CONCEPT
Institutional Imagination
The capacity to envision and construct social arrangements that do not yet exist—the faculty Heilbroner identified as essential to humane economic transitions.
Institutional imagination is the cognitive and political capacity to perceive existing institutions as provisional human constructions rather than natural laws, and to envision alternatives adequate to new material conditions. Heilbroner never formalized it as a term but deployed it across his corpus as the faculty distinguishing societies that navigate technological transitions humanely from those that default to market mechanisms. The eight-hour day, public education, social insurance—each represents an exercise of institutional imagination: someone looked at the prevailing arrangement, recognized its inadequacy, and built something structurally new. This faculty operates at a different level than policy expertise, which optimizes existing frameworks; it redesigns the frameworks themselves. The AI transition demands institutional imagination at a scale and speed unprecedented in capitalist history, because the technology is transforming work faster than the institutions governing work can adapt.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Heilbroner's framework identifies three conditions under which institutional imagination operates most effectively. First, crisis recognition: the institutional innovators must perceive existing arrangements as failing in ways the prevailing ideology