Michele Moody-Adams is Joseph L. Straus Professor of Political Philosophy and Legal Theory at Columbia University. Her most recent book is Making Space for Justice: Social Movements, Collective Imagination, and Political Hope (2022). Moody-Adams holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Wellesley College; a BA and MA from Oxford University in Philosophy, Politics and Economics; and a Ph.D. from Harvard University where she completed her dissertation under the direction of John Rawls. She is also a Lifetime Honorary Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
This week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Michele Moody-Adams’ recent book: Making Space for Justice: Social Movements, Collective Imagination, and Political Hope. Today we begin with an introduction from Michele. Commentaries and replies will follow Tuesday through Thursday.
* * *
Making Space for Justice: Social Movements, Collective Imagination, and Political Hope defends a “cognitive approach” to social movements, presuming that such movements often generate insights about political life, and its moral underpinnings, which can deepen social understanding and enrich philosophical reflection.[1] The book identifies relevant insights through analysis of the political struggles and social criticism generated by several social movements and their organic intellectuals. I consider social reform movements of the 19th century (mainly abolitionism), the 20th Century (such as the women’s movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and the United Farm Workers), and the 21st century (such as #Me Too and Black Lives Matter). I also examine efforts to transform authoritarian regimes into democracies, such as the Velvet Revolution in the former Czechoslovakia and the Arab Spring. The book develops these movements’ most significant insights regarding the nature of justice, the demands of conscientious citizenship, and the role of hope in political life.
But a principal aim of Making Space for Justice is to elucidate several insights that can be gleaned from social movements about the role of imagination in political life. Imagination, in this account, is a complex (and heterogeneous) set of capacities that allows us to generate images, experiences, ideas, interpretations, and stories that present unfamiliar possibilities and perspectives, and that stimulate novel reflection on what is actual and familiar. Defending a “high confidence” view of the power of imagination in virtually every domain of human concern, I show that successful social movements have frequently –and appropriately—drawn on the socially transformative possibilities of imagination to help make space for justice. I also show that what we learn about the power of imagination to help change the world has important implications for efforts to sustain institutions and practices in which justice is already embodied.
One of the book’s central claims is that, from the start, social movements have correctly considered imagination to be fundamental to the project of constituting political communities. The wisdom of social movements thus anticipated Benedict Anderson’s compelling argument that any political society larger than a small village is always an imagined community: “the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”[2] Anderson urges that this “image of communion” is shaped by a commitment to shared sacrifice as an important support of civic life, and that it underwrites a sense of “deep horizontal comradeship” that cannot be produced by reason. On this view, while reason and rational principle are indispensable in ‘ordinary’ political deliberation, they cannot create and sustain a sense of horizontal comradeship, since this depends on the capacity to imagine community with others. Like the most insightful social movements, Anderson thus (rightly) rejects a claim that has dominated contemporary political thought: the claim that reason, and agreement on rational principles, are the most important sources of political stability.
Yet I argue in Making Space for Justice that, for social movements, imagination is important to political life in an even deeper sense. Here, the wisdom of social movements is akin to Charles Taylor’s view that every political society is shaped by a “social imaginary” that is neither “an intellectual scheme” nor a theory, but an amalgamation of the main ways in which a people “imagine social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between themselves and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie their expectations.”[3] A social imaginary is the collective understanding that makes possible a society’s “common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy.” Taylor calls this collective understanding an “imaginary” because it is mainly “carried in images, stories and legends.”
Making Space for Justice shows that a great deal of movement activism is fully intelligible only when understood as an effort to reshape a given social imaginary. This is certainly the most plausible understanding, for instance, of activism that has focused on the aesthetic dimensions of political life—especially on symbolic expression embodied in public monuments, rituals of commemoration, and emblems of community identity such as flags. I contend that agents of aesthetic activism correctly assume that critical elements of a society’s social imaginary often help to sustain belief in narratives that underwrite unjustly stigmatizing, dehumanizing, and oppressive institutions and practices. In such contexts, the only way to make social and cultural space for justice is to remove and (possibly) relocate, or dramatically reframe, the artifacts that symbolically sustain those narratives. Agents of aesthetic activism rightly believe that, often, we cannot remake the social world in service of justice unless we can first reshape its guiding social imaginary.
