Philosophers / Contemporary Western
Charles Taylor
CA 1931-11-05
Canadian political philosopher (1931- ), professor emeritus at McGill, a leading communitarian. Sources of the Self and A Secular Age recast the modern self and secularisation; Templeton and Kyoto Prizes followed.
What You Can Learn
Three Taylorian moves carry into modern leadership. First, authenticity presupposes others. "Be yourself" is hollow without community; real authenticity is forged with shared meanings. Second, the politics of recognition gives diversity a philosophical floor: identity is dialogically negotiated, so failing to recognise members damages their capacity to be themselves. Third, the secular-age frame maps pluralist decision-making: leaders must articulate why something matters across traditions.
Words That Resonate
We are selves only in that certain issues matter for us. What I am as a self, my identity, is essentially defined by the way things have significance for me.
Authenticity is not the enemy of demands that emanate from beyond the self; it supposes such demands.
Our age is very far from settling in to a comfortable unbelief. We live in a condition where we cannot help but be aware that there are a number of different construals.
My discovering my own identity doesn't mean that I work it out in isolation, but that I negotiate it through dialogue, partly overt, partly internal, with others.
Life & Legacy
Charles Margrave Taylor is the most prominent Canadian political philosopher of his generation and one of the few thinkers who works fluently across analytic and continental traditions. Born in Montreal in 1931, he graduated from McGill in 1952 in history, then read PPE at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, taking his D.Phil. in philosophy in 1961.
As a student in 1957 he co-founded the Universities and Left Review with E. P. Thompson; in 1960 it merged into the New Left Review. Back in Canada in 1961 he taught at McGill and Université de Montréal, helped found the Quebec NDP and stood four times as its candidate. From 1972 to 1998 he held the McGill chair in political science, also serving as Chichele Professor at Oxford.
His 1964 dissertation, The Explanation of Behaviour, attacked behaviourist methodology and argued that natural-scientific method cannot fully account for human action — placing him in the Diltheyan hermeneutic tradition. Hegel (1975) became a standard reference. His magnum opus, Sources of the Self (1989), traced the modern Western self to three sources — inwardness, affirmation of ordinary life and an expressive voice of nature — across 600 pages from Plato to Foucault. The Ethics of Authenticity (1991) followed, showing that authenticity presupposes voices beyond the self.
In the 1980s he led, with Sandel, Walzer and MacIntyre, the liberal-communitarian debate, defending communal goods against thin liberal contractualism. He played the same role in 1990s multiculturalism debates, articulating a politics of recognition that took identity to be dialogically formed.
A Secular Age (2007) is his other monumental work: a reconstruction of how Western societies passed in 500 years from a condition in which God was the default frame to one in which religious belief is one option among many. He won the Templeton Prize in 2007, the Kyoto Prize in 2008 and the Berggruen Prize in 2016, and writes in English, French and German.
Expert Perspective
Within contemporary political philosophy Taylor stands as a leading communitarian voice and one of the few thinkers fluent in both Hegelian-phenomenological and Anglo-American analytic traditions. With Sandel, Walzer and MacIntyre he reset late-twentieth-century debates on liberalism, identity and secularisation.
