Historical Trajectories and Political Imaginaries

The concept of imaginary has acquired increasing importance in sociology and social theory over the last decades. This session proposes to discuss its relevance for analysing the relationship between history and the political imaginary, attending to the tension between certain relatively established imaginary and institutional features and their historical variations.

Although modernity can be associated with some shared features, such as individualism, justifications for hierarchical relations, equal freedom, and diverse forms of solidarity, these elements have not unfolded in a uniform way. They have been historically modulated by institutional trajectories, social conflicts, forms of authority, political memories, processes of democratization, colonial and postcolonial experiences, economic transformations, and disputes around the legitimacy of the social order.

The session invites contributions to explore how these features are articulated, reinterpreted, and tensioned in concrete historical contexts. The central question is whether they possess sufficient homogeneity to appear as a shared horizon, or whether historical variation is so significant that it ends up predominating over any common core. The panel welcomes contributions from social theory, historical sociology, political sociology, and comparative approaches.