Imagination in the State Sciences

Abstract

This essay is an imaginative exercise about the role of the state scientist in an intangible future, something like 1000 years in the future. As the exercise of the future presented here is on a very large scale, the text is exploratory in nature and clearly has no predictive pretensions. Usually, state scientists focus on two approaches when reflecting on their own role: a pragmatic one, which aims at solving concrete political problems or the survival of the course itself, and an abstract one, which focuses on the theory and philosophy of the state or other epistemological issues. However, neither of them allows for a more free and loose imaginative exercise, an approach that I call romantic. That is the proposal of this essay: an exploratory imaginative exercise about the role of the scientist of the state in this intangible future, driven by curiosity. For this exploratory exercise, help was sought from artificial intelligence, through ChatGPT, and literature, especially science fiction. The goal is to stimulate imagination and to think more broadly and creatively about the role of the state scientist in a distant future, and to demonstrate how important it is, even as a strategy for effective interdisciplinary work and for the sake of the future, to appropriate the themes and debates of the present time.