The primary focus of my research is on the concept of the “political imagination” and the roles played by imagination in politics and the history of political thought. The imagination is one of the most basic human mental faculties. I argue that just like reason and emotions, the imagination is crucial for our understanding of politics and of key political concepts such as justice, freedom, legitimacy, and stability. I am working on two book projects that recover the historical meaning of this concept and show how it can enrich our study of past and present democratic practices.
Project I: The Invention of Imagination
My first book manuscript, The Invention of Imagination, offers a new account of the earliest origins of the concept of “imagination” in archaic and classical Greece and explores its potential roles in democratic politics. It is motivated by the current global crisis of liberal democracy and the growing gaps between how democratic citizens view, interpret, and understand their social and political world. I argue that this phenomenon—often described today in terms of “deep disagreement,” “belief polarization,” or “epistemic fragmentation”—can be traced back to the earliest days of Western philosophy and that it is inextricably tied to the discovery or invention of the concept of imagination. The imagination was “invented” within an environment of radical epistemic uncertainty and as part of an attempt to capture and explain how and why different individuals come to perceive the world in different ways. Recovering this untold history of imagination and situating it within the historical context of the ancient Athenian democracy can inform our search for democratic remedies to our own crisis of epistemic fragmentation, disagreement, and polarization.
The Invention of Imagination begins by offering a novel account of the earliest origins of the concept of imagination. Scholarship on this topic tends to begin with Plato and Aristotle, with little to no work dedicated to the real questions and issues that have made this concept an urgent object of investigation for these and later philosophers in the first place. Tracing the roots of the ancient Greek terms for imagination (phantasia and eikasia) back to the Homeric epic and the tragic poetry of Aeschylus, I show that they were often used to capture the subjectivity of human experience and in the context of various episodes and encounters that depict a world of radical epistemic uncertainty. I call this the “problem of imagination”: the idea that, given imagination’s role in producing mental representations of the world, and since these representations tend to vary across individuals, the imagination may undermine our ability to have a shared experience of the world and agree on the nature of the world, the language we use to describe it, or the actions we should take to preserve or change it. This problem is, of course, still very much alive today, even though the language of “imagination” came to be replaced by more contemporary terms of art like “belief polarization” or “deep disagreements.”
The Invention of Imagination shows how this problem of imagination—and the linguistic, literary, and social context in which it first appeared—motivated later philosophers like Plato and Aristotle to turn the imagination into an object of philosophical inquiry. Plato was the first thinker to explicitly study the imagination and its role in the human mind. Yet, this aspect of his thought is rarely discussed in contemporary scholarship, and no work to date has examined the implications of this concept to his political writings. I argue that Plato develops his theoretical account of the imagination as a direct and explicit response to the abovementioned “problem of imagination,” especially as it appears in Homer. For Plato, the problem of imagination was inseparable from the problem of democracy. Democracy was “the most beautiful regime” precisely because it fostered and encouraged imagination’s tendency to produce varied representations of the world and allowed each citizen to pursue the good as it appears to them. In Plato’s critique of democracy, it turns out that the imaginative heterogeneity that turns democracy into a beautiful spectacle also makes it unstable and prone to anarchy and disorder, ultimately putting it on a path toward tyranny. To guard against this threat, Plato—a master of imaginative creativity in his own thought and writing—recommends a polity in which the imagination will be controlled and heavily regulated. The creation of the Republic’s ideal city thus turns out to be a moment of imaginative creativity, but it follows by a closing of the imagination: preventing any kind of novelty and innovation that might disturb or challenge its ideal order.
Like Plato, Aristotle recognized the difficulties posed by imagination. Unlike his teacher, however, his work provides us with a basis for a different, more democratic solution to the “problem of imagination.” While a Platonic solution may secure social order and political stability, it comes at the expense of the diversity and plurality of the polis. It thus runs the risk of destroying the very thing it aims to protect. As I argue in the next chapter—and in “Political Phantasies: Aristotle on Imagination and Collective Action” (American Journal of Political Science, 2024)—Aristotle sought to address the problem of imagination by means of a free, deliberative, and collective effort of the community. For Aristotle, the imagination is shaped by one’s moral character, which, in turn, is formed by one’s actions and activities. His solution to the problem of imagination is thus found in the collective construction of a shared imagination through civic education: the active participation of citizens in the formation and operation of their own democratic institutions, which shapes their identity as democratic citizens and the way they see the world and their fellow citizens.
