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Modern Social Imaginaries
One of the most influential philosophers in the English-speaking world, Charles Taylor is internationally renowned for his contributions to political and moral theory, particularly to debates about identity formation, multiculturalism, secularism, and modernity. In Modern Social Imaginaries, Taylor continues his recent reflections on the theme of multiple modernities. To account for the differences among modernities, Taylor sets out his idea of the social imaginary, a broad understanding of the way a given people imagine their collective social life. Retelling the history of Western modernity, Taylor traces the development of a distinct social imaginary. Animated by the idea of a moral order based on the mutual benefit of equal participants, the Western social imaginary is characterized by three key cultural forms—the economy, the public sphere, and self-governance. Taylor’s account of these cultural formations provides a fresh perspective on how to read the specifics of Western how we came to imagine society primarily as an economy for exchanging goods and services to promote mutual prosperity, how we began to imagine the public sphere as a metaphorical place for deliberation and discussion among strangers on issues of mutual concern, and how we invented the idea of a self-governing people capable of secular “founding” acts without recourse to transcendent principles. Accessible in length and style, Modern Social Imaginaries offers a clear and concise framework for understanding the structure of modern life in the West and the different forms modernity has taken around the world.
232 pages, Paperback
First published December 8, 2003
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About the author
Charles Margrave Taylor
151 books656 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. This profile may contain books from multiple authors of this name.
Other authors with this name:
Charles Taylor
Charles Taylor, Journalist, Film critic
Charles Margrave Taylor CC GOQ FBA FRSC is a Canadian philosopher, and professor emeritus at McGill University. He is best known for his contributions to political philosophy, the philosophy of social science, history of philosophy and intellectual history. This work has earned him the prestigious Kyoto Prize, the Templeton Prize, the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy, and the John W. Kluge Prize, in addition to widespread esteem among philosophers. (Source: Wikipedia)
Other authors with this name:
Charles Taylor
Charles Taylor, Journalist, Film critic
Charles Margrave Taylor CC GOQ FBA FRSC is a Canadian philosopher, and professor emeritus at McGill University. He is best known for his contributions to political philosophy, the philosophy of social science, history of philosophy and intellectual history. This work has earned him the prestigious Kyoto Prize, the Templeton Prize, the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy, and the John W. Kluge Prize, in addition to widespread esteem among philosophers. (Source: Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 51 reviews
June 9, 2023
بحث في تاريخ الحداثة الغربية، ومنابع تشكُّلها، وقيام الأسس المفاهيمية التي انبنت عليها
من خلال منظور المتخيل الاجتماعي:
وهو التصور المشترك بين الناس، الذي يتصورون من خلاله واقعهم الاجتماعي، والعلاقات فيما بينهم، وعلاقاتهم بالجماعات الأخرى، ويفسّرون به الأفكار والصور المعيارية الكامنة خلف هذا الواقع.
ولا ادّعي هضمي لجميع الأفكار الواردة في الكتاب، لكثافتها وتركيزها، وهو يحتاج إلى قراءة متصلة، لا متقطعة كقراءتي، وأيضاً لو قُرئ مرتين، لكان أعون على تفهُّمه
من خلال منظور المتخيل الاجتماعي:
وهو التصور المشترك بين الناس، الذي يتصورون من خلاله واقعهم الاجتماعي، والعلاقات فيما بينهم، وعلاقاتهم بالجماعات الأخرى، ويفسّرون به الأفكار والصور المعيارية الكامنة خلف هذا الواقع.
ولا ادّعي هضمي لجميع الأفكار الواردة في الكتاب، لكثافتها وتركيزها، وهو يحتاج إلى قراءة متصلة، لا متقطعة كقراءتي، وأيضاً لو قُرئ مرتين، لكان أعون على تفهُّمه
August 21, 2016
كتاب مهم، وفيه أسس فلسفة تشارلز تايلر السياسية
August 16, 2016
To be reviewed ..
October 5, 2021
Come back to me in 10 years when I’ve reread this book 3 times and finally have something intelligent to say about it.
March 11, 2017
There is much to enjoy in this dense and compact book. Charles Taylor first explains the term "social imaginary"; essentially a repertoire of understandings and practices, both conscious and unconscious, that allow us to navigate our time and space in a certain way. He then takes a historical perspective of how the Modern social imaginary was born by tracing through "The Great Disembedding" where he has a nice, albeit probably simplistic (I'm not fluent enough in social and political history to truly know if he left our important details), comparison of modern and pre-modern societies.
The latter half of this book then takes a much more analytical turn about what striking characteristics Modern contains. These include the Enlightenment view of the Economy, the Public Sphere, and the Sovereign People. There is an honorable mention for the primacy of individual rights as well towards the end. These were the much more fascinating and thought-provoking sections.
Taylor's writing took some getting used to and at times you find yourself re-reading some convoluted paragraph a few times, but his overarching ideas are clear and poignant. This little work is a more social and political understanding of how practices and unquestioned assumptions impact the way in which we see the world.
The latter half of this book then takes a much more analytical turn about what striking characteristics Modern contains. These include the Enlightenment view of the Economy, the Public Sphere, and the Sovereign People. There is an honorable mention for the primacy of individual rights as well towards the end. These were the much more fascinating and thought-provoking sections.
Taylor's writing took some getting used to and at times you find yourself re-reading some convoluted paragraph a few times, but his overarching ideas are clear and poignant. This little work is a more social and political understanding of how practices and unquestioned assumptions impact the way in which we see the world.
July 20, 2019
Charles Taylor tells a dense and fascinating story about the emergence of our 'modern social imaginary’, at the intersection of historical, philosophical and sociological lenses. Loosely spoken, we might understand a ‘social imaginary’ as a worldview. Taylor explains it as ‘the ways we are able to think or imagine the whole of society’. In other words, the modern social imaginary is "the way we collectively imagine, even pretheoretically, our social life in the contemporary Western world”. Its pre-theoretical nature implies that it can never be adequately expressed in the form of a specific doctrine. A social imaginary is rather embedded in images, stories and legends. It doesn’t prescribe but makes common practices possible.
[Parenthesis: Is he talking about ‘the’ modern social imaginary or ‘a’ modern social imaginary? At the very end of the book, the author expresses the hope that we “we finally get over seeing modernity as a single process of which Europe is the paradigm, and that we understand the European model as (…) one model among many, a province of the multiform world we hope (a little against hope) will emerge in order and peace.” This book offers, therefore, not an account of modernity as such, but zooms in on one particular, historically pre-eminent, embodiment of it.]
