G. L. S. Shackle, Imagination and the Nature of Choice (1979)

Shackle’s book is at once a theory of choice, a critique of deterministic economics, and a phenomenology of time. Its point of departure is not preference, scarcity, or calculable risk, but the present fact of thinking. Thought is the only direct datum, and its passing is the primitive experience from which “time” is abstracted.

THE IMMEDIATE KNOWABLE is thought.

From this Shackle derives the book’s governing opposition: either history is already determinate and choice is merely an illusion of mechanism, or the future is a void into which imagination introduces genuine novelty. The present is “solitary,” containing past as memory or trace and time-to-come as a formal axis awaiting imagined contents. Hence the central thesis: real choice is a “beginning,” an uncaused cause, a taking-place not wholly implicit in antecedents. If choice matters, it cannot be fully foreknown; if it can be fully foreknown, it cannot be choice in Shackle’s strong sense.

Time-to-come imperiously demands to be filled, it provides the practical business of imagination.

The structure of the work unfolds from this metaphysical premise. Early chapters distinguish the “News” received from the field, the “Scheme” by which the field is interpreted, and the “Imagined, deemed Possible,” the rival histories-to-come composed by the chooser. Shackle’s decisive move is to deny that choosables are given objects waiting to be ranked. They are works of thought: symbolic courses of action together with “skeins” of rival possible sequels. Choice is therefore not optimization over a closed list, but the imaginative origination and comparison of open-ended futures.

Possibility, for the chooser, is the absence of discernible fatal obstacles.

This definition of epistemic possibility governs the middle chapters. A sequel is possible not because it has a measurable probability, but because the chooser cannot see what blocks it. Choice shifts “the bounds of the possible” by orienting resources, intentions, and commitments toward one enterprise rather than another. Shackle’s famous emphasis on commitment follows: a choice immediately changes not the external world but the chooser’s imaginative and moral posture toward it.

Choice is commitment.

The incentive for choosing is thus a present “good state of mind,” an anticipatory access to desired sequels purchased at the cost of exposure to counter-desired ones. The chooser cannot secure the desired report from the field; he can commit himself so that such a report becomes imaginatively possible. This is why enterprise has the form of a bet: one cannot imagine winning without accepting the possibility of losing.

The later chapters formalize this insight without surrendering it to probability theory. Shackle develops the notions of epistemic standing, disbelief, potential surprise, ascendancy, and focus-gain/focus-loss. The point of the formalism is not to calculate an objective future but to represent how imagined sequels arrest attention through their desiredness and their degree of obstruction. Against frequency probability, Shackle insists that many crucial choices are not repeatable trials. Insurance can calculate “risk” only where experiments are divisible and seriable; enterprise, politics, battle, investment, and creation often are not.

Choice is amongst skeins of possibilities, the Imagined, deemed Possible.

This argument gives the book its relevance for economics. Shackle’s target is the conception of economic choice as response to fully specified alternatives under known constraints. Investment, for him, is the exemplary economic act because it is action under unforeknowledge: a symbolic commitment of resources to an imagined future whose outcomes cannot be exhaustively listed. His critique of Keynes’s probability theory is sympathetic but severe: where Keynes seeks “rational belief,” Shackle finds imaginative suggestion, incomplete evidence, and creative judgment.

The closing chapters return to the language of enterprise, policy, symbols, and formal thought. Because choosables must be imagined, they must be symbolically stated; no future action or sequel can be exhaustively literal. “Enterprise” names choice viewed as a committed venture into unknowledge, while “policy” names flexible pursuit of ends under unforeknowable conditions.

Enterprise is action in pursuit of imagination

Shackle’s final question—whether there is a logic of uncertainty—receives a deliberately radical answer. Logic can govern formal systems, but it cannot abolish the gulf between experience, imagination, and time-to-come. Human beings do not solve a pre-written future; they make history by choosing among imagined possibilities.

The gap between experience and logic is one which logic cannot bridge.