Attempts by social movements to reshape social imaginaries embody a deep understanding of what Amy Kind calls the heterogeneity of imagination: including appreciation of the wide array of activities and contexts in which imagination can be exercised, and the broad range of cognitive, perceptual, and affective capacities that are relevant to particular projects involving exercise of imagination.[4] Indeed, as Making Space for Justice shows, the heterogeneity of imagination and its products has been central to the work of social movements. Aesthetic activism, which draws on aesthetic imagination to challenge stigmatizing civic art and architecture, is often a central element of attempts to reshape a given social imaginary. This is also true of language activism, which draws on varied cognitive and perceptual capacities that comprise epistemic imagination, to challenge linguistic forms that limit understanding of human experience and distort perception of social reality. Nearly all social movements also engage in narrative activism, drawing on the cognitive and perceptual capacities that shape narrative imagination, to articulate narratives that reshape the social imaginary by giving new meaning to our observations and experiences of the social world. Making Space for Justice shows that these varieties of activism aimed at changing the social imaginary are critically important complements to boycotts, sit-ins, and strikes.
Of course, to pursue justice effectively, social movements must often appeal to sympathetic imagination. I show in Making Space for Justice that one of the most important insights to emerge from the work of social movements is the insight that any demand for social justice is a demand for humane regard: a stance that combines robust respect for human agency with compassionate concern for the human vulnerability to suffer. Movements seeking social justice must therefore be able to show what is unjust about particular failures of humane regard—about unwarranted interference with human agency and concerted disregard for the human capacity to suffer. When discursive reason fails in these efforts, as it often does, social movements have wisely appealed to sympathetic imagination to try to produce what literary scholar Courtney Baker calls “humane insight” into the reality of injustice.[5] Making Space for Justice analyzes several movement efforts to produce humane insight: including 19th century slave narratives, early 20th century anti-lynching work, and mid- 20th century projects of Civil Rights pioneers such as Martin Luther King, Jr and the mother of Emmett Till. I also discuss the roles of art and photojournalism in furthering humane insight, and thereby helping to make social and cultural space for effective redress of injustice.
Social movements also help us understand the possibility and promise of collective imagination, since some of the most transformative phenomena produced by imagination have resulted from collaborations involving many people, over greatly extended periods of time. For instance, although the phrase “sexual harassment” was first articulated in 1974 (at a “consciousness-raising” session at Cornell University) it was the culmination of language activism by generations of women who had sought, for decades, to transform the language used to describe important dimensions of their experience. Socially transformative imagination is seldom a single homogeneous mental activity taking place in an individual mind.
Some critics charge that imagination is dangerously antithetical to reason, but social movements have shown that imagination can be used to help counter biases and conceptual deficiencies that limit the effectiveness of reason. Making Space for Justice explores the role of imagination in challenging the epistemic inadequacy of certain culturally dominant concepts. It also considers uses of imagination to counter perceptual biases that distort affect, restrict sympathy, and limit understanding; cognitive biases that encourage political inertia; and problematic social narratives that underwrite politically motivated reasoning and encourage fear and mistrust of ‘unfamiliar’ others.
Making Space for Justice concludes by reflecting on uses of imagination to help create and sustain political hope. Hope is deeply intertwined with imagination, since having hope typically depends on the ability to consider unfamiliar possibilities and perspectives, and to engage in novel forms of reflection about what is familiar. I argue that in order to harness the power of imagination to sustain political hope, social movements must strike a sustainable balance between rhetoric that demands redress for injustice and rhetoric that inspires us to imagine the possibility of social reconciliation. I also urge that social movements must learn to counter destructive uses of imagination—especially political rhetoric that appeals to fear, anger, and resentment in ways that endanger the sometimes-fragile sources of collective political hope.
Notes
[1] Eyerman, R. and Jamison, A. (1991) Social Movements: A Cognitive Approach (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press).
[2] Anderson, B. (2006) Imagined Communities (London: Verso).
[3] Taylor, C. (2003). Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press).
[4] Kind, A. (2013). “The Heterogeneity of Imagination.” Erkenntnis 78: 141-159.
[5] Baler, C. (2017). Humane Insight: Looking at Images of African American Suffering and Death. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press).