Taylor's View Research Articles

Rethinking History, Science, and Religion: An Exploration of Conflict and the Complexity Principle

Rethinking History, Science, and Religion: An Exploration of Conflict and the Complexity Principle

Mixed Messages: The Religions of Modernism

Mixed Messages:The Religions of Modernism Allen Dunn (bio) Craig Bradshaw Woelfel, Varieties of Aesthetic Experience: Literary Modernism and the Dissociation of Belief, Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2018. 228 pp. Modernity is generally believed to be the age of secularism, the time when age-old structures of religious belief give way to a new scientific view of the world that leaves little room for the articles of religious faith. It is not surprising, then, that many assume that those artists, musicians, poets, and novelists who today are known as modernists must be the inheritors of this secularism and that modernism produces a godless art for a godless age. In Varieties of Aesthetic Experience: Literary Modernism and the Dissociation of Belief, Craig Bradshaw Woelfel argues that scholars have misunderstood the role of religion in literary modernism because they have been misled by the conventional "subtraction" narrative of the emergence of secular modernity wherein religion simply fades away as it is replaced by a modern secular scientific view of the world. However, in modernism as in modern culture more generally, religion does not fade away, Woelfel argues, but remains one of the several irreconcilable elements that generate a world of perpetual conflict. Woelfel quotes Charles Taylor, the most famous and influential advocate of this point of view, who observes that "modernization is not a narrative of unbelief replacing belief; …actually, the change is more drastic. It is more like cacophony replacing meaning as such" (13). As Taylor views it, modernity creates a "pluralist world, in which many forms of belief and unbelief jostle, and hence fragilize each other" (2007, 531). Woelfel's project, then, is to apply Taylor's argument to two exemplary modernist writers, T. S. Eliot and E. M. Forster, in order to demonstrate that it is a mistake to classify either writer as either secular or religious. Rather, he insists, we should understand the modernist text as "a liminal site of cross-pressured religious engagement, a space used to critique, simultaneously, traditional or orthodox religious belief and, simultaneously, entirely immanent or rational accounts of life, knowledge, and experience" (2018, 13). As Woelfel demonstrates in a series of close readings, the various cultural cross-pressures that Taylor finds in modernity are readily apparent [End Page 375] in the work of Forster, a self-proclaimed agnostic whose skeptical pluralism entertains mutually contradictory truth claims without prompting him to endorse or refute any of them. In the opening lines of his essay "What I Believe," Forester famously announces that he does not "believe in belief." In Woelfel's account, this means that Forester does not believe that there is a way to reconcile "the emotional reality of [his] religious experience" with the secular scientific world-view that he also feels compelled to affirm. In a trope of Eliot's famous phrase, Woelfel calls this "the dissociation of belief" and finds evidence of it in Forester's correspondence, interviews, criticism, and novels, most notably in the Miramar Caves episode of A Passage to India. He finds that a similar dissociation is implicit in Forester's aesthetics which are predicated on the belief that a rigorous and systematic criticism of art must always fall short of its mark. For Forster, such systematic criticism must necessarily fail because it cannot convey literature's power to unite the experiences of writer and reader in a moment of transcendence, a transcendence that by definition cannot be captured in the critic's intellectual system. Given the inevitable failure of literary criticism, the critic's primary virtue must then be humility, and given his skepticism about human claims to any absolute knowledge, humility emerges as Forster's cardinal virtue. Eliot's case is less straightforward. After his much publicized conversion to Christianity in 1927, his life has usually been framed as a conversion narrative that culminates in his profession of Christian faith. Woelfel, of course, is mindful of this but asserts that Eliot's thought remains thoroughly modern because it incorporates the kinds of conflicting beliefs that Taylor describes. This is true, he insists, both before and after his conversion. As Woelfel summarizes his account of Eliot's attitude toward belief: "I argue that it seems unclear...

Religious Pluralism as an Imaginative Practice

To understand the complex religious dynamics in a globalizing world, Arjun Appadurai's view on imagination as a social practice, Charles Taylor's view on social imaginaries, and John Dewey's view on moral imagination are discussed. Their views enable us to understand religious dynamics as a “space of contestation” in which secular and religious images and voices (sometimes embodied in the same person) interact, argue, and clash. Imagination can be used in violent ways in service of extremist world images that spread over the world by the intensive use of social media. This raises an urgent question for psychology of religion: what enables people psychologically to engage in religious pluralism, understood as negotiating and perhaps stimulating diversity in non-violent, constructive ways? It is argued that dialogical psychology helps us to understand the self as the anchor point and navigational system of the social imaginaries that are at play in religious dynamics.

