ENTREVISTA A CHARLES TAYLOR POR H. Rosa y A. Laitinen_2002

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On Identity, Alienation and Consequences of September 11th. An Interview

with Charles Taylor
Chapter · January 2002
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Part Four
Interview
HARTMUT ROSA and ARTO LAITINEN1
10. Tocqueville instead of Marx:

On Identity, Alienation and the Consequences of
September 11th.
An Interview with Charles Taylor
HR/AL: Professor Taylor, what are you working on these days?

CT: Well, several things. One of the things I am working on is something I
was lecturing this fall at the New School University, and that I have called
‘modern social imaginaries’. It is an attempt to understand western mod-
ernity in terms of the different ways in which people imagine their social
existence. These imaginaries are a condition for new kinds of practices that
are characteristic of modernity. This research is an internal part of a larger
project to understand modern secular civilization, the modern west as a
secular civilization. What does that notion exactly mean? What does it
amount to? How did it happen?
HR/AL: How does your new project differ from Sources of the Self 2?
CT: There is a relation. Sources was a tracing of the development of modern-
ity in terms of the understandings of individual identity, but there are also
understandings of what society is and how we relate to it and what the
sacred is and how we relate to it. These are all facets of the same develop-
ment. So there is going to be a lot of interrelation and a lot of mutual
borrowing between these projects.
HR/AL: Does the terminological shift from ‘interpretations’ to ‘imaginaries’

carry some theoretical weight?
CT: No, you just need a word for the ways in which we together, as a group
of people who are engaged in a practice together, be it a whole society or
some smaller group, have to imagine in a similar way what we are doing in
order to make sense, common sense, of this practice. Understanding that
very often does involve our interpreting what people are doing because it is
166 Hartmut Rosa and Arto Laitinen
not by its very definition all laid out, it is something that you as a thinker or
observer have to articulate and here interpretive disputes can very easily
arise.
Communitarianism and the Events of September 11th

HR/AL: Although it is a bit early to answer this question conclusively – do
you feel that the events of September 11th here in New York will influence
or change your perception of our political predicament in the 21st century?
CT: I think these events may seem like a blip at some point, because I think
that we were heading anyway in the direction that they indicate. These
events just revealed something that was already on our route. What is called
globalisation has to have its negative sides as well as its supposed positive
sides. Part of its negative side is that there is a sense of deep hostility on the
part of people who have a difficult time. They develop a sense of scape-
goating towards others, sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly, sometimes
with correct attributions of responsibility, sometimes with incorrect. This has
always existed in human history but they have very often been confined
within smaller areas or one society. Now the fact of globalisation means that
just as, for example, American styles of popular music can spread every-
where in the world, so the sense of America (or the West or the advanced
societies or whatever) crushing and exploiting us will also spread, and so
will the sense of ‘that is where you have to hit’. It is just an accident that it
did not happen in 1993 when they tried to bring down the World Trade
Center but did not use enough dynamite. It was evident to everybody that
they are going to try again and we were just a bit surprised that they did so
well. But this phenomenon was already in train and this time they were just
particularly and spectacularly successful.
HR/AL: How do you understand the events of September 11th more

