Preface Introduction Part I: The Work of Reform 1. The Bulwarks of Belief 2. The Rise of the Disciplinary Society 3. The Great Disembedding 4. Modern Social Imaginaries 5. The Spectre of Idealism Part II: The Turning Point 6. Providential Deism 7. The Impersonal Order Part III: The Nova Effect 8. The Malaises of Modernity 9. The Dark Abyss of Time 10. The Expanding Universe of Unbelief 11. Nineteenth-Century Trajectories Part IV: Narratives of Secularization 12. The Age of Mobilization 13. The Age of Authenticity 14. Religion Today Part V: Conditions of Belief 15. The Immanent Frame 16. Cross Pressures 17. Dilemmas 1 18. Dilemmas 2 19. Unquiet Frontiers of Modernity 20. Conversions Epilogue: The Many Stories Notes Index
Taylor's book is a major and highly original contribution to the debates on secularization that have been ongoing for the past century. There is no book remotely like it. -- Alasdair MacIntyre This is Charles Taylor's breakthrough book, a book of really major importance, because he succeeds in recasting the whole debate about secularism. This is one of the most important books written in my lifetime. I am tempted to say the most important book, but that may just express the spell the book has cast over me at the moment. -- Robert N. Bellah
Charles Taylor is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at McGill University. Author of The Language Animal, Sources of the Self, The Ethics of Authenticity, and A Secular Age, he has received many honors, including the Templeton Prize, the Berggruen Prize, and membership in the Order of Canada.
A Secular Age is a work of stupendous breadth and erudition.
*New York Times Book Review*
A Secular Age represents a singular achievement…Taylor is somehow
uniquely able to combine chutzpah and good manners, making bold and
imaginative claims, yet always attending respectfully to the whole
range of disciplines that touch on the philosophical trajectory
being drawn, whether that be history, sociology, theology, art
theory, cultural studies, anthropology or social theory…A Secular
Age succeeds in the same way as his previous work: in illuminating
through complicating. At the same time, this book seems to step up
the ambition somewhat: by attempting to provide a final definitive
account of all the narratives and complications that make up our
contemporary age, as they implode on themselves and interact with
one another…Hegel knew, of course, that ‘the owl of Minerva spreads
its wings only with the falling of the dusk’; or, in other words,
that philosophy can only fathom the truth about an age in
hindsight, when the day has passed. But then again, that didn’t
stop Hegel having a go; and we should be glad that it hasn’t
stopped Charles Taylor, either.
*Times Literary Supplement*
Charles Taylor’s remarkable book A Secular Age achieves something
quite different from what other writers on secularization have
accomplished. Most have focused on decline as the essence of
secularism—either the removal of religion from sphere after sphere
of public life, or the decrease of religious belief and practice.
But Taylor focuses on what kind of religion makes sense in a
secular age…Taylor is asking not only how secularism became a
significant option in a civilization that not so long ago was
explicitly Christian, but what that change means for the spiritual
quest, both of those who are still religious and those who consider
themselves secular. I doubt many people have even perceived that
aspect of secularism, and Taylor’s book should be as much of a
revelation to them as it was to me.
*Commonweal*
Taylor’s book is a major and highly original contribution to the
debates on secularization that have been ongoing for the past
century. There is no book remotely like it.
*Alasdair MacIntyre*
One finds big nuggets of insight, useful to almost anybody with an
interest in the progress of human society…A vast ideological
anatomy of possible ways of thinking about the gradual onset of
secularism as experienced in fields ranging from art to poetry to
psychoanalysis…Taylor also lays bare the inconsistencies of some
secular critiques of religion.
*The Economist*
[A] thumping great volume.
*The Guardian*
In A Secular Age, philosopher Charles Taylor takes on the broad
phenomenon of secularization in its full complexity…[A] voluminous,
impressively researched and often fascinating social and
intellectual history…Taylor’s account encompasses art, literature,
science, fashion, private life—all those human activities that have
been sometimes more, sometimes less affected by religion over the
last five centuries.
