printThe Social Imaginary as a Battlefield:
Resources for a Critical Thought
Colombo E.
Professor of Sociology of Culture at the Department of Social and Political Science, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milano, Italy enzo.colombo@unimi.it
Rebughini P.
Professor of Sociology of Culture at the Department of Social and Political Science, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milano, Italy paola.rebughini@unimi.it
Romanovskiy N.V. (Translater)
Dr. Sci. (Hist.), Prof., Chief Researcher of the Institute of Sociology of FCTAS RAS; Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the Journal “Sociological Studies”, Moscow, Russia socis@isras.ru
Colombo E., Rebughini P., Romanovskiy N.V. The Social Imaginary as a Battlefield: Resources for a Critical Thought. Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya [Sociological Studies]. 2026. No 9. P. 81-95
This article introduces a conflictual perspective to the study of social imaginaries, emphasizing their capacity to represent spaces of social critique. Critically revisiting the now classic conceptions of Cornelius Castoriadis and Charles Taylor, the article proposes to look at the social imaginary as a battlefield for the hegemony of shared meaning and the definition of social reality. It engages in a theoretical analysis that foregrounds the political dimension of social imaginaries, indicating them as the social space in which the prefiguration of possible futures arises from a critique of the existing and contributes to eliciting emotions and a sense of involvement that push to action. The article underlines the heuristic importance of conceiving the social imaginary as the space in which different possible forms of social orders fight to define the real of social reality. Given its nature based on the representation of the possible and desirable – as well as the fearsome and the avoidable – the social imaginary is the battlefield on which possible alternatives to the existing are constructed in an endeavor to make them hegemonic, that is, credible, preferable, or inevitable, and thus orient collective aspirations and actions.
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