ABSTRACT
This chapter explores crucial moments in the genealogy of the diminishing role of justice in politics and political theory and how this connected to changing conceptions of society. It explains crucial moments in the factoring out of justice from the domain of politics and political theory in the Western tradition. In focusing on two representations of political community and government one pictorial, the other textual the chapter has engaged in a historical study not of empirical reality, but of representations of historical reality, both imaginary and real. The philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis has coined the social imaginary to describe the creative and symbolic dimension of the social world, the dimension through which human beings create their ways of living together and their ways of representing their collective life. The social imaginary in Castoriadis sense is more fundamental, creating and defining the terms and institutions with which ideologies are constructed.
