but what they make of it.
I find it helpful to borrow an image from painting. An ideology has a vanishing point: a goal set on reality, to which everything else is subordinate, and which fixes the angle from which the world is read—and from which someone hopes to change it. The imaginary has no vanishing point. It is the background, close to common sense: a general stock of symbolic forms, frames, images and templates. Ideology is composed in the foreground, out of pieces taken from that background, and its political force lies in the composition.
This does not mean the two are made of different stuff. They grow from the same root, which is social imagination. In a dialogue in 1985, Paul Ricœur and Castoriadis (who agreed on very little) agreed on this: every society has a collective imagination, productive in Ricœur’s vocabulary and creative in Castoriadis’s, which reworks older elements and patterns into new combinations (Ricœur and Castoriadis 2017). That imagination feeds both the imaginary and ideology, and it does more than reflect institutions; it helps to bring them into being. In his Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, Ricœur went a step further, describing ideology as at once lived and imaginary—the lived, experienced as imaginary (Ricœur 1986). Louis Althusser, coming from a very different place, had made a similar point: ideology “represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (Althusser [1971] 2014, p. 181). And that relationship is anything but ethereal. It shapes what people do, the habits they form and the kind of subjects they become.
Serge Moscovici adds a sociologist’s caution. Societies think, he argued, and not only through their elites or their institutions. In the street, in cafés, offices and hospitals, people are constantly working out their own “philosophies”; events, science and ideologies are simply food for thought (Moscovici 1984). This is why the imaginary is never mere propaganda, and why an ideology cannot just be imposed from above. It takes hold when it latches on to something a society is already imagining.
How does it latch on? Through schemas. Immanuel Kant used the term—alongside “symbolic hypotyposes”—for the way imagination organizes experience before concepts arrive (see Anselmi 2013). Carried over to society, a schema is a recurring configuration that holds an ideology together, a load-bearing beam that keeps symbols, beliefs and ideas in place. It is symbolic in the old Greek sense of syn-ballein: what holds the parts together. A name, an image, a life story or a historical episode can all lead back to the same configuration, long settled in the social imaginary.
The struggle between ideologies is often a struggle over who gets to activate a shared schema, and towards which vanishing point.
Venezuela is a case I know very well, having studied the “Bolivarian schools” of the Chávez years (Anselmi 2013). The cult of Simón Bolívar was built in the nineteenth century by the elites, for the people. As the historian Germán Carrera Damas showed in El culto a Bolívar, it helped hold the country together against separatist pressures, supplied a program of government and offered a model of civic virtue (Carrera Damas 2003, p. 19). In the 1960s, revolutionary Marxist movements turned it into a cult of the people, for the people. In the 2000s, Chávez made that revolutionary reading the backbone of a state ideology. The schema stayed put; the vanishing point moved. Ministries, public walls, government campaigns, even primary schools were renamed “Bolivarian” and filled with portraits of the Liberator—a unity of style that was also a unity of purpose. A schema like this gives an ideology continuity over time, letting it adapt without losing its identity and coherence in space, anchoring a whole constellation of signs, slogans and minor symbols. Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities are put together in much the same way (Anderson [1983] 2016).
Why does any of this matter now? John B. Thompson saw early on, in Ideology and Modern Culture, that in media-saturated societies the symbolic can no longer be treated as decoration. Social life, he wrote, “is, to some extent, a field of contestation in which struggle takes place through words and symbols as well as through the use of physical force” (Thompson 1991, p. 99). Digital media have since multiplied and accelerated the circulation of symbols far beyond national public spheres. The reservoir is now overflowing, and constantly refilled. Contemporary ideologies—illiberal ones above all—increasingly look like collages of fragments fished out of it: memes, grievances, national myths, foreign borrowings. They often seem to be more about meaning than about doctrine.
There is a deeper, structural reason too. The great ideologies of the twentieth century, socialism and nationalism first among them, were largely holistic, in Emilio Gentile’s sense (Gentile 2013). They put the collective before the individual and rested on a collective subject, in mass societies organized around class. Today’s ideologies are born into a different world—post-Fordist in its economy, hyper-individualized in its social life, post-democratic in its politics—and they are individual-based. Each person stitches together a set of ideas, like a patchwork.
This is the defining feature of our moment. Political ideas are no longer handed down by a party or a class. Individuals pick them up and assemble them as they move through the environments and sub-environments that make up the political imaginary: national memory, religious tradition, online subcultures, consumer lifestyles. The materials are shared; the assembly is individual. So, crucially, is the vanishing point. In twentieth-century ideologies it lay in a collective future —the classless society, the redeemed nation; today it lies in the self, which becomes both the measure and the goal of political ideas, in what Christopher Lasch called the culture of narcissism (Lasch [1979] 2018). Sovereigntism, producerism, conspiracism and the politics of security all follow the same template: the citizen who feels like a monad under siege and asks politics to protect him and his household, even when he speaks in the name of the people or the nation. And because there is no longer a collective subject to fix the vanishing point, these individual configurations keep reaching back to the background, drawing directly on the imaginary’s myths and fears with no party or class in between. That is why ideology now seems to blur into the imaginary.
Today’s political ideas are built from a common imaginary, but on an individual basis.
It is an accurate observation, but it invites the wrong conclusion: that ideology has dissolved into the imaginary, that there are no projects left, only atmospheres. That is the old “end of ideology” thesis in new clothes, and Karl Mannheim’s paradox should make us suspicious of it (Mannheim 1936). Every judgement about ideology is made from inside an ideological field. Periods of sharp polarization give way to periods in which ideological conflict seems to have evaporated—but the apparent absence of ideology is usually a sign that one ideological family has won. The neoliberal decades produced an imaginary in which globalization was simply inevitable, and that imaginary was itself the residue of a very successful ideology.
So the task is not to choose between ideology and the imaginary but to watch the traffic between them: how material is taken from the common reservoir, organized around a schema and pointed towards a vanishing point; and how, in the other direction, victorious ideologies sink back into the imaginary and harden into common sense, as Antonio Gramsci understood (Gramsci 1971). Illiberal actors rarely invent new myths. They mine the national imaginaries already there, wake dormant schemas and give them a new direction. Democrats who answer only with policy arguments are speaking to the parole, while the fight is also over the langue.
Lived ideologies inhabit the imaginary, but they are not the imaginary. Keeping that distinction sharp lets us see politics where we might otherwise see only culture: people with aims, working with materials they did not make, trying to turn a shared past towards a future of their own.
This essay draws on my book Ideologie politiche (Mondadori Università, 2023), especially the sections on political culture and the social imaginary, on ideological hybridisation, and on social imagination and the socio-historical schemas of ideologies.
References
Almond G.A., Verba S., The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1963, reprint ed., Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2015.
Althusser L., On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, London, Verso, 2014.
Anderson B., Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London, Verso, 1983, reprint ed., London, Verso 2016.
Anselmi M., Chavez’s Children: Ideology, Education, and Society in Latin America, Lanham (MD), Lexington Books, 2013.
Anselmi M., Ideologie politiche, Milano, Mondadori Università, 2023.
Carrera Damas G., El culto a Bolívar, Caracas, Alfadil Ediciones, 2003.
Castoriadis C., The Imaginary Institution of Society, Cambridge (UK), Polity Press, 1987, reprint ed., Cambridge (UK), Polity Press, 1997.
Gentile E., “Total and Totalitarian Ideologies,” in M. Freeden, L.T. Sargent, M. Stears (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013.
Gramsci A., Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1971.
Lasch C., The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, New York, W.W. Norton, 1979, reprint ed., New York, W.W. Norton, 2018.
Lefort C., “Outline of the Genesis of Ideology in Modern Societies,” in Id., The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, ed. J.B. Thompson, Cambridge (MA), MIT Press, 1986.
Mannheim K., Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1936.
Moscovici S., “The Phenomenon of Social Representations,” in R.M. Farr, S. Moscovici (eds.), Social Representations, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Ricœur P., Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, ed. G.H. Taylor, New York, Columbia University Press, 1986.
Ricœur P., Castoriadis C., “Dialogue on History and the Social Imaginary,” trans. S. Davidson, in S. Adams (ed.), Ricoeur and Castoriadis in Discussion: On Human Creation, Historical Novelty, and the Social Imaginary, London, Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017.
Saussure F. de, Writings in General Linguistics, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006.
Thompson J.B., Ideology and Modern Culture: Critical Social Theory in the Era of Mass Communication, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1991.
