Mary Wollstonecraft’s Enlightened Legacy:
The “Modern Social Imaginary” of the Egalitarian Family
Eileen Hunt Botting
Abstract
Charles Taylor has recently used the term “modern social imaginary” to describe dominant sets
of norms, practices, and expectations—such as the market economy or the public sphere—that
are rooted in the philosophies of the European Enlightenment, and have since permeated the
common experience of life in the contemporary Western world. Building upon Taylor’s
argument, this article charts how Mary Wollstonecraft became one of the major philosophical
sources from the Enlightenment era to shape the emergent modern social imaginary of the
egalitarian family that increasingly serves as the background against which debates about the
family take place today.
Keywords: Mary Wollstonecraft, Charles Taylor, Family, Enlightenment, Modern Social
Imaginary
Charles Taylor has recently argued that modern Western culture is oriented around
several fundamental “social imaginaries:” the market economy, the public sphere (and its binary
of the private sphere and nuclear family), and popular self-governance, among others. He
defines a “social imaginary” as “something much broader than the intellectual schemes people
may entertain when they think about social reality in a disengaged mode. I am thinking, rather,
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Eileen Hunt Botting is Thomas J. and Robert T. Rolfs Assistant Professor of Political Science at
the University of Notre Dame. Her book, Family Feuds: Wollstonecraft, Burke, and Rousseau
on the Transformation of the Family, is forthcoming from SUNY Press in March 2006. This
article was written for a forthcoming issue of American Behavioral Scientist entitled “The End of
Enlightenment?”
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