Charles Taylor

The Core Argument

In Sources of the Self (1989), Taylor traces the historical genealogy of the modern Western sense of identity across several centuries of moral and religious thought, from Augustine through the Reformation, Enlightenment rationalism, and Romanticism, arguing that the modern belief in an inner, authentic self to be discovered and expressed — what he and later commentators call “expressive individualism” — was not a spontaneous late-modern development but the outcome of long, traceable shifts in how people in the West understood moral sources and personal significance. In A Secular Age (2007), Taylor extends this genealogical method to the question of religious belief itself, arguing against accounts that treat secularization as a simple, one-directional “subtraction story” in which science and reason progressively strip away superstition. Instead, Taylor describes secularization as a transformation in the very “conditions of belief,” a centuries-long process beginning around 1500 in which religious faith shifted from being the unquestioned, taken-for-granted background of social life to becoming one option among several, contestable and chosen rather than simply inherited.

Historical Influence

Sources of the Self became a central text in communitarian critiques of liberal political theory, contributing alongside the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and Michael Sandel to a sustained philosophical debate, sometimes called the liberal-communitarian debate, over whether the self that liberal political theory presupposes is coherent apart from the historical and cultural traditions that constitute it. A Secular Age substantially reshaped the sociology and philosophy of religion, offering scholars a widely adopted alternative to earlier, more linear secularization theories associated with sociologists such as Peter Berger, and its account of secularization as a long historical process rather than a sudden mid-twentieth-century cultural rupture continues to inform historical and sociological work on the relationship between religion and modernity.

Disputed Scholarly Interpretation

Scholars of religion have raised several lines of critique against A Secular Age’s account. Some sociologists of religion have argued that Taylor’s narrative, though vast in scope, remains substantially a history of elite Latin Christian and Western European intellectual developments, and that it says comparatively little about lived popular religious practice or about secularization processes outside the North Atlantic world, limiting the account’s claim to describe secularity as a general condition of modernity. Others have questioned whether Taylor’s genealogical account, despite explicitly rejecting simple subtraction narratives, nonetheless retains an implicit assumption that the trajectory from religious to secular conditions of belief was in some sense a coherent, singular story rather than one of several plausible framings. Within political philosophy, Taylor’s communitarian critique of Rawlsian liberalism in Sources of the Self and related work continues to be contested by liberal theorists, who argue that his account underestimates liberalism’s own resources for accommodating culturally and historically embedded selves.

Sources