Name: Modern Social Imaginaries
ISBN: 9780822332930

Charles Taylor

DIVAn accounting of the varying forms of social imaginary that have underpinned the rise of Western modernity./div

Modern Social Imaginaries

Sean Wilson

Great insights on how shared self-imagination in modern society help us make sense of our own practices, and the particular forms that takes.

Most interesting to me was the idea that a pre-modern people would have considered themselves as always constituted by laws (since time immemorial). Modern people, by contrast, see their political order as something that the group consented to. Thus, the group has to be defined in some "pre-political" way; hence, nationalism.

If you don't have time or the wherewithal to read A Secular Age, you can get to the heart of Taylor's thought in that book in this compact volume.