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Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997)

Castoriadis argues that society creates itself — not out of nothing, but not out of anything that determines it either. Every society institutes its own world: its meanings, its norms, its categories, its sense of what is real and what matters. This institution is not a rational contract, not an economic base producing a cultural superstructure, not the unfolding of a historical logic. It is the work of the radical imagination — the capacity to posit new forms, new meanings, new ways of being that cannot be derived from what came before. Autonomy is the project of making this self-institution conscious: a society that knows it creates its own forms and takes responsibility for them, rather than attributing them to God, nature, tradition, or historical necessity.

Life

Born in Constantinople (Istanbul) in 1922 to Greek parents. He grew up in Athens during a politically turbulent period — dictatorship, occupation, civil war — and was politically active from his teens, joining the Greek Communist Party at fifteen and breaking with it over Stalinism. He moved to Paris in 1945, where he spent the rest of his life.

With Claude Lefort, he co-founded the journal and group Socialisme ou Barbarie (1948–1967), which developed a critique of bureaucratic capitalism and Soviet totalitarianism from outside the official Marxist and Trotskyist frameworks. The group’s analysis — that the fundamental division in modern society is between order-givers and order-takers, not between owners and workers — was influential on the French New Left, the Situationists, and the events of May 1968.

Castoriadis broke with Marxism in the 1960s, concluding that its economic determinism was a form of the heteronomy he opposed — attributing society’s self-creation to an impersonal mechanism (the forces of production) rather than recognising it as the work of human imagination. He trained as a psychoanalyst (practising from 1973) and held a position at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. His intellectual range was unusual: economics, psychoanalysis, political theory, ancient Greek philosophy, mathematics, and music. He died in Paris in 1997.

The imaginary institution of society

The Imaginary Institution of Society (L’institution imaginaire de la société, 1975) is Castoriadis’s central work. Every society is held together not by force or rational agreement but by a web of meanings — what Castoriadis calls the social imaginary (l’imaginaire social). The social imaginary is not a set of images or representations; it is the capacity of a society to create the forms through which it makes sense of itself. A society’s gods, its institutions, its categories of thought, its sense of time and space, its understanding of what a person is — these are not discovered or deduced but instituted through collective creation.

The institution is “imaginary” not in the sense of being unreal but in the sense of being the product of imagination — the positing of forms that cannot be derived from what already exists. A new social form (democracy, for instance, or monotheism, or capitalism) does not follow logically from prior conditions. It is a genuine creation: something that was not and then was. Castoriadis calls this the radical imaginary — the root capacity to create new meaning.

Radical imagination

The radical imagination operates at two levels. At the individual level, it is the psyche’s capacity to create a world of representations, affects, and desires that is irreducible to external stimuli. Castoriadis draws on Freud but departs from him: the unconscious is not merely a repository of repressed content but a creative source — the psyche produces its own representations, its own meanings. At the social level, the radical imaginary is the collective capacity to institute new forms of social life — new ways of organising meaning, time, authority, identity.

The two levels are not independent. The individual psyche is socialised — it takes on the meanings of its society — but society is also the creation of psyches that bring their own imaginative capacity. Neither level reduces to the other. This gives Castoriadis a distinctive position on the individual-society question: society is not an aggregate of individuals (the liberal view), and the individual is not a product of society (the structuralist or functionalist view). Each creates and is created by the other.

Autonomy and heteronomy

Autonomy is Castoriadis’s political and philosophical programme. A society is autonomous when it recognises that its institutions are its own creation and takes explicit responsibility for them — when it can question, revise, and recreate its own forms. A society is heteronomous when it attributes its institutions to a source outside itself — God, nature, tradition, historical law, economic necessity — and thereby forecloses the question of whether its forms could be otherwise.

Most societies in history have been heteronomous: their self-institution is concealed behind a claim that the social order is given, not made. The two historical breakthroughs into autonomy, for Castoriadis, are ancient Greece (the invention of philosophy and democracy — the explicit questioning of inherited norms) and modern Europe (the democratic and revolutionary tradition). Both are incomplete and fragile.

Autonomy is not a state but a project — an ongoing activity of self-institution. It requires citizens who are capable of questioning their society’s norms, which in turn requires institutions (education, public deliberation, political participation) that cultivate this capacity. The autonomous society is not the society that has found the right answers but the one that keeps the questions open.

Where Castoriadis stops

The concept of the radical imaginary — society creates forms that cannot be derived from prior conditions — is powerful but raises a question Castoriadis names without fully resolving: if new forms are genuinely created (not determined), what makes one creation better than another? Autonomy is the value that orients the project, but autonomy itself is a creation of the radical imaginary — one possible self-institution among others. Castoriadis insists autonomy is not arbitrary (it has the unique property of reflexively endorsing its own conditions — it is the self-institution that knows itself as self-institution), but whether this reflexive endorsement is sufficient grounding for a political programme is debated.

The relationship between the individual psyche and the social imaginary is the other persistent difficulty. Castoriadis argues neither reduces to the other, but the mechanism of their interaction — how individual imagination becomes social institution, how social institution shapes individual imagination — is described rather than theorised with the precision his critics have wanted. Taylor’s hermeneutic approach to shared meanings and Habermas’s communicative rationality offer more specified accounts of the same interface, though at the cost of what Castoriadis would regard as premature rationalisation of a fundamentally creative process.

Key works

See also: Arendt · Taylor · Marx