From Charles Taylor to Marcel Gauchet, theorists of the social imaginary have given us new ways
to talk about the shared structures of meanings and practices of the West. Theorists of this group
have argued against the narrow horizons of meaning that are deployed by deliberative political
theories in developing their basic normative concepts and principles, providing an alternative to
the oscillation between the constructivism and the realism. Theorists of the imaginary have
enabled us to think about normatively charged collective imaginaries as logically prior to the
construction of normative principles. What theorists of the imaginary have not done is make
specific connections between the ontological background of social imaginaries and the normative
utterance. This lacuna has left them vulnerable to the charges of ‘normative deficit’ and vagueness
that Habermas and others famously make against philosophies of ‘world disclosure’. This article
develops a conception of the normative utterance that enables us to reason through social imaginaries.
In such reasoning, claims are not expressed in the propositional form of the Rawlsian or
Habermasian justification, but through a complex engagement with the worldhood that informs
normative judgments.