Western political thought has systematically subordinated imagination to rationality

Evidence

As Bottici (2014) has compellingly argued, the history of Western political thought (from Hobbes to Hegel and from Rawls to Habermas) is riddled with an image of politics in which rationality reigns supreme and imagination is treated instrumentally, left in thrall to reason. This state of affairs has weakened major theoretical critiques from across the spectrum, which have tended to treat capitalism as a particular form of either rationality or irrationality, or yet to focus on “identifying reason’s own limits”—often with the deleterious effect of separating theory from politics (Callison 2019; also see Callison and Manfredi 2020). The European Enlightenment legacy of homo politicus has in fact been in a close embrace with the persistent heritage of a rational homo economicus. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 147

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the author’s later counter-speculations chapter — the claim that theory separated from politics is the weakness his own intervention addresses. — connects to: Western epistemology’s root metaphors sexualize and dominate the known — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1352; The Dialectic of Enlightenment targeted the whole Western rationalist tradition, not just Marxism — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 781; Legitimacy of speculation was fought over competing forms of imagination — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 188