A conference report by Avshalom Schwartz and Alicia Steinmetz

In recent years, imagination has become a renewed topic of interest for political philosophers. While political and philosophical concern with the imagination has a long history within Western thought, it has tended to be a marginal or ignored topic in contemporary political theory, in part due to the dominance of analytic moral philosophy and Kantian-inspired models of deliberation and public reasoning over the past few decades.

However, various developments in the early twenty-first century – such as the rise of new digital communication technologies, democratic backsliding, and new voices and strategies in political activism – have placed imagination back on the agenda of political philosophers. So far, many of these new explorations of the politics of imagination (and the imagination of politics) have occurred in isolation from each other. 

The Stanford Imagination Workshop, organized by Avshalom Schwartz and Alicia Steinmetz with the generous support of the Stanford Humanities Center, The Zephyr Institute, and the Transformation of Democracy Workshop, was envisioned as an attempt to provide scholars a formal and institutional opportunity to converse and exchange ideas.