Sublime

The size of this space depends both on imagination and on the work done to translate imagination into practical options. In principle, we could map any society by the size of its possibility spaces, and we would expect those with larger spaces to respond better to shocks and surprises than those with smaller spaces. This, in essence, is the functio

Institutions sometimes seem like the opposite of imagination. They are formal and bureaucratic, stable and predictable. Yet they can help societies to imagine,

Globally, today, the urge to moral idealism and a new ethos of responsibility in civil – that is non-violent – society may well represent the migration of the transcendent regarding which Weber’s colleague, Georg Simmel, was so persuaded. What Václav Havel dubbed the ‘politics of the anti-political’ has become an enormous though amorphous, weakly i

planning became the generation of projects and decisions that are more robust under a variety of alternative futures.

CIA assessment,

Through examining these types of results we can see a particular class of outcomes emerging from each lab. They are best understood as different forms of capital.

But there is a fourth possibility. Canadian writer and activist Naomi Klein proposes that we strengthen and deepen the practice of democracy even as we enlarge the power of the state.

According to some scholars, since 9/11 we have seen the rise of “strategic incapacitation” as a security response, focused on the prevention