Social Imaginary

Charles Taylor and Claudia Strauss argue that social imaginaries are a “cultural model”, that is, the common understandings through which people imagine their surroundings.

Charles Taylor argues that the social imaginary is not an idealized understanding of things but rather a matter of complex understandings in which both facts and norms play important roles. The social imaginary affects people’s perceptions of how things are (facts) and people’s perceptions of how things should be (norms):

"I want to speak of social imaginary here, rather than social theory, because there are important—and multiple—differences between the two. I speak of imaginary because I’m talking about the way ordinary people ‘imagine’ their social surroundings, and this is often not expressed in theoretical terms; it is carried in images, stories, and legends. But it is also the case that theory is usually the possession of a small minority, whereas what is interesting in the social imaginary is that it is shared by large groups of people, if not the whole society. Which leads to a third difference: the social imaginary is that common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy. In addition, we should note that what start off as theories held by a few people may come to infiltrate the social imaginary, first that of elites, perhaps, and then of society as a whole. The social imaginary is that common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy." (Charles Taylor, “Modern Social Imaginaries,” Public Culture 14, issue 1 (2002), p. 106.)

Building on this theory, Claudia Strauss argues that Taylor’s social imaginary “fits cognitive authropologists’ conception of cultural models” because cultural models are also widely shared and they are implicit schemas for people to interpret the world and their behavior. Cultural-model theorists further argue that there is more than one cultural model and that cultural models affect people’s behavior to different extents and in different ways.

Taylor’s and Strauss’ social-imaginary model implies a dialogic relationship between the elite minority and the “ordinary” majority—that social theory can integrate itself into the social imaginary and, also, that the social imaginary can derive its form and content from “below.”