A New Social Imaginary in the Making in the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE): Deliberalism

Every society is self-instituted and evolves under the authority of a radical imaginary that escapes the will of social individuals. This radical imaginary begets a social imaginary. The latter is never stable because it is shaped by the tension between the instituted social imaginary and the instituting social imaginary. As part of this understanding of Castoriadis’ work, we will present deliberalism (Dacheux, Goujon, 2020) as an instituting social imaginary in the making within the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) or, more precisely, within a part of the SSE that we call “solidarity initiatives”. To present this thesis, which makes liberalism the instituted social imaginary of capitalism, we will proceed in four stages: first, to set up our epistemological framework, then to define our main concepts theoretically, next to present and characterize solidarity initiatives and, finally, to indicate how deliberalism could be a new instituting social imaginary.