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 modernity: 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.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 5.0 / 5.0
Concise but sometimes confusing:
I'm glad Taylor wrote this short, concise book. His book Sources of the Self, a long tour through modern Western ideas of the human individual and their implications for moral philosophy, is wonderful and illuminating; but you don't always want to read 800 pages. So this book has the virtue of relative brevity. It also extends Taylor's ideas about Western thought from models of modern selfhood to modern institutions: the market and political self-governance. But I have to agree with "Squirrel's"... more info
Excellent dissection of the ideology of modernity:
This book is Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (not to be confused with the Liberian ex-dictator of the same name!) at his most concise and accessible. Here he uses his typical "history of ideas" approach to explaining the content of the modern way of seeing the world, one that so profoundly affects the West and its policies yet is so hard to describe. Taylor's general philosophical project is to attack the idea of Western liberalism as being a "neutral" or "non-ideological" view of the world, and to... more info
How we imagine who we are:
Charles Taylor, along with Will Kymlicka, represents Canada's claim to be taken seriously as an intellectual superpower. In this small work, he has brought his immense intellect to bear on the question of how we imagine who we are as members of societies. For students of political theory this is a useful work.
Lucid Brilliance:
Charles Taylor is one of the Western world's foremost intellectuals and theorists of what is broadly called "modernity" which begins somewhere around the 16th century and continues today, even as it is challenged by so-called "post-modernists". The current work puts the concept of modernity into a theoretical framework which Taylor terms the "social imaginary" (hence the title of the book). The "social imaginary", broadly speaking, consists of images, stories and legends, is shared by large groups of... more info
