Social Imaginaries and the Concept of the Future: A Response to Delanty

Abstract The present reflections respond to Gerard Delanty’s critical engagement with debates on social imaginaries as found in “Imaginaries and the Future. A Conversation with Gerard Delanty” (in this issue). The responses canvass various dimensions of Delanty’s social theory, and can be grouped around the themes of cosmopolitanism, backlash and counter-imaginaries; capitalism as a social imaginary, capitalism as a system; the entwined problematics of multiple modernities, civilizational imaginaries, and intercivilizational encounters; and the radical imaginary and operational imaginaries. They conclude by further fleshing out understandings of social imaginaries, especially in relation to the concept of “the future”.