From classical to uncomfortable modernity: Charles Taylor's reinterpretation of modernity

Charles Taylor is one of the most important philosophers and political thinkers of our time. With his monumental work A Secular Age, he has presented an original and influential interpretation of Western modernity based on the genesis of modern secularity. Against the backdrop of classical social science theories of modernity, Karsten Pangerl reconstructs this development from the naïve beliefs of the Middle Ages to the emergence of the immanent framework and the situation of opposing pressures in the present day as a lengthy process whose core is the formation of a new moral order. This genealogy of modern secularity is analysed in the context of Taylor's entire oeuvre, and the consequences for his political thinking are highlighted. In a critical examination of Taylor's endeavour to keep open the possibility of a transcendental reference to the experience of personal 'fullness,' he characterises Taylor's 'uneasy modernity' as a normative project that must rediscover its normativity.