Rossi, Philip J.

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Marquette Universitye-Publications@MarquetteTheology Faculty Research and Publications Theology, Department of12-1-2004Review of "Modern Social Imaginaries," by CharlesTaylorPhilip J. RossiMarquette University, philip.rossi@marquette.eduPublished version. Theological Studies, Vol. 65, No. 4 (December 2004): 907. Permalink. © 2004Theological Studies, Inc. Used with permission.sponse in which the lover (I) affectivelyaffirm the beloved (you) for yourself (asa radical end), in yourself (on accountof your intrinsic lovable actuality), di-rectly and explicitly in your personal actof being, implicitly in your total reality,by which affirmation my personal beingis consonantly present to you and in youand yours is present to and in me, bywhich I affectively identify with yourpersonal being, by which in some senseI am you affectively” (163).The first three chapters of PersonalFriendship summarize and build on theargument and conclusions of The Expe-rience of Love, and go on to develop aphilosophical phenomenology of friend-ship, the communing that is our ulti-mate goal as human persons.Concrete examples in this work aresparse. T. is a philosopher’s philoso-pher, but those not skilled in T.’s care-ful, penetrating, philosophical reason-ing, might find this text difficult, chal-lenging, tedious, and, dare one say,boring? Like a Rorschach test that re-veals more of the percipient than of it-self, however, one’s judgment of T.’swork will ultimately be a judgment ofoneself.WILLIAM J. SNECK, S.J.Loyola College of MarylandMODERN SOCIAL IMAGINARIES. ByCharles Taylor. Public Planet Books.Durham, N.C.: Duke University. 2004.Pp. 215. $64.95; $18.95.At various points in his magisterialSources of the Self (1989), Taylor adum-brated important connections betweenhis analysis of “the ensemble of (largelyunarticulated) understandings of what itis to be a human agent” (Sources, xi)and the social dynamics that helpedform a culture of unbelief within West-ern modernity. T.’s current work ex-plores some of those connections underthe heading of “social imaginaries.”This concept, developed from the workof Benedict Anderson, includes both“the way people think of their social ex-istence . . . and the deeper normativenotions and expectations that underlie[their] expectations [of one another]”(23).T. contends that a new vision ofmoral order, traceable to the naturallaw theories of Locke and Grotius,played a fundamental role in shapingthe social imaginary constitutive ofmodernity in the West. Society isthereby envisioned as an order of mu-tual benefit for its members, who aretied to one another in terms of rightsand obligations. T. traces a “double ex-pansion” of this order: “in extension(more people live by it . . . ) and in in-tensity (the demands it makes are heavi-er. . .)” (5). These processes have in-volved a “great disembedding” of indi-viduals from the cosmic, social, andreligious contexts that previously hadbeen constitutive of their identities(chap. 4). The outcome has been thecreation of “three important forms ofsocial self-understanding crucial to mo-dernity . . . the economy, the publicsphere, and the practices and outlooksof democratic self-rule” (69).Since Sources of the Self, T. has beenassembling an account of secularitycounter to ones that make the elimina-tion of God and religion from the publicsphere its main trajectory. He takessecularity to consist, instead, in a shiftto a “radically purged time conscious-ness . . . [in which] associations areplaced firmly and wholly in homog-enous, profane time” (99). Rather thaneliminating God, this notion opensspace for God to be “central to thepersonal identities of individuals orgroups” (193). While Modern SocialImaginaries offers more elements ofT.’s account, its complete articulationawaits publication of his 1999 Edin-burgh Gifford Lectures, Living in aSecular Age.PHILIP ROSSI, S.J.Marquette University, MilwaukeeRELIGION AND RATIONALITY: ESSAYS ONREASON, GOD, AND MODERNITY. ByJu¨rgen Habermas. Edited with an intro-duction by Eduardo Mendieta. Cam-bridge, Mass.: MIT, 2002. Pp. 176.$19.95.Habermas’s treatment of religion inhis Theory of Communicative Action(1981, ET 1984–1987) can easily suggest907SHORTER NOTICES

Review of  Modern Social Imaginaries,  by Charles Taylor

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Review of Modern Social Imaginaries, by Charles Taylor

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