precisely? You mentioned globalisation. What is the best explanatory level
of this event? Is it the level of small terrorist groups, of nation states, or of
cultural conflicts and the global order?
CT: If you want to get a quick name for it, it is more the level of cultural
change and globalisation. That’s what it is partly about. Of course it has got
many levels and on one level it is a civilizational issue because of the way
Bin Laden and others are talking it up: as they see it, it is an attack on Islam
by the advanced world and particularly by America. But that itself is not a
simple explanation because it is unclear what we mean by Islam. Here there
An Interview with Charles Taylor 167
is something very typical to the modern world and it’s hard to get the
categories right. Religious identities like being Islamic for instance are
operating in a different way in the modern world from before. They are
operating somewhat analogously to how we understood national identities
to operate, i.e. with a sense of strong belonging to this identity and its values
and with a sense of these identities being potentially subjects of humiliation
or proper recognition or attack. Identities are open to these different kinds
of fate and that is something that did not quite exist before. Earlier Islam
could be victorious or defeated, as one can see from the concept of religious
warrior, who would spread the faith or fail to spread the faith. There could
be victories and defeats, and Islam could invade Spain and many centuries
later be kicked out of Spain. That is not quite the same as the plight of
identities in the very mediatised universe in which we live now, where it is
not simply a question of who’s taking over ruling but it’s a question of how
they are presented, portrayed and how the views are being spread. Here we
have religious identities operating in some respects like the way national
identities have been operating. Sometimes it is the question of who is ruling
but also a question of whether they are recognized, or whether they are
portrayed in a demeaning fashion. Think of the Rushdie-case, it is a classic
case, where the demeaning presentation of the prophet and Islam particu-
larly in the West and in the English language and western press was
something absolutely intolerable. We are living in a world in which religious
identities are operating in some ways like previous national identities and in
which all these issues about modern national identities that did not have a
precise analogue earlier are now being debated and that is in a way why
something like this had to happen at some point. There is a widespread
feeling of Islam being demeaned or presented as something backward which
can then become amalgamated with all sorts of other feelings of dissatisfac-
tion, that we’re being ill treated by the West, or that our development is
being frustrated by the West and so on. This builds up to extremely power-
ful emotions, which can then because of the idea of identity rejection lead to
vengeance and action against the West by attacking it.
HR/AL: If that is the case and if that is the way to interpret the situation
would you not think that what we are doing now, namely going to war
against Afghanistan, is precisely the wrong thing to do because it leads to
another humiliation of the Islam or Arab identity.
CT: You have to balance this long-term issue against the fact that the ability
of these people to carry out this kind of efficacious attack on America
depends on them having sanctuary and money, so there is an argument of

moving against the sanctuary and against the money-trail. But then that
cannot be the end of the war. The long-term solution, however, is more
difficult than people tend to think, that is, it is not going to be easy for
Western countries to change this whole mindset. But it would take away
some of the irritation if they could bring peace to the Middle East. That
would have tremendously positive effects by taking away one of the factors
that is creating this feeling. But in the long run the problem is this kind of
perverse identity moves, where one’s whole sense of one’s identity gets
bound up with the idea of the necessity of revenge and striking back. It is
the kind of thing you now see on both sides in Palestine: you see complete
horror and helplessness and you know that each move creates on the other
side the sense that they absolutely owe it to themselves to strike back. The
only long-term way that this can be defeated is from within. This is the way
in which we are totally vulnerable to each other. Without the invention or
recovery of other kinds of Islam – which incidentally would be much more
justifiable in terms of the actual Koran and the hadith – we are not going to
be able to defeat this phenomenon or do anything but a series of rampant
defensive maneuvers. The whole assumption of so many people in the West,
particularly in America, that in principle they are all-powerful if they just
find the right levers – and then they argue about the levers whether these
are economic aid or bombs – is just mistaken in our situation. We live in a
world with these people and how they understand themselves is inevitably
going to have a terribly powerful impact on us. We have to hope we can
help the process, and one thing we can of course do is to broadcast less
contempt and blanket condemnation of Islam from the West. That is
something that people in our world do not understand.
HR/AL: Commonly, your work is closely associated with philosophical and