*Los Angeles Times*
A rich, complex book, but what I most appreciate is [Taylor’s]
vision of a ‘secular’ future that is both open and also contains at
least pockets of spiritual rigor, and that is propelled by
religious motivation, a strong and enduring piece of our
nature.
*New York Times*
Taylor is arguably the most interesting and important philosopher
writing in English today…What makes Taylor so important? Over more
than 40 years, four large books, four or five slimmer essays and
several volumes of articles, he has worked out a distinctive
network of arguments and an exceptionally rich analysis of the
modern self and its values—an analysis that reveals us to be
altogether deeper and more interesting, but also less self-aware,
than we tend to suppose…A Secular Age sets out to offer a richer
characterization of secularization and the nature of contemporary
belief, both religious and skeptical…Taylor writes brilliantly
about the new social forms—the nation state, the market economy,
the charitable enterprise—and the ideals of altruism and public
service that have emerged with them…A Secular Age is effectively a
polemic against dogmatic atheism…It is full of insights, and many
of its component parts—notably Taylor’s discussion of the
‘pressures’ that make a settled view on the big ontological
questions hard to sustain—are as good as anything by this
magnificent philosopher.
*Prospect*
Taylor’s masterful integration of history, sociology, philosophy,
and theology demands much of the reader. In return you will be
convinced that Charles Taylor is one of the smartest and deepest
social thinkers of our time.
*Slate*
In an idiosyncratic blend of the philosophical, the historical, and
the speculative, Taylor describes the shift from a world brim-full
with spirits and magic to a world where divinity is absent. His
account resists the idea that the rise of secularism is a process
of subtraction, of loss, and of disenchantment. Rather, Taylor
describes secularity’s birth as the migration of ideas, subtle
changes in those ideas, and the opening of new possibilities. If
Taylor’s communitarian scholarship celebrated historical and social
rootedness, A Secular Age is an encomium to the sheer happenstance
of how those circumstances arose.
*American Prospect*
[A Secular Age] may become an enduring contribution to
understanding religious belief, the evolution of the secular order,
and the defining characteristics of modern secularism and
contemporary spirituality. Like Charles Taylor’s earlier books, it
is a product of prodigious erudition. Its 874 dense pages brim with
original observation, cogent argument constructed from sources in a
wide array of disciplines, and generous ecumenical gestures, even
towards humanists. His story is complex, somewhat repetitious and
yet unflaggingly interesting: it is loaded with so much novel
detail and insight that the reader will be grateful for each scrap
of familiar ground.
*Australian Review of Books*
Sophisticated, erudite…with excursions into history, philosophy and
literature, A Secular Age is a weighty and challenging tome. It is
also a brilliant account of the ‘sensed context’ in which
secularization developed. And a moving meditation, by a believer,
on the ‘ineradicable bent’ of human beings to respond to something
beyond life, to keep open ‘the transcendent window.’
*Baltimore Sun*
If you are, as I am, often puzzled by the landscape of contemporary
religious belief and unbelief, you will regard Charles Taylor’s
huge and hugely rewarding intellectual history of the
secularization of European and North American culture as a
marvelous gift. A Secular Age is a first-class map of the spiritual
terrain of Western modernity as well as the road that got us
here.
*Christian Century*
A culminating dispatch from the philosophical frontlines. It is at
once encyclopedic and incisive, a sweeping overview that is no less
analytically rigorous for its breadth. Its subject is a
philosophical history of the past, present and future of Western
Christendom. As such, it begins with a deceptively simple question:
How did it become possible for anyone to not believe in God?…A
Secular Age recounts the history of an idea, in other words, but in
it the past is not an inert, settled fact, but a reservoir to be
drawn upon to shatter the sameness and the apparent inevitability
of the present. As a history it clarifies crucial intellectual and
theological divisions that continue to structure debates about
divinity, but with the aim of reforming the way we think about
them, ‘to show the play of destabilization and recomposition.’
