(updated from yesterday, sorry for the late post)

I’m trying to form a coherent description and understanding of the idea of social imagination, and possibly a few of its necessary relationships– to freedom, to politics and movements, and possibly to human well-being, though that’s obviously a rabbit hole.

One interesting thing about this direction is that the idea of social imagination was first explored by someone I’ve read extensively and respect very much, the late, great C. Wright Mills, though I didn’t know this until today. His book “The Power Elite” was a thrill– written in 1956, and still nearly perfectly accurate today. I had to present it and lead a discussion on it in a social theory course I took a few years ago and it comes to mind constantly. (Incidentally, rumor has it that I’m right now writing this post in his old office.)

Anyway, as part of his work on describing reality through sociology, he uses “social imagination” in a way that that I find very congruent with my own struggles to describe and understand processes I see around me as I pass through life.

The sociological imagination is the ability to see things socially and how they interact and influence each other. To have a sociological imagination, a person must be able to pull away from the situation and think from an alternative point of view. It requires to "think ourselves away from our daily routines and look at them anew". To acquire knowledge, it is important to not follow a routine, but rather to break free from the immediacy of personal circumstances and put things into a wider context. The actions of people are much more important than the act itself.

The key concept there is the ability to pull back and look at everything as it really is. This can not happen from within the thing being seen, but necessarily only from outside of it. In our world today it’s hard to do this. Even the smartest people have a hard time taking that step back– or more accurately, realizing there’s a space to step back into–and are thus stuck (doomed? condemned? fooled? merely unfortunate? better off? lucky?) to live as a manufactured actor in the world, performing and behaving as directed and intended by a system with hidden hands controlling many puppets, and operating with a vision of nothing for humankind.

Maxine Greene says:

“We also have our social imagination: the capacity to invent visions of what should be and what might be in our deficient society, on the streets where we live, on our schools. As I write of social imagination, I am reminded of Jean-Paul Sartre’s declaration that “it is on the day that we can conceive of a different state of affairs that a new light falls on our troubles and our suffering and that we decide that these are unbearable” (1956, pp. 434-435) (p. 5).”

Written in the same year as Mill’s Power Elite. I had lunch with her yesterday– she’s 95 and it was more of a snack than a lunch, and her aid didn’t let it last more than about 30 minutes. I’m not exactly sure how I managed to get that lunch meeting– she’s one of the most influential educational philosophers of our time. She used to run the Lincoln Center Institute and now has her own: http://www.maxinegreene.org/

She had some very clear ideas about public space, freedom and social imagination, and speaking with her was helpful. I wish I knew who to speak with next.

When I asked her for advice on how to drill down deeper into the subject she said: “Use your imagination”, and winked.

I’m trying, Maxine.