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This important new book by a major voice in the Social Imaginaries movement offers the most systematic attempt to establish conceptual and historical links between the idea of modernity as a new civilization and the notion of multiple modernities. Arnason demonstrates a theory of globalization that is still compatible with the emphasis on unity and diversity of modernity as a civilization.

This article discusses successive positions of the Frankfurt School, contrasts them to the unfolding ideas of Castoriadis and argues for a critical theory centred on a concept of autonomy, but aware of the obstacles and complications inherent in social–historical reality and its modern configuration. To clarify this perspective, we need a concept of society that distances itself from the Parsonian paradigm, more so than recent theorists of the Frankfurt School have done. The critique of over-integrated images of society, developed by various sociologists in the 1970s and 1980s but not properly assimilated by the mainstream of the discipline and never taken on board by Frankfurt theorists, is an important source of reference, and it can be taken further in the light of Castoriadis's reflections on the social–historical. The result is a definition of autonomy as a capacity of explicit and unlimited interrogation, confronted with its own hubristic temptations in the context of a multidimensional social world.

Contemporary reflections on capitalism as a social-historical formation build on the legacy of classical theorists and comparative analysts. To clarify the main lines of this ongoing debate, it seems useful to distinguish three dichotomies that have been central to interpretations of capitalist development. The question of unity and diversity has been most prominent in the controversies of the past few decades; its ramifications range from micro-economic research on 'varieties of capitalism' to less sustained discussions about the place and role of capitalism within the framework of multiple modernities. Another key distinction contrasts systemic perspectives on capitalism with historical ones. In this regard, Schumpeter's work is particularly interesting, but as an illustration of the problematic rather than an answer to the basic questions. The notion of a spirit of capitalism is most frequently associated with Weber's work, where the spirit appeared as the source of a dynamic to which it then fell victim. Reconsiderations of the issue have raised questions about more durable versions and more varied expressions of the spirit, less likely to be eliminated by a self-propelling dynamic. Finally, comments on the articles included in the special issue suggest that they all have something to say on all three aspects of the field, but that their most innovative content may consist in attempts to move beyond systemic models of unity.

This article argues that a civilizational perspective is central to Castoriadis's interpretation of ancient Greece, even if he does not use the language of civilizational analysis. More specifically, his line of argument has clear affinities with Eisenstadt's definition of the 'civilizational dimension' in terms of connections between cultural interpretations of the world and institutional forms of social life. Castoriadis has less to say about geocultural and geopolitical structures of the Greek world, which would also be important topics for a balanced civilizational approach. His distinctive variation on the civilizational theme rests on the idea of social imaginary significations; in the ancient Greek case, this starting point leads to the reconstruction of a 'primary grasp of the world', an imaginary core that conditions further developments and innovations. This core component of Greek culture centres on the human condition as the existence of mortals in a world characterized by imperfect order and underlying chaos. The Homeric poems are Castoriadis's main source for the contents and directions of this original Greek imaginary. He understands the Homeric world as a framework within which the transformation of the polis towards autonomy could be initiated. Thus, the result is a strong emphasis on the archaic period as a formative phase of the whole Greek civilizational trajectory.