In the nineteenth century, two new disciplines emerged at universities
which became important for the academic establishment of education but
whose objects were not in the traditional sense real, but imagined: psychol-
ogy and sociology. Just as long before, theology had developed on the basis
of imaginaries of a god or deity, psychology emerged on the basis of an
imaginary of the soul, and sociology on the basis of an imaginary of soci-
ety. Both university newcomers, psychology and sociology, had precursors.
The imaginary of the soul had ancient philosophical as well as Christian
occidental and later, since the Reformation, especially Protestant roots.
The conception of society, on the other hand, as we still see it today, was
much more recent, and yet it also presupposed a different imaginary, which
however never became an academic discipline in its own right.