Sketching Out an Emancipatory Discourse

Chapter twoSketChing out an emanCipatory DiSCourSe: Corruption, politiCal SpaCeS anD SoCial imaginarieSHere, then, is the paradox in the search for civil society at the century's end.The very fertility of the Idea-its broad, transnational appeal as a trope of moral imagining-stems from its polyvalence: its capacity to condense distinct doctrines and ethical strains in a fan of pliable associations that can be variously distilled and infinitely elaborated [. ..].The more inchoate and polymorphous, the more appealing: the more appealing, the less attainable in any substantive, meaningful form.[. ..].As Durkheim said long ago, the ritual of conjuring with resonant signs is a condition of the very possibility of imagining society, sui generis.1But if there is no ground of the social, any historical intervention will be the work of limited historical agents.This limitation, however, is more than compensated for by a new freedom that social agents win as they become the creators of their own world.2

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