Daily Inspiration Quote by Edmund Wilson

A critic’s sentence that reads like a quiet alarm bell: the imagination has moved from decorating the world to redesigning it. Wilson isn’t praising fantasy for fantasy’s sake; he’s marking a historical threshold where “human society” becomes thinkable as an artifact, not a fate. The phrasing matters. “Has already come to conceive” is deliberately incremental, almost bureaucratic, as if this radical turn has arrived not with a revolution’s drumbeat but with the slow normalization of an idea. The understatement is the point: once a possibility can be imagined, it becomes discussable, then arguable, then actionable.

Wilson wrote in a century that kept trying to draft a new human blueprint. Between Bolshevism, fascism, the New Deal, technocratic planning, and the postwar managerial state, politics started to look less like stewardship and more like engineering. His use of “recreating” hints at both ambition and hubris. It’s a creative verb with a godlike shadow: to recreate society is to assume society can be taken apart and reassembled, with casualties treated as “material.”

The subtext carries a critic’s skepticism about systems that promise total renovation. Wilson is alert to the seduction of comprehensive plans, the way they flatter the intellect and anesthetize doubt. Yet there’s also a begrudging realism: you can’t uninvent this mental capacity. Once people can picture alternative orders, the old order loses its aura of inevitability. The sentence captures modernity’s signature tension: imagination as liberation, imagination as instrument of control.