Modern Social Imaginaries (Public Planet) by Charles Taylor

Author:Charles Taylor [Taylor, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780822332930

8 The Sovereign People

opular sovereignty is the third in the great connected chain of mutations in the social imaginary that have helped constitute modern society. It too starts off as a theory, and then gradually infiltrates and transmutes social imaginaries. But how does this come about? We can in fact distinguish two rather different paths. I define them here as ideal types, recognizing that in real historical developments they often are combined and sometimes are difficult to disentangle.

On the one hand, a theory may inspire a new kind of activity with new practices, and in this way form the imaginary of whatever groups adopt these practices. The first Puritan churches formed around the idea of a covenant provide examples of this. A new ecclesial structure flowed from a theological innovation; this becomes part of the story of political change, because the civil structures themselves were influenced in certain American colonies by the ways churches were governed, as with Connecticut Congregationalism, where only the converted enjoyed full citizenship.

Or else the change in the social imaginary comes with a reinterpretation of a practice that already existed in the old dis pensation. Older forms of legitimacy are colonized, as it were, with the new understandings of order, and then transformed, in certain cases, without a clear break.

The United States is a case in point. The reigning notions of legitimacy in Britain and America, the ones that fired the English Civil War, for instance, as well as the beginnings of the colonies' rebellion, were basically backward-looking. They turned around the idea of an "ancient constitution," an order based on law holding since time out of mind, in which Parliament had its rightful place beside the king. This was typical of one of the most widespread premodern understandings of order, which referred back to a "time of origins" (Eliade's phrase), which was not in ordinary time.

This older idea emerges from the American Revolution transformed into a full-fledged foundation in popular sovereignty, whereby the U.S. Constitution is put in the mouth of "We, the people." This was preceded by an appeal to the idealized order of natural law, in the invocation of "truths held self-evident" in the Declaration of Independence.' The transition was made easier because what was understood as the traditional law gave an important place to elected assemblies and their consent to taxation. All that was needed was to shift the balance in these so as to make elections the only source of legitimate power.

But what has to take place for this change to come off is a transformed social imaginary, in which the idea of foundation is taken out of the mythical early time and seen as something that people can do today. In other words, it becomes something that can be brought about by collective action in contemporary, purely secular time. This happened sometime in the eighteenth century, but really more toward its end than its beginning. Elites had propounded theories of founding action beforehand, but these hadn't adequately sunk into the general social imaginary for them to be acted on.

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