political communitarianism. Communitarians care for particularistic tra-
ditions, religions, and strong evaluations, which cannot be checked by, or
subjected to, deontological moral judgments. Now, if one was really ill-
willed, one could perhaps claim that the Taliban and other radical islamists
are clearly communitarians – they seem to act on their strongest evaluations,
i.e. very deep-rooted ethical convictions, and they are worried about eroding
traditions and communities which they seek to protect. Thus, are conflicts
like the one between the Taliban and the US not an inevitable consequence
of communitarian commitments?
CT: These conflicts are very likely consequences of very strong commit-
ments that people have to their traditions, unless those traditions are
reinterpreted in order to make it possible to live with other people. In your
question ‘communitarian’ is operating as a word for a certain moral take on
these issues but I do not see this as an interesting issue to have a moral take
on. What take do we have on the fact that human beings are deeply
embedded in traditions? It is like asking me to have a moral take on the fact
that the moon is going around the earth. Granted that people are deeply
embedded in traditions we have the issue of how we work that out. Do we
find starting from our different traditions ways of living with each other?
Can we find in Islam the resources for not having a totally destructive
attitude towards everybody else outside of Islam? The answer is yes. So I am
very much in favour of people finding ways of living in a human and
morally justified way with each other. Where there is an opposition here is
that I think that what people very often call the liberal take on this – and I do
not really like to concede that word to them – which imagines that we can
leap outside of our traditions is so unrealistic that is does not really help to
frame the problem. So we are left with the issue that since we are embedded
in traditions, can we find a way of understanding them in such a way that
we can live together? That’s really the name of the game today: how can we
help people from the other side, or is it even possible for us to help? I think
we can at least refrain from hindering.
HR/AL: Although you are counted among the ‘founding fathers’ of commu-
nitarianism, you have indicated that you do not consider yourself to be one.
What are the reasons for your dissatisfaction with communitarianism?
CT: It is just that the word is terribly confusing. One meaning is the kind of
project Amitai Etzioni, for example, is engaged in, where the idea is that we
should think of the whole society more like a community and less like a lot
of disparate individuals with rights, rather we should stress obligations. I
have a certain sympathy with that but it is of course a completely different
position from the particular one that you mentioned, where you think that
there is some moral value involved in people’s particular historic, national
or linguistic traditions, because that means that you are looking at society as
made up of people with different traditions. Someone like Etzioni is only
rarely talking about the issues of cultural difference, he is really talking
about whether we only have rights and not also duties. These two are
different issues, and there are 25 others. My problem with the word ‘com-
munitarianism’ is not that I object to being so called under various of these
distinctions, but that the word is very often used in a blanket way. So if you
say that you are a communitarian you get tagged to all possible positions
that are not even coherent among themselves.3
HR/AL: What would be the kind of communitarian society that you would
advocate?
CT: I am quite sympathetic to a lot of the things that Etzioni says, that is, I
think that sometimes we conceive the problems of our liberal societies too
much in terms of the rights of individuals and not enough in terms of how
we can live together in a human way with solidarity. I suspect that Etzioni,
who is an Israeli, is really a social-democrat who is wondering how to sell
this in the American scene. On that issue I’m quite sympathetic with him.
Concerning the other set of issues about the importance of particular
cultural traditions I think that they cannot just simply be ignored or over-
come. One cannot dictate people their identity.
HR/AL: So do you think that the state or society cannot be neutral with
regard to the differences but has to negotiate them?
CT: Yes, the in principle neutral position that would involve withdrawing
from all differences to some higher ground very often does not exist, so the
question is how we can have some decent coexistence as co-citizens with
basic equality and that will be very differently answered in each society.
Societies can learn from each other but what works depends on the particu-
lar situations. There is no general solution that can be handed down. This is
a myth of the English-speaking societies, particularly America. Because they
are so powerful they think of themselves as the universe and they think that
there is such a thing as a general solution, but if you come from a small
country you see right away that these general solutions that are handed
down from the centre of the cultural universe are sometimes completely
irrelevant and miss the crucial points.
Revisiting key concepts in social criticism

