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Thinkers

Charles Taylor

Communitarian · North America · born 1931

Canadian philosopher who argues that we become who we are through shared language and community.

What it is

Charles Taylor (born 1931) is a Canadian philosopher. He was born in Montreal to a French-speaking Catholic mother and an English-speaking Protestant father, studied history at McGill and then philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford, and held the Chichele chair of social and political theory there.

He is known for arguing that a person is not an isolated chooser but someone whose self is shaped by language, community and shared ways of seeing the world, and that these cannot be left out of an account of morals and politics.

The main ideas

  • The self is shaped with others. He holds that the self depends on a social world. Ties to family, tradition and community are not extras added to a finished individual, because they help make the person who they are.
  • Strongly evaluated goods. People do not just weigh their wants against each other. They treat some goods as higher or more worthy than others, and these goods are found in the social world around them, not invented by each person alone.
  • Interpretation. Moral and political judgment depends on a language of reasons and a framework of meanings within which people see their world. So he took an interpretive approach, called hermeneutics, to the study of society.
  • The modern self. In Sources of the Self (1989) he examined the making of the modern identity, the multiplicity of the self in the modern Western world.
  • Against an isolated self. He is grouped with thinkers who criticised the liberal picture of a person as free of communal ties. The name "communitarian" was pinned on such critics by others, usually their opponents, and was not one they claimed.
  • A secular age. In A Secular Age (2007) he took up religion and secularity in modern Western societies. He is himself a practising Catholic, and religion is a theme of his later work.

What it looks like in practice

Imagine a person who moves to a new country and finds that the family customs and the language they grew up with count for little. On Taylor's view the loss is more than a change of scenery, because those ties helped make them who they are, and a fair way of living together has to take that seriously. This is an illustration of his line of thought, not a passage from his writing.

Books and moments

  • Sources of the Self (1989) is a study of the making of the modern identity.
  • The Politics of Recognition (1992) is a well-known essay.
  • A Secular Age (2007) is a large work on religion and secularity in the modern West.

Questions and criticism

  • How much does the community shape us? If the self is formed with others, it is fair to ask how far a person can still step back, question and revise the values they were given.
  • Does the liberal picture really assume an isolated self? Some argue that the critics aimed at a view liberals did not hold. Others disagree, and the question stays open here.
  • Is the label fair? The word "communitarian" was applied to Taylor and others by outsiders. It is an open question how well it describes what he argues.

Close neighbours

The pages on Michael Sandel and Alasdair MacIntyre belong to the same group of critics of the isolated self, John Rawls is the thinker they answered, and the page on G. W. F. Hegel covers a philosopher whose work he wrote about.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced

  • Michael Sandel · He built on Taylor's account of the self as formed by shared life. (scholars disagree about this link)

Influenced by

  • G. W. F. Hegel · He wrote a major study of Hegel and took up his view of the self as formed by shared life.

Other Communitarian thinkers

Sources we used

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