Marc Caldwell's extensively researched article makes an important contribution to the studies of Charles Taylor's work, his relationship to the British New Left and the formation of British cultural studies. Generally there are three main lines of argument: the first concerns Taylor's contribution to the early New Left. The second deals with his general philosophical position, especially as it concerns his attitude to classical Marxism. The third speculates on how he may have influenced the starting position of Birmingham cultural studies. As to the first, it is very well covered in terms of scope of research. However, I do have slight reservations about emphases, though accepting the broad outline. These questions of influence are difficult to assess and there is rarely enough detailed published evidence available to make more than an interpretive reading. The point is that there was really no such one thing as the New Left on which Taylor could have exerted an influence--it was always an amalgam of usually incoherent traditions and movements. It is useful to bear in mind that the New Left, and its journal, New Left Review, was the result of an amalgamation of two journals (Universities and Left Review and The New Reasoner), which represented different generations with different attitudes to, and experiences of, Marxism, the Communist tradition, etc., and were born in related but different circumstances. These traditions were internally very diverse. The journals (and the currents) were not formally united until 1960, and the New Left continued to be marked by differences in outlook and influenced by traditions that were not internally coherent. For example, E.P. Thompson and John Saville had been distinguished Marxist historians affiliated with the Communist Party, and The New Reasoner started as a dissident journal within the Party. Thompson and Saville left the Party before being expelled from it. Many who left with them did not go on to become active in the New Left, but simply lost interest in the politics of the left. Raphael Samuel, who did remain active in the Party, belonged in many ways to the position taken by Thompson and Saville. Samuel was a historian in the Party, but was a generation younger and his activities were centered on the Oxford political scene. Charles Taylor and I had never been in the Communist Party. As one of its key editors, Taylor was most influential in the foundation of Universities and Left Review, its early politics and to some extent its theoretical/ philosophical positions (though he was much more sophisticated philosophically than the rest of us, and had a position in Oxford philosophical debates largely unrelated to his politics). His influence on the ULR 'tradition' was especially strong in the days before he returned to Canada: the adoption of a kind of socialist humanism, a critique of Stalinism, a revival of the Hegelian tradition in Marx, especially 'alienation' as in the recently rediscovered Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, the critique of economism, of English philosophical empiricism and its suspicion of continental 'metaphysics' (Merleau Ponty, and indeed Hegel!), and of positivism in the social sciences, etc. These were loose 'positions' in the New Left, especially in the ULR milieu, though the majority of people around the New Left Review editorial boards never adopted or rarely discussed many of these positions. He also shared the more practical political tasks required by establishing ULR and defining a new left politics. …