HR/AL: What is apparent in contemporary society is the roaring silence on
the part of leftist intellectuals. There seem to be no political visions, not even
a focus of social criticism. Do you see a role for present-day intellectuals in
shaping our contemporary form of life? What, in your view, should
contemporary political criticism focus on?
CT: I think we are in what I hope is a transition to something better, a

transition that is very important and fateful. There was a political family in
all Western societies, maybe with the exception of the United States, which
we call the Left and which was socialist or social-democratic and had a
series of very general orientations about state-control or direction of the
economy, sometimes nationalization, a very vigorous welfare-state with
redistributive policies. That went along with the idea that there is an overall
alternative way of doing things to the one that you find on the Right. The
various difficulties with one part of the program, it was supposed, could be
coped with by another part of the program. The welfare state, for instance,
certainly requires redistributions that are hard to get accepted unless
everybody’s income is growing and not stagnant, so the idea was that we
have a Keynesian cum left-wing orientation of economic management,
which will then make it possible to have growth. This was parallel to the
other overall alternative solution of the Bolsheviks, which nobody in the
democratic world accepted, but they had in common the idea of a wholly
alternative way of doing things. I think that it is very hard for people on the
Left to abandon that and this is why one gets expressions like ‘Third Way’
that is used both by Blair and Schröder. What the Third Way says is that we
think that the old second way is not going to work but that we will not
abandon the idea of a global alternative. But in actual fact, if you look at
what emerges in the policy-mix under this heading it is more like a re-
conceptualization of our whole world. There is a series of very deep
dilemmas of contemporary capitalism and there are less just and more just
and less creative and more creative attempts to come to terms with them.
That is really what the politics of the Left is about today. There are these
demands of growth and efficiency, that lead to measures like taking the state
out and having more markets, that have in some ways been proposed by the
Left itself. And on the other side there are the demands of having a society
with some degree of solidarity, humanity and civility and those require that
one has sometimes quite vigorous state-control. There are more or less
creative, useful and productive ways of doing this. So a real Third Way
would not be a global alternative but a series of different interesting and
creative solutions. I have just been speaking to Robin Blackburn about his
new notion of pension funds organized by affinity groups, which can use
some of the proceeds for social goals and investments of a socially directed
kind. We have this in Quebec with the trade unions and the fonds de soli-
darité. It is not the solution to everything but just one measure in a whole set
of measures. So to get back to your basic question, we intellectuals can do
something positive by first of all doing something negative, we can stop

holding out the hope that there is a new alternative global way and stop
refusing to admit that the older one is unworkable. A lot of us are being
paralyzed by thinking that we still should provide a global alternative. After
we have abandoned that position we can play our part depending on what
expertise we have in this or that area in building up a raft of creative
measures that will not be the same in every country. That is what remains.
HR/AL: You are one of the few intellectuals who are not only concerned
about politics but have actually been politicians themselves. Thus, you were
vice-president of the Quebec social democratic party (NDP) and you were
running for the Canadian House of Commons. If you were a political leader
right now, in which way would you try to steer and change society?
CT: In the country where I actually live in, in Canada, one of the most
important frontiers is globalisation. I think that we need to have a coalition
of middle-range powers to inflect some of the rules of the game of the WTO.
We need to get this out of the hands of the US and of the G7, without, of
course, abolishing G7, which couldn’t be done anyway. We need to have
more mobilization on a broader basis to lean on G7. We need a set of rules
that cope with the ecological situation but also with the dangerous specula-
tive flows of capital and investments, and the adjudication of treaties,
questions which are a matter of life and death for us and for other countries.
The other thing that is terribly important for us is our social-democratic
health system in Canada and we are under a terrible pressure because our
tax-levels are higher than in the US and as long as they are having their
totally stone-age system this economic pressure will not become weaker.
People compare their incomes to the American salaries, and then often make
false calculations, because they forget they have to pay their private health
insurances etc.
HR/AL: In your earlier writings, starting from your very early attempts of
formulating something like a socialist humanism4 through The Pattern of
Politics5 right up to, e.g., “The Nature and Scope of Distributive Justice”6,
you expressed a strong concern for the vast distributional inequalities of our
societies and our world, like so many others did. Now, the inequalities are
still rapidly increasing on all accounts, but the issue has largely disappeared
from your writing and from the agenda of many others, too. Is equality no
longer important today?
CT: It certainly still is an important issue but we have to think of a new way
of tackling it. There are different kinds of inequalities in the world and the
inequality across the world between different societies is in a different
category from the inequalities within a society. In both cases the increases
are partly due to the phenomenal growth. Particularly in a larger number of
Western societies it is not the case that the bottom has fallen, rather it has
risen, but the top has risen much more quickly. It is not going to be easy to
cope with this in the short run. So maybe the shift should be from thinking
in terms of equality to thinking in terms of improving the welfare-predica-
ment of the bottom. If we just try to roll the inequalities back that could
probably only be done by curtailing the upper level and I think we would
defeated in a democratic society and there would even be some degree of
reduction of the welfare of everybody. So perhaps we have to think more of
two things: one of them I just mentioned, doing something to improve the
welfare of the people at the bottom. The other has to do with some dimen-
sion of equality, namely that the more we have such institutions as for
instance our health-system where – at least in theory – rich and poor walk in
and get the same treatment, the more we have some meaningful dimension
of equality, because people anyway have the sense that we are all citizens.
That is one of the reasons why I would fight like a tiger not to fall back into
the US-type of system because there on this dimension no sense of equal
citizenship can be created. These two things by themselves do not, of course,
meet the galloping statistics of the difference between the richest and the
poorest but I think that we cannot make a frontal assault on that.
HR/AL: It is interesting that when we were talking earlier about the

