Abstract

This thesis is a contextual examination of Charles Taylor's philosophical system applied to politics. It traces the origins of Taylor's project in Isaiah Berlin's revival of political philosophy at Oxford in the late 1950s and the critique of Stalinism. This thesis argues that Taylor's philosophy developed out of the New Left project of reconsidering the foundations of socialism. This developed into a critique of the common faults of Marxism and Liberalism as having fallen prey to a modernity characterised by a scientific and bureaucratic world-view. This thesis argues that Taylor redeveloped Hegel using linguistic and psychoanalytic theory to reconsider the foundations of Marxism and modernity, and to develop a post-modern Sittlichkeit. Finally, this thesis shows how Taylor viewed the crisis of modernity exemplified in the delayed modernisation of Quebec.