The Future of the Christian Past: Marcel Gauchet and Charles Taylor on the Essence of Religion and its Evolution

This article explores the differences between Marcel Gauchet and Charles Taylor with respect to their theories of secularization. It starts by looking at their resemblances; it continues by distinguishing a two-fold difference in their approach. The variation within their similar methodologies is examined, and then the consequences of these divergent definitions of religion are investigated. We focus on four themes: the role of the Axial religions, the significance of Incarnation and Reformation, the significance of Christianity as the ‘religion of the departure from religion’, and the possibility of religious ‘conversion’. Taylor's and Gauchet's views on the future of religion diverge as a function of their different interpretations of ‘fulfilment’ and ‘hunger for meaning’.

Hegel as a Theorist of Secularization

Hegel's philosophy of religion is characterized by what seems to be a deep tension. On the one hand, Hegel claims to be a Christian thinker, viewing religion, and in particular Christianity, as a manifestation of the absolute. On the other hand, however, he seems to view modernity as largely secular, devoid of authoritative claims to transcendence. Modernity is secular in the political sense of requiring the state to be neutral when it comes to matters of religion. However, it is also secular in the sense of there being no recourse to authoritative representations of a transcendent God. Drawing on Charles Taylor's view of secularization, the article focuses on the second strand of his religious thinking, exploring how Hegel can be thought of as a theorist of secularization. It is claimed that his dialectic of religious development describes a process of secularization. Ultimately, Hegel's system offers a view of the absolute as immanent, suggesting that an adequate account of religion will necessarily have to accept secularization as the end-point of spirit's development. This is how the tension between religion and secularization can be resolved.

Modernist Theologies

Modernist Theologies Stephen Sicari “What Vatican rule‐makers and secularist ideologies unite in not being able to see, is that there are more ways of being a Catholic Christian than either have imagined” (Taylor, 504). These are the two extremes I want to try to avoid, navigating a middle way between a reactionary retreat on one side that ignores progress and change in the secular world and a progressive advance on the other that ignores what may be a permanent and universal feature of humanity. The essay that follows is an attempt to map out this middle way and in so doing reconnect with the Catholic Church, through a reading of modernist literature. The poetry we call “high modernist” is famous for seeking to find ways to indicate the “higher” aspects of human life in a world increasingly developing secular attitudes toward values and ideals. In this essay, I use the work of Charles Taylor to define what we may mean by “a secular age” and then use Taylor's insights to demonstrate, albeit briefly and in broad strokes, the way the high modernists worked to recompose religion in the first half of the twentieth century. Rather than focus on a single writer from the period under review, I think it may be more profitable to show how several of the usual suspects from the high modernist canon—James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens—can be viewed as working to retrieve religious feeling and ideals from our pre‐Modern tradition and recompose religion in the secular age. So what do I mean by “a secular age”? Nothing more, and nothing less, than what Charles Taylor means in his magisterial work with that title. Obviously, I cannot do justice to the comprehensive demonstration of Taylor's argument that unfolds in almost eight hundred pages; perhaps, I may provide an outline sufficient to set up my own argument and to indicate the great potential for application of Taylor's views. In A Secular Age, Taylor labors to show how Western civilization has moved from a religious age, in which belief in God and higher things was not only possible but the default option, to a “secular age,” in which such belief is still possible but now only one of many different ways of viewing the world. In fact, the default option in a secular age is more or less what he calls “exclusive humanism,” a humanism that has no need for higher things and so can exist excluding God and the divine. Taylor traces the slow and complex movement from belief to atheism, watching how various developments, not the least of which is empirical science, contribute to the discrediting of religion and make belief in higher things difficult if not impossible. Taylor is persuasive because he sees clearly that religious belief is still viable in the secular age and that the new forms it is taking bear important relation to what was once dominant. Central to his argument, and to the one I will be pursuing here, is that traditional religious belief has been destabilized by the various developments from the Enlightenment onward, and that it is capable of being recomposed into new and viable forms. That is my argument about the modernist poets: that they perform both the actions, performing first the destabilization of traditional attitudes and then recomposing them into new forms. The new forms have a specific and concrete relation to the older forms of traditional Christianity, but they are new and perhaps made more capable of evoking genuine religious feeling. Pound's “Make it new” applied to religion. Joyce's new ecclesia I always start my thinking about modernism with Joyce, and I justify this strategy by noting the obvious point that his work on Ulysses is earlier than the mature work of the other high modernists and written quite independently. I learned long ago from Stanley Sultan that true direction of influence in the story of modernism is Joyce onto T. S. Eliot and Pound, who were eagerly receiving episodes of Ulysses sent to Pound in his capacity as literary editor of the Little Review. I also like to cite Eliot's brief and powerful...

