Charles Taylor at the front line in Canadian politics

I. Philosophical and political ambitions (1960–1971)

After his doctoral studies with Isaiah Berlin at Oxford, Charles Taylor came back to Canada to teach philosophy at McGill and Université de Montréal. His return coincided with a time of social and political upheaval in Québec (the majority French-speaking province), known as the “Quiet Revolution”. This was an era of late and sometimes brutal modernization, not unlike what happened, with a different chronology, in other Catholic societies such as Ireland, Spain, and ultimately Poland. The “Quiet Revolution” signaled the transformation of French-Canadian nationalism (rural-based, conservative, Catholic, apolitical) into the much more assertive and sovereignty-seeking Québec nationalism. During this decade, Charles Taylor was present at the front line in the project of modernizing the political party of Canadian social-democracy to make it more hospitable to the new Québec. He joined forces with others to reconfigure the spirit and the letter of Canadian federalism. On four different occasions he was a candidate for the party of the moderate Left (New Democratic Party, NDP) at federal elections. Always, he fought hard. Always, he lost. His great nemesis was the most important political figure of twentieth-century Canada, Pierre-Elliott Trudeau (1919–2000). Trudeau had his own views about what needed to be done in Canada, and particularly with Québec: a rejuvenated constitution with bilingualism, multiculturalism, a Charter of Rights, and no special status for any province. In the end, he prevailed. For a while after Trudeau’s triumph in 1968, Taylor remained involved at the top level of the NDP. Many saw him as its future leader. The late sixties, however, were a time of radicalization all over the Western world. Taylor’s moderation, his virtues as a compromise-builder, appeared “passé.” The new Zeitgeist meant that philosophy would remain as the sole endeavor for the realization of his professional ambitions. However, he would not abandon completely the political front line.

II. “Reconciling the solitudes” ¹ between Canadian federalism and Québec nationalism (1971–1995)

Taylor’s major books were published in 1964 (The Explanation of Behavior), 1975 (Hegel), 1985 (two volumes of Philosophical Papers) and 1989 (Sources of the Self). ² Along with his other writings, these books earned him a formidable reputation in epistemology, German thought, and philosophical anthropology. Outside Canada it is less well known that, although his mind was concentrated on philosophical endeavors, he remained a participant at key moments in the politics of Canada and Québec. In 1970–1971, his hermeneutical phenomenology enabled him to propose an interpretation for the emergence of a young and alienated middle-class in Québec, resorting to terrorism for the attainment of political objectives. Taylor’s years at Oxford with the Chichele Chair in Social and Political Theory coincided with the surge of René Lévesque’s sovereigntist Parti Québécois in Québec politics. Lévesque promised an independence referendum for the Spring of 1980. Taylor abandoned Oxford one more time to campaign for a united Canada, alongside his old nemesis Pierre-Elliott Trudeau, in the weeks prior to the referendum that was held on May 20, 1980. The sovereigntists were roundly defeated (60%–40%).

This result created momentum for the achievement of Trudeau’s greatest dream: severing the last Canadian constitutional ties with the United Kingdom and entrenching a new charter of rights and freedoms. On many dimensions, Taylor remained at odds with Trudeau: the latter put forward the politics of rights, while the former privileged civic participation; Taylor had no objections, on principle, with the politics granting predominance to the French language in Québec, while Trudeau adamantly defended the idea of symmetrical language rights all across Canada; Taylor defended the idea of asymmetrical federalism with a form of special status for Québec, whereas Trudeau always remained opposed to such a view. In the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, Taylor and Trudeau seem to have maintained warm and cordial personal relationships despite their diverging views. Between 1990 and 1995, Charles Taylor was quite often present at the front line in Québec politics. Always a partisan of federalism and of Canadian unity, he showed great courage and great valiance in never abandoning the project to make the whole country more hospitable to his native province. On television, in countless op-ed newspaper articles and interviews, at the meetings of parliamentary committees, the moderate, generous, sensitive, past-conscious, and future-oriented voice of Charles Taylor was often heard during these years of momentous political and constitutional upheavals.

III. Reducing the anxieties in the relationships between majority and minorities in Québec (1995–2016)

A second sovereignty referendum was held in Québec on October 30, 1995. The results were much closer than fifteen years earlier: the NO side won, and Canadian unity survived, albeit by a very slight margin (50.6%–49.4%). On the night of the referendum the Premier of Québec, Jacques Parizeau, suggested that sovereigntists had been defeated by “money and ethnic votes,” alluding to the overwhelming support given to Canadian unity by recently naturalized immigrants. Ever since that day, Charles Taylor has been active on the front line in Québec politics in a variety of ways, fostering dialog and understanding between the French-speaking majority and the various groups forming the diverse minorities: aboriginal peoples, immigrants, and the English-speaking community. For two years, in 2007–2008, he teamed up with historian and sociologist Gérard Bouchard to study the so-called “crisis of reasonable accommodations,” that had erupted in Québec following media reports about purported “exaggerated demands” made by members of minority religious communities. Published in 2008, the Report of the Bouchard-Taylor Commission called for the establishment of a model based on open secularism, with regards to demands made on behalf of religious claims, and on integrative interculturalism, with regards to the objective of fostering reciprocal interactions between majority and minorities. The title of the Report, of course authored by the two chairpersons, was nevertheless vintage Taylor: Building the Future: A Time for Reconciliation. ³ At about the same time he was crisscrossing Québec with Gérard Bouchard for various hearings on behalf of the Commission in 2007, Taylor published one more masterpiece, A Secular Age. ⁴ Taylor has always used the formidable resources of his mind to make sense of modern society, the world of immanence. However, he has always maintained that there remains a place in our universe for the perspective of transcendence, the one of religion. As often happened in the various phases of his career, universalistic insights were employed in 2007–2008 to illuminate a particular, situated context. In secularized Québec and elsewhere, Taylor gives voice to the perspectives and rights of religious believers and more generally, to the really vulnerable members of the community. These are immigrant religious believers in secularized Québec, but they can also be majority French-speaking Quebeckers in English-dominated federal Canada. No matter who these vulnerable people are, they can count on Charles Taylor to be at their side on the front line of political life.

There are places where the front line is more dangerous than others. Charles Taylor has had the good fortune so far to lead most of his adult life in Montréal, Québec, and Canada. He has been spared the dramas and tragedies experienced by Patočka and countless others. However, if a philosophy makes sense when the thinker is courageous enough to defend its ideas in the rougher parts of the public sphere where he or she lives then, clearly, Charles Taylor’s philosophy makes a lot of sense in Canada and elsewhere.