The book concludes with an attempt to generalize this Aristotelian insight into a democratic solution to the problem of imagination. In other words, it sketches a solution to the problem of imagination that is compatible with democratic ideals, values, and practices and strengthens—rather than undermines—the capacity of democratic citizens to do things together and collaborate in a shared project of collective self-governance. I argue that the ancient Athenian democratic institutions—above all, the assembly—illustrate how a democratic imagination can come about in practice. The Athenian assembly was composed of a diverse body of citizens, each guided by what Arendt called the “dokei moi”—it “seems to me—and their own unique and subjective mental representation of the world. But when the assembly announced its decisions, it proclaimed that they “seemed [good] to the demos” (edoxe tōi dēmōi). They were thus transformed, by means of deliberation, debate, oratory, and mass voting, into a collective agent capable of action and guided by a shared mental representation, turning the individual dokei moi, “it seems to me,” into dokei tōi dēmōi, “it seems good to the demos,” to us. This imaginary unity is “democratic” not only because it is the outcome of democratic decision-making—which underlying its relationship to autonomy and popular sovereignty—but also because it reflects a commitment to unity and diversity. It also points us to a more dynamic—and thus potentially more useful—understanding of the role of imagination in politics in a way that engenders and supports unity, stability, and continuity on the one hand and creativity, dynamism, and diversity on the other.
The book is currently under advance contract with the Philosophy of Memory and Imagination series at Oxford University Press (ed. Amy Kind) and is scheduled to be sent out for review by August 2025. To date, this project has generated several additional stand-alone papers. In “Political Imagination and its Limits” (Synthese, 2022), I propose a new conceptual framework for the “political imagination,” outlining the different roles imagination plays in politics. “Imagination and Creativity in the Political Realm” (in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination and Creativity, forthcoming) focuses on the creative function of imagination, examining the potential benefits and risks of the creativity of imagination to our social and political life. Finally, in “Aristophanes’ Critical Imagination” (in progress), I utilize the comic plays of Aristophanes to examine the important—yet often neglected—critical function of the imagination, demonstrating its importance for maintaining a healthy and stable democracy.
Taken as a whole, this book project generates novel theoretical insights into the role of imagination in past and present democratic politics. At the same time, it also seeks to inform democratic citizens who are facing tremendous challenges, from climate change and racial justice to populism and democratic backsliding. Addressing these challenges requires not only a significant amount of ingenuity and innovation. It also demands that we reimagine the meaning and practice of democratic citizenship today and utilize our political imagination to promote a more stable, just, and diverse collective life.
Project II: Imagination in the History of Political Thought
Alongside my work on the democratic imagination, I study the role of imagination in the history of philosophy. Pre-modern philosophers had very different conceptions of imagination than we have today. They attributed important political roles to the imagination and were often concerned with the potential threats it poses to political stability. My second book project, The Catching of Beelzebub: Thomas Hobbes’s Philosophy of Imagination (in progress), uncovers this history, focusing on the relationship between imagination, knowledge, and authority in the history of ideas.
Early modernity and the Enlightenment are often described as the age of reason. Yet, they were also the “age of imagination,” or rather the struggle between reason and imagination. Like many of his contemporaries, Hobbes sought to ground political authority in objective knowledge of the world. Yet, Hobbes recognized that the struggle over authority is often determined on imaginary grounds. The events of the English Civil War proved to him that prophets and religious leaders pose a political problem because of their ability to enrapture citizens, to hold their imaginations captive and thus undermine their rational acceptance of political authority. In this project, I argue that Hobbes’s natural and civic science are deeply motivated by his concern with the imagination, a concern that can speak to our current crises of authority and legitimacy. We know the difficulty of advancing public policy by appealing solely to scientific and empirical reasoning. The recent global response to the Covid-19 pandemic illustrates it all too well. The recovery of imagination from the age of reason helps us identify imagination’s capacity to supplement our reason-based political discourse while highlighting the need to guard against the dangers of inflamed imagination.
