Charles Taylor and the pre-history of British cultural studies

Abstract

Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor is recognised as one of the most profound thinkers of our time, as a critic of Western modernity and an advocate of democratic public life. The range of his work straddles politics, ethics, anthropology, spirituality, identity, history, science and other topics, with a keen eye on modern philosophy and the history of ideas. His intellectual work is driven by the vision of a philosophical anthropology that questions the contemporary bifurcation between the ideological aspects of our contemporary science culture, and those dimensions of human experience that tend to be systematically diminished, if not negated, in disciplined academic study. As much as Taylor-the-philosopher is easily recognised as a giant among contemporary thinkers, this article draws attention to Taylor-the-student during his time at Oxford in the 1950s. Here we see that Taylor's presence and involvement in the first New Left (1956–1962) was not coincidental to his being ‘in the right place at the right time’. This article puts forward argument to suggest that Taylor was instrumental in the movement that constituted the terrain on which the emergence of the field of British cultural studies was made possible. This terrain may be understood as that field's pre-history; and as important as Taylor is to contemporary social thought, so too was he to the constitution of that pre-history.