Taylor and the problem of recognizing cultural groups

Recognition of cultural groups is an issue that puzzles those involved in the discussions around multiculturalism. Charles Taylor (1994) has done important groundwork in his ‘The politics of recognition’ where different possibilities of multicultural policy-making are discussed. This article concentrates on one social ontological problem that can be found in Taylor’s widely recognized theory. This article proceeds as follows. At first, Taylor's view on recognition is briefly introduced. This view potentially faces the reification problem, which states that recognizing a group that is not really an agent might result in misrecognition and disrespect of individual members of the group. The forms of misrecognition and disrespect range from homogenizing sets of individuals to forced identities anddissonance between individual and collective identities. After the problems of cultural recognition have been made clear, insights from the field of social ontology are brought into the picture. The agency of cultural groups is not self-evident, and in this paper it is argued that Taylor faces a problem when he grants agency to certain kinds of groups that are not really agents. This can be shown using the tools provided by contemporary analytical social ontology. Finally, a tentative way of conceptualizing cultural recognition is offered. The suggestion is that, despite its vagueness, Taylor's position includes elements that enable incorporating a robust social ontological theory into it. If this is done, many of the worries stated in the reification problem might be avoided.

Must the Sacred be Transcendent?

In his book A Secular Age, Charles Taylor appeals to the metaphysical–normative distinction between “immanence” and “transcendence” as definitive for post-Axial religion. On Taylor's view, therefore, those of us who embrace a fully secular modernity can be described as having abandoned “transcendence” to take up our lives wholly within the confines of the immanent frame, though he grants we may seek alternative satisfactions or “substitutes” for eternity. But the notion that any metaphysical–normative model of sacred experience can serve as an irresistible foundation is open to doubt if one recalls the Heideggerian insight that any metaphysical picture both reveals and conceals aspects of our experience. Taylor's own description of sacred and non-sacred experience within the immanent frame seems to rely upon this foundational distinction, without entertaining the possibility that the language itself may very well actually distort what our experience is like. This paper pursues the above objections to Taylor's argument, focusing special attention on the assumption that one can judge aesthetic experience (such as listening to a Beethoven string quartet) with the criteria we have inherited from post-Axial religion. The overwhelming authority of the Axial tradition might seem to validate questions such as, “Is there an object?” or “Is the experience purely immanent?” But to such questions we might respond that such language simply has no grip on the phenomena. Any such talk of “substitution” might therefore be understood as an historical remnant in Taylor's book of the traditional monotheist's critique of idolatry.

The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China, by Jay Taylor

Although not, in general, a fan of political biography as a genre, I found Taylor's highly positive presentation of Chiang Kai-shek's life hard to put down. At nearly 600 pages it might be regarded as a daunting read, but I finished it in just four days. The principal problem with the book, however, lies not in its length but in Taylor's use of Chiang Kai-shek's diary; rather than engaging with it critically as a complex document, he primarily uses the diary as a source of fact for Chiang's life. Thus, while the primary strength of the book is its ability to string together the numerous, momentous events of Chiang's life, a more nuanced reading of the key text—his diary—would have improved the book immensely. First, to the weaknesses: Taylor confesses himself to have been, earlier, a critic of Chiang, but, through an examination of the former dictator's diary and other materials, has come around to a more positive view. Most Republican era specialists are re-evaluating the efficacy of Chinese Nationalist (GMD) rule; nevertheless, Taylor's view errs, in my view, too much on the positive. When discussing the state-led attacks on Chinese Communists after 1927, Taylor admits that ‘very likely [Chiang] had a hidden hand in them’ (p. 70), but that seems hardly a strong enough assessment of the regime's responsibility, considering the fact that the perpetrators were often directly appointed by Chiang himself. Whenever Taylor is unable to find direct evidence of Chiang's involvement (particularly in his diary), he seems reluctant to assign responsibility; although, as (even titular) commanding officer of these forces, Chiang was in some sense responsible for their actions. As Taylor in fact demonstrates quite well in the book, the Chiang family at this time navigated the turbulent political world as (or more) brutally than their rivals. Taylor also attempts to moderate criticism of Chiang in his discussion of the 1938 destruction of the Yellow River dykes (p. 155) by saying how his utter lack of remorse was ‘like other leaders in the great war’.

