Making the Past Useful for a Pluralistic Present: Taylor, Arendt, and a Problem for Historical Reasoning

Abstract

more partial reading of history which in turn can help to cultivate a politics that is at once more contestatory yet more inclusive than what Taylor's model is able to promote. Charles Taylor and Hannah Arendt are two thinkers who have produced an abundance of influential work on how as modern subjects can better think what we are doing (Arendt 1958, 5) in response to the problems of late modern societies, yet their work is rarely mentioned in the same breath. In thinking what we are doing, both invoke the past to provide a viable foundation for thinking through present politi? cal malaises. Moreover, for both theorists, a central feature of political life and political theorizing is plurality. This article focuses on Taylor's confrontation with a specific problem of plurality, that of political fragmentation, and the insights an Arendtian model of storytelling can provide for it. A politically fragmented state is one whose members increasingly identify with the concerns of specific groups rather than the state as a whole. To address political fragmentation is to address the tension between accommodating narrowly defined identities and promoting allegiance to a larger polity. It is to confront the ques? tion, if justice is interpreted as the recognition and accommodation of differences among social groups then what will hold the more encompassing political community? (Kahane 1999, 267). Fragmentation is spawned by the following democratic dilemma: modern democracies need cohesion around a political identity and precisely this provides a strong temptation to exclude those who cannot or will not fit easily into the identity with which the majority feels comfortable, or believes it alone can hold them together (Taylor 1999b, 279). Taylor has confronted fragmentation as a political actor and commentator, political theorist, philosopher, and person of faith. In the first two instances, Taylor explicitly addresses fragmentation, while in the latter two, Taylor finds himself wrestling with the tension between the same two nor? mative forces of an openness to difference or particularity and articulating a basis for commonality at work in a viable solution to fragmentation. Taylor's work proves to be very insightful for understanding what fragmentation involves and what a viable solution entails because (a) Taylor generates a