‘A sort of Catholic Marxist’: Charles Taylor, the British New Left, and a communion of saints

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ABSTRACT This article examines Charles Taylor’s involvement with the British New Left during his time as a student at the University of Oxford (1952–1961). It illustrates that the intellectual and political principles he articulated during this period continue to structure his interrelated historiographical, philosophical-anthropological, and constructive-theological endeavours. It demonstrates this point by attending to aspects of Taylor’s intellectual biography (including his network at Oxford, Alba Taylor’s political writing, and the British New Left’s reception of Antonio Gramsci) and examining how themes from his debate with E. P. Thompson regarding the philosophical pathologies inherent in Marxist Communism in the wake of 1956 permeate his constructive Catholic theology of a ‘Communion of Saints’ in A Secular Age.