Taylor situates the emergence of the Western modern social imaginary in the new conception of moral order of seventeenth-century natural law theory. This was heavily indebted to Stoicism, and among its chief originators were the Flemish and Dutch neo-Stoics, Justus Lipsius and Hugo Grotius. (Incidentally, Lipsius was born in the little village of Overijse, which is just a stone’s throw from where I happen to be writing this review). Stoic natural law asserted the existence of a rational and purposeful order to the universe and assumes within humans a 'divine spark' which helps them to live in accordance with this nature. So, the order underlying society derives from the nature of its members. Human beings are rational, sociable agents who are meant to collaborate in peace to their mutual benefit. And thus the picture of society is that of individuals who come together to form a political entity against a certain preexisting moral background and with certain ends in view. "The moral background is one of natural rights: these people have certain moral obligations towards each other. The ends sought are certain common benefits, of which security is the most important.” The idea of society as existing for the mutual benefit of individuals and the defense of their rights has taken on more and more importance. Taylor’s book is, therefore, an account of how this basic idea has come to colonize our social imaginary.
Taylor structures his discussion along three key vectors of social-self understanding: the economy, the public sphere and the practices of democratic self-rule.
First, it is quite understandable how the concept of moral order embedded in natural law theory led to a conception of society as ‘an economy’, i.e. an interlocking set of activities of production, exchange, and consumption, which form a system with its own laws and its own dynamic. This is a significant departure of the idea of a social order as Platonic Forms-at-work. In that worldview hierarchical differentiation ('orators, bellators, laboratores') is seen as the proper order of things. But in the modern social imaginary the distribution of functions in society is contingent; it has to be justified merely instrumentally. “In one way or the other, the modern order gives no ontological status to hierarchy or any particular structure of differentiation.” (This is a fascinating insight, but then it’s interesting to see how dominant the hierarchical template has become in modern organizations, not on ontological grounds but on purely pragmatic grounds of efficiency. It is only recently that we have started to question this orthodoxy and to experiment with organizational practices of self-rule. So the modern social imaginary continues to manifest itself in sometimes contradictory ways).
Eighteenth-century physiocrats and Adam Smith took the idea of polity as economy further: the web of exchange and collaboration grew beyond a mere metaphor for society but became its important purpose, the royal road to peace and orderly existence.
Very interesting for me personally here is Taylor’s observation that this ‘economic’ view of society engendered a ‘bifocal’ view of society. This is how he puts it: “So the new horizontal world in secular time allows for two opposite ways of imagining society. On one side, we become capable of imagining new free, horizontal modes of collective agency, and hence of entering into and creating such agencies because they are now in our repertoire. On the other, we become capable of objectifying society as a system of normindependent processes, in some ways analogous to those in nature. On the one hand, society is a field of common agency, on the other hand a terrain to be mapped, synoptically represented, analyzed, perhaps preparatory to being acted on from the outside by enlightened administrators.”
Taylor outlines how a ‘systems view’ on society grew out of natural law theory. And this systems view manifests an epistemological rift: we need pictures of the layout of society as inert reality and the causal connections that structure it, just as much as we need models and embodied practices of (and for) our collective action on it. in other words: "Our modern imaginary thus includes not only categories that enable common action but also categories of process and classification that happen or have their effects behind the backs of agents.” This, in my view, is the tension between the hard, objectivist and the soft, constructivist systems view we are still wrestling with today. Taylor thinks these perspectives cannot be dissociated; they fundamentally belong to the same range of imaginings that derive from the modern moral order.
The second vector of change was the constitution of the public sphere. The public sphere is a locus in which rational views are elaborated that should guide government. Taylor conceptualizes it as a ‘metatopical’ common space that knits together conversations unfolding across locales and media. How does this differ from, say, the discussions in an ancient polis? The difference is that the debate in the modern public sphere is carried on by people who are not directly involved in the political decision-making. It is supposed to be listened to by power, but it is not itself an exercise of power. “With the modern public sphere comes the idea that political power must be supervised and checked by something outside.” Not by the will of God but by reason embodied in a public discourse to which potentially every citizen had access. The newness of the public sphere lies in its extra-political character. And in its radical secularity. Which means that there is nothing - say, religion, or ancestral laws - that transcends the common actions of the public sphere. It is an association that is constituted by nothing outside of the common actions carried out in it: coming to a common mind through the exchange of ideas.
Popular sovereignty is the third in the great connected chain of mutations in the social imaginary that have helped constitute modern society. The foundations of new political entities were located in 'a will of the people' that did not need a pre-existing law to act as a people. It could see itself as the source of law. This conception emerged from the interplay between new and traditional social imaginaries as demonstrated, in distinct ways, by the two great 18th-century revolutions. The American Revolution came down on a new union government that its basis of legitimacy in a “people of the United States” and was embodied in a clear and unconstested institutional form, namely elected assemblies based on manhood suffrage. In the case of the French Revolution this shared understanding of the institutional meaning of the sovereignty of the nation was absent, with fateful consequences. The result was a Rousseauian politics of virtue, highly ‘ideological’ and quasi-religious in tone. It gravitated towards quasi-theatrical forms of representations that make the general will of the people manifest in situ. This kind of politics were, and are, particularly prone to violence and scapegoating.
Taylor sees the unfolding of the modern social imaginary along these three axes as ‘a long march’. The march carried forward an extension of the new social imaginary beyond the social elites that originally adopted it, and it extended the principles of this new imaginary to other levels and niches of social life. Progress was not uniform. "The people of the time can easily seem to us to be inconsistent, even hypocritical. Elite males spoke of rights, equality, and the republic, but thought nothing of keeping indentured servants, not to speak of slaves, and kept their women, children, their households in general under traditional patriarchal power. Didn’t they see the glaring contradiction? (…) It took us a long time to come to see the family, specifically the husband-wife relation in the now nuclear family, outside of the older household framework, in a critical democraticegalitarian light. This happened, as it were, only yesterday. Uniformity across niches is far from an obvious, commonsense requirement.”
I’m concluding with an quote in extenso that summarizes our modern social imaginary in a profound and persuasive way:
A beautiful, tantalizing idea that is in urgent need of re-invention in an age where the economy is vampirizing planet and polity, the public sphere is undermined with fake news and propaganda, and the will of the people is being channeled into a Manichean politics of scapegoating.
[Parenthesis: Is he talking about ‘the’ modern social imaginary or ‘a’ modern social imaginary? At the very end of the book, the author expresses the hope that we “we finally get over seeing modernity as a single process of which Europe is the paradigm, and that we understand the European model as (…) one model among many, a province of the multiform world we hope (a little against hope) will emerge in order and peace.” This book offers, therefore, not an account of modernity as such, but zooms in on one particular, historically pre-eminent, embodiment of it.]
Taylor situates the emergence of the Western modern social imaginary in the new conception of moral order of seventeenth-century natural law theory. This was heavily indebted to Stoicism, and among its chief originators were the Flemish and Dutch neo-Stoics, Justus Lipsius and Hugo Grotius. (Incidentally, Lipsius was born in the little village of Overijse, which is just a stone’s throw from where I happen to be writing this review). Stoic natural law asserted the existence of a rational and purposeful order to the universe and assumes within humans a 'divine spark' which helps them to live in accordance with this nature. So, the order underlying society derives from the nature of its members. Human beings are rational, sociable agents who are meant to collaborate in peace to their mutual benefit. And thus the picture of society is that of individuals who come together to form a political entity against a certain preexisting moral background and with certain ends in view. "The moral background is one of natural rights: these people have certain moral obligations towards each other. The ends sought are certain common benefits, of which security is the most important.” The idea of society as existing for the mutual benefit of individuals and the defense of their rights has taken on more and more importance. Taylor’s book is, therefore, an account of how this basic idea has come to colonize our social imaginary.
Taylor structures his discussion along three key vectors of social-self understanding: the economy, the public sphere and the practices of democratic self-rule.
First, it is quite understandable how the concept of moral order embedded in natural law theory led to a conception of society as ‘an economy’, i.e. an interlocking set of activities of production, exchange, and consumption, which form a system with its own laws and its own dynamic. This is a significant departure of the idea of a social order as Platonic Forms-at-work. In that worldview hierarchical differentiation ('orators, bellators, laboratores') is seen as the proper order of things. But in the modern social imaginary the distribution of functions in society is contingent; it has to be justified merely instrumentally. “In one way or the other, the modern order gives no ontological status to hierarchy or any particular structure of differentiation.” (This is a fascinating insight, but then it’s interesting to see how dominant the hierarchical template has become in modern organizations, not on ontological grounds but on purely pragmatic grounds of efficiency. It is only recently that we have started to question this orthodoxy and to experiment with organizational practices of self-rule. So the modern social imaginary continues to manifest itself in sometimes contradictory ways).
Eighteenth-century physiocrats and Adam Smith took the idea of polity as economy further: the web of exchange and collaboration grew beyond a mere metaphor for society but became its important purpose, the royal road to peace and orderly existence.
Very interesting for me personally here is Taylor’s observation that this ‘economic’ view of society engendered a ‘bifocal’ view of society. This is how he puts it: “So the new horizontal world in secular time allows for two opposite ways of imagining society. On one side, we become capable of imagining new free, horizontal modes of collective agency, and hence of entering into and creating such agencies because they are now in our repertoire. On the other, we become capable of objectifying society as a system of normindependent processes, in some ways analogous to those in nature. On the one hand, society is a field of common agency, on the other hand a terrain to be mapped, synoptically represented, analyzed, perhaps preparatory to being acted on from the outside by enlightened administrators.”
Taylor outlines how a ‘systems view’ on society grew out of natural law theory. And this systems view manifests an epistemological rift: we need pictures of the layout of society as inert reality and the causal connections that structure it, just as much as we need models and embodied practices of (and for) our collective action on it. in other words: "Our modern imaginary thus includes not only categories that enable common action but also categories of process and classification that happen or have their effects behind the backs of agents.” This, in my view, is the tension between the hard, objectivist and the soft, constructivist systems view we are still wrestling with today. Taylor thinks these perspectives cannot be dissociated; they fundamentally belong to the same range of imaginings that derive from the modern moral order.
The second vector of change was the constitution of the public sphere. The public sphere is a locus in which rational views are elaborated that should guide government. Taylor conceptualizes it as a ‘metatopical’ common space that knits together conversations unfolding across locales and media. How does this differ from, say, the discussions in an ancient polis? The difference is that the debate in the modern public sphere is carried on by people who are not directly involved in the political decision-making. It is supposed to be listened to by power, but it is not itself an exercise of power. “With the modern public sphere comes the idea that political power must be supervised and checked by something outside.” Not by the will of God but by reason embodied in a public discourse to which potentially every citizen had access. The newness of the public sphere lies in its extra-political character. And in its radical secularity. Which means that there is nothing - say, religion, or ancestral laws - that transcends the common actions of the public sphere. It is an association that is constituted by nothing outside of the common actions carried out in it: coming to a common mind through the exchange of ideas.
Popular sovereignty is the third in the great connected chain of mutations in the social imaginary that have helped constitute modern society. The foundations of new political entities were located in 'a will of the people' that did not need a pre-existing law to act as a people. It could see itself as the source of law. This conception emerged from the interplay between new and traditional social imaginaries as demonstrated, in distinct ways, by the two great 18th-century revolutions. The American Revolution came down on a new union government that its basis of legitimacy in a “people of the United States” and was embodied in a clear and unconstested institutional form, namely elected assemblies based on manhood suffrage. In the case of the French Revolution this shared understanding of the institutional meaning of the sovereignty of the nation was absent, with fateful consequences. The result was a Rousseauian politics of virtue, highly ‘ideological’ and quasi-religious in tone. It gravitated towards quasi-theatrical forms of representations that make the general will of the people manifest in situ. This kind of politics were, and are, particularly prone to violence and scapegoating.
Taylor sees the unfolding of the modern social imaginary along these three axes as ‘a long march’. The march carried forward an extension of the new social imaginary beyond the social elites that originally adopted it, and it extended the principles of this new imaginary to other levels and niches of social life. Progress was not uniform. "The people of the time can easily seem to us to be inconsistent, even hypocritical. Elite males spoke of rights, equality, and the republic, but thought nothing of keeping indentured servants, not to speak of slaves, and kept their women, children, their households in general under traditional patriarchal power. Didn’t they see the glaring contradiction? (…) It took us a long time to come to see the family, specifically the husband-wife relation in the now nuclear family, outside of the older household framework, in a critical democraticegalitarian light. This happened, as it were, only yesterday. Uniformity across niches is far from an obvious, commonsense requirement.”
I’m concluding with an quote in extenso that summarizes our modern social imaginary in a profound and persuasive way:
“What is the feature of our ‘imagined communities’ by which people very often do readily accept that they are free under a democratic regime even where their will is overridden on important issues? The answer they accept runs something like this: You, like the rest of us, are free just in virtue of the fact that we are ruling ourselves in common and not being ruled by some agency that need not take account of us. Your freedom consists in your having a guaranteed voice in the sovereign, that you can be heard and have some part in making the decision. You enjoy this freedom by virtue of a law that enfranchises all of us, and so we enjoy this together. Your freedom is realized and defended by this law, whether you win or lose in any particular decision. This law defines a community of those whose freedom it realizes and defends together. It defines a collective agency, a people, whose acting together by the law preserves their freedom. Such is the answer, valid or not, that people have come to accept in democratic society. We can see right away that it involves their accepting a kind of belonging much stronger than that of any chance group that might come together. It is an ongoing collective agency, membership in which realizes something very important: a kind of freedom. Insofar as this good is crucial to members’ identity, they thus identify strongly with this agency, and hence also feel a bond with their coparticipants in this agency. It is only an appeal to this kind of membership that can answer the challenge of an individual or group who contemplates rebelling against an adverse decision in the name of their freedom.”
A beautiful, tantalizing idea that is in urgent need of re-invention in an age where the economy is vampirizing planet and polity, the public sphere is undermined with fake news and propaganda, and the will of the people is being channeled into a Manichean politics of scapegoating.
October 1, 2015
This text is an excellent combination of philosophical anthropology, or theory of human nature, historical consciousness, and social diagnosis. It is a book worthy of 4.5 stars in my opinion. Specifically, one of the aims of the book is to articulate our position in terms of Western modernity in light of a theory that differentiates the concept of modernity itself. This welcome move opens up a variety of ways to chart the trajectory of different societies and cultures in terms of modernity. The key move is to locate human action within a larger context of a 'social imaginary'. The social imaginary is something like the inherited cultural and social context in which human beings move, live , and articulate themselves in their choices and actions. It is a welcome concept because it develops a concept of structure that shapes human agency that does not go on to totally determine it in either idealistic or materialistic ways. Rather, because human agency is so circumscribed by our relation to time, either conceived in sacred or profane senses, the socially agreed upon or unconsciously adapted sense of the past present and future is irreducible to the live options for us, whom Taylor elsewhere calls'self-interpreting animals'. Our notions of time, however, are changing with wider social and historical shifts. Making sense of these shifts is part of an ongoing process whereby we articulate our position with respect to each other and our wider environment.
In short different cultural and historical trajectories give rise to different ways of imagining one's self and one's options, as well as one's society. In this sense there are different social imaginaries. Hence, there are multiple modernities. Noentheless, there is a bit of a universalistic stroke in his overall description, as his model of human agency , his understanding of how humans inherit, inhabit, and change their social imaginary comes across as an ineliminable, or 'transcendentally necessary' aspect of human action.
Empirically, the discussion of the rise of market societies, the transformation of relations of among classes, and the sociological concepts Taylor enlists to argue his case are compelling, in my humble opinion. It's definitely a work worth rereading.
In short different cultural and historical trajectories give rise to different ways of imagining one's self and one's options, as well as one's society. In this sense there are different social imaginaries. Hence, there are multiple modernities. Noentheless, there is a bit of a universalistic stroke in his overall description, as his model of human agency , his understanding of how humans inherit, inhabit, and change their social imaginary comes across as an ineliminable, or 'transcendentally necessary' aspect of human action.
Empirically, the discussion of the rise of market societies, the transformation of relations of among classes, and the sociological concepts Taylor enlists to argue his case are compelling, in my humble opinion. It's definitely a work worth rereading.
April 29, 2014
It reminded me a lot of Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition as it describes modernism as a unifying/levelling process and the loss of the hero and 'natural' hierarchy.
"With the coming of a commercial society, it seemed that greatness, heroism, and full-hearted dedication to a nonutilitarian cause were in danger of atrophy, even of disappearing from the world" (p.81).
On the positive side, modernism (according to Taylor) does not necessarily lead to 'alienation, meaninglessness, a sense of impending social dissolution' but can be seen as a trend towards cosmopolitanism: "Modern individualism, as a moral idea, doesn’t mean ceasing to belong at all – that’s the individualism of anomie and breakdown – but imagining oneself as belonging to ever wider and more impersonal entities: the state, the movement, the community of mankind. This is the change that has been described from another angel as the shift form 'network' or 'relational' identities to 'categorical' ones" (p.160).
I have mixed feelings about this perspective, and the book as a whole. The 'social imaginary' is an interesting metaphor but it doesn't seem to reveal anything more than that people live within their horizons. On the other hand, I did enjoy his discussions about revolutionary change being tautological and that the social imaginary can be (and has been) ideological and imbued with false consciousness.
"With the coming of a commercial society, it seemed that greatness, heroism, and full-hearted dedication to a nonutilitarian cause were in danger of atrophy, even of disappearing from the world" (p.81).
On the positive side, modernism (according to Taylor) does not necessarily lead to 'alienation, meaninglessness, a sense of impending social dissolution' but can be seen as a trend towards cosmopolitanism: "Modern individualism, as a moral idea, doesn’t mean ceasing to belong at all – that’s the individualism of anomie and breakdown – but imagining oneself as belonging to ever wider and more impersonal entities: the state, the movement, the community of mankind. This is the change that has been described from another angel as the shift form 'network' or 'relational' identities to 'categorical' ones" (p.160).
I have mixed feelings about this perspective, and the book as a whole. The 'social imaginary' is an interesting metaphor but it doesn't seem to reveal anything more than that people live within their horizons. On the other hand, I did enjoy his discussions about revolutionary change being tautological and that the social imaginary can be (and has been) ideological and imbued with false consciousness.
January 10, 2024
Demasiado interesante. Habla mucho sobre el orden moral de la modernidad y sus efectos en el imaginario colectivo, el tema de la secularidad aparece más hacia el final seguramente en vista de los temas tratados en “A Secular Age”. My puntual y con demasiadas referencias, no puede faltar la alusión a Habermas, Marx y Weber para criticar la convergencia que se da entre modos de producción, vida privada (fe, por supuesto) y vida pública.
“From all this, Pope triumphantly concludes "that true self love and social are the same”.
And so perhaps the first big shift wrought by this new idea of order, both in theory and in social imaginary, consists in our coming to see our society as an economy, an interlocking set of activities of production, exchange, and consumption, which form a system with its own laws and its own dynamic.
Instead of being merely the management, by those in au-thority, of the resources we collectively need in household or state, the economic now defines a way we are linked together, a sphere of coexistence that in principle could suffice to itself, if only disorder and conflict didn't threaten.”
“From all this, Pope triumphantly concludes "that true self love and social are the same”.
And so perhaps the first big shift wrought by this new idea of order, both in theory and in social imaginary, consists in our coming to see our society as an economy, an interlocking set of activities of production, exchange, and consumption, which form a system with its own laws and its own dynamic.
Instead of being merely the management, by those in au-thority, of the resources we collectively need in household or state, the economic now defines a way we are linked together, a sphere of coexistence that in principle could suffice to itself, if only disorder and conflict didn't threaten.”
December 12, 2020
Wonderful book! Charles Taylor is indeed a quite interesting (and user-friendly in this case) philosopher of our modern times.
April 2, 2024
Good, but very deep
I read this book for one of my Master courses. It has some great points, but it's a very deep and heavy read.
I read this book for one of my Master courses. It has some great points, but it's a very deep and heavy read.
September 26, 2023
I wish I read this before a Secular Age. In Modern Social Imaginaries, Taylor packs in the definition and the consequences of what he sees as the root of the secular age. For Taylor, he sees the moving away from a chain of being as the root of the Secular Age (in short, a denial of Aristotelian philosophy). In denying this, what type of Social Imagination do we arrive at? One of rebellion and revolution, a reason that Charles Taylor focuses much on revolutions. P. 774-5 in a Secular Age sums up the three major points that can be found in this book: First the rise of elite Theology. This is captured in ch.4, and he points towards the Protestant Reformation as the scapegoat. This seen clearly in he's denial of a relationship between capitalism and the Protestant work ethic. Instead, the break from the Higher forms leads to an individuality that results in a secular or revolutionary mindset. On the other hand, Charles Taylor in the next chapter points out that the move towards a mechanic world (i.e. Adam Smith's invisible hand) lead to the increasing of natural rights or putting humanity at the core instead of God. He does pick up on Weber again and Weber's emphasis on order for all persons. The end goal is that of harmony and anti-elitist movements. This would be captured today in John Milbank's eucharist hospitality with his form of political governance. In the end, Taylor submits that history entered into a division of upper and lower thought revealing perhaps his Hegelianism. Anyone looking for an introduction to Taylor should pick up this book, and anyone entering into the discussion of what is secularization should have this on their shelves.
May 13, 2014
I feel the need to reread this small book every so often to get back in touch with Taylor's genealogical method of explaining modern social imaginaries. I should really be revisiting his The Secular Age which is a much more in-depth approach to much the same material.
I greatly value the book believing Taylor's approach to be exemplary. However, while continuing to give the work five stars, because I believe it has changed my own way of looking at history, society and my own beliefs, I need to say that I am critical of Taylor's writing style which at times is misleading, mostly, I suspect, as a stylistic method for arranging his arguments. An example is his putting forward arguments about the development of American democracy. For much of the book he leads his reader to believe that there is a certain purity to this development and to the current product. Of course, no reader of the book book would accept these arguments. In the second to last chapter, Taylor finally shows his hand and discusses reality. In my opinion, he does this in order to raise some points about religion at this point. It shows a certain attempt to manipulate which I do not appreciate. I will, of course, forgive this ruse and read the book again as I will eventually reread The Secular Age despite its final flawed arguments to suggest that religion should have a formal seat at the table in our secular society.
I greatly value the book believing Taylor's approach to be exemplary. However, while continuing to give the work five stars, because I believe it has changed my own way of looking at history, society and my own beliefs, I need to say that I am critical of Taylor's writing style which at times is misleading, mostly, I suspect, as a stylistic method for arranging his arguments. An example is his putting forward arguments about the development of American democracy. For much of the book he leads his reader to believe that there is a certain purity to this development and to the current product. Of course, no reader of the book book would accept these arguments. In the second to last chapter, Taylor finally shows his hand and discusses reality. In my opinion, he does this in order to raise some points about religion at this point. It shows a certain attempt to manipulate which I do not appreciate. I will, of course, forgive this ruse and read the book again as I will eventually reread The Secular Age despite its final flawed arguments to suggest that religion should have a formal seat at the table in our secular society.
October 27, 2015
Profound and concise, Taylor puts his finger on the nature of societal cohesion in the modern age by reference to what he calls a "social imaginary." This social imaginary is more than simply a "worldview" or a set of propositions held in the intellect. An imaginary encompasses all that it means to live and move within a common group of people. Greetings, language, how we interact in public, and taken-for-granted assumptions about what is right and wrong in given circumstances are all constitutive of the social imaginary. Taylor explains the shift from an imaginary grounded in something transcendent and "other" to one that is wholly secular and self-constituting.
Taylor's all encompassing knowledge of a variety of subjects is clearly visible in this work, especially in light of its brevity. It was depressing to read about what we lost at the turn of the Enlightenment with regard to the public square. Taylor remains academically ambivalent about the whole thing, but he lavishes some opinion on his mention of the Catholic persecution of Jews and witches during the height of the close relationship of Church and State. He makes it clear what a terrible thing this persecution was. Sigh, predictable Canadian liberal Catholic reacts negatively to a clearly justifiable defense of social cohesion and monopoly of the Church in religious life. If not for this paragraph I would have given the book 5 stars.
Taylor's all encompassing knowledge of a variety of subjects is clearly visible in this work, especially in light of its brevity. It was depressing to read about what we lost at the turn of the Enlightenment with regard to the public square. Taylor remains academically ambivalent about the whole thing, but he lavishes some opinion on his mention of the Catholic persecution of Jews and witches during the height of the close relationship of Church and State. He makes it clear what a terrible thing this persecution was. Sigh, predictable Canadian liberal Catholic reacts negatively to a clearly justifiable defense of social cohesion and monopoly of the Church in religious life. If not for this paragraph I would have given the book 5 stars.
November 1, 2015
Charles Taylor is obviously erudite but "Modern Social Imaginaries" is very theoretical. Taylor does a good job describing how society creates and sustains social Imaginaries and cites many historical examples, although his lengthy excursion into French history during the Revolution feels too distracting from the main themes of this book. I do find his discussion of religion and the secular interesting, particularly in the first half of the book and near the end in chapter 13 (in this regard, Taylor focuses a lot on the notion of sacred and secular time).
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January 16, 2021أولا الترجمة سيئة ، ثانيا يوجد تلخيص من المؤلف نفسه للكتاب تقريبا في أهم مباحثه في كتابه الآخر "عصر علماني" في الصفحات مابين 243 إلى 316 ..
April 30, 2023
الكتاب : المتخيلات الاجتماعية الحديثة
للكاتب و الفيلسوف الكندي تشارلز تايلر
يعرف الكاتب المتخيل الإجتماعي بكونه فكرة مغايرة للنظرية الإجتماعية إنما هو نوع من التأمل في الواقع الإجتماعي ، أي ما يتخيله الناس عن مجتمعاتهم و علاقتهم و حتي تطلعاتهم عنها
من خلال هذا الموضوع الذي يتعلق بعلم الإجتماع بدرجة ما يشرح لنا الكاتب فكرة تطور المفاهيم و المتخيلات الجمعية عبر الزمن لتصل إلي شكلها الحالي ، إلى الحداثة و ما بعد الحداثة و كيف تغير شكل العالم و ما هي أهم المقومات التي تغيرت بدرجة أولى
يبدأها من النظام الأخلاقي ، حيث كان النطام الأخلاقي قديما نظاما أو سمة تتصل بالله و الكون بينما النظام الأخلاقي الحديث صار يرتكز علينا نحن البشر ، أي بطريقة أكثر بساطة قديما كان الدين و المعتقد و الكون هو ما ينبثق منه النظام الأخلاقي ، لكن الآن أصبح النظام الأخلاقي بشريا متعلق بنا و بما نعتقد أنه أخلاقي ، ...
يعتبر الكاتب أيضا النظام القديم على انه نظام تراتبي تقوم المهن فيه او الوظائف علي تكميل بعضها البعض ، بينما النظام الحديث يقوم علي التبادل بدل التكامل ، يقول الكاتب أن الشروط الواجب تقديمها لنظامنا الحالية ه�� ضمان الأمان و السيرورة الاقتصادية ، بينما كنا مطالبينا في السابق أن تؤدي كل طبقة عملها من أجل ضمان تكامل النظام ...
ذكر الكاتب أيضا مراح تشكل المدينة و التمدن من خلال المثال الأوروبي و العوامل التي ساهمت في جعل المجتمعات الأوروبية تقبل الشكل الجديد للمدينة و التمدن و ذالك أن الشعوب الأوروبية كانت تحت ظل الحكم الديني و ساهم الانعتاق من المسيحية الكاثوليكية إلى الإصلاح البروتساتني أي أهم مراح تطور الديني بظهور النظام الإجتماعي و الأخلاقي الجديد الذي بات من تصحيحه للممارسات المسيحية إلى رفضها و كما يضيف أن الفلسفة الرواقية أيضا كان لها دور في هذا التطور و الذي حدث للأفكار المسيحية ، كل هذه الأحداث و الثورة الفكرية التي عرفتها هذه الشعوب أوجدت صورة للمدينة الحديثة و التمدن الذي بدأت الطبقات الأروستقراطية كأولي الطبقات في تطبيقه
يذكر الكاتب أيضا أفكار مثل المجال العام الذي يعتبر فكرة ثورية في المجتمعات الحديثة ، تبدو فكرة المجال العام ذكية بالنسبة لي جدا ، رغم عدم فهمي الكامل لما طرحه الكاتب في هذه الفكرة ، لكن الكاتب يعتقد أن ما ميز التطور الذي حدث في عصرنا الحالي هو المجال العام و يقصد بالمجال العام هنا هو مجموعة الأفكار التي تناقشها مجموعة من الناس الغير مرتبطين أو حتى الذين لم يلتقوا أبدا لإبداء رأيهم في مواضيع الحياة المختلفة و قد منحنا العصر الحديث هذه الميزة عن غيرنا من الحضارات و المجتمعات القديمة بحيث يحرص الكاتب على التفريق بين المجال العام و الأفعال المشتركة و الصالح العام لأنه يعتبر حد فهمي المجال العام فكرة متعالية عن الأفكار السابقة بحيث يعتبر المجال العام تجسيدا لما يمكن القول بأنه مجموعة من الأفكار المختلفة التي تناقش في التلفاز و الكتب و الجرائد من قبل أشخاص مختلفين و خلفيات مختلفة و تصل إلى طرح أفكار قد تساعد في تغير قوانين سياسية و إجتماعية ، من دون أن يكون هذا القصد منها ، أي يشبه الفضاء المشترك للأفكار التي تطرح من أجل تطوير و تبادل أفكار مختلفة القصد منها هو هذه الحركة في الأفكار و القناعات نفسه ...
ذكر أيضا افكار مثل الشعب السيد التي ظهرت في القرون الحديثة كطفرة غريبة عن تاريخ التطور البشري ، إضافة إلي أفكار عديدة يطول شرحها و أمثلة ذكية جدا تفسر ربما كل هذه القفزات التاريخية في التطور البشري
ركز أيضا على شرح الإقتصاد الحديث الذي يعتبر عجلة أساسية حسب الكاتب في سرعة هذا التطور و تقبل المجتمع له بدرجة أولى ...
