The Canadian philosopher whose Sources of the Self traced the historical making of modern identity from Augustine through Romanticism to the present, and whose Hegel, Multiculturalism, and Secular Age reframed continental philosophy for Anglophone readers and shaped late twentieth-century debates on identity, recognition, and secularization.
charles-taylor
Canadian philosopher (b. 1931) whose work bridges analytic and continental traditions, whose Sources of the Self (1989) and A Secular Age (2007) are major works of philosophical history, and whose essays on multiculturalism and the politics of recognition have shaped late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century political theory.
Born 1931; alive as of knowledge cutoff.
Life
Charles Margrave Taylor was born on 5 November 1931 in Montreal, into a bilingual family of Anglophone Protestant father (Walter Margrave Taylor) and Francophone Catholic mother (Simone Margrave). The bilingual and bi-religious household shaped the philosophical attention to identity, language, and culture that runs through Taylor's mature work.
He was educated at Selwyn House School in Westmount, McGill University (B.A. in history, 1952), and Balliol College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar, where he took a B.A. in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics in 1955 and a D.Phil. in 1961. The Oxford supervisors were Isaiah Berlin and G. E. M. Anscombe; the thesis, on behavioral psychology and the question of explanation in the human sciences, was published in revised form as The Explanation of Behaviour (Routledge, 1964) and established Taylor's early reputation as a critic of behaviorism in psychology and of the broader project of treating human action through the framework of natural-scientific causal explanation.
The academic career was split between Oxford (Fellow of All Souls 1956–61 and later Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory 1976–81, the chair Isaiah Berlin had held) and McGill (from 1961, where Taylor would be based for most of his career as Professor of Philosophy and Political Science). He retired from McGill in 1997 and has continued as professor emeritus and as a public intellectual contributor to Canadian and broader debates.
Taylor's political engagement was distinctive. He stood four times as a candidate for the federal New Democratic Party in Quebec ridings between 1963 and 1968 (losing each time, including the famous 1965 election in which he was defeated by Pierre Trudeau in Mount Royal); he served on the Bouchard-Taylor Commission on cultural and religious accommodation in Quebec in 2007–08; he has been continuously active in Quebec and broader Canadian intellectual-political life.
The honors are extensive: Templeton Prize (2007), Kyoto Prize (2008), Berggruen Prize (2016), the Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Philosophical Association, multiple honorary degrees.
Sources of the Self
Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Harvard University Press, 1989) is Taylor's most ambitious systematic work. The book runs to over 600 pages and constructs a sustained historical-philosophical narrative of how the modern Western conception of selfhood came to be.
The central thesis: the modern self has three principal moral sources that have come together historically to form contemporary identity. (1) The Augustinian inwardness of the late ancient and medieval Christian tradition, in which the self turns inward to find God and to know the truth (Augustine's noli foras ire, in te ipsum redi — "do not go outside; return to yourself"). (2) The Cartesian-Lockean disengagement of the early modern period, in which the self acquires its modern shape as the detached observer of self and world capable of methodical, scientific, instrumental control. (3) The Romantic expressivism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in which the self becomes the unique inner depth whose expression in life and art realizes a genuine personal identity not reducible to general categories.
The contemporary self is the heir of all three sources, often without explicit awareness of any of them. Modern moral philosophy, which presents itself as a neutral analytical inquiry, in fact operates within the framework these historical sources have constructed; the apparent universality of modern moral categories is in fact the product of a particular historical formation.
The book proceeds through detailed historical analyses — of Plato, of Augustine, of Descartes, of Locke, of Montaigne, of the deists and Enlightenment, of Rousseau, of the Romantics, of the modernists — each contributing a strand to the contemporary fabric. The work has been the major contribution to the philosophical history of the self in late twentieth-century English-language philosophy and the principal critique of the dominant ahistorical liberal-individualist framework against which it is directed.
Hegel
The 1975 Hegel (Cambridge University Press) was the first major Anglophone presentation of Hegelian philosophy in a comprehensive and sympathetic mode. The book, running to over 500 pages, treats the entire Hegelian system — the Phenomenology, the Logic, the Philosophy of Right, the philosophy of history, the philosophy of religion — with attention to both the systematic ambition and the substantive insights.
