Political culture (concept and social imaginaries)

Abstract

The entry offers a complementary itinerary to the work of Andrea Greppi, addressing the category of ‘political culture’ from the theory of history, intellectual historiography, the analysis of social imaginaries, the studies of nationalisms and international history. In the first place, the paper offers a review on its adoption in historiography and cultural studies, accompanying it with a synthetic definition of the term. Then we will proceed to evaluate its epistemic virtues, exposing its applications in recent historiography and the epistemological advantages it has brought. Later, the post will incorporate three propositional sections. The first will postulate a dialogue between the category and the theoretical background of the study of political ideologies and social imaginaries, as a way to delimit the scales of analyzable group actors. The second will offer a heuristic model to optimize the analysis of political cultures based on their relationship with the category of ‘historical consciousness’. Finally, we will address the potentialities offered by the application of the concept to two fields of such relevance as studies on nationalism and the theory of international relations.