Charles Taylor

Thinking and Living Deep Diversity

By (author) Mark Redhead Political Thought, California State University

Paperback - £48.00

Publication date:

04 March 2002

Length of book:

272 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Dimensions:

229x147mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9780742521278

Over the past four decades, Charles Taylor's work as an intellectual historian, epistemologist, and normative political theorist has made him a leading figure in contemporary social philosophy. In Charles Taylor: Thinking and Living Deep Diversity, Mark Redhead examines the problem of political fragmentation, the problem of how to accommodate narrowly defined groups while promoting allegiance to a larger polity, through an analysis of Taylor's thought and politics. Redhead argues that Taylor's work evinces a gallant, though unsucessful confrontation with fragmentation that dramatically illuminates the politcal, moral and epistemological tensions at play in a problem of political fragmentation. Charles Taylor is both a major contribution to contemporary debates about liberalism, group rights, and multiculturalism as well as a path breaking study of the politics, life, and thought of Charles Taylor.
Cultural diversity today is not an academic issue, but a lived reality for many societies in the grip of globalization. No contemporary thinker has reflected more seriously on this reality than Charles Taylor whose work champions a recognition of 'deep diversity' as an alternative to communal homogeneity and atomistic fragmentation. Redhead examines this perspective on numerous levels—political, philosophical, and personal—thus offering a perceptive entree into the Canadian's complex opus, while also suggesting a more pragmatic solution to some remaining quandaries in that work.