Social Imagination (Greene)

Social imagination extends Greene's framework from the individual to the collective. It names the capacity of a community — a classroom, an institution, a society — to perceive alternatives to the arrangements it has inherited and to envision common purposes that exceed any single participant's vision. Social imagination is what allows a group of diverse people to discover, through sustained deliberation, possibilities that none of them could have reached alone. Greene positioned the concept explicitly against scientism, technicism, and instrumental rationality — the three forces she saw narrowing the field of collective possibility by reducing the real to the measurable, the good to the efficient, and the valuable to the useful. The AI moment demands social imagination at a scale that exceeds anything in recent memory, because the questions it poses — about education, about economic distribution, about governance — cannot be answered by individuals acting alone.