Review on: Taylor Ch. Secular Age. M .: BBI, 2017. 967 p.

Abstract

Written in 2007 and translated into Russian in 2017, The Secular Age is a development of a philosophical and narrative strategy that was present in the author's earlier works. As a specialist in Hegel's philosophy, Taylor proceeds from a vision of history as an ontologically conditioned process, with each event inscribed in a universal process. In this grandiose work of a thousand pages by design and execution, Taylor explores a process that is fundamental to modernity - the coming of secularism and the transformation of religion that took place in the Western world or, as Taylor defines the area of his research, in the North Atlantic region of the world, including Western Europe and North America. Taylor's focus is on the so-called "social imaginary", an integral description of how people perceive and describe themselves in their everyday lives. More universal than rationally articulated theoretical means of self-description, the imaginary acts as a backdrop for social practices, and changes in the imaginary are inevitably linked to changes in these practices.