DIAGNOSTIC SELF‐TESTING: AUTONOMOUS CHOICES AND RELATIONAL RESPONSIBILITIES

Diagnostic self-testing devices are being developed for many illnesses, chronic diseases and infections. These will be used in hospitals, at point-of-care facilities and at home. Designed to allow earlier detection of diseases, self-testing diagnostic devices may improve disease prevention, slow the progression of disease and facilitate better treatment outcomes. These devices have the potential to benefit both the individual and society by enabling individuals to take a more proactive role in the maintenance of their health and by helping society improve health and reduce health costs. However, the full implications of future home-based diagnostic technology for individuals and society remain unclear due to their novelty. We argue that the development of diagnostic tools, especially for home use, will heighten a number of ethical challenges. This paper will explore some of the ethical implications of home-based self-testing diagnostic devices for the autonomous and relational dimensions of the person. This will be facilitated by examining the impact of diagnostic devices for individual autonomy, for the delivery of accurate diagnosis and for the personal significance of the information for the user. The latter will be examined using Charles Taylor's view of personhood and his emphasis on human agency and interpretation. While the ethical issues are not necessarily new, the development of home-based self-testing diagnostic devices will make issues regarding autonomy, accuracy of information and personal significance more and more demanding. This will be the case particularly when an individual's autonomous choices come into conflict with the person's relational responsibilities.

Metonymic grounding of ideological metaphors: Evidence from advertising gender metaphors

This paper argues that ideological metaphors can be special cases of conceptual interaction between metaphor and metonymy, along with synecdoche. We focus on a specific type of ideological metaphor, advertising gender metaphors. Within a cognitive semantic–pragmatic framework we have described and analysed the strategies and complex conceptual metaphoric–metonymic/synecdochic patterns in a case study of 292 advertising gender metaphors taken from a corpus of 1610 advertising metaphors present in 1142 commercial ads published in British Cosmopolitan. Metonymy, along with synecdoche, has been shown, as far as the above analysis of advertising gender metaphors is concerned, to precede in all but one of the various types and subtypes of this concrete type of ideological metaphor. The existence of underlying patterns of metonymic (and synecdochic) motivation used for gender assignment is, therefore, proven and evidence is given for Taylor's view (1995:138) that all (ideological) metaphors may necessarily need underlying metonymisations. It also supports Dirven (1993), Croft (1993), Barcelona (2000a,b), Radden's (2000), Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez (2000) and Geeraerts’ (2003) idea of a metaphor–metonymy continuum with the intermediate notion of metonymy-based metaphors.

DANIEL L. UNOWSKY. The Pomp and Politics of Patriotism: Imperial Celebrations in Habsburg Austria, 1848-1916. (Central European Studies.) West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press. 2007. Pp. xiii, 269. $29.95

This fine monograph presents Emperor Franz Joseph as a central factor in reinforcing the importance of the monarchy in the last half century of the Habsburg empire, especially as nationalism and other factors seemed to weaken the state and finally render it obsolete by 1918. Arguing against the A. J. P. Taylor view that the dissolution of Austria-Hungary was inevitable, Daniel L. Unowsky focuses instead on the relationship between Vienna and its many provinces, between monarchical ritual and nationalist fervor, between claims for tradition and claims for liberal modernization that shaped imperial celebrations during this period, without an eye on the end of the monarchy. The book has an ambitious span of sixty years and touches on events from Vienna to Cracow and Lviv. The author begins by examining the attempts of the emperor after 1848 to link his authority to and claim popularity on the basis of Catholic traditions and ritual. Moving from Vienna to the province of Galicia, Unowsky then follows the imperial attempts to secure the same stable image of the monarchy as carrier of tradition and strength. The avenues for analyzing the path of imperial pomp in the provinces are the visits (some aborted) of the emperor to Galicia in 1851, 1868, 1880, and 1894. Finally, the author looks closely at the successes and failures of Franz Joseph's 1898 jubilee in reinforcing the values and image of the monarch as a legitimate binding force of the entire empire.