Taylor's Hegel is not the speculative metaphysician of older Anglophone caricature but a philosopher of expressive selfhood and of embodied spirit, whose key insight is that genuine freedom requires a certain kind of social and institutional embodiment. The reading drew on the long French tradition of Hegel interpretation (Hyppolite, Kojève, Wahl) but presented Hegel in a form that contemporary Anglophone philosophy could engage. The book has shaped subsequent Anglophone Hegel scholarship through Robert Pippin, Terry Pinkard, Robert Williams, and others.
The Politics of Recognition
The long essay The Politics of Recognition (originally a 1992 lecture at Princeton, published with critical commentary in Multiculturalism edited by Amy Gutmann, Princeton University Press, 1992; expanded edition 1994) is Taylor's most influential single short text. The argument: contemporary multicultural politics requires categorial vocabulary the standard liberal political theory has not supplied. The demand for recognition of distinct cultures and identities cannot be reduced to claims for equal treatment under universal principles; the underlying conception of identity requires that the bearers of identity be recognized in their particularity by those around them, and the failure of recognition is not merely a denial of equal opportunity but a positive harm to the formation and sustenance of identity itself.
The argument has been continuously debated. The communitarian-liberal dispute of the early 1990s, the multiculturalism debates of the 1990s and 2000s, the politics-of-recognition discussions in social and political theory (Honneth, Fraser, Markell, Patchen Markell) have all proceeded substantially in dialogue with Taylor's framing. The essay is one of the most influential single contributions to late twentieth-century political philosophy.
A Secular Age
A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007), derived from Taylor's 1998–99 Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh, is the late masterwork. The book runs to nearly 900 pages and offers the most ambitious philosophical account of secularization produced in the early twenty-first century.
The central question: how did the West move from the religious condition of 1500 (when not believing in God was almost inconceivable for most people in the central Western European societies) to the contemporary condition (in which belief is one option among many, and unbelief is the default for many people in many cultural settings)? Taylor's answer is not the standard subtraction story of mainline secularization theory — the story that secularization is simply what happens when the false religious accretions are removed by advancing science and modernity. The shift is a positive cultural-historical construction: a long, complex, multi-stage process by which new conditions of belief have come into existence, requiring new positive achievements at each stage.
The book's structure: Part I treats the bulwarks of belief in 1500 and how they began to be eroded; Part II treats the early modern providential deism that emerged from the Reformation; Part III treats the rise of the immanent frame in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; Part IV treats the conditions of religious belief and disbelief in the present, the various forms each has taken, and the ongoing cultural-political dynamics of the secular age. The conclusion: secularization is not the disappearance of religion but the transformation of the conditions under which religion (and irreligion) are lived; the secular age is not the post-religious age but a new religious age with its own characteristic forms of religious and anti-religious life.
The book has been the major work of philosophical-historical engagement with secularization in the early twenty-first century. Critical literature includes the Calhoun-Juergensmeyer-VanAntwerpen Rethinking Secularism (Oxford University Press, 2011), the Warner-VanAntwerpen-Calhoun Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2010), and continuing engagement in the philosophy of religion, theology, and political theory.
Reception
Taylor's reception has spread continuously across philosophical, political-theoretical, theological, and broader humanistic-cultural fields. The early work on the philosophy of action and explanation was widely read in Anglophone philosophy; the Hegel book made him a principal Anglophone interpreter of continental thought; the political-theoretical work on multiculturalism and recognition became foundational to debates in those areas; Sources of the Self and A Secular Age established him as one of the major Anglophone philosophers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
The critical literature is extensive. Ruth Abbey's Charles Taylor (Princeton University Press, 2000) is the standard introduction; James Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular (Eerdmans, 2014) is the major theological engagement with A Secular Age; the substantial body of work by Nicholas Smith, Mark Redhead, Hartmut Rosa, and others develops Taylor's framework in various directions.
Significance
Taylor's importance has several dimensions. As philosopher of action and the human sciences, the early work supplied the major Anglophone critique of behaviorist and reductionist programs in those fields. As interpreter of Hegel and the continental tradition, the Hegel and subsequent works opened that tradition to Anglophone readers in a sustained and rigorous way. As political theorist, the recognition essay and the broader engagement with multiculturalism reshaped how contemporary political theory thinks about identity, culture, and political community. As philosophical historian, Sources of the Self and A Secular Age provided the most ambitious recent narratives of the historical formation of modern selfhood and the modern conditions of religious belief, with consequences across philosophy, theology, and the broader humanities.