Philosophy & Social Criticism

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Review essay: Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC:

Duke University Press, 2004), 215 pp
Jeremy S. Neill
Philosophy Social Criticism 2008 34: 575
DOI: 10.1177/0191453708089200

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Jeremy S. Neill

Review essay

Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke

University Press, 2004), 215 pp.

In recent years, Charles Taylor has become the foremost practitioner of

a new kind of philosophical genre: the brief but wide-ranging historical
survey of our contemporary intellectual categories. Modern Social Imag-
inaries is no exception to this trend. The book is a broad exposition of
the cultural and religious practices that Taylor is expected to analyze at
even greater length in his forthcoming Gifford Lecture project. It traces
a grand intellectual history from the small and insulated social hierar-
chies of the seventeenth century to the enormous egalitarian democracies
of the 21st century. The central thesis of the book is that there were three
major transitional moments between pre-modern and modern social
understandings: (1) the growth of market economies; (2) the development
of a public discursive sphere; and (3) the invention of popular sovereignty.
Together these three cultural revolutions transformed the sacred and
vertical social understandings of our ancestors into the secular and hori-
zontal social understandings of the contemporary world.
Taylor’s elegant explication of the history of our contemporary intel-
lectual categories constitutes an impressive philosophical sketch. His
level-headed chronological analysis is a welcome counter-balance to some
of the overly optimistic predictions of neo-liberal political philosophers.
At the heart of the book is an exposition of what Taylor calls our modern
‘social imaginaries’. Technically speaking, social imaginaries are ‘the ways
people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others,
how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that
are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that
underlie these expectations’ (23). Often social imaginaries are initiated
from the top down by academic theorists, but just as frequently they

PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM • vol 34 no 5 • pp. 575–580

PSC
Copyright © 2008 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)
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Philosophy & Social Criticism 34 (5)
arise from the ground up by the gradual variation of human practices.
While the external manifestations of social imaginaries can and do
undergo paradigm shifts, the continued existence of social imaginaries
does not. Imaginaries are the invisible meta-structures of societies, the
behavioral assumptions of vast groups of affiliated peoples, and they
remain conceptually stable across many generations of human minds.
Even during the height of the French Revolution, for instance, there still
existed in the minds and practices of the French people a contiguous set
of culturally conscious assumptions.
For our purposes it will suffice to take Taylor’s sometimes nebulous
use of social imaginaries to be an abbreviated reference to the shared
social beliefs of a given people group. Taylor’s claim is that post-
Enlightenment political philosophers have been mistaken in their belief
that modernity is a finite set of monolithic theoretical understandings.
The goal of his book is to teach his colleagues to think in the much
more flexible terms of modern social imaginaries. A more thorough
understanding of our modern social imaginaries will, he thinks, enable
us to see that the standard scholarly picture of a conceptually mono-
lithic modernity is really just one of modernity’s many possible concep-
tual interpretations: ‘The modern imaginary contains a whole gamut of
forms in complex interaction and potential mutual transition’ (170–1).
Approaching 21st-century societies in terms of modern social imaginar-
ies will also enable contemporary scholars to step outside of their inherent
cultural embeddedness.
Broadly speaking, we can divide Taylor’s Imaginaries into three dis-
tinctive thematic moments. The first of these three moments, developed
in the book’s opening chapters, is a familiar one about the ongoing
disenchantment of western religious life. Taylor enthusiasts will recall
that he has already written about this theme at length, most recently in
Varieties of Religion Today. The treatment of religious disenchantment
in Imaginaries differs in important ways from the account Taylor
provides in Varieties. Imaginaries concentrates less on the personalistic
and Jamesian spiritual categories of Varieties and more on an abstract
set of legal and philosophical breakthroughs that were first developed
in the middle of the 17th century. Once these normative breakthroughs
gained entry into the social practices of European people groups, they
led to the overthrow of some of the West’s long-standing spiritual
rituals. Consider, for example, the religious ceremonies of post-medieval
Catholicism. One of the essential features of post-medieval religious
understandings was their embeddedness in the general population’s
social routines. But beginning in the middle of the 17th century, an influ-
ential group of moral and legal philosophers rejected the theoretical
foundation that had justified the collectivist religious practices of the
post-medieval world. Grotius and Locke were particularly instrumental

