Abstract

This article illuminates the puzzling gap between political theory and political imagination. Theory is dominated by liberalism and its insistence on interests, reason, rights, individualism, and the social contract. Movies - and the social imaginations of the political they mirror - turn out to be completely different: Instead of interests, we find love, instead of the contract, we find sacrifice, and instead of the individual, we find the family. Turning to film therefore reveals liberal theory to suffer from a failure of the imagination.