In a recent diary I suggested that the way out of our current political dilemma can be found through the ongoing use of our collective political imagination, and that our main problem of our era was the mobilization of this imagination. (The argument of that diary goes further of course -- it's because our political imagination lacks political force that we don't have a Left in America.) At any rate, I thought it meaningful to write this short book review collage, if only to show that there is indeed political imagination in the world today.

Here I've chosen books as representative vehicles for the human imagination; the choice may seem arbitrary, and here one remembers the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley's (1821) invocation of poetry: "poetry, in a general sense, may be defined as 'the expression of the Imagination'". Shelley, moreover, intended poetry as the "expression of the Imagination" to include political imagination; he argued at the end of "A Defence of Poetry" that poets are the "unacknowledged legislators of the world." However, I feel that, in the present-day reality of the 21st century, really good books are especially suited to express imaginative ideas while at the same time allowing their readers to carry on with further imagination in ways which facilitate the use of the political imagination.

The political imagination, in turn, is imagination as it matters in the world of politics; imagination that is able to change the relationships between human beings and contribute to revolutionary uprisings and other changes in political and social organization.

I know that the book reviews presented here are exceedingly brief; but I'm recommending all of them, and the main point I'm trying to make is that even though the politics at the top of the hierarchies of money and power appears conceived out of boredom and stupidity, there is no shortage of political imagination in the world today. At any rate, all of these books have been reviewed elsewhere, some of them by yours truly in a publication called Capitalism Nature Socialism or at Daily Kos (before March of last year).

The following seven volumes argue a wide variety of different things -- but one thing they all share in common is that they all ask the reader to view things differently and thus to stimulate the imagination of how things could actually be different. Carrying the political imagination further, in this regard, would mean reading the books and allowing one's ideas about them to influence one's political work. At any rate, here are the volumes I've chosen to display:

• Isabelle Stengers: In Catastrophic Times (2015)

Stengers is a Belgian philosopher of science who, because of her work with people such as Ilya Prigogine and Bruno Latour, came to some radical conclusions some time ago as regards the nature of science as actually practiced and as regards the democratization of science that needs to take place. Here is an illuminating review of Stengers' book.

• Chris Jennings: Paradise Now (2016)

Jennings is a "writer living in northern California" whose exploration of the history of utopian communities in early-19th-century America reveals both origins and destinies of utopianism as well as the wide variety of ways in which the utopians of that era experimented with the routines of everyday life. By contrast, Jennings argues at the end of his book, our own ideas of politics and of everyday life appear relatively lacking in imagination -- we could learn from the early utopians then. Here is a review of Jennings' book.

• Jodi Dean: Crowds and Party (2016)

Dean offers a social psychology of movements, making connections between the crowds of people who flood into the streets at moments of political realization and the political parties which must invariably accompany genuine political change. Here is a review of Dean's book.

• Jason W. Moore: Capitalism in the Web of Life (2015)

Moore is a professor at Binghamton University in New York who has devised an alternate vocabulary to revise what he imagines as the "Cartesianism" of social science and of history. Having created this alternate vocabulary, Moore proceeds to retell the story of the history of capitalism without the biased perspective putting "Nature" in one intellectual box and "society" in another box. Readers are thus afforded a picture of the history of capitalism that allows them to reimagine people as part of, and not above, the natural world. Here is a recent review of Moore's work.

• Ivette Perfecto, John Vandermeer, and Angus Wright: Nature's Matrix (2009)

This trio of authors investigates ecological conditions for local agriculture in various places in the world, mostly in the Americas, to suggest that sustainable agriculture requires social movement support if it is to maintain "high-quality matrices" for its continued practice. Food production thus becomes more than industry or science and brought into the examination of the question of how we are to live together. Here is a review of the Perfecto et al. book.

• Frances Hutchinson, Mary Mellor, and Wendy Olsen: The Politics of Money (2002)

Hutchinson, Mellor, and Olsen investigate the actual practices surrounding money today while at the same time inviting us to imagine other money systems than the ones we currently use. Here's a brief review.

• Duncan Earle and Jean Simonelli: Uprising of Hope (2002)

Earle and Simonelli perform an ethnographic study of Zapatista society in the jungles of southern Mexico to evoke the local, tradition-based origins of Zapatista practice and the innovative politics which it generated and generates to this day.

These are only seven examples (among many) of innovation in the political imagination existing in the world today. Here I've only managed to scratch the surface of the imaginative ocean existing within the billions of human brains on planet Earth. I'm sure that each of you can find, within this ocean, new ideas, innovative political thinking, and suggestions which might prompt innovative thinking and thus bring new audiences to the idea that something other than "more of the same" is possible.

The political problem with such imagination, of course, is that for an imaginative politics to be actualized, new ideas have to be connected in some way to political power. Actual practices of political power, however, remain mired in the social structures which enable the few to rule the many. Imagination becomes marginalized, a thing for free time, special celebrations, or unusual emergencies. It is one thing to say that there is a great ocean of imagination in the human world, and another to pick out a few examples of imaginative thinking which evoke the realm of the possible while defying integration into the realm of "more of the same."