of the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things
go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper
normative notions and images that underlie these expectations” (Taylor, 2004, p. 23). In other
words, a social imaginary is a common set of social expectations and practices that enable
ordinary persons of a given community to imagine how their interactions with each other in a
particular aspect of life should work, and thus shape how they do work.
Taylor speaks of social imaginaries on both the macro and micro levels: on the macro
level, the social imaginary is the manner in which a society broadly conceives and practices its
social relations; on the micro level, there are social imaginaries (such as the market economy)
that constitute and “articulate” this broader moral and social order (2004, pp. 29-31, 143).
Taylor argues that although the fundamental modern Western “micro” social imaginaries have
their roots in European philosophical, political and literary discourse of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, they are not purely theoretical concepts. Social imaginaries have been
made manifest by shared human social practices and expectations in North Atlantic nations since
their initial, theoretical definition during what Kant and other eighteenth-century Europeans
called “an age of enlightenment” (Kant, 1991, p. 58). Taylor’s concept of the social imaginary is
helpful for navigating a path between the poles of idealism and historicism found in
contemporary scholarship on the history of political thought. Rather than arguing that ideas are
the primary causal forces behind the trajectory of history, or that material, historical forces (such
as economics) generate epiphenomenal ideas, Taylor is able to recognize how philosophical,
scientific and religious ideas penetrate and shape social practices and expectations, and how
social practices and expectations both transform and embody such ideas. In this essay, Taylor’s
notion of the social imaginary gives us a framework within which we can examine the nuances
of how Enlightenment-era philosophical discourse on the family has both fashioned and been
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Convention