Alicia Steinmetz

Her research looks at how reason has been imagined in Western political thought, and how images of reason change over time. Her current book project, Claiming the World: Bourgeois Freedom and the Problem of Imagination, makes an argument about contemporary political thinking by telling a new story about its European early modern past. The argument is that the idea of reason as separate from, and often opposed to, the imagination is a fiction which has outlived its usefulness, and that imagination should be recovered as a central object of political-theoretical inquiry in the present. She builds this argument by telling a new story about the development of bourgeois freedom as a process of wrestling with the powerful but unpredictable force of imagination amidst the rise of commercial society, a process whose stakes were the very boundaries of the “self” and the self’s sphere of proper control. Across the book, she shows how a series of politically motivated visions of free selfhood produced successive transformations in how the relationship between imagination and reason has been understood.