Imposed Rationality and Besieged Imagination: Practical Life and Social Pathologies
À propos de cet e-book
Consumerism, bureaucratism, moralism, juridification, some forms of corruption and the particular Latin American case of “malinchism” can be interpreted as social pathologies insofar as they imply such distortion. This way of conceptualizing social pathologies integrates the traditional sociological macro‐explanation manifested through the negative consequences of the processes of social rationalization with a micro‐explanation articulated around the findings of cognitive psychology such as availability heuristic.
Understanding social pathologies as a cognitive failure allows us to identify the introduction of normative friction as the main way to counteract their effects. One of the potential effects of normative friction, as a specific form of cognitive dissonance, is the intense exercise of the imagination, thus operating as a condition of possibility for the exercise of autonomy and reflection. Democratic ethical life, understood as a shared democratic culture, as well as social institutions and narratives, are the privileged social spaces and means to trigger reflective processes that can counteract social pathologies through a reflective reappropriation of the meaning of the shared practical context.An extraordinary contribution by a Critical Theorist to the return of the concept of imagination today. It takes up the challenge once taken by Kant to think about imagination as the pivotal activity not only of knowledge and experience, but above all, for action. The author claims that imagination makes criticism possible (pathologies) and it allows us to envision alternative views into the path for social transformation. Without imagination nothing is possible.
María Pía Lara, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa, Mexico
À propos de l'auteur
Gustavo Pereira is Professor of Ethics and Political Philosophy and Director of the Department of Philosophy of Praxis at the Faculty of Humanities, Universidad de la República (Uruguay). He has founded and is co-director of the interdisciplinary research group “Ethics, Justice and Economy” at the same University. His research has been mainly focused on social justice and theory of democracy, and more recently on social philosophy, in particular social pathologies, alienation and the cognitive microfoundations of those social phenomena. Some of his books are Medios, capacidades y justicia distributiva (UNAM, 2004), Las voces de la igualdad (Proteus, 2010) and Elements of a Critical Theory of Justice (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013).