explanatory focus on the conflict between the US and the Taliban you
referred to problems of recognition but not to distributional inequalities.
Now, there will be a new book out soon that contains a debate between Axel
Honneth and Nancy Fraser on the proper relationship between concerns for
recognition and concerns for equality.7 What seems to be apparent is that
today in theory as well as in political practice, the focus has shifted from
distributional to recognitional aspects, and actually, this seems to be the case
in your thinking as well. How would you see the relation between struggles
over distribution and struggles for recognition?
CT: It is certainly true that the appeal of the Taliban – in spite of what the
Taliban itself say – is very great in places where there is no real possibility
for the people to improve their plight, a real possibility as opposed to this
imaginary one. These are places like Pakistan with its incredibly stagnant
economy that is held back by a corrupt government. These are not the
condition in which any kind of initiative can take off, whether private or
public, that could improve the people’s lot in general. So it is not just an
issue of recognition, it is in a way an issue about the recognition of people’s
well-being. It is important not to focus on equality but to make it possible for
the bottom to rise. It is just a joke even to think about equality between life
in Peshawar and in New York, what matters is whether something can get
off the ground in Peshawar in terms of economic development. It is not just
a recognition-issue. You have to have both recognition and its economic
pendant. The issue is not equality but the attempt of creating a setting in
which the economic situation become better, for example through small-
scale loans.
HR/AL: How would you see the relation between demands for recognition
and the distributional aspects in conceptual terms? Is one reducible to the
other?
CT: They are two distinct areas in which people have needs, desires, hopes
and aspirations, but it is also clear that there is interdependence. The fact, for
example, that there seems to be no future in the world for young kids in
certain areas is both very destructive for their self-esteem and produces the
sense of total blockage. It is clear that strong recognition demands respond
to the loss of self-esteem because the loss of self-esteem turns around being
treated like dirt, which, of course, involves the economic situation. So there
is a way in which, without ever being reducible to each other, recognition
and economic aspects are both dimensions of human life that will always be
there. In existential predicaments blockage on one side can have very strong
effects on the other side and vice versa. So there is a need not to think simply
in terms of recognition.
HR/AL: You have praised Axel Honneth’s book on recognition8 as a path-

