ABSTRACT
Cornell and Seely approach the notion of public imagination through the ideas of Baruch Spinoza, who offers the perspective that the mind’s imagination, like the material world, is always collective. Embeddedness in an affective world means that any one person is determined by her encounters. Similarly, democracy allows the individual to be affected by as many people as possible, in all of their diversity, which promotes the maximal clarification of inadequate ideas. Cornell and Seely demonstrate how after the 2016 U.S. election, President Donald Trump’s movement, as well as those throughout Europe, resulted from a collapse of an ethical horizon or sense of shared meaning within neoliberal capitalism. Spinoza’s philosophy is used to make sense of this phenomenon, showing how the left might build an effective response to it. Spinoza shows that the more individuals open themselves to being affected by others, the more they allow themselves to engage in complex situations, enriching imagination and moving away from “inadequate” ideas toward a rational commons. In turn, a new powerful left can only create a rich collective imagination capable of confronting this crisis by opening to new forms of contact that allow individuals to be affected by and imagine others in new ways.
