Soc (2012) 49:299–301
DOI 10.1007/s12115-012-9546-8
BOOK REVIEW
Raymond Geuss, Politics and the Imagination
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. 198 pp. $24.95. ISBN: 978-1400832132
Lorraine Krall
Published online: 7 March 2012
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012
Talking about politics and imagination together might, at
first blush, seem to signal a version of utopianism. Raymond
Geuss’s Politics and the Imagination is quite the opposite:
Geuss rails against utopian thought in favor of a politics of
action and concrete engagement, albeit a concrete engage-
ment that draws on imagination. This includes both imagin-
ing one’s self in another’s position, as well as mining works
of art for their political insights.
Raymond Geuss’s Politics and the Imagination considers
what political work imagination can do—both in freeing us
from our own prejudices and in aiding us in sympathizing
with others. The collection of twelve essays varies im-
mensely, ranging from reflections on particular aspects of
art and specific works—Don Quixote, music, Paul Celan’s
poetry—to reflections on contemporary political matters,
such as Bush and Blair on Iraq, to a description of conver-
sations with Richard Rorty.
Geuss’s passionate and wide-ranging approach to the rela-
tionship between politics and imagination is an insightful
critique of narrow ideas of reason that ignore imagination’s
benefits. In addition, Geuss reveals the dangers of clinging to
comprehensive systems, rather than more flexibly dealing
with changing contexts. While Geuss draws attention back
to the role of imagination, which has been shamefully
eschewed from politics, the picture he provides remains prob-
lematic. He focuses on imagination’s innovative potential and
downplays its ability to explain social roles and cultivate
customs. He also ignores imagination’s potential dark side,
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praising instead the possibilities of existential imagination.
Thus Geuss can be contrasted with other conceptions of
imagination, including that of T.S. Eliot, who would locate
imagination’s innovation within the context of an ordered
tradition actively engaged with moral concerns.
Guess’s essays advance two central arguments. First, he
contends that imagination is important to all forms of politics,
repeatedly critiquing political theories that advocate reason as
autonomous and exclude imagination; Kant and Rawls are
both implicated.
Second, Guess argues for critical distance: “the distance I
am able to put between myself and my social world with its
associated beliefs, intellectual habits, and attitudes is a cru-
cial variable in determining how much I can see, how much
I can understand, and whether I can occupy a position from
which radical social criticism is possible” (xi). Imagination,
then, is a way to achieve distance from a society and a
position from which one can criticize that society. He unfor-
tunately emphasizes this ability of imagination to distance us
from our prejudices over the ability of imagination to locate us
within a particular social context. For instance, in his essay,
“On Museums,” Geuss maintains that what museums should
do is encourage “an openness to new experience” (110). What
stands in the way of that openness to new experience is “the
general idea that what our cultural institutions should do is
give us or reinforce in us a natural sense of belonging, iden-
tifying with a prestigious collectivity, being at home in our
world” (111). According to Geuss, imagination’s ability to
foster a sense of belonging in a group is at odds with its ability
to provide a platform for critique.
While Geuss defends the importance of imagination to
politics and its importance for critiquing society, he offers
no settled conception of the relationship between politics
300
and imagination. He implies that it might not be possible to
theorize a single relationship between them, and then pro-
ceeds to explore several possible links between politics and
imagination.
The first essay is surprising in a collection of essays about
imagination: Geuss examines in detail the nuances of the Iraq
War alliance between the United States and Britain in the early
aughts, arguing that political opinions are heavily influenced
by historical and institutional contexts. For Geuss, political
judgment is much messier than the way in which it is por-
trayed by some “political philosophers from whose untender
embraces [he] would like to save politics”; he critiques the
idea that politics is primarily the evaluation of truth-claims
and the application of ethics, maintaining that this would be an
“idealized version of a Socratic dialogue” (4).
Geuss sees the 9/11 attacks as exercises in political
imagination, separate from a moral sense. His work is
an attempt to imagine the motivations of those with
whom he disagrees—not only those who supported the
Iraq War, but also the perpetrators of the suicide hijackings.
Geuss’s attempt to be equally sympathetic to both of these
parties is curious. While he emphasizes and illustrates
imagination’s ability to free us from our prejudices, he
gives us no external standard by which to critique or
praise one instance of imagination over another. As long
as imagination encourages polyphony, he accepts it. This
lack of exploration of the dark side of imagination is a
remarkable for a treatment of imagination’s role in politics.
