In this extensive inquiry into the sources of modern selfhood, Charles Taylor demonstrates just how rich and precious those resources are. The modern turn to subjectivity, with its attendant rejection of an objective order of reason, has led--it seems to many--to meresubjectivism at the mildest and to sheer nihilism at the worst. Many critics believe that the modern order has no moral backbone and has proved corrosive to all that might foster human good. Taylor rejects this view. He argues that, properly understood, our modern notion of the self provides a framework that more than compensates for the abandonment of substantive notions of rationality.

The major insight of Sources of the Selfis that modern subjectivity, in all its epistemological, aesthetic, and political ramifications, has its roots in ideas of human good. After first arguing that contemporary philosophers have ignored how self and good connect, the author defines the modern identity by describing its genesis. His effort to uncover and map our moral sources leads to novel interpretations of most of the figures and movements in the modern tradition. Taylor shows that the modern turn inward is not disastrous but is in fact the result of our long efforts to define and reach the good. At the heart of this definition he finds what he calls the affirmation of ordinary life, a value which has decisively if not completely replaced an older conception of reason as connected to a hierarchy based on birth and wealth. In telling the story of a revolution whose proponents have been Augustine, Montaigne, Luther, and a host of others, Taylor's goal is in part to make sure we do not lose sight of their goal and endanger all that has been achieved. Sources of the Selfprovides a decisive defense of the modern order and a sharp rebuff to its critics.

Undoubtedly one of the most significant works in moral philosophy and the history of ideas to appear in recent decades.

A magnificent account, full, fair, well read, well written, complicated and high spirited--a credit, one might say, to the modern self that is capable of plumbing the depths of its own heritage in such a generous way.

Sources of the Selfis in every sense a large book: in length and in the range of what it covers, but above all in the generosity and breadth of its sympathies and its interest in humanity...Few books on such large subjects are so engaging.

Surely one of the most important philosophical works of the last quarter of a century.

For sociologists, there is no more important philosopher writing in the world today than Charles Taylor.

Charles Tayloris Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at <>McGill University.

Preface

PART I Identity and the Good

1. Inescapable Frameworks

2. The Self in Moral Space

3. Ethics of Inarticulacy

4. Moral Sources

PART II Inwardness

5. Moral Topography

6. Plato's Self-Mastery

7. "In Interiore Homine"

8. Descartes's Disengaged Reason

9. Locke's Punctual Self

10. Exploring "l'Humaine Condition"

11. Inner Nature

12. A Digression on Historical Explanation

PART III The Affirmation of Ordinary Life

13. "God Loveth Adverbs"

14. Rationalized Christianity

15. Moral Sentiments

16. The Providential Order

17. The Culture of Modernity

PART IV The Voice of Nature

18. Fractured Horizons19. Radical Enlightenment

20. Nature as Source

21. The Expressivist Turn

PART V Subtler Languages

22. Our Victorian Contemporaries

23. Visions of the Post-Romantic Age

24. Epiphanies of Modernism

25. Conclusion: The Conflicts of Modernity

Notes

Index