Many critics observe a methodological flaw in Taylor’s work. They claim that there is an alleged discrepancy between Taylor’s historical approach on the one hand and his defense of fullness in term...

In this essay I discuss the historical adequacy of Charles Taylor's philosophical history of secularization, as presented in his A Secular Age . I do so by situating it in relation to the contextual historiography of secularization in early modern Europe, with a particular focus on developments in the German Empire. Considering how profoundly conceptions of secularization have been bound to competing religious and political programmes, we must begin our discussion by entertaining the possibility that modern philosophical and historiographic conceptions (...) of secularization might themselves be outcrops of this unfinished competition. Peter Gordon has rightly observed that Taylor's philosophical history of secularization is a Catholic one, and that this is bound up with a specific view of secularization as a theological and ecclesiological “disembedding” of rational subjectivity from its prior embodiment in a sacral body, community , and cosmos. Taylor delivers this history in his “reform master narrative”: that certain fundamental religious and cultural reforms or changes in early modern Europe wrought the secularization responsible for a modern epoch of “unbelief”. (shrink)

This paper identifies and analyzes the problem of historicism in Charles Taylor's work overall, but with particular emphasis on his most recent publication, A Secular Age. I circumscribe the problem of historicism through reference to the nineteenth-century German philosophical tradition in which it developed, in particular in the thought of Wilhelm Dilthey. I then trace the structural similarities between the notions of history to be found in the thought of Taylor and Dilthey and how these structural similarities raise worries associated (...) with the problem of historicism. I argue that the structural aporia of historicism evident in Taylor's work brings to light a live philosophical problem that is basic to theoretical debates in the study religion. (shrink)

This article seeks to shed light on some of the problematic assumptions underpinning the contemporary debate over the constitutional identity of the European Union. The central claim put forward here is that the development of the European Union’s constitution is significantly constrained by what Charles Taylor has described as the modern social imaginary. The constraint operates at two levels. First, modern understandings of constitutionalism typically ignore or underemphasize its dynamic and historical characteristics and its relationship with the self-understanding of political (...) subjects. Thus, modern constitutionalism fails to acknowledge the importance of historically conditioned assumptions involved in the formation of the identities of political subjects. In short, it fails to understand constitutionalism as a ‘regime’. Second, modern constitutionalism’s blind-spots result in a relatively unreflective adherence to a particular type of constitutional regime: the modern economy and its associated ‘consumerist’ form of political citizenship. (shrink)