The misuse of imagination and art in politics, through
propaganda, among other things, seems to demand its
own treatment.
The only form of imagination that Geuss criticizes is an
imagination that leads to consensus, rather than to open-
mindedness. This narrow critique is due to Geuss’s concep-
tion of imagination not being rooted in and responsive to
human nature. Instead, he advocates an understanding of
imagination as existential. For instance, he uncritically
explains Celan’s view that “[p]oetry states that what is infinite
in the universe is not God, Nature, Life, but rather the point-
lessness of it all” (132). He also extends Nietzsche’s philology-
based skepticism to culture, maintaining that culture itself is a
necessary illusion (95).
For Geuss, neither imagination nor politics are rooted in
something deeper than man’s own capacity as an innovator.
His rejection of nature is insightful insofar as it rejects nature
as a system that can be applied to society: he critiques the idea
that “one can get an adequate understanding of society as a
whole by construing it as a single, huge, rule-governed sys-
tem” (46, italics in the original). He maintains that this idea of
the world as a regulated system is based on Kantian claims
that reason is autonomous, authoritative, and universal (53).
The focus, according to Geuss, should not be on the rules, but
rather on the actors and on the particular context in which they
Soc (2012) 49:299–301
act. While Geuss is right to criticize the understanding of
nature as a discrete, decontextualized system that is capable
of being appealed to without reference to concrete circum-
stances, he goes too far in his effort to entirely separate
imagination from a grounding in nature.
An alternative theory of imagination might find inspira-
tion in the work of T.S. Eliot, among others. Eliot’s “Tradi-
tion and the Individual Talent” describes the way in which
the past and the creativity of the poet interact, balancing
imagination’s innovation with its foundation in tradition:
“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning
alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation
of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value
him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison,
among the dead. … The necessity that he shall conform, that
he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new
work of art is created is something that happens simulta-
neously to all the works of art which preceded it. The
existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves,
which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really
new) work of art among them” (38).
Eliot recognizes creativity as both an innovation and
something that is still connected to what preceded it. While
these customs that precede innovation, according to Eliot,
are in some sense polyphonous (insofar as they deviate from
each other), they also contain within them a cohesive order
or tradition. Later in the same essay, Eliot writes about the
poet, “[H]e is not likely to know what is to be done unless
he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present
moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is
dead, but of what is already living” (44). Here, again, he
describes tradition as not merely the cultural context of new
works, but rather a coherent tradition that inspires what
comes after it.
It is the existence of this order in a tradition that Geuss
denies (87, 95). Guess emphasizes, rather, that society and
tradition are polyphonous (78). His focus on preserving the
multivocity of society is an attempt to respond to a destructive
modern emphasis on consensus, deriving from, among other
things, social contract theories (78–79). Guess would do well
to attend here to Tocqueville’s insight that the solution to the
problem of conformity to the mass is not simply individualism
or innovation, but rather includes a relinking of men to inter-
mediary institutions. Without attachment to smaller groups
within a society, society’s polyphony will be difficult or
impossible to preserve.
In After Strange Gods, his Page-Barbour Lectures at the
University of Virginia, Eliot reflects on ideas in “Tradition
and the Individual Talent,” expanding their relevance beyond
literature. He defines tradition as “habitual actions, habits and
customs” that always involve “a mixture of good and bad”
(18–19). According to Eliot, “Tradition by itself is not
enough; it must be perpetually criticized and brought up to
Soc (2012) 49:299–301 301

date under the supervision of what I call orthodoxy” (67).
Tradition alone is not sufficient; rather, tradition itself must be
evaluated and criticized. Evaluation of a tradition relies on
standards outside of the tradition itself—and this evaluation
involves moral considerations. Geuss’s imagination, unlike
Eliot’s, emphasizes innovation over consensus and shies away
from issues of morality. Imagination, as Geuss points out, is an
important antidote to the problems of our contemporary
world. Geuss does his readers a great service in leading them
to reflect on the political role of imagination.
Further Reading
Eliot, T. S. 1934. After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy.
New York: Harcourt, Brace.
Eliot, T. S. 1975. Tradition and the Individual Talent. In F.
Kermode (Ed.), Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot (pp. 37–44).
New York: Harcourt, Inc.
Lorraine Krall is a graduate student in political theory at Georgetown
University.