From Plato to Marx, political thought has emerged as an application of a theory of the essence of society and history. With a foundational identificatory ontology, for which "being" has always meant "being determined," it obscured the particular being of the socio-historical as radical imaginary.

The first part of this book ("Marxism and Revolutionary Theory," published in the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie in 1964-1965) shows how Marx, trapped by this ontology, was led to stifle the new seeds that his thought contained. The revolutionary paradigm transcends any "rational foundation": a new institution of society entails a overcoming of the institutionalized " discourse."

We must see history as creation, the institutionalizing society or the social imaginary in action within the institutionalized society, and the socio-historical as a mode of being unknown to inherited thought. The second part ("The Social Imaginary and Institution") depicts the socio-historical as an ontological genesis, a continuing creation, a self-alteration that arises as institution.

This institution - of the world, of individuals, of things - grounded in nature, always includes an identificatory component, but is essentially the creation of a magma of social imaginary meanings. Society usually does not know itself as self-institution, and this constitutes the alienation manifested in the belief in an exo-social origin of institution and its rationalization by inherited thought.

The revolutionary paradigm, the paradigm of an explicit self-institution of society, depends solely and exclusively on the social doing-being of people, whose political thinking - thinking of society as something that makes itself - is an essential component.

[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]