Shaping Each Other’s Vision: Collective Intentionality and the Zohran Mamdani Campaign

This year began with Zohran Mamdani taking office as the Mayor of New York City, after having run what has been widely lauded as one of the most distinct and successful political campaigns of modern history. Mamdani’s campaign is unique and his success extraordinary in several respects: he went from polling at 1% to defeating his opponents by a landslide margin in just over one year; his campaign recruited over one hundred thousand volunteers, engaging first-time voters and immigrants typically overlooked or deliberately excluded from electoral politics; and his platform was centered on affordability—not only the most deeply felt issue for the vast majority of New Yorkers (and, increasingly, others around the country), but also something which requires Mamdani to challenge power directly, taking on the billionaires who have built well-entrenched and complex systems of profit designed to make themselves even wealthier.

What, if anything, can contemporary analytic philosophy do to help us understand the phenomena at play in the Mamdani campaign? And likewise, how can political movements such as the Mamdani campaign better inform philosophical investigations into the social world?

I don’t want to take it for granted that most philosophers would accept uncontroversially that such phenomena (e.g., recruiting volunteers into political work, building a platform which speaks to the majority, navigating entrenched systems of corruption) fall under the scope of proper philosophical inquiry. I do think, however, that for there to be any kind of meaningful or interesting relationship between philosophy and politics, philosophy should strive towards understanding these phenomena. Simply put, if this isn’t philosophy, I guess that’s fine—but too bad for philosophy.

Recent work in social ontology has made strides towards this end, emphasizing the merit of theories which capture real-world social and political phenomena. Though social ontology is a sub-discipline concerned with understanding the nature of the social world and its constituent parts, some contemporary social ontologists have argued that what we might call the “old guard” of the field (Bratman, Gilbert, Searle, Tuomela) failed to capture the most important parts of the social world, especially those having to do with injustice and oppression (e.g., race, gender). This is both because of the paradigmatic examples the old guard relied upon (e.g., idealized cases of coordination, such as going on a walk together) and because of the tools they constructed for studying those examples.

The central tool which has come under contention is collective intentionality, a concept which describes the capacity for multiple minds to be jointly directed at something. For the old guard, and still, for some other contemporary social ontologists, collective intentionality is the fundamental building block of the social world: social facts, categories, and institutions all exist on the basis of collective intentional attitudes and actions, from joint actions to collective beliefs.

For what we might call the “new guard” (e.g., Burman 2023; Brännmark 2025), collective intentionality overidealizes and thus misrepresents (in an ideologically dubious way) the fabric of the social world. For example, social categories are often established and maintained through power and domination, and these categories persist and impact people without, necessarily, the expression of intentional attitudes or actions by those effected. So, on this kind of view, collective intentionality is not the right kind of analytic tool for studying the social world as it really is.

When we look at the kind of political phenomena involved in movements such as the Mamdani campaign, however, it seems like collective intentionality is exactly the analytic tool needed to both describe and analyze the important social processes at play. Consider the following quote from Tascha Van Auken, Mamdani’s campaign field director, on the night of the election:

“Thousands, thousands of people did it. And every time every volunteer went to a door and talked to a stranger, they offered their vision to that stranger and invited that stranger to be a part of shaping their vision…[E]very door knock and every phone call is a statement of belief that politics is for all of us. This campaign and this city is all of ours to shape.” (Emphasis added).

When we think about people articulating their vision of the world to others, asking others to articulate their own vision, then meshing their visions together to form a shared picture for how the world might be; when we think about people articulating statements of belief which are both shared and which implicate others in ways those others must be implicated in, we are thinking about paradigmatic modes of collective intentionality that look much like what the old guard of social ontology was interested in: shared aims, meshing sub-plans towards shared aims, joint actions, and collective belief.

At a picket line for striking Starbucks workers in December, Mamdani further emphasized the link between paradigmatic modes of collective intentionality (joint action and shared goals) and political attitudes and action, such as economic precarity and solidarity:

“Solidarity…is not an abstract concept. It is measured in picket lines stood on in the rain and in the sleet. It is measured in rent payments that workers do not know if they will be able to meet, child care bills they do not know whether they will be able to afford. And it is measured in strangers, who have never met one another, linking arms to fight for a shared goal and a fair future.” (Emphasis added).

The framework of collective intentionality can help us better understand the distinctive aspects of the Mamdani campaign. When people understand how their aims are aligned to a broader goal, they can better understand (and act on) their part in the collective action needed to bring about that goal; when people recognize their vision of the world is shared with others, they can understand the extent to which their aspirations are actionable and their plights are widely experienced. Beyond simply describing successful political action, collective intentionality thus also helps us better understand the mechanisms underlying such action. A successful campaign requires people talking to each other, understanding their shared interests and ends, and coming together to organize and implement plans for joint and collective actions aimed at bringing about those shared ends.

Just as collective intentionality can help us understand the Mamdani campaign, the campaign can also tell us something philosophically interesting about the nature of collective intentionality. We can use successful political action to shift our paradigmatic examples of collective intentionality away from cases like walking together and instead look to collective political action for our most basic examples of the phenomena we want to study. Articulating widely held, deeply felt demands in the workplace; understanding one’s own social condition as shared; recognizing the relationship between the realization of individual interests and collective action—perhaps these should be the examples from which we develop theories about the nature of shared intention, joint action, and more. These would be precisely the kinds of examples which also help us debate, for instance, the role of normatively binding joint obligations in joint actions, of the sort Margaret Gilbert advocates for but which other social ontologists have challenged.

If we grant that contemporary analytic philosophy and real-world political phenomena can be mutually informative, then the next step is continuing to evaluate and debate, as some social ontologists are already doing, which tools are best suited for building that relationship. Again, while some have argued that tools such as collective intentionality don’t appropriately treat the most important political phenomena, I contend that, for the analysis of political actions (e.g., recognizing and responding to injustice, building political structures which bring about positive change in the world), collective intentionality is indispensable.

Against a common interpretation of Marx’s old adage that philosophers merely interpret the world whilst they should instead try to change it, I do think that using philosophy to describe and understand the world is a necessary step towards changing it. An understanding of the mechanisms and processes underlying successful political actions is valuable knowledge which can enable smoother, more effective future actions. Going from interpretation to change, however, requires that we each take deliberate action beyond the traditional scope of academic work. It requires talking to others about what we’ve come to understand about the world and joining or building organizations (e.g., workplace unions or faculty associations, local chapters of political organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America) wherein collective political actions are planned, divisions of labor established, and shared ends are worked towards. Importantly, it requires doing one’s part in those organizations.

As the Mamdani campaign reminds us, politics is for all of us, which doesn’t simply mean that the doors are open for us all (which they are, across different realms of political influence—workplaces, local communities, government), but also that politics needs us all; more hands are needed on deck to use what we know about the social world to shape and bring about a positive vision of what it could be.