Few contemporary thinkers can match the diversity, quantity, and quality of work produced by Charles Taylor. At the center of this corpus has been his work on Western modernity, the most important effort of which being his 1989 opus, Sources of the Self. Fifteen years later, Taylor has now published the first installment of a new, related, but distinct study of Western modernity.

Sources of the Self sought to do nothing less than spell out the normative contours of what Taylor called the modern identity, or what more accurately might be described as the constellation of moral values ontologically present within the political cultures of modern Western states. In Modern Social Imaginaries, Taylor explores the emergence of the modern social imaginary, a common set of understandings that makes possible a society's common practices of politics, morality, religion, and economics, as well as provides a widely shared sense of the legitimacy (or lack thereof) of these practices. Whereas Sources of the Self focuses on the values of what Taylor called life goods and constitutive goods that comprise the normative features of Western modernity, Modern Social Imaginaries concerns itself with the emergence of a variety of social practices that arise in conjunction with the development of a modern moral order embodying many of the same goods (such as autonomy, equality, disengaged reason, and the affirmation of ordinary life) that Taylor chronicles in Sources. Modern Social Imaginaries is the story of how a set of ideas initially wrapped up in the discursive practices of the seventeenth-century natural-law tradition of Grotius and Locke becomes transformed by modern and contemporary intellectuals and along the way drives the development of modern collective practices, such as civility, the market economy, the public sphere, and the practice of democratic self-rule. More specifically, the book chronicles the development of this modern moral order through a series of redactions that make it increasingly more inclusive, richer (in its contents), and demanding (in its requirements on modern Western subjects) as Western modernity progresses from its genesis in the seventeenth century to its present incarnations.

The careful reader of Taylor will find a good deal to have been rearticulations of previously published work. In fact, Taylor is, to a degree, integrating previous work done on, for example, the public sphere with his new concern with the modern social imaginary. Modern Social Imaginaries partly reads as the praxis-oriented complement to Sources that a variety of his critics needed to be convinced of the account of modernity given in Sources of the Self.

However, Imaginaries is more than this, for it is also a story of the rise of secularity in the modern West and the role secularity plays in the development of the modern social imaginary. The book is, in fact, an expansion of a central section of Taylor's 1999 Gifford Lectures, entitled Living in a Secular Age. As such, the book provides his first significant published response to an issue that has occupied much of his thought since Sources: What does it mean to live in an age that is both secular yet informed by theistic moral sources like Taylor's own Catholicism? Picking up on a point made a decade earlier (see Charles Taylor, Philosophical Arguments [1995]) he notes that Western modernity and by extension the modern social imaginary is secular, not in the frequent, rather loose sense of the word, where it designates the absence of religion, but rather in the fact that religion occupies a different place, compatible with the sense that all social action that transpires under the modern social imaginary takes place in profane time, instead of being understood in light of (and often situated within) some theistic narrative of human existence (p. 194). What makes Western modernity an era without precedent is its secularity. Modernity's secularity, Taylor tells us, compels moderns to see both their societies as void of a divine foundation and “any idea of society as constituted in something that transcends contemporary common action” (p. 93). Throughout the middle and later sections of the book, Taylor plausibly shows how modern practices, such as the market economy and the public sphere, as well as the notion of a sovereign people or nation which is central to modern forms of democratic self-rule, are themselves constituted by secularity.

While the story of the rise of the modern social imaginary is insightful, the implications Taylor takes from it are somewhat incomplete. Though he chronicles the different manners in which the modern social imaginary has been experienced through the West (p. 154), one nevertheless wonders whether he has presented a rather overdetermined analysis of the modern social imaginary that might leave the reader with a restrictive account of the limits of moral and political theorizing (or practical reasoning) within modern Western democracies today. Put differently, Taylor, as he often does elsewhere, frequently invokes the “we” when discussing the hold the modern social imaginary has on members of Western democratic societies. Yet one wonders who exactly this “we” is and how exactly (and to what degree) the assorted members of the “we” are constituted by the modern social imaginary.

Moreover, Taylor spends a mere two pages hinting at the meaning and implications of the most provocative idea in the book, provincializing Europe. What does this rich concept entail and mean in the twenty-first century? One wishes he had spent more time answering this question than only hinting at it in passing. These criticisms, though, are ones that the reader senses Taylor will undoubtedly answer when the next installment of this project, Living in a Secular Age, makes its way into print. And they only arise because of the thought-provoking power of this concise and rewarding book.