Avshalom Schwartz

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.

This article offers a new interpretation of the second ‘theological’ pattern in Plato’s Republic. Situating Plato within his religious context, it argues that this pattern calls into question the traditional ancient model of divine epiphany. Divine epiphany was a central element in Greek religion. Yet, in the absence of a centralized religious organization, this model threatened the philosophers’ authoritative position. Plato’s second pattern seeks not only to undermine this potential threat but also to pave the way towards a new, philosophicalmodel of divine epiphany, thus further establishing the philosophers’ authority and legitimacy within and outside his ideal city.

This paper concerns the growing political polarization in the U.S. and the challenges faced by political activists in their effort to mobilize around struggles and demands for policy changes. We argue that basic income can serve as a key policy around which social movements and political activists of different beliefs systems – feminist activists, racial justice activists, liberal egalitarians, Marxists-socialists, and libertarians – could form an overlapping consensus. This would allow them to have a common political goal without having to reach agreement over fundamental values, thus gaining more political visibility and increasing their ability to promote socio-political change.

This paper offers a novel interpretation of the political implications of Hobbes’s theory of imagination and his solution to the threat posed by the imagination to political stability. While recent work has correctly identified the problem the imagination poses for Hobbes, it has underestimated the severity of the problem and, accordingly, has underestimated the length to which the Hobbesian sovereign will have to go in order to solve it. By reconstructing Hobbes’s account of sleep and the operation of the imagination during sleep, this paper argues that the Hobbesian sovereign who seeks to solve the problem of the imagination must maintain his subjects in a ‘state of sleep,’ by preventing any kind of new inputs from disturbing their imagination. This solution suggests that the citizens of the Leviathan state are not sleeping sovereigns, but rather sleeping subjects.

This paper investigates the development of Hobbes’s theory of imagination and its unique intervention in the scientific debates of the seventeenth century. I argue that this intervention is designed to solve a tension between Hobbes’s scientific and political commitments. His scientific commitments led him to take the imagination seriously. While unorthodox in many ways, Hobbes was working within the predominant scientific framework of his time, which can be traced back to Aristotle and Galen. The same framework, however, was used for naturalistic explanations for prophecy. This posed a problem for Hobbes, who was equally committed to the advances of science and to guarding against the political threat posed by prophets. I argue that Hobbes’s theory of imagination solves this tension by constructing a scientific account of imagination that is loyal to the leading scientific ideas while ruling out any potential use of imagination in the natural explanation of prophecy.

This article provides a new account of the role of phantasia, imagination, in Aristotle's political thought. Phantasia plays a key role in Aristotle's psychology and is crucial for explaining any kind of movement and action. I argue that this insight holds for collective actions as well. By offering a reconsideration of the famous “Wisdom of the Multitude” passage, this article shows that the capacity of a multitude to act together is tied to its ability to share a collective phantasma: a mental representation of the practical end or goal of their collective effort as good and thus worthy of pursuit. However, I argue that given the subjective nature of phantasia, acting together can be hard. I conclude that since one's phantasia is shaped by one's moral character, a community can achieve a shared phantasma—and thus secure collective action—by means of persuasion, habituation, and education.