Though this isn’t a book you take to the beach, it remains
eminently readable. As philosophers go, Taylor is a kind of
behaviorist, more concerned with elaborating the implications of a
way of thinking than with showing its contradictions. Unlike most
philosophers, though, Taylor seems at pains to remain accessible to
a general audience to capture complex philosophical debate in
ordinary language. An important part of Taylor’s argument is that
religion and the belief in God, most particularly the experience of
transcendence, are not at all outmoded…Though it avoids predictions
or prescriptions, A Secular Age leaves us with the sense that the
future will be a far poorer, less human place, if we do not
discover some expression for that transcendent otherness.
*Cleveland Plain Dealer*
It is, simply, the most comprehensive account of the process and
meaning of secularization…Taylor’s depiction of the past two
centuries is rich with insights and subtle analyses…Familiarity
with Taylor’s book is now the entry ticket for any serious
discussion of secularization.
*Commonweal*
Very occasionally there appears a book destined to endure. A
Secular Age is such a book…A Secular Age is an important and deeply
interesting work. Its central thesis is that secularization must be
understood not simply as the decline of certain beliefs and
institutions, but as a total change in our experience of the
world…There are subtle, original discussions of the modern self, of
changing conceptions of time, of the religious landscape of art,
and much else besides. Taylor has a great gift of empathy, an
ability to inhabit and bring to life the mental world of both
believers and unbelievers. A true Hegelian, he sees the goal of
philosophy as understanding, not judgment.
*Daily Telegraph*
A Secular Age offers an invaluable map of how the modern
religious–secular divide came into being.
*Dissent*
Though this essential Canadian intellectual may overstate the
triumph of secularity, his huge and elegant work takes on the
transformation of the world from 1500, when it was almost
impossible not to believe in a Creator, to 2000, when religion was
simply one choice on a menu of belief systems. He finds the answer
in ‘exclusive humanism,’ which sees ‘no final goals beyond human
flourishing, nor any allegiance to anything else beyond this
flourishing.’
*Globe & Mail*
It is refreshing to read an inquiry into the condition of religion
that is exploratory in its approach. Charles Taylor, a Roman
Catholic as well as one of the world’s leading political theorists,
does not aim to attack or defend any system of belief in his new
book, A Secular Age. Rather, he wants to elucidate the very idea of
a secular world. For Taylor, the difference between the pre-modern
Western world and the modern West is not simply that beliefs held
then are no longer accepted today; it is that the entire framework
of thought has changed.
*Harper’s*
In a determinedly brilliant new book, Charles Taylor challenges the
‘subtraction theory’ of secularization which defines it as a
process whereby religion simply falls away, to be replaced by
science and rationality. Instead, he sees secularism as a
development within Western Christianity, stemming from the
increasingly anthropocentric versions of religion that arose from
the Reformation. For Taylor, the modern age is not an age without
religion; instead, secularization heralds ‘a move from a society
where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to
one in which it is understood to be one option among others.’ The
result is a radical pluralism which, as well as offering
unprecedented freedom, creates new challenges and
instabilities.
*London Review of Books*
The real genius of this erudite and profound book resides in its
grandeur of theme and richness of detail. For all its imposing
intellectual density, it is a delight to read; at times, it was
literally impossible to put down. Yet it is also a work that ought
to be read by degrees—one chapter at a time, with ample pause for
reflection.
*Montreal Gazette*
A salutary and sophisticated defense of how life was lived before
the daring views of a tiny secular elite inspired mass
indifference, and how it might be lived in the future.
*New York Sun*
Taylor reminds us that we remain spiritual creatures in our most
essential natures, and that what we take for granted—our age’s lack
of religious faith—is, in fact, an anomaly of history. Our
forefathers did not live this way and our grandchildren might not
either. Considering the doubts about extreme secularism, it is
possible we are entering a new Age of Spirit. If so, Taylor’s
latest magnum opus serves as a comprehensive guide to the
reemergence of religious sensibility.
