Polanyi's revolutionary imaginary

Jon Fennell

pp. 119-141

in: Charles W. Lowney (ed), Charles Taylor, Michael Polanyi and the critique of modernity, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Abstract

In this chapter, Fennell looks at the social imaginaries that Taylor examines in Modern Social Imaginaries and A Secular Age. He offers an alternative imaginary built up from Polanyi's understanding of sense-reading. Polanyi's self-reflexive vision is grounded, but not foundational; it also re-introduces a role for faith in the discovery of knowledge. Fennell presents Polanyi's wider vision of anthropogenesis as one that supports a free society open to discovering truths about reality. This vision also provides a means for religious thinking to be revitalized. Fennell acknowledges, with Taylor, that one cannot go back to the social and religious imaginaries of the past with their outmoded hierarchies, but he directs us forward toward responsible re-enchantment.