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5646 Browne and Lynch.Indd TAYLOR AND POLITICS A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION Craig Browne and Andrew P. Lynch 55646_Browne646_Browne aandnd LLynch.inddynch.indd iiiiii 112/02/182/02/18 55:00:00 PPMM Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Craig Browne and Andrew P. Lynch, 2018 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 9193 7 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9194 4 (paperback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9195 1 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 9196 8 (epub) The right of Craig Browne and Andrew P. Lynch to be identifi ed as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). 55646_Browne646_Browne aandnd LLynch.inddynch.indd iivv 112/02/182/02/18 55:00:00 PPMM Contents Acknowledgements vi Abbreviations of Taylor’s Works vii Introduction 1 1 Charles Taylor: A Thinker for Our Times 17 2 Meaning, Identity and Freedom 33 3 Romanticism and Modernity 55 4 Democracy and Recognition 79 5 Modern Social Imaginaries 107 6 Living in a Secular Age 129 7 A Secular Age: Controversies and Critiques 151 8 Charles Taylor’s Work after A Secular Age 174 Conclusion 193 Bibliography 197 Index 209 55646_Browne646_Browne aandnd LLynch.inddynch.indd v 112/02/182/02/18 55:00:00 PPMM Abbreviations of Taylor’s Works APLS ‘Afterword: Apologia pro Libro suo’, in Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen and Craig Calhoun (eds) Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age. 2010. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 300–21. BF Building the Future: A Time for Reconciliation. Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor. 2008. Quebec: Government of Quebec. CM A Catholic Modernity? 1999. New York: Oxford University Press. CP Church and People: Disjunctions in a Secular Age. Charles Taylor, José Casanova and George F. McLean (eds). 2012. Washington, DC: Council for Research in Values and Philosophy. DC Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays. 2011. Cam- bridge, MA: Harvard University Press. EA The Ethics of Authenticity. 1992. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. EB The Explanation of Behaviour. 1964. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. H Hegel. 1975. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. HAL Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers 1. 1985. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. HMS Hegel and Modern Society. 1979. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. KP Kluge Prize Acceptance Speech. 2015. Washington, DC: Library of Congress. LA The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Lin- guistic Capacity. 2016. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. M Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Amy Gutmann (ed.). 1994. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni- versity Press. vii 55646_Browne646_Browne aandnd LLynch.inddynch.indd vviiii 112/02/182/02/18 55:00:00 PPMM taylor and politics MSI Modern Social Imaginaries. 2004. Durham: Duke University Press. PA Philosophical Arguments. 1995. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. PHS Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2. 1985. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. RR Retrieving Realism. Herbert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor. 2015. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. RS Reconciling the Solitudes: Essays in Canadian Federalism and Nationalism. 1993. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. SA A Secular Age. 2007. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. SFC Secularism and Freedom of Conscience. Jocelyn Maclure and Charles Taylor. 2011. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. SS Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. 1989. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. VRT Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited. 2002. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. viii 55646_Browne646_Browne aandnd LLynch.inddynch.indd vviiiiii 112/02/182/02/18 55:00:00 PPMM Introduction Charles Taylor is one of the world’s foremost thinkers, and he has produced an impressive body of work over a lifetime which focuses on some of the most pressing issues of contemporary politics and social life, including social diversity, religion and secularism, justice, language and philosophical considerations on realism. His work has been noted by academics around the globe, but has also caught the attention of politicians, policy makers and government administra- tors in a number of countries. His ideas are debated in a range of aca- demic disciplines beyond his own of philosophy, including sociology, anthropology, religious studies, theology, history, political science, cultural studies and literary theory. Whenever big ideas are being dis- cussed that have an impact on social integration and the living of meaningful lives, Taylor’s work is soon mentioned. His writings have instigated a large body of secondary literature, including conferences debating the implications of his ideas, journal symposiums, edited volumes on topics he has engaged with, and book length treatises that investigate his work from a range of perspectives. Furthermore, his writings constitute a substantial alternative to the dominant liberal strand of political theory and offer a novel critique of capitalist society. Taylor’s conception of freedom has identifi able links with the aims of contemporary movements for social change. Taylor’s writings represent a major account of historical processes of democratisation and a unique interpretation of the attributes of a democratic political culture. Indeed, Taylor is concerned with the moral horizon of politics and with how meanings and values shape political institutions and practices. Taylor’s politics is usually charac- terised as communitarian, but while Taylor is critical of ‘atomistic’ individualism and ‘proceduralism’, his politics should be more prop- erly understood as a type of ‘holistic liberalism’. As Nicholas Smith points out, Taylor is not a systems builder; that is, he has not developed one consistent philosophical edifi ce or framework that attempts to understand the world or reality, and he has not written one particular book that sums up his philosophy. 1 55646_Browne646_Browne aandnd LLynch.inddynch.indd 1 112/02/182/02/18 55:00:00 PPMM taylor and politics Rather, Taylor has made many novel, and in some cases ground- breaking, contributions to a wide range of philosophical and social issues, including the work of Hegel, the politics of recognition and multiculturalism, personhood, modernity, the self, language, real- ism, hermeneutics and science, history and the Romantic Move- ment, religion and secularism, and freedom. Taylor’s approach is problem-oriented (Smith 2002). He believes that many contempo- rary political debates are not intractable, rather political disputes can be reformulated through revealing their larger moral back- ground. More controversially, Taylor claims that certain questions are inescapable, and he aims to make the basis of evaluations explicit and to reveal how signifi cance is constituted. Furthermore, Taylor’s work has not been confi ned to abstract philosophising; he has also been directly involved in politics for much of his adult life, and this includes stints as a political candidate and academic interventions into political issues. Throughout his career, Taylor has grappled with a range of problems that stem from the duality that often occurs in intellec- tual thought, for instance his interest in Romanticism as a counter- movement of the Enlightenment; his defence of communitarianism in the face of atomist understandings of social relations; and his deep thinking on secularism as it relates to religion. Our analysis highlights how Taylor’s political thought is founded on his gen- eral philosophical perspective, and how his arguments develop through participation in major contemporary theoretical debates, like those over the politics of recognition, civil society, secularism and modernity. We will pay particular attention to Taylor’s writings over the last decade and their endeavours to develop a perspective that is relevant to the contemporary social and political situation. This will involve a survey of the wide-ranging debate that Taylor’s book A Secular Age has stimulated, and we will examine the criti- cal response to this work in the social sciences. Taylor’s writings represent one of the most important accounts of long-term his- torical processes of democratisation, especially signifi cant for their clarifi cation of the background frameworks of understanding that shape a democratic culture. Similarly, Taylor’s political theory elab- orates a distinctive conception of freedom, one that incorporates aspects of romanticism’s notions of self-realisation and self-expres- sion, assumptions drawn from his philosophical anthropology and related ‘moral ontology’, as well as refl ecting Taylor’s commitment to a holistic version of liberalism. We hope to show how Taylor 2 55646_Browne646_Browne aandnd LLynch.inddynch.indd 2 112/02/182/02/18 55:00:00 PPMM introduction draws on this perspective in his critical diagnoses of the ‘malaise of modernity’, which is manifested in alienation, fragmentation and isolation. We will
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