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Neill: Review essay
in nudging the West’s received ethical categories toward a distinctively
modern form of secular understanding. Their legal theories successfully
separated practical normativity from the divine endorsement it had
enjoyed during the post-Thomistic medieval period.
Simultaneous with the philosophical insurgency of Grotius and Locke
was a revolution in the religious rituals of the general populace. Taylor
traces this second, populist uprising to the spiritual concerns of the
Protestant and Catholic reformers. The practical goals of 17th-century
church reformers, much like the theoretical goals of Grotius and Locke,
involved the destruction of post-medieval Catholicism’s public religious
practices. Usually this destruction was couched in the language of a
theoretical transformation – one in which collectivist Catholic rites were
developed into introspective sets of private religious practices. The
reformers’ efforts were generally successful. By the beginning of the 18th
century, it was widely thought in western European countries that private
piety was more conducive to the health of the individual soul than public
religious ceremonies. The ongoing development of personalized forms
of spirituality was also thought by many leaders to have inoculated their
communities against the untoward metaphysical forces that had in the
past caused psychological upheavals among certain social groups.
Chapters five through eight of Imaginaries develop the second and
most important of the book’s three thematic moments – the formation
of our modern social imaginaries. Taylor subdivides the formation
process into three related constituents: the rise of impersonal economic
exchanges, the rise of the public sphere, and the rise of popular sover-
eignty. Each of the three constituents is worth a brief commentary. The
practical conceptual deliverances of the Enlightenment began to radiate
out into the daily social routines of the populace in the early decades
of the 18th century. In a surprisingly short period of time, these deliv-
erances had disassembled the last vestiges of the late medieval world’s
hierarchical economies. The impersonal economic exchanges that they
fostered were so fiscally efficient that they rapidly displaced relational
economic engagements in the mind of the populace. Before the 18th
century had passed, impersonal economic exchanges had become an
indispensable component of the collective self-image of modern societies.
Taylor’s point in noting this fact is that in modernity an objectified and
secular form of economic categories replaced the relational and sacred
economic understandings of pre-modern communities. The rise of capi-
talism introduced the West to an era of impersonal and contractually
based social interactions.
A similar formation process led to the rise of the modern public
sphere. What exactly does the public sphere mean for Taylor? The public
sphere is, Taylor argues, a uniquely modern structure of shared discur-
sive understandings. Persons involved in it are often nothing more than

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 34 (5)
strangers to each other. They are, however, perfectly comfortable engaging
in complicated dialogues about the common welfare. The reason why
modern citizens have grown so willing to participate in an impersonal
and religiously disenchanted public sphere is that they have become
convinced of the inherent rationality of the discursive decision-making
process. Moderns take the views they develop in the public sphere to
be rational because they think that discursive exchanges constitute a
more normatively valid set of developmental processes than the divinely
mandated social conclusions of their ancestors. Hence, along with the
ideological independence of the modern public sphere there has developed
a certain attitude of practical secularity. Taylor believes that the perceived
rationality of modernity’s discursive formulations has had important
consequences for some of our most prominent social institutions –
modern governments, for example, are now forced to give due consider-
ation to the deliberations of the public sphere, even when these deliber-
ations yield comparatively unsophisticated political models.
The rise of a popular understanding of sovereignty is the third major
component of our modern social imaginaries. Taylor’s explication of
popular sovereignty is particularly commendable for its rigor and schol-
arly documentation. The American and French Revolutions, he argues,
represent two radically different developments in the formation of
modern people groups. The American case exemplifies the peaceable
transformation of the 18th century’s received social hierarchies into a
comfortably egalitarian political and economic climate. The relative
stability of 18th-century American social structures is, Taylor believes,
traceable to the fierce desire of the American colonists to justify their
actions by an intellectual heritage they shared with their Loyalist adver-
saries. Regardless, though, of the cognitive sources of the peaceful
American transition, the fact is that there was never a clear break
between older and newer forms of cultural legitimacy in the American
revolutionary period.
The French case, unlike the American case, is paradigmatic of the
way in which large-scale physical instabilities can sometimes accompany
major social transformations. The failure of French society to maintain
social order between 1792 and 1794 is, Taylor argues, indicative of the
fact that modernity’s newly developing social imaginaries require two
assumptions for their success: (1) that their participants agree with the
foundational constituents of the new social imaginary, and (2) that their
participants understand how to transform the new social imaginary into
an effective empirical outcome. Fortunately for the modern world, the
transition between traditional and modern social imaginaries has rarely
been as violent as the transition between the complimentary social hier-
archy of the ancien régime and the popular ideals of sovereignty and
social equality espoused by the French revolutionaries.

