Modern Social Imaginaries

Abstract

Taylor’s political thinking seeks to come to terms with the changed ideological and political context that coalesced during the twentieth century’s last decades and the new millennium. It involves a reinterpretation of modernity in light of its questioning and a new take on the cultural background to modernity’s dominant institutional forms, liberal democracy and modern capitalism. Taylor’s contributions to two theoretical perspectives that offer important insights into the present are explained: multiple (or alternative) modernities and social imaginaries. The chapter clarifies multiple modernities and social imaginaries’ intellectual backgrounds and development in response to specific theoretical and political problems, like the dissolution of State Socialist societies, anti-colonial struggles, and religious fundamentalism. It argues that Taylor’s desire to revisit the question of the relationship between religion and the secular motivated his work on modern social imaginaries. Taylor contends that the modern social imaginary generates a notion of society as constituted as a moral order of mutual benefit and that this image informs individual practices. Taylor’s proposals are critically compared with those of the principal initiators of the social imaginaries theoretical perspective, especially those of Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort.