Ideologia, immaginazione, e immaginario sociale

Abstract

Ideology has been approached in a negative manner for a long time, and in recent years has been a relatively marginalized field of research in political and social studies. This paper argues that the complex – constructive as well as distortive, narrowing – nature of ideologies needs to be recognized if we want to understand the current challenges of populism and illiberalism. A broader argument is that ideologies are best understood in relation to the backcloth of a more abstract, trans-ideological cultural dimension, that of the relatively open-ended horizon of social imaginaries. Contemporary ideological critiques of liberal and constitutional democracy maybe understood as a reaction to a relatively robustly institutionalized imaginary of liberal-constitutional democracy. The populist counterreaction to liberal legalism, constitutional democracy and the human rights imaginary ought hence to be understood as an ideological phenomenon in its own right, and its success may even indicate an unsettling of the dominant imaginary and a potential shift (or even return) towards an imaginary dominated by nationalism and sovereignism. The paper hence attempts to contribute to existing debates in two ways: the consideration of ideology in relation to social imaginaries and a claim towards the self-standing ideological nature of contemporary populism.