Social Imaginary and Ideology: An Integrative Account

The notion of social imaginaries has become one of the most widely invoked concepts in recent social theory, yet its relation to its theoretical predecessor, the concept of ideology, remains undertheorized. This paper argues that the two concepts are not interchangeable and that collapsing the distinction between them comes at a significant theoretical cost. Against this, we develop an integrative account in which social imaginaries function as the normatively neutral background structures of shared meaningful experience, while ideologies designate particular positions taken up and contested within that background. On this account, social imaginaries appear as constitutively underdetermined coordinates of shared social life—the background against which ideological conflicts over their own interpretation and specification gain salience.