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“Democracy Is Always Going to Be Hard”: An Interview with Charles Taylor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2022

Paolo Costa Open the ORCID record for Paolo Costa [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

This interview with the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor was designed and realized to celebrate his ninetieth birthday in November 2021. The interview touches on all the main themes of Taylor's oeuvre, from his view of philosophy to the inherent link between human intelligence and strong evaluations, from the Immanent Frame to postsecularity, from today's democratic crisis to the 1980s debate between liberals and communitarians, from Xi Jinping's China to the global health emergency, from spirituality to Philosophical Romanticism. It is both a hindsight analysis by a first-class thinker and a glance into the future by an incurable optimist.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 84 , Issue 2 , Spring 2022 , pp. 238 - 251
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of University of Notre Dame

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Footnotes

The interview, recorded on March 29, 2021, was first published in Italian translation as “Un ponte teso tra vita attiva e contemplativa. Intervista a Charles Taylor” (A bridge between vita activa and vita contemplativa: an interview with Charles Taylor), in Modernità al bivio. L'eredità della ragione romantica: tre testi inediti e una conversazione, ed. Paolo Costa (Bologna: Marietti 1820, 2021). I thank the publisher for permission to publish the original English version.

References

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3 Nicholas Thompson, “When Tech Knows You Better than You Know Yourself,” Wired, April 10, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/artificial-intelligence-yuval-noah-harari-tristan-harris/, accessed Dec. 20, 2021; Harari, Yuval Noah, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (New York: Harper, 2017), chap. 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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5 Charles Taylor, “What Is Human Agency?” and “Self-Interpreting Animals,” in Philosophical Papers, vol. 1, Human Agency and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 15–76.

6 Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), chap. 15Google Scholar.

7 Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good? (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020).

8 Bell, Daniel A., The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

9 The “Meng affair” reached a diplomatic solution on September 24, 2021, with the simultaneous release of Meng and Kovrig/Spavor, who returned to Canada the following day.

10 Charles Taylor, “What Drove Me to Philosophy?,” 2008, https://www.kyotoprize.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/2008_C.pdf, accessed Dec. 20, 2021.