Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dk4vv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T12:41:20.372Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

How to Live Together in Difference: Redhead on Taylor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 October 2015

Extract

Mark Redhead's first book, Charles Taylor: Living and Thinking Deep Diversity, offers an in-depth study of Taylor's political thought which insists, rightly in my view, on the close connection between that political thought on the one hand and Taylor's political context and activism in his native Quebec on the other. In this new book, it is both reassuring and instructive to witness someone with Redhead's deep and long knowledge of Taylor incorporate his more recent work, A Secular Age, into a discussion of the themes of Taylor's corpus more generally.

Type
Roundtable: Mark Redhead's Reasoning with Who We Are: Democratic Theory for a Not So Liberal Era
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Mark Redhead, Charles Taylor: Living and Thinking Deep Diversity (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002).

2 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

3 Ruth Abbey, “Theorizing Secularity 3: Authenticity, Ontology, Fragilization,” in Aspiring to Fullness in a Secular Age: Essays on Religion and Theology in the Work of Charles Taylor, ed. Carlos D. Colorado and Justin D. Klassen (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014), 98–124.

4 Taylor, Secular Age, 11.

5 In “A Secular Age: The Missing Question Mark,” in The Taylor Effect: Responding to a Secular Age, ed. Ian Leask et al. (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 8–25, I argue that the ideal of fullness is a variation on Taylor's older theme of strong evaluation.

6 These ideas have appeared in several publications, including Taylor, Charles, “The Dynamics of Democratic Exclusion,” Journal of Democracy 9, no. 4 (1998): 143–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Taylor, “Religion and European Integration,” in Conditions of European Solidarity, vol. 2, Religion in the New Europe, ed. Krzysztof Michalski (New York: Central European University Press, 2006), 1–22.

7 Taylor, “Dynamics of Democratic Exclusion,” 152. Interestingly, in the book's introduction (2), Redhead quotes a version of this question from another of Taylor's texts.

8 In The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights, ed. Joanne R. Bauer and Daniel A. Bell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 124–44.

9 Taylor also invokes the idea of an overlapping consensus in “Religion and European Integration,” 16–17, and in his short book, coauthored with Jocelyn Maclure, Secularism and Freedom of Conscience, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Camdridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 10–12, 15–18, 20–21, 107–8. For an interesting comparison of Rawls's and Taylor's use of this idea, see Barnhart, Michael G., “An Overlapping Consensus: A Critique of Two Approaches,” Review of Politics 66, no. 2 (2004): 257–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 By the phrase “religious turn,” I refer not only to Taylor's interest in religion as a social or historical force but also to the fact that he has become more explicit about his own religious faith and the ways in which it influences his thinking. The first, tentative manifestation of this turn comes at the end of Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). It was consolidated with A Catholic Modernity? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) and further strengthened by A Secular Age in 2007.