Modern Social Imaginaries makes a decent backdrop to other works describing the modern constitution, such as Latour's We Have Never Been Modern and Foucault's Discipline and Punish, but simply doesn't have the imagination or the rigor that I seek in my grand theories. On the plus side, this book is accessible and easy to read, which is not always true for works of philosophy and social theory. The problem is that it seems like a mostly facile re-inscription of conventional wisdom and political mythology: ground well trodden by Marx and Weber and Habermas.

Taylor traces the dawn of the modern social imaginary, the basic ordering of social into free individuals interacting under a framework of equality under a tripartite free market economy, public political sphere, and private self-governance, to Locke and Grotius and a moral order of natural human rights as the foundation of sovereign democratic states. This equality stands in contrast to the older order of hierarchical relationships of submission and protection, the the Three Estates of feudal society (those who pray, those who fight, those who work). However, the comparative analysis is merely between the Anglo-American changes and the French Revolution. Two examples stand in for all the diversities of history, and worse, the centuries of work required to evolve from a feudal structure to recognizably modern market-state-society is simply elided.