breaking study, and you have of course written the famous and widely
discussed essay on The Politics of Recognition yourself9. How would you view
the connections between the two works and what are the main differences
between your approaches?
CT: The connections are obvious because we are both plugged into the same
philosophical texts in the tradition but we also both picked up the fact that
the issue of recognition is something terribly important in the modern
world. The differences are harder to express but I think that maybe Axel
Honneth is looking for a general theory with some kind of normative import
of what kinds of recognition there are and how much they are needed. I am
looking for an understanding of why recognition has become so important
in the modern world and of the big shifts in self-understanding and in the
predicament that brought this situation about. So I am not looking first and
foremost for normative rules or recommendations. These different ap-
proaches are, of course, not opposed to each other but focus on different
sides of the phenomenon. If I were ever to carry out this program really
properly it would certainly involve ideas of what ought to be done, but this
depends very much on the particular situations in which these problems
arise. So what I am doing on a more general level is trying to find a vocabu-
lary to understand this development and how it came about and I think that
Axel Honneth is rather looking for the normative grid to tell us what to do
in this situation. My approach is historical, it is the same kind of approach as
with the social imaginaries. I want to explore how the situation changes and
how these issues become burning issues of modernity in a certain form that
they were not before. In a particular situation one could maybe make things
better and overcome some of the deep differences but a solution arises out
of a particular take on the situation and the vocabulary that I am trying to
develop would supposedly give you the terms that allow you to have a
better take, that would at least be my hope.
HR/AL: It will soon be ten years since you published The Ethics of Authen-
ticity and The Politics of Recognition. What is your view of the debate these
writings have stirred?
CT: In a way I was very surprised about this debate and I feel that a lot of it
mistook what I was doing because in the particular philosophical world in
which I have to operate there is such an emphasis on finding the norms that
people took me to be proposing norms when I was not. Particularly with The
Politics of Recognition I was astonished how often people were desperately
trying to abstract some definition of norms from what was actually an
attempt to explain why this kind of question was arising now. I may have a
way of writing which in that kind of situation is very confusing and I did not
realize that. There may be a gap between a normative discourse and a
discourse which wants to explain why people sense a need for recognition.
So I was accused of all sorts of things because people took this discourse
sometimes not as interpretive but as my recommendations. The particular
intellectual world in which all of this has been taken up is so focused on the
normative whereas I think that this is sometimes not the most useful thing
to do because you need a historically sensitive understanding of the

predicament before you can make normative sense of it.
HR/AL: Just as with equality, the concept of alienation has largely dis-
appeared from contemporary debate as well as from your vocabulary. This
is a little surprising given the use of the concept in your earlier writings not
just in a Marxist sense, but also in a ‘Hegelian’ way of indicating a mismatch
between the strong ethical convictions, or evaluations, of the individuals on
the one hand and public social institutions and practices on the other. Even
at the time you were concerned about a ‘legitimation crisis’10 of western
societies, you did not hesitate to talk of an impending alienation-crisis of
frightening proportions. Were you wrong then, or have we overcome that
problem by now, or could a contemporary form of social criticism still gain
much by using such a notion of alienation?
CT: I am not sure why I feel no longer tempted to use the notion of aliena-
tion, but let me start by saying that there is another sense of the word
alienation captured by the notion of disaffection and a sense of distance on
which I do not change my view at all. The same is true of the danger of that
impending crisis you mentioned that I see still growing. People, for exam-
ple, develop this sense of ‘It does not matter if I vote’ in many countries but
especially in the US to the frightening extent that now less than 50 percent
of the people actually exercise their right to vote. Maybe I do not feel
tempted to use the word ‘alienation’ here for the trivial reason that I see it
too much in the Hegelian-Marxist framework. I think it is more about a
sense of powerlessness that is better captured in Tocquevilleian terms.
HR/AL: But in your writings you argue that there is not just the distance of
people to the political system but alienation from everyday practices, for
example at the work-place, that do not express or reflect their strong
evaluations.
CT: Yes, this surely is another sense that people have of their whole
civilization when they develop the ‘iron cage’-feeling that Max Weber has
articulated. I have nothing against it but I am just not tempted to use the
language of alienation. Certainly at the political level the Tocquevilleian
terms are the best to see what the problem is and what kinds of instruments
of collective empowerment like associations, movements and the decentral-
ization of political decision-making might be part of a solution. There has
also been a subtle shift in the way of thinking. Until some point in the last
fifty years, I do not know exactly when, we were thinking in the Marxist
way and had the idea that we are moving into an era with bigger firms and
production units and an ever more impersonal structure people are working
in and a massively bureaucratized world. But then the economy began to
move into another direction, even the large bureaucratic firms tried to
become more flexible and at least for a great number of people in the
professional classes the work unit has broken down. Interesting sociological
work has shown that a lot of people are willing to take a certain cut in their
income in order to be able to work at home, or freelance, or as a consultant,
as against working in a big office. There are now of course other kinds of
problems, one of the prices people pay for taking this option is that they
sometimes work longer and get less money, but that does not seem to be a
decisive objection to such a career move. In a sense they are – to use the old
language – disalienating themselves, they are moving in the right direction
on the alienation dimension, while sometimes they get into another kind of
bind, because they have to spend a lot of more time working. To the extent
that they then have less time for their family, this can aggravate the
problem. ‘Alienation’ does not seem immediately to be the right word for
that, it is more like another kind of ‘iron cage’.
HR/AL: In The Pattern of Politics you developed an idea, which you never
really took up later, namely, the creation of a ‘dialogue’ society in which all
citizens and groups are involved in the process of defining the common
good. Contrary to this, your essay on recognition and multiculturalism
suggests that the francophone majority of Quebec ought to be given the
privilege of defining the common good for Quebec. This implies the
exclusion of minorities from this process of definition, which you indicate is
no problem as long as their basic rights are respected. The ‘dialogue society’
would not give any group such a monopoly of definition. Thus, is it not the
dialogue society rather than the ‘distinct society’ that provides the starting
point for an answer to the problems of multiculturalism? Perhaps we may
add that the dialogue society would not need to postulate the pre-political
cultural essences of communities, which some of your critics have taken to
be problematic.
CT: I certainly think that this criticism is not true because I have never been
assuming a pre-political essence of communities. The point is very interest-
ing but I do not think that there is a conflict there because we are talking
about different kinds of issues. Within Quebec I have been a very strong
proponent of the involvement of the voices of everybody in the definition of
issues like language policy and that is exactly what is distinguishing me
from the hard-lined nationalists with whom I had big public fights about
that. This point about the right of the society of Quebec to determine certain
issues was more an issue of constitutional powers. Does Quebec as a society
in Canada have the right to step outside what others might consider the
normal way of dealing with language and legislation or ought it to be kept
in certain bounds? One example is that Canadian society would, for
instance, normally tend to think that requiring you to send your kid to a
publicly funded school with a certain language should not be allowed
whereas the majority in the society of Quebec feels that they need this kind
of measure. This clearly is a ‘distinct society’-issue but that in no way
dictates the idea that there should be a self-definition of a community that
excludes these other voices. Contrary to that also in this project the minor-
ities should have a say in what the common good is. The definition of the
distinct society in the famous Meech Lake Accord (1987) was very carefully
worded and the point was made that it has to involve both the majority and
the minorities. That is the very positive part of the idea of a distinct society.
HR/AL: Your critics argue that there are no more neatly defined and
separable cultures out there in the globalized world, and those who stick to
the idea of a coherent, long-term stable identity will necessarily fail in a
society based on contingency, flexibility and rapid change, as Richard
Sennett has tried to show in his The Corrosion of Character.11 Are your con-
ceptions of culture and identity not terribly anachronistic?
CT: I can never get the force of this move because we do not need to have
self-contained cultures in order to have cultural conflicts. Cultural conflicts
can occur between people who share a lot but do not share one particular
belief. If there were self-contained cultures we would by definition not have
cultural conflicts but we would be totally ignoring each other. But this does
not mean that we do not need a concept like culture.
HR/AL: But are there still cultural groups, which can be defined as a group
with a certain ‘you’? Is not that already an imposition, which attributes an
identity to a group of people who might be totally different?
CT: But who is talking about attributing? Cultural conflicts arise because
people are self-attributing identities to themