In the present work, distinguished
Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor continues to advance his long‑term
project of exploring the self‑understandings that constitute
modernity.  As he describes it, Modern
Social Imaginaries is “an expansion of a central section” (xi) of
a book in preparation, on the subject of his 1999 Gifford Lectures,
“Living in a Secular Age”. 
The project involves a historical recounting of the course by which the
particular social forms and practices that define modernity have risen, but
approaches this recounting through the ‘social imaginary’ which enables and
makes sense of these practices. 
Although Taylor’s wider project places great importance on the notion of
‘multiple modernities’, reflecting the possibility that the West’s path to
modernity may not be followed by modernization in the non‑Western world,
the present work focuses on an account of Western history to exemplify the
inseparability of that modernity from a certain social imaginary.  Tracing the specificity of the Western
version of modernity in this way should make room for these other paths to
modernity, with their own specific histories.

Evidently, the crucial concept here is
that of the social imaginary.  As already
mentioned, a social imaginary enables and makes sense of human practices, but
some care is necessary to locate this notion properly in the philosophical
terrain.  A social imaginary is a
commonly shared understanding of how things go, as well as how things should
go, in the collective life of a community, which would include their grasp on
the point of their practices, the nuances of social relationships, plus a more
comprehensive sense of how their social world hangs together as a whole.  But this does not refer to an
intellectualization of those practices, as one might be encouraged to produce
at leisure at the end of the day when ruminating ‘what that was all
about’.  Rather, ‘social imaginary’
refers to the engaged, effective understanding of what one is doing, such as it
actually carries one through the day. 
To borrow Taylor’s illustration, the everyday social agent’s grasp on
their social space differs from the theoretical description of society in the
same way that ‘having one’s bearings’ in familiar physical space differs from
having a paper map of the same space. 
The idea here, then, is akin to both Marx’s notion of praxis and
Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘form of life’. 
Both these latter ideas account for the pointfulness of behavior by
embedding it in a wider context, a pre‑theoretical background
collectively held by a community. 
Hence, a social imaginary differs from social theory in being the
possession of the whole community, not a minority of theorists, and in being
carried by ‘folk’ means (stories, images) rather than theoretical discourse.

However, this does not exclude theory
from informing a social imaginary.  Part
of what Taylor attempts to trace is the diffusion of the ideas of key theorists
(e.g. Locke) into a community, so thoroughly that they become common place in
the understanding of its collective life. 
Theory no doubt shapes collective self-understanding, but it does so by
becoming integrated into the practice of the community, over a lengthy course
of its history.  But Taylor takes care
to distinguish his claim from an ‘ideas-with-legs’ thesis: what he offers is
neither an idealist (where ideas are the moving force in history) nor a
materialist explanation of social behavior. 
The practices under discussion should not be seen as mere physical
events.  Rather, “because human
practices are the kind of things that make sense, certain ideas are internal to
them” (32).  A better nutshell
encapsulation of Marx’s praxis would be hard to find.  This middle approach could perhaps be termed
‘cultural realism’, requiring one to take seriously the collective activity of
human beings as practical and reflective, and not reducible to physical
processes nor to vapid ideation.

Now, the point of choosing this level of
analysis is to allow Taylor to sketch a genealogy of the ‘modern moral
order’.  By the ‘modern moral order’, he
means the image of society as an aggregate of individuals bound in relations of
mutual benefit, be it for security or economic prosperity, characterized by
equality and expressed best in rights and freedoms.  Unlike the manner in which these ideas typically appear in social
philosophy, as springing purely from a rational reflection on the state of
nature, Taylor seeks to present them as artifacts of a historical process of
transformation stretching back to the 1500s, and this he does with a masterful
hand through the central chapters of his book. 
He focuses in on three major aspects of Western modernity – the social
forms of the market economy, the public sphere and the self-governing people –
as the pivots of his sketch.  Despite
its brevity, the book conveys a rich sense of historicity in Taylor’s
sensitivity to the nuance and detail of the past he examines.  Due to the limitations of a review such as
this, and possibly also to a philosopher’s reluctance to delve into the clutter
of factual matters, it is perhaps best to leave these details to be discovered
by the reader €“ a task that will well repay effort.  Instead, let us conclude by reflecting on a particularly
refreshing aspect of Taylor’s analysis.

Taylor’s particularly sensitive history
of modernity owes much to a kind of ‘hermeneutic historicism’.  Arguably, human agents only have cultural
features such as Taylor is describing here as ‘Western modernity’ and the
‘modern moral order’, in virtue of possessing a collective understanding or
interpretation of each other and their situation, and this understanding is
carried historically through received interpretive devices (i.e. stories,
images, as mentioned earlier) passed on from generation to generation.  The self-perception of a people changes over
time by the slow alteration of the circumstances of subsequent generations,
itself an effect of the exercise of their powers of interpretation.  If this is the case, then it is always
relevant to take the longitudinal view of something like, say, the modernist
self-assessment as ‘individuals related by mutual benefit’ and regard that as
the outcome of a history, the career of which must be traced through its
transformation by both material conditions and intellectual influence back to
possibly very different original formations. 
This is what Taylor sketches out in this small book.  But in doing this, one seems inevitably to
collide, on the one hand, with the sense of naturalism that attaches to these
encultured self-perceptions, and on the other, with theoretical positions
seeking to naturalize historical or cultural features and thus avoid taking
them seriously.  What is needed to
address this confrontation is a demonstration that that very sense of
naturalism is itself a historical artifact and a demonstration of the
possibility of treating history and culture non-reductively.  The richness of Taylor’s historical
recounting of modernity does an enviable job of the first task, and though
there is scarcely enough room for the second task, he takes care to be ‘off on
the right foot’ with it.  This seems a
welcome change from the naturalizing tendency in philosophy of the last several
decades, and perhaps marks the beginning of a trend from which most disciplines
of the Western intellectual world could profit.  In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche complained of
philosophers’ ‘lack of historical sense’: at least in Charles Taylor’s case, he
must withdraw the charge.

©
2004 George Williamson

George Williamson, Ph.D., Department of
Philosophy, University of Saskatchewan

Categories: Philosophical