ABSTRACT
Cornelius Castoriadis was born in Constantinople in 1922. Castoriadis’ social thought is inseparable from the ‘socialism or barbarism’ theme found in Marx, Engels, Luxemburg and Trotsky, but he was the first to express it as a present contending alternative. Castoriadis maintained his unorthodox Marxist view of the director-executant division as the key to all class societies when he expanded his anthropological conception from one focused narrowly on economics to one which also took in ‘cultural’ and ‘sexual functions’. Castoriadis has elucidated the magmas of significations of various societies, especially the core imaginary significations of modern society: the goal of unlimited expansion of rational mastery, with its momentous ecological consequences, and the project of autonomy, today on the wane in a society which produces only ‘the greedy, the frustrated and the conformist’. The basic contradiction of capitalism, a system which must both solicit and discourage participation, remains, but has expanded to all fields.
