Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination

The cool and the hot support each other. The most compelling imagination combines the heat of emotion with cooler analysis, integrating these in ways that are cognitively and emotionally coherent.6 The importance of complementary systems also helps to explain why timing matters so much. For an imaginative idea to spread, there may need to be comple

Thinking about grafting can also quickly generate new ideas. What if schools became places for health; what if democracy was introduced into the workplace; what if the provision of childcare or care for the elderly was managed on platforms like Amazon or Uber?

Some imagination points forwards and some points only backwards; some draws on the experiences and thoughts of the frontiers of its time—science, art, social organisation—and some rejects these. However, it’s not enough simply to be ‘for progress’ or to seek to ride the tides of history. Instead, the most interesting patterns of social imagination

Creative thought is often helped by mobilising metaphor and analogy—seeing one thing and thinking of another (a variant of the grafting process described above). Much of social change comes from shifts in metaphors. Do we see society as a war, a body or an organism; a building, a machine or a family?

Pull theories, by contrast, focus less on the inherent appeal of ideas and more on the needs and demands they satisfy.

The shared brain also needs a shared memory—of what was tried in the past, or how to respond to unlikely but threatening risks. A well-organised memory is one justification for a permanent civil service. But few governments organise their memories very well, and many large organisations struggle to know what they know.

Thin imagination is vague and partial, whereas thick imagination combines ideas, philosophy, programmes and detailed implementation. Most influential ideas achieve their impact by becoming thick in this sense, as well as through repetition.

All these theories attempt to counter the crude dichotomy that suggests we can either have relatively small-scale and simple social organisation, with high levels of freedom, or complex, large-scale societies that trap us in an iron cage of restraints. Instead, they suggest that progress can mean more complexity and scale as well as more autonomy.

it is only through multiplication and trying many things out that our world finds a way for a few to succeed, and the smartest organisations are the ones that learn how to balance imagination and realism without quite so much waste.

Our world is shaped by dominant political imaginaries of which there are relatively few at any point in history.