Modern Social Imaginaries by Charles Taylor The Modern Self in the Labyrinth: Politics and the Entrapment Imagination by Eyal Chowers (review)

Abstract

[MW5 8.1 (2008) 111-127] ISSN 1470-8078 Book Reviews Charles Taylor, Modem Social Imaginaries (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004), 215pp. ISBN 0-82233-255-8. £14.50. Eyal Chowers, The Modem Self in the Labyrinth: Politics and the Entrapment Imagina tion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 250pp. ISBN 0-67401-330-1.£32.50. Max Weber famously talked about the difficulties of maintaining an autonomous existence under the bureaucratized conditions of modern life, and challenged those who would wish to be seen as having a vocation (Beruf) to meet the demands of the day. In his own search for the 'sources' of the modern self, Charles Taylor has endeavoured to outline his own vision of what selfhood entails in the modern era, and where it has come from. Both Weber and Taylor too are incredibly interested in the place of religion in modern life, but whereas Weber's account of religion was always primarily historical and tied to questions of the uniqueness of occidental development, Taylor brings to his own writings a deeply suggestive Catholicism, which he uses to counter the claims of an apparently atomistic contemporary liberal ism. In his recent book on modern social imaginaries, Taylor attempts to provide a brief genealogy of something like the myths we have come to live by, and the events which he thinks might well come to dominate our sense of community at particular moments; the case of the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales is one of the examples that comes out here. But there is a wider historical vision, as one would both hope and expect, from Taylor's investigation. The book opens with a discussion of the 'modern moral order' as seen through Grotius and Locke—and although the two are not quite conflated, they do run together. Natural rights discourses are given key analytical purchase for their impact on our understanding modernity itself, and Taylor focuses on Locke especially as a figure that tied consent to property, religion and money, arguing that 'the require ment of original consent, via the halfway house of Locke's consent to taxation, becomes the fully-fledged doctrine of popular sovereignty under which we now live' (p. 5). Today, this has grown in 'extension' and 'intensity' (p. 5). From an initial use in discussions of governmental legitimacy, to a reformulation of God's providence and cosmological order—the idea of secularization, which he does seem to take over somewhat from Weber's schema—Taylor thinks these basic ideas have become more than an intellectual theory, and transformed into a social imaginary. The natural law 'hermeneutic of legitimation' (p. 7) highlights the fact that the modern moral order as social imaginary travels on another axis, from the herme neutic to the prescriptive, and on this journey becomes associated with various ideas about the relationship between law and history (e.g., the ancient Constitution© Max Weber Studies 2008, Global Policy Institute, London Metropolitan University, 31 Jewry Street, London, EC3N 2EY. 112 Max Weber Studies in English discourse), the importance of hierarchy (ranging from Platonic theories of the Forms to theories of correspondence and complementarity (the King's two bodies for example) (pp. 9ff., also p. 16). Such ideas contain 'ontic' components— they are ideas that make claims about their realizability. But, .. .the modern idealization of order departs radically from this. It is not just that there is no place for a Platonic-type Form at work: connected to this, whatever distribution of functions a society might develop is deemed contingent; its justification is instrumental and it cannot itself define the good. The basic normative principle is, indeed, that the members of society serve each other's needs, help each other. In this way, they complement each other. But the particular functional differ entiation they need to take on to do this most effectively is endowed with no essential worth. It is adventitious and potentially changeable. Mutual respect and interest make up the new normative order, and it is judged, as is the organization of society, along instrumental grounds (p. 13). This is a secular modification of Locke's account of divine order and providence, tied to the proper use of...