Turning or Spinning? Charles Taylor's Catholicism: A Reply to Ian Fraser

Charles Taylor's work has recently taken a religious turn, with Taylor becoming more explicit about his own religious faith and its influence on his thinking. Ian Fraser offers a systematic, critical exploration of the nature of Taylor's Catholicism as it appears in his writings. This reply to Fraser endorses his belief in the importance of looking carefully at Taylor's religious views. However, it raises doubts about some of Fraser's particular arguments and conclusions, and aims to foster a clearer understanding of Taylor's religious beliefs. It poses questions for Fraser about (i) what Taylor is setting out to do in A Catholic Modernity?; (ii) why he invokes the figure of Matteo Ricci; (iii) whether he believes that acts of practical benevolence are impossible without a religious foundation; and (iv) whether his religiously-inspired pluralism suffers an inherent contradiction.

"The Supply for Tomorrow Must Not Fail": The Civil War of Captain Simon Perkins, Jr., a Union Quartermaster (review)

Reviewed by: “The Supply for Tomorrow Must Not Fail”: The Civil War of Captain Simon Perkins Jr., a Union Quartermaster Kathleen Gorman “The Supply for Tomorrow Must Not Fail”: The Civil War of Captain Simon Perkins Jr., a Union Quartermaster. By Lenette S. Taylor. (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2004. Pp. 260. Cloth, $35.00.) The history of the Civil War has seemingly been written from every conceivable angle. Lenette Taylor's "The Supply for Tomorrow Must Not Fail" provides the reader with a different view by looking at the war through the eyes of Union Assistant Quartermaster Capt. Simon Perkins Jr. Taylor believes that Perkins and his fellow quartermasters were crucial to the Union victory and have not yet been given the credit they deserve. She strives to remedy this lack of credit by revealing the Civil War career of Perkins through careful and exhaustive analysis of primary sources. In Taylor's view, Perkins clearly represents the entire Quartermaster Corps. Twenty-three-year-old Simon Perkins joined the Union Army in 1862 from Ohio, after having served briefly with the 19th Ohio in 1861. He was from a wealthy and influential family in Akron and had some previous business experience (which would serve him well during the war). Perkins was appointed a captain in the quartermaster corps. For much of his military career, he worked providing supplies for the Union Army in the West. He helped move animals, food, supplies, and people to where they were needed for the war effort. Perkins remained a captain in the army (a not uncommon problem for quartermasters) until he resigned in 1864. He spent the last years of his life in Pennsylvania working at an assortment of jobs. As quartermaster Perkins helped supply the Union Army as it moved through Tennessee, Mississippi, and into Georgia. Military records and letters allow Taylor to carefully show how Perkins and other quartermasters went far beyond the call of duty to assist the army in every possible way. One of the most interesting parts of the work is Taylor's description of Perkins's role in acquiring buildings for the use of the military in Nashville. This is one of the few parts of the work where Taylor is able to show the effect of the work of the quartermasters not only on the Union Army but also on Southern civilians. Through military records, Taylor illustrates the complex and vital role the quartermasters played in the Union victory, but she is less convincing in suggesting they have been largely ignored. They have not been the subject of much individual study (aside from the works discussed in the "Preface"), but they have been given credit in almost every major work on the Civil War. Even textbooks note the huge advantage the Union had not only in the availability of its resources, but also its utilization of them. Additionally, despite her yeoman efforts in finding Perkins's personal and family records, the reader is left without much information about the man. His work is well detailed, but the rest of his life is almost entirely absent. Neither Taylor nor the reader is exactly sure why he resigned from [End Page 102] the military in 1864. Did he resent his recent transfer, lack of promotion, or really need to attend to a crisis at home? But, as Taylor notes, it may not be possible to find all the answers from the limited available sources. Despite his often crucial role in the war, Perkins still remains largely in the shadows. Taylor writes well and does an amazing amount of work with limited resources. She deserves much credit for bringing Perkins and his fellow quartermasters into the limelight. However, this is a work of most use to those Civil War scholars with specialized interests. For those readers interested in the logistics of supplying the massive Union Army with what it needed to fight, "The Supply for Tomorrow Must Not Fail" is invaluable. Kathleen Gorman Minnesota State University Mankato Copyright © 2006 The Kent State University Press

