Ideologia, immaginazione e immaginario sociale

Ideology has been approached in a negative manner for a long time, and in recent years has been a relatively marginalized field of research in political and social studies. This paper argues that the complex – constructive as well as distortive, narrowing – nature of ideologies needs to be recognized if we want to understand the current challenges of popu- lism and illiberalism. A broader argument is that ideologies are best understood in relation to the backcloth of a more abstract, trans-ideological cultural dimension, that of the relatively open-ended horizon of social imaginaries. Contemporary ideological critiques of liberal and constitutional democracy maybe understood as a reaction to a relatively robustly institution- alized imaginary of liberal-constitutional democracy. The populist counterreaction to liberal legalism, constitutional democracy and the human rights imaginary ought hence to be un- derstood as an ideological phenomenon in its own right, and its success may even indicate an unsettling of the dominant imaginary and a potential shift (or even return) towards an imagi- nary dominated by nationalism and sovereignism. The paper hence attempts to contribute to existing debates in two ways: the consideration of ideology in relation to social imaginaries and a claim towards the self-standing ideological nature of contemporary populism.