*Ottawa Citizen*
The focus here is neither on the role of religion in public
institutions nor on the extent of religious belief, but rather on
its conditions…It is the slow emergence of secularity in this sense
that Taylor sets out to explain, at formidable length, and in
remarkable historical and philosophical detail. Binding all that
detail together is an argument that Taylor manages to sustain over
nearly eight hundred pages. Simply put, A Secular Age is a
magisterial refutation of what Taylor calls the ‘subtraction story’
of secularisation.
*Philosopher’s Magazine*
Taylor’s gargantuan philosophical history of modernity, which
complicates the flattering and simplified story we like to tell
ourselves about secularization, is a major intellectual event.
*Prospect*
Grapples with the Christian–secular relationship, and with
admirable nuance (unlike most theology).
*The Tablet*
Taylor makes a strong case for the presence in ordinary moral life
of something like Plato’s idea of the Good, however little
acknowledged…A Secular Age carries the story further, into the
question of the role of religion in constituting a person’s
identity. Taylor wants to lay out what it takes to go on believing
in God, in the absence of any equivalent to the intellectual,
cultural and imaginative surroundings in which pre-modern religion
was quietly embedded. This is what he calls our ‘social imaginary’:
how we collectively sense what is normal and appropriate in our
dealings with one another and with the world around us. This is
something deeper and more diffused than philosophical theories or
thought-out positions.
*The Tablet*
A Secular Age is a towering achievement…It shows the ways we have
traveled from the automatic certainties of 1500 to the fragile
alignments of today. It transforms the secularization debate.
*The Tablet*
Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age offers a uniquely rich historical
and philosophical overview of how we came to take a disenchanted
world for granted—quietly inviting us to reflect that if
disenchantment and the absence of the divine were learned habits of
mind, they might not necessarily be the self-evidently rational
truths so many think they are.
*Times Literary Supplement*
[A] big, powerful book…[Taylor’s] book is massive in its historical
and philosophical scope. Penetrating and dense, it would take
months to fully digest. Loosely structured, it’s crammed with
original insights. Taylor, 75, can pack more into one of his
complex paragraphs than most prevaricating, deconstructing academic
philosophers can say in a chapter, or even a book…The book explores
the immense ramifications of how the West shifted in a few
centuries from being a society in which ‘it was virtually
impossible not to believe in God’ to one in which belief is
optional, often frowned upon.
*Vancouver Sun*
If the author had accomplished nothing more than a survey of the
voluminous body of ‘secularization theory,’ he would have done
something valuable. But, although Taylor clearly articulates his
disdain for the view that modernity ineluctably led to the death of
God, he goes far beyond a literature review…In addition to its
conceptual value, this study is notable for its lucidity. Taylor
has translated complex philosophical theories into language that
any educated reader will be able to follow, yet he has not
sacrificed an iota of sophistication or nuance. A magisterial
book.
*Kirkus Reviews (starred review)*
In his characteristically erudite yet engaging fashion, Taylor
takes up where he left off in his magnificent Sources of the Self
(1989) as he brilliantly traces the emergence of secularity and the
processes of secularization in the modern age…Taylor sweeps grandly
and magisterially through the 18th and 19th centuries as he
recreates the history of secularism and its parallel challenges to
religion. He concludes that a focus on the religious has never been
lost in Western culture, but that it is one among many stories
striving for acceptance. Taylor’s examination of the rise of
unbelief in the 19th century is alone worth the price of the book
and offers an essential reminder that the Victorian age, more than
the Enlightenment, dominates our present view of the meanings of
secularity. Taylor’s inspired combination of philosophy and history
sparkles in this must-read virtuoso performance.
*Publishers Weekly (starred review)*
This is Charles Taylor’s breakthrough book, a book of really major
importance, because he succeeds in recasting the whole debate about
secularism. This is one of the most important books written in my
lifetime. I am tempted to say the most important book, but that may
just express the spell the book has cast over me at the moment.
*Robert N. Bellah*
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