Citizenship and democratic doubt: the legacy of progressive thought

Much of the world today views America as an imperialist nation bent on global military, economic, and cultural domination. At home few share this negative view, largely because of a widespread belief in the irreproachable purity of our goals. Bob Pepperman Taylor, however, argues that our moral self-righteousness may potentially imperil our democratic ideals and threaten democracy itself by plunging us into illiberalism. Taylor looks closely at six key thinkers in the Progressive tradition whose work helps illuminate the essential flaws in our current thinking about democracy. Their writings, he contends, offer insights that can reinforce and strengthen a vigorous democratic faith, warn us of the dangers inherent in various forms of democratic arrogance, and counsel a kind of doubt or humility that would make us much better democratic citizens. All six thinkers - Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, John Dewey, Jane Addams, Carl Becker, and Aldo Leopold - were active in the first half of the twentieth century and grew out of and reflect the temper of American Progressivism. Their writings, in Taylor's view, illuminate harmful beliefs that constrain and even delude the popular democratic imagination in America. Taylor argues that Croly, Lippmann, and Dewey overestimate the normative value of science and underestimate the utopianism of their democratic visions. By contrast, Addams, Becker, and Leopold resisted these scientific and utopian temptations and offered reform-minded Americans a stronger understanding of what it meant to practice democratic citizenship. Addams counsels us to walk humbly before God; Becker embraces the Progressive faith in equality and justice but discards its dogma of certain progress; and Leopold employs moral authority rather than his scientific training to defend our natural inheritance in what he recognizes is an ambiguous political debate. These three, Taylor argues, by aiming less at the grand transformation of the human condition than at practical solutions, show greater respect for democratic possibilities than did their more messianic counterparts. They promote a much more modest understanding of the possibilities both for democracy and the role of science in informing democratic practice. They also point to a clearer understanding of the virtues that citizens should cultivate if democracy is to prosper.

A. J. P. Taylor on the ‘Greater’ German Problem

ability to draw clear connections between the past and the present was one of A. J. P. Taylor's greatest strengths as a historian, lending his work a continuing significance. This is true despite the fact that, in his writings, Taylor was often contemptuous of attempts to draw 'lessons' from history. cIn my opinion,' he declares in one of his famous Ford lectures, 'we learn nothing from history except the infinite variety of men's behavior. We study it, as we listen to music or read poetry, for pleasure, not for instruction.'1 This professed reluctance to draw direct lessons from history sprang largely, he explains, from his conviction that 'most things in history happen by accident.'2 He may have actually believed this, and much of his writing does betray an amused detachment about the foibles of past statesmen. But Taylor was too much of an activist consistently to adopt such an agnostic historicism. For the man who remained politically engaged throughout his career, who appeared on many public platforms and on television, and who wrote historical articles in the press, there was no easy distinction between the historian and the public intellectual, between analyst and advocate. This general observation is especially true when dealing with Taylor's writings on the Germans. Kathleen Burk is correct to consider the German question the central factor in Taylor's view of history.3 One could go further and say that the German question was the link between Taylor's view of the past and his concerns about the present and the future. It is no coincidence, for example, that his most important works on the German question in European history were written in the fifteen years after the Second World War, when that question was particularly acute in contemporary politics. Indeed, all his treatments of Germany are suffused with the concerns of the time. Although his historical works dealt primarily with the crucial decades between 1848 and the First World War, he never forgot the contemporary implications of the German question for the post-1945 world.