للكاتب و الفيلسوف الكندي تشارلز تايلر
يعرف الكاتب المتخيل الإجتماعي بكونه فكرة مغايرة للنظرية الإجتماعية إنما هو نوع من التأمل في الواقع الإجتماعي ، أي ما يتخيله الناس عن مجتمعاتهم و علاقتهم و حتي تطلعاتهم عنها
من خلال هذا الموضوع الذي يتعلق بعلم الإجتماع بدرجة ما يشرح لنا الكاتب فكرة تطور المفاهيم و المتخيلات الجمعية عبر الزمن لتصل إلي شكلها الحالي ، إلى الحداثة و ما بعد الحداثة و كيف تغير شكل العالم و ما هي أهم المقومات التي تغيرت بدرجة أولى
يبدأها من النظام الأخلاقي ، حيث كان النطام الأخلاقي قديما نظاما أو سمة تتصل بالله و الكون بينما النظام الأخلاقي الحديث صار يرتكز علينا نحن البشر ، أي بطريقة أكثر بساطة قديما كان الدين و المعتقد و الكون هو ما ينبثق منه النظام الأخلاقي ، لكن الآن أصبح النظام الأخلاقي بشريا متعلق بنا و بما نعتقد أنه أخلاقي ، ...
يعتبر الكاتب أيضا النظام القديم على انه نظام تراتبي تقوم المهن فيه او الوظائف علي تكميل بعضها البعض ، بينما النظام الحديث يقوم علي التبادل بدل التكامل ، يقول الكاتب أن الشروط الواجب تقديمها لنظامنا الحالية ه�� ضمان الأمان و السيرورة الاقتصادية ، بينما كنا مطالبينا في السابق أن تؤدي كل طبقة عملها من أجل ضمان تكامل النظام ...
ذكر الكاتب أيضا مراح تشكل المدينة و التمدن من خلال المثال الأوروبي و العوامل التي ساهمت في جعل المجتمعات الأوروبية تقبل الشكل الجديد للمدينة و التمدن و ذالك أن الشعوب الأوروبية كانت تحت ظل الحكم الديني و ساهم الانعتاق من المسيحية الكاثوليكية إلى الإصلاح البروتساتني أي أهم مراح تطور الديني بظهور النظام الإجتماعي و الأخلاقي الجديد الذي بات من تصحيحه للممارسات المسيحية إلى رفضها و كما يضيف أن الفلسفة الرواقية أيضا كان لها دور في هذا التطور و الذي حدث للأفكار المسيحية ، كل هذه الأحداث و الثورة الفكرية التي عرفتها هذه الشعوب أوجدت صورة للمدينة الحديثة و التمدن الذي بدأت الطبقات الأروستقراطية كأولي الطبقات في تطبيقه
يذكر الكاتب أيضا أفكار مثل المجال العام الذي يعتبر فكرة ثورية في المجتمعات الحديثة ، تبدو فكرة المجال العام ذكية بالنسبة لي جدا ، رغم عدم فهمي الكامل لما طرحه الكاتب في هذه الفكرة ، لكن الكاتب يعتقد أن ما ميز التطور الذي حدث في عصرنا الحالي هو المجال العام و يقصد بالمجال العام هنا هو مجموعة الأفكار التي تناقشها مجموعة من الناس الغير مرتبطين أو حتى الذين لم يلتقوا أبدا لإبداء رأيهم في مواضيع الحياة المختلفة و قد منحنا العصر الحديث هذه الميزة عن غيرنا من الحضارات و المجتمعات القديمة بحيث يحرص الكاتب على التفريق بين المجال العام و الأفعال المشتركة و الصالح العام لأنه يعتبر حد فهمي المجال العام فكرة متعالية عن الأفكار السابقة بحيث يعتبر المجال العام تجسيدا لما يمكن القول بأنه مجموعة من الأفكار المختلفة التي تناقش في التلفاز و الكتب و الجرائد من قبل أشخاص مختلفين و خلفيات مختلفة و تصل إلى طرح أفكار قد تساعد في تغير قوانين سياسية و إجتماعية ، من دون أن يكون هذا القصد منها ، أي يشبه الفضاء المشترك للأفكار التي تطرح من أجل تطوير و تبادل أفكار مختلفة القصد منها هو هذه الحركة في الأفكار و القناعات نفسه ...
ذكر أيضا افكار مثل الشعب السيد التي ظهرت في القرون الحديثة كطفرة غريبة عن تاريخ التطور البشري ، إضافة إلي أفكار عديدة يطول شرحها و أمثلة ذكية جدا تفسر ربما كل هذه القفزات التاريخية في التطور البشري
ركز أيضا على شرح الإقتصاد الحديث الذي يعتبر عجلة أساسية حسب الكاتب في سرعة هذا التطور و تقبل المجتمع له بدرجة أولى ...
December 9, 2023
This concise volume offers a good gateway into the concepts that animate and render our collective behaviors and omissions legible within contemporary society. It contrasts the prevailing social imaginary of our times with the markedly different worldviews of the 17th century when these novel modes of conceiving our place in the universe began to surface. This is something I don't think many people fully grok. Especially when you see people attempting to thrust Aristotelian virtue ethics onto teenagers in places like orida. There is an incoherence there that Taylor teases out, and would be useful for those who think we can just transplant one ethic system from 2 centuries ago onto our own and it will all be fine is absurd.
Taylor’s extensive examination of the re-conceptualization of time is critical here. He juxtaposes an atemporal perspective, where time is external and immutable, with what he terms 'secular time'—a linear, progressive understanding that is uniquely modern. This shift is crucial for grasping the transformation of our position within the cosmos and, consequently, within society. This new temporal framework dislodges us from the concept of an 'enchanted' universe, where predetermined roles are enacted, to one that is 'disenchanted,' compelling us to fulfill normative obligations imposed by a restructured social order.
Taylor's book is indispensable for those seeking to comprehend the root causes of today's societal incoherence and our struggles to find common ground. It is an essential read for anyone endeavoring to make sense of the underlying dissonances that characterize modern communal life.
Taylor’s extensive examination of the re-conceptualization of time is critical here. He juxtaposes an atemporal perspective, where time is external and immutable, with what he terms 'secular time'—a linear, progressive understanding that is uniquely modern. This shift is crucial for grasping the transformation of our position within the cosmos and, consequently, within society. This new temporal framework dislodges us from the concept of an 'enchanted' universe, where predetermined roles are enacted, to one that is 'disenchanted,' compelling us to fulfill normative obligations imposed by a restructured social order.
Taylor's book is indispensable for those seeking to comprehend the root causes of today's societal incoherence and our struggles to find common ground. It is an essential read for anyone endeavoring to make sense of the underlying dissonances that characterize modern communal life.
December 31, 2018
I struggled with this book because I don't absorb philosophy easily, and because Taylor makes many historical references to things that are outside my experience or knowledge. Thus, his attempts at illustrations sometimes are just plain lost on me. However, it is conceptually very rich. It is shorter than his epic tome, A Secular Age, which completely lost me.
What I particularly liked was his definition of terms: the social imaginary--which is a kind of collective worldview by which we conceive of not only our world but our interactions, expectations, and possibilities with others. This concept goes a long way toward helping to understand the ways in which we associate, the lies we allow ourselves to believe, and the commitments we make. In the last chapter, he focuses on the post-religious age--the age in which we are no longer dependent upon "God" or "higher time" for our social organization and social structuring. The loss here is that this change cuts us off from the past as we have no recourse to God for our social order (except that often our culture does keep insisting on using God as whipping boy for all our social ills--but Taylor doesn't discuss that). Yet, he argues that this is not the end of "God" in the public sphere merely a recasting of God's role and relationship to the public domain.
What I particularly liked was his definition of terms: the social imaginary--which is a kind of collective worldview by which we conceive of not only our world but our interactions, expectations, and possibilities with others. This concept goes a long way toward helping to understand the ways in which we associate, the lies we allow ourselves to believe, and the commitments we make. In the last chapter, he focuses on the post-religious age--the age in which we are no longer dependent upon "God" or "higher time" for our social organization and social structuring. The loss here is that this change cuts us off from the past as we have no recourse to God for our social order (except that often our culture does keep insisting on using God as whipping boy for all our social ills--but Taylor doesn't discuss that). Yet, he argues that this is not the end of "God" in the public sphere merely a recasting of God's role and relationship to the public domain.
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June 16, 2025a very strange book. not rating since it didn't feel right. at first i was really hostile to CT's approach but then Paul S. made me a bit more receptive to him. this is one of CT's shorter books, which is odd, since he has massive ambitions. this book sets out quite a few of them, namely, social imaginaries and its explanatory power. the concept isn't so complicated, and I think I would have rather taken it in through an essay than this book. he talks a lot about history and happenings, but "does" very little history in and of itself, i.e., he's not doing much historical digging, just making sense of the historical literature that's around. i'm receptive to the idea of social imaginaries but I don't think CT does enough in this book to fully justify its usage or see how it supervenes on much of the literature he cites. i don't think i'll read A Secular Age but i think that's where this idea is more fully developed. redeemed by mentioning Habermas
July 11, 2023
This is a good book. I find the definitions and connections that Taylor makes between moral order, social imaginary, and practices influenced in a long march as laid out in chapters 1 and 2 excellent. Those two chapters get 5 stars and are worth a read for everyone. The chapters that remain, in which Taylor gives a historical account of various social imaginations and the ways in which they developed and are developing are also good, but not great. They are confusing at times, clunky, and overly technical. They mainly suffer from Taylor not giving his opinion on matters. His academic equivocality at times leads one to be confused as to the point Taylor is driving at. Overall, read the first two chapters and the last if you want the point he is making. Read the whole book if you are a Taylor fan and want his take on why there are more cultures than one in the modern word.
May 24, 2023
Western societies abandoned their sacred foundations, moved into secular time, and redefined and founded themselves into new and diverse social imaginaries. The problem with these imaginaries is that they are quite fluid, abstract, and from time to time end in dictatorship and public opinion/hysteria. One of the underlying themes in this book is that this modern process of abstraction, rationalization, and disembodiment created all kinds of new problems for us; and as such Taylor seems to defend the primitive Christianity and Catholic Church against modern forms of Christianity like Protestantism.
July 26, 2023
Great insights on how shared self-imagination in modern society help us make sense of our own practices, and the particular forms that takes.
Most interesting to me was the idea that a pre-modern people would have considered themselves as always constituted by laws (since time immemorial). Modern people, by contrast, see their political order as something that the group consented to. Thus, the group has to be defined in some "pre-political" way; hence, nationalism.
If you don't have time or the wherewithal to read A Secular Age, you can get to the heart of Taylor's thought in that book in this compact volume.
Most interesting to me was the idea that a pre-modern people would have considered themselves as always constituted by laws (since time immemorial). Modern people, by contrast, see their political order as something that the group consented to. Thus, the group has to be defined in some "pre-political" way; hence, nationalism.
If you don't have time or the wherewithal to read A Secular Age, you can get to the heart of Taylor's thought in that book in this compact volume.
September 21, 2024
Read for a course, twenty years after its release. I struggle with philosophy, so likely missed a lot. I appreciated the historical background outlining how we've moved from the past of hierarchies and set places within the Great Chain of Being to a more horizontal society today. I struggle with the "so what" part of what Taylor has explained and wonder how he would update the book today--or is it still current?
April 14, 2025
This is a decent place to start for those interested in Taylor's ideas. It is probably best read with other people. It offers snapshots of several of his ideas that get delved into in A Secular Age, which was published a year later. Taylor's work is difficult to read but his ideas are extremely valuable for gaining a thoughtful perspective on our current way of imagining the world. He traces the history of things that we often assume have always been the case.
October 11, 2019
Seen this cited often, but regret reading this instead of also heavily cited Sources of the Self. This seems like a more breezy take which risks not satisfying either the philosophers or the historians. On the plus side, it’s accessibility probably makes it appealing for students and if you want to familiarize yourself with his overall approach.
February 10, 2022
This is an amazing book. The insights that he has brought to bear on our modern society meant a great deal to me, and help me explain and understand so much of what is happening around me. Thank you, Charles Taylor.
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July 17, 2022Taylor has given me a great gift by laying out all the parallels between the violence of the French Revolution—fueled by self-righteous rage and obsession with ritual purification—and our modern populist culture.
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August 8, 2023 كتاب يربط متخيل الدولة الحديثة باللحظة التاريخية، وفاعلية الإنسان لاسيما فيما يراها تشارلز تايلرمكوناً من ثلاثة أبعاد وهي الاقتصاد، الفضاء المشترك، الدولة الديمقراطية الحديثة، فالمتخيل هو ما يعطي معنى للأفعال،والتي لا يمكن أن تفهم بدون بعدها الاخلاقي.
October 3, 2018
Less reliant on ’grand narratives’ than ”a secular age”
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