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Neill: Review essay
The third of Imaginaries’ three thematic moments also touches on
religion, albeit on a civil form of religious expression rather than on
an ecclesiastical one. We have seen that modernity has brought about
important changes in our economic, political and cultural paradigms.
In the last chapters of the book, Taylor argues that modernity has also
brought about an alteration in our understanding of human rights and
abilities. As modern social imaginaries have evolved over the past three
centuries, the common privileges which were once recognized as the
rights of particular people groups have been transformed into a culture
of impersonal and universal human rights. This continuously evolving
civil religion of universal human rights is the reason why modern societies
do not always seem to be as secular as might be suggested by contem-
porary uses of the term ‘secular’. Taylor does not think that modern social
structures are fundamentally hostile to religiously informed conceptual
categories. Rather, in the modern social consciousness the language of
human rights has simply evolved away from explicitly religious forms
of expression. The centuries-long progression of modern rights-talk has
been toward a much more nebulous location in the egalitarian traces
of public cultural structures. It is the political identity of modern
peoples which has become the primary location for their public religious
sentiments. The conceptual space occupied by God in the hierarchical
societies of the past has been reinvented in terms of our common national
identities.
Taylor’s literary style in this book is simple and elegant. Imaginaries
is a well-researched cultural essay written by an eminent scholar and
public philosopher. But discerning readers might still feel the need for a
more rigorous development of the book’s idiosyncratic terminology. At
the end of the book we are left with the feeling that Taylor’s definition
of social imaginaries has been overhasty. What exactly is a social imag-
inary, and wherein lies its value as a philosophical category?
Taylor uses social imaginaries to refer to large swaths of people
(many of whom are diverse in their general outlook and beliefs) without
departing significantly from his central topical concerns. As scholarly
tools, social imaginaries appear to be explication devices which enable
their author to unpack large-scale cultural changes. Unfortunately,
Taylor’s quasi-psychological definition of social imaginaries does little to
associate them with recognizable institutional arrangements or national
people groups. The scholarly tool of the social imaginary is fundamen-
tally different from most of the standard investigative paradigms of
contemporary academic examination. Conventional scholarly inquiries
into the social forms of modernity take individualisms or bureaucracies
or nation-states to be modernity’s fundamental building blocks. But the
way Taylor approaches modernity is more reminiscent of a collective
social unconsciousness manifested in public cultural practices than it is

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 34 (5)
of a recognizable set of explicit institutional arrangements. At least in
this regard, the idea of social imaginaries, of collective sets of common
psychological understandings, is reminiscent of the earlier work that
Taylor has done on Hegelian cultural themes. Social imaginaries are the
tools of a master philosophical impressionist. Taylor’s greatest philoso-
phical skills are in sketching impressive theoretical canvasses, and his
wide-ranging account of our modern social imaginaries leaves him little
time to inquire into the factual details of the stories he tells.
From some of the definitional problems associated with social imag-
inaries we can see that the book’s more detailed observations are made
without a significant amount of standard philosophical argumentation.
In all fairness to Taylor, the book anticipates this criticism and states
early on that its intention is to provide a general thematic sketch of
modernity’s religious, economic, and political influences. In Imaginaries
Taylor makes no effort to furnish his readers with a rigorous textual
exposition or a standardized form of conventional philosophical argu-
mentation. His project is fundamentally a descriptive one, unlike some
of the other grand narratives of modernity that have been developed in
recent years (namely MacIntyre, Foucault, etc.). Nevertheless, at certain
points in the book Taylor seems to be inserting himself in the role of
political advocate. The few prescriptive conclusions that he draws from
his analysis are nebulous and varied. But by casting himself in the role
of an impartial observer chronicling the historical antecedents of modern
intellectual categories, Taylor betrays a predilection for a certain kind
of social order. It is an order that looks expectantly toward the future,
while retaining a certain fondness for the social structures of the past.
At the back of Taylor’s optimistic vision for modernity is the awareness
that pre-modern cultural structures have often been just as successful,
if not more so, at accomplishing the very social achievements in which
modernity takes the greatest pride.
Imaginaries is yet another one of Charles Taylor’s first-rate concep-
tual overviews of our contemporary social assumptions. While I cannot
recommend it with confidence to those whose interest is in modernity’s
rigorous forms of philosophical argumentation, the book is an excellent
resource for those who want to read a general survey of modernity’s
diverse cultural history.

Saint Louis University, USA

PSC

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