Charles Taylor on overcoming incommensurability

As he recognizes, Taylor's view of practical reasoning commits him to the existence of incommensurable world-views. However, he holds that it is in principle possible to overcome these incommensurabilities. He has two major arguments for this conclusion, which I label the argument from the human condition, and the transition argument. I show that the first argument, though perhaps successful in the case Taylor takes as an example, cannot be generalized. The second argument is even less successful, since all the evidence it produces is compatible with a thoroughgoing relativism. I point out, moreover, that even if Taylor's arguments were successful, they would not demonstrate that someone who chose to continue to reject the practice that had been vindicated would be irrational to do so. I conclude that there seems no way to circumvent the relativism to which Taylor's picture of practical reasoning leads.

Once More unto the Breach: Britain's Guarantee to Poland, March 1939

In the continuing debate on the origins and ends of appeasement,' three generations of tough-minded historians have sifted through the ruins of Britain's pre-war foreign policy planning. After the war, western historians tended to condemn the Munich Agreement and its makers, and described the 31 March 1939 guarantee to Poland as the point when British leaders belatedly stood up to Hitler, though often with a caveat criticizing the exclusion of the Soviet Union. A.J.P. Taylor and certain of his students challenged this dominant interpretation; they argued that the guarantee was the continuation of appeasement, as it allowed for further territorial revision in Europe. In Taylor's view, however, appeasement was entirely justified, as it represented a principled attempt to avoid war. After the 1968-9 opening of the relevant British documents under the thirty-year rule, the third generation of postwar historians submitted the policy of appeasement to a fundamental reassessment. They emphasized the strategic and economic constraints which severely limited the options of the Cabinet in its responses to nazi Germany, and many exonerated the then Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, of previous charges of craven behaviour at Munich. Strangely, historians have subjected the British guarantee to Poland of 31 March 1939 to a very different process of revision. Several historians have questioned the early orthodoxy, and offered a set of widely divergent explanations of both the expectations and intentions of British statesmen. Simon Newman dominates the field. He argues a continuity thesis: Britain's traditional foreign policy never allowed for the domination of the European continent by any one power, and Chamberlain's Cabinet maintained that policy even during 1938, as it resisted nazi expansion at all points short of war. In Newman's view, the only change in

Management Theory DéJà Vu? Scientific and Total Quality Management

ABSTRACTThis article compares W. Edwards Deming's total quality management (TQM) theory with Frederick Winslow Taylor's scientific management theory. Although these two theories have in the past been misrepresented as philosophical opposites, the authors have researched and highlighted the extensive degree of similarity between the two. The recent rise in TQM's popularity prompts an examination of similarities between Deming's and Taylor's views on general management, operations management, and people management. Also presented are the new aspects of productivity addressed by TQM. Some time-tested productivity improvement primitives are described.

Taylor on Self-Celebration and Gratitude

In The Sources of Self, as in his earlier Philosophy and Human Sciences, Charles Taylor takes on two principal sets of opponents: reductionist naturalists, heirs of Enlightenment, on one hand and self-involved expressivists, heirs of Romanticism, on other . Taylor sees naturalists as caught in self-referential inconsistency, unable to account for own passionate belief that we ought to uncover irreducible reality behind reducible appearances. Theories of materialist utilitarianism, he says, hard to bring into focus. They have two sides-a reductive ontology and impetus-which are hard to combine. (p. 337) Taylor thinks that any movement with size, strength and endurance of reductive naturalism must have been motivated by some sense of what he calls hypergood, constitutive good. There must be which functions as moral source-that is, as something undistorted recognition of which empowers us to do good. (p. 342 ) On Taylor's view, it is a recognizable feature of whole class of modern positions which descends from radical Enlightenment class of which Marxism is paradigmatic-that their principal words of power are denunciatory. Much of what they live by has to be inferred from rage with which enemies are attacked and refuted. Such position draws its ideals, if not directly from its enemies, at least from culture which they have better articulated. (p. 339) So it is parasitic on hypergood which it refuses to acknowledge. Taylor admits that the mere fact that position may be at its inception parasitic on sources it cannot itself acknowledge doesn't prove that it is unfit to build new world. It may have resources which are yet to flower. (p. 340) But he makes little attempt to explore possibility of non-reductive naturalism, one which would reject the disengaged subject and takes account of what he calls situatedness of self-and of all antiCartesian and anti-Kantian lessons we have learned from Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, later Wittgenstein, and Polanyi. (p. 514, esp. n. 27) This was