Imagination, from Futures to Failures.

This paper assesses how policymakers understand their past and present in times of political uncertainty, and how this affects their actions and future orientations. More precisely, the analysis centers on the leaders of political parties in Romania and France, who expected to build their strong or even overwhelming popularity into political dominance in the post-World War Two years. But because these leaders represented the Communists in France and non-Communist parties in Romania, they were unsuccessful. While this outcome is, with hindsight, unsurprising, it does not mean that once Soviet tanks made it to Bucharest and American troops arrived in Paris, these individuals simply gave up their attempts to come to power. Instead, I argue that in both places, leaders of very different ideologies were involved in failures of imagination: they failed to adjust their expectations and behaviors to the new political realities emerging in their countries, largely because they misunderstood these new contexts. This paper thus makes a historiographical and conceptual contribution by highlighting the importance of actors' intent, and specifically how uncertain contexts lead to action choices that have unintended, and indeed undesirable consequences. In turn, building on a Bourdieusian model of uncertainty, and psychological studies of imagination, I show that a choice of action from within a cultural repertoire may be wrong, in the sense that the outcome of the action does not meet the goal intended when the action was taken. We see, then, that failure is endemic to human action, happening at the intersection of actors' past, present, and future, while gaining a conceptual model of culture through which to study such failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]