What about our era, marked by an unprecedented crisis of reason, a collapse of the political imagination and a generalized intellectual abandonment? All criteria have been diluted, the most elementary points of reference have evaporated. It is a vague epoch like no other that configures a strange emptiness and a soft emptiness that make imperious the demand to think lucidity and rigor. In this book, Cornelius Castoriadis bears witness to his obstinate lucidity in the exposition of what he himself calls his "mother ideas", because as responsible for our destiny we have the obligation to influence a possible awakening through the non-indulgent criticism of the "order" of things "and he returns to the sources of our Greco-Western tradition: Co-founder with Claude Lefort of the legendary magazine Socialisme ou barbarie (1949-1965), Castoriadis was the author of some of the main texts that defined ideas and orientation of the group and the magazine. Initially very attacked by their critical analyzes of the Soviet regime, Stalinism, bureaucracy and totalitarianism, over time, manifest adherence to these enlightening and original ideas has become a kind of political and intellectual virtue.