The imaginary roots of politics. A Weberian reading

Weber’s indication on this central concept thus finds an application that goes beyond the specific case developed in his text. First of all, we are induced to say that worldviews, as he understands them, exercise a crucial role for the determination of our practical aims, our interests, and feasible strategies for their satisfaction in dealing with our passions that become effectively possible only when they are found in a suitable context determining their times, ways, and direction. Thus, for example, political passions can materialize through different practices and strategies according to diverse imaginaries. Yet Weber’s precision in the text mentioned induces us to say something more: worldviews hold a strategic role in the interpretation of our own con- dition of existence. In Weber’s outlook, not only the concrete working of emotive energies, not only the political activation of passions, but their very onset refers to a specific weltbild. In doing this, it also cir- cumscribes what it is legitimately possible to hope for and imagine. Hence, bound to an imaginative dimension that is essentially political, this aspect is therefore also dependent on the worldview of a certain period.