The originality of Charles Taylor's thought can be seen in the fact that it is not easy to “place” his work over the last fifteen years in the categories of standard academic disciplines. It is not really political philosophy. It is not really sociology (though it perhaps leans more towards sociology than towards political philosophy). It is something else. But what? Cultural history and the history of philosophy clearly provide the materials for Taylor's enterprise, but whatever it is, it aims for something intellectually more ambitious than mere intellectual or cultural history. The term “social imaginary” in fact captures quite well this “unplaceability” of his work between philosophy and sociology.

To be a modern is to be shaped in one's identity by a package of moral conceptions shared with all other members of one's society: the idea of moral individualism (the notion that one has a life of one's own to live—a life with its own authentic integrity); the idea of society as conferring mutual benefits on its constituent members; the idea of equality and equal rights; and so on. The general model that Taylor has in mind is something like applied and popularized theory, and the way it shapes public consciousness (such as the image of political community as the product of a society-wide “contract” [29, 46]). Taylor is interested in the historical process whereby a new set of moral and political conceptions “penetrates” (29) or “infiltrates” (28) the social imagination of the whole society, and thereby transforms the common practices that define social and moral order. As he puts it, “the theory is schematized [that is, given a particular shape] in the dense sphere of common practice” (30; cf. 115–116). The focus is not theory but what Hans-Georg Gadamer called the historical effectivity (Wirkungsgeschichte) of theory. The question of whether the articles of faith that make up the modern social imaginary are philosophically compelling is not a question that Taylor is interested in pursuing; indeed, it probably does not make much sense to him. The point is that we live it, so we don't have much choice but to try to make sense of it. In vindicating it, we vindicate ourselves.

It is probably a bit misleading to speak of the modern social imaginary, for Taylor is strongly committed to the idea of modernities in the plural, and this plurality of modernities would be put in question or compromised if there were a singular social imaginary of modernity. Taylor (rightly) insists “that we [must] finally get over seeing modernity as a single process of which Europe is the paradigm, and that we [come to] understand the European model … as, at the end of the day, one model among many” (196). In any case, the main features of the modern social imaginary (or imaginaries) as sketched by Taylor are easy to summarize. In Chapter 4, Taylor offers a very simple typology of the history of religion, contrasting “early religions” with higher, “post-axial” religions, in order to dramatize how individualism over the course of history fundamentally reshapes religious life both in the West and in the East. Taylor's thesis is that modern moral individualism has its foundation in these much older transformations in religious experience (64). Here as elsewhere, one marvels at just how many insights into the intellectual and cultural history of our current experience of the world are packed into this little book.

In the central chapters of the book, Taylor's genealogy of modern society privileges three main ideas: the idea of economy as a network of mutual benefit; the idea of a sphere of publicity where opinions are shared and contested among members of the society—a space where public opinion can take shape; and the idea of popular sovereignty or sovereign self-rule. Chapter 5 discusses the new understanding of economic life (dating from the 17th-18th centuries) according to which the mutually beneficial exchange of services gives evidence of God's providential care for human beings. Needless to say, this view renders economic exchange much more central to how one conceives the purposes of human life (72: “the economy … came to be seen more and more as the dominant end of society”). In Chapters 6 and 7, Taylor shows that Jürgen Habermas's theme of “the public sphere” (Taylor calls it “metatopical common space” [86]) is constitutive for the self-understanding of modernity (although the idea of privacy/intimacy is no less constitutive). In the latter half of the book, notably Chapters 8 to 10 and Chapter 13, Taylor reprises the analysis of the structure of modern nationalism that he has offered in other writings.

Taylor tells us that the book under review is a preliminary installment of a larger work on “Living in a Secular Age,” so we are led to expect that he will give special attention to the problem of secularity within social imaginaries that define themselves as modern. But Taylor does not mean by secularity what we commonly associate with this term (a society liberated from religious authority). Rather, according to the idea of secularity as Taylor construes it, the secular (i.e., modern) society is one that does not aspire to express some transcendent, metaphysical order, but simply the self-constructed order composed by its citizens (93, 97, 194). It is, as he puts it, a society that does not feel obliged to found its social order on anything that “transcends our common action” (94). In that sense, the discussion of secularity isn't confined to the chapter entitled “The Meaning of Secularity” (Chapter 13), but rather, pervades the whole book.

Taylor says that his project consists in “describing the social imaginary of the modern West” (196) in order to contribute to an eventual intercultural dialogue between the West and non-Western societies. In other words, the essential lesson that study of the shape of modern consciousness is meant to teach is humility in the face of cultural possibilities that are yet to be experienced or explored. No one can deny that this is a good lesson for social theory to teach. The question remains whether Taylor's practice of philosophy in a sociological mode (or philosophical sociology) honours or betrays philosophy's historical ambition to confront questions of moral and political validity apart from the fact that particular societies happen to embrace various beliefs. If Plato wants to get us out of the cave, Taylor responds—if this is a cave, at least it is our cave.