Charles Taylor's The Malaise of Modernity, 1991

September 06, 2026

This was from Taylor’s Massey Lectures from the CBC, published 1991. Not sure when the lectures where delivered. I have listened to and attended some of these lectures in the past, and their tone was rather different from that of this book, so I wonder to what degree the published word represents what was actually spoken.

I only started taking notes and highlighting the text about 2/3 of the way through, so what is here will be even more cursory than it would otherwise be.

The book identifies three “malaises” of modernity: 1 individualism (loss of connection to something beyond the self that gives meaning), 2 the predominance of instrumental reason (seen as a factor that divorces from control of and intimacy with the forces that shape our lives), and 3 (which derives from the previous two) a “soft despotism” (Taylor mentions de Tocqueville here) that purports to offer freedom but imperceptibly hems us in and divorces us from the springs of collective action. For reasons of Space, Taylor says he will focus on the first.
Significantly simplifying things, his argument is that the modern emphasis on personal choice/freedom/authenticity is misunderstood both by its critics and boosters.
For the former, Taylor cites critics like Bloom and his Closing of the American Mind that links individualism to relativism, and thereby to a flattening out of life as people become increasingly narcissistic. Taylor has concerns about relativism, but sets them aside for now. To describe this phenomenon that Bloom et al oppose in more charitable terms, he draws upon Lionel Trilling’s Sincerity and Authenticity and throughout the upcoming chapters will seek to outline a form of authenticity that avoids the pitfalls focused on by Bloom et al but also seeks to rescue it from some of the frivolity that its own defenders fall into, a “liberalism of neutrality” (17) which too hastily eschews discussion of the “good life”.
Taylor traces the origin of the ideal of authenticity to various sources, e.g. Locke and Rousseau.
He also shows how certain of the more “self-centered” forms of the ideal of authenticity fail to consider the dialogical character of identity formation, and the importance of significant others in this process (35) in presenting us with a horizon of significance, without which none of our actions can be meaningful in any real sense. (This is slightly reminiscent of CS Lewis’ reflections on morality/tao/the way that I have almost entirely forgotten, maybe from Men without chests?) “Self choice supposes there are other issues of significance beyond self-choice” (39), without these the project falls into triviality at best, even absurdity. “I can define my identity only against the background of things that matter” (40).
Another criticism of the modern culture of authenticity is that it makes one’s relations to others subservient to one’s own (narrowly-defined) interests and pursuits. The moral principle underlying “soft relativism”: “no one has the right to criticize another’s values” (45); combined with Lockean contract theory, this orients us towards avoiding things that can limit another’s individualism.
Taylor wants to sharply distinguish self-referentiality of content vs manner: by manner I think he means that my orientation must be explicitly mine, “true to myself” in some way, whereas the content of this can (and I think Taylor thinks it should be) substantially not about me e.g. about some higher purpose like God, a community, or tending the earth (82). But in the modern world many of the traditional points of reference are no long available to us, or alive (83): Baudelaire can write about them but they are part of his personal vision. We can trace this change through the Romantics, the difference between Pope and Shelley (84). Instead of a public order we have various private orders, some discussion of the Great Chain of Being and angels (86-7). But even for the Romantic and post-Romantic poets we must keep in mind the distinction between subjectivization of content vs manner. Wordsworth’s “spontaneous overflow of powerful meaning” must be read alongside his effort to articulate something more than just his own private experience, likewise with Rilke (88). Taylor says “may still need to see ourselves as part of a larger order that can make claims upon us” (89), but this isn’t terribly convincing and is sort of undermined by his earlier discussion about public horizon of significance: how can a private vision/order make the same kind of claim? And how does this rescue us from the worst risks of the malaise? “Indeed” says Taylor “this latter may be thought of as urgent. It would greatly help to stave of ecological disaster if we could recover a sense of the demand tha mour natural surroundings and wilderness make on us “(90). This reminds me of Marx’s criticism of utopian thinking (not of course that I think Marx was entirely write and Taylor is entirely wrong/naive).
Are we trapped in an iron cage (Weber) of instrumental reason, relativism and the concomitant anomie? We are indeed pushed in this direction by powerful forces but there are points of resistance (99). Taylor points out a few concrete examples and sources of such resistance, even some that are “internal” to the tradition that has spawned these dangers, but in the end it still feels fairly hopeless.
“What should have died along with communism is the belief that modern societies can be run on a single principle, whether that of planning under the general will or that of free-market allocations. Our challenge is actually to combine in some non-self-stultifying fashion a number of ways of operating, which are jointly necessary to a free and prosperous society but which also tend to impede each other” (110). This “self-stultifying” aspect is a theme throughout the book, how to avoid it. “Governing a contemporary society is continually recreating a balance between requirements that tend to undercut each other… There can never be in the nature o the case a definitive solution” (111). Bureaucracy is necessary but also “tends to strengthen the enframings that favour an atomist and instrumentalist stance towards the world and others” (111).
Perhaps the danger Tocqueville adumbrated is not actual despotic control but something subtler, “fragmentation”, people unable to band together for a common purpose, feeling “linked in common projects with some others but these com more to be partial groupings rather than the whole society: for instance, a local community, an ethnic minority, the adherents of some religion or ideology, the promoters of some special interest” (113). I wish Taylor provided a richer picture of what such well-integrated societies (assuming we are talking about complex societies and not small hyper-traditional ones), able to band together as a whole, have actually looked like, outside wartime and other emergencies that necessitate everyone pulling together.
Taylor links the aspects of American politics of a) leaving thorny issues to judicial solution and b) focus on single-issue campaigns to the atrophy of a third aspect, the formation of democratic majorities “around meaningful programs that can be then carried t o completion” (115). A problem with judicial solution is that they tend to be “winner take all; either you win or you lose. In particular, judicial decisions about rights tend to be conceived as all or nothing matters. They very concept of a right seems to call for integral satisfaction” (117). This reminds of Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s comment to the effect of (roughly) Roe v Wade win being dangerous since it reached too far, farther than the populace was actually read for, making it ripe for rollback.