In a series of published papers, I show that understanding the unique threats posed by the imagination sheds new light on some of the most puzzling aspects of Hobbes’s political theory. In “Leviathan Versus Beelzebub: Hobbes on the Prophetic Imagination” (History of European Ideas, 2023), I contextualize Hobbes’s theory of imagination to reveal his unique intervention in the scientific debates of the seventeenth century. I argue that Hobbes’s theory of imagination illustrates a fundamental tension between his scientific and political commitments. Hobbes’s theory of imagination remains loyal to the leading ideas of the “new science.” Nonetheless, it makes several important interventions. These are designed, I argue, to rule out any potential use of imagination in the scientific explanation of prophecy, a practice that Hobbes viewed as posing severe threats to political order. In “The Sleeping Subject: On the Use and Abuse of Imagination in Hobbes’s Leviathan” (Hobbes Studies, 2020), I further investigate the political implications of Hobbes’s theory of imagination, focusing on his solution to the threats posed by imagination to political stability. This interpretation reveals how some of the most controversial aspects of Hobbes’s political thought—such as his insistence on strict censorship—can be viewed as part of his solution to the pervasive dangers of the imagination.
Additional Research and Collaborations
In addition to these two long-term projects, I have several stand-alone papers that further explore questions of political authority, legitimacy, and stability. The first, “Divine Epiphany and Political Authority in Plato’s Republic” (History of Political Thought, 2023), offers a new interpretation of Plato’s theological principles in the Republic. The philosophers are meant to be the sole source of political authority in the ideal city. Ancient Greek theology, however, espoused a model of epiphany in which any individual, in principle, could experience an encounter with the divine. In the absence of a central religious organization, such individual epiphanic experiences often conferred significant moral and political authority on those who experienced them. I argue that Plato seeks to undermine this potential threat to the authority of the philosophers, calling into question the possibility of an individual encounter with the divine. At the same time, Plato appropriates the language and concepts of divine epiphany in the service of his new, philosophical model of epiphany, thereby further establishing the philosophers’ authority and legitimacy in his ideal city.
In “Pericles’ Funeral Oration and the Mythical ‘Catalogue of Exploits’” (under review), I offer a novel answer to an old puzzle in Thucydides scholarship: that among the surviving Funeral Orations, Pericles’ is the only one that does not mention the Athenian mythical Catalogue of Exploits. Situating the Oration within a contested debate regarding the nature of Athenian identity, I explain this omission as a response to a challenge posed by a commonly held depiction of Athens’ national character, which highlights the restless and venturesome aspects of Athenian identity and its natural tendency for risk-taking. While these traits were potentially productive, they can also be unpredictable, volatile, and thus politically dangerous. Finally, “Revisiting the Meaning of syllogos at Thucydides 2.22” (working paper) contributes to the longstanding debate on the nature of Pericles’ leadership during the Peloponnesian War. Was Pericles a devoted democrat, or was he establishing a de-facto monarchy? I offer a new interpretation of a key passage in the History, where Thucydides describes Pericles’ decision not to call an assembly during a Peloponnesian attack on Athens. I argue that this passage should be read as demonstrating Pericles’ attempt to prevent not only an assembly meeting at a crucial moment but also any kind of public debate and deliberation that may contradict his executive decision.
I have an active interest in collaborations across the different subfields of political theory and political science. In “Du Bois’ Platonic Egalitarianism” (in preparation), Desmond Jagmohan and I offer an original account of the underlying Platonic themes in W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk. Understanding Du Bois’ appropriation of Plato’s doctrine, we argue, sheds new light on some of the most controversial aspects of this work, revealing deeply egalitarian intentions within ideas that are normally considered elitist and paternalistic. This collaboration illustrates what I take to be the broader potential uses of classical political thought today and the applicability of the history of political thought to a wide range of contemporary topics and debates. It provides resources for innovative teaching in political theory, drawing new connections between different authors, and engaging undergraduates in the study of the history of political thought by relating it to topics they deeply care about today. In “Disagree to Agree: Forming Consensus Around Basic Income in Times of Political Divisiveness” (in Political Activism and Basic Income Guarantee, 2020), Olga Lenczewska and I examine a variety of historical and contemporary justifications for Universal Basic Income and identify the conditions under which such policy may become the object of a Rawlsian “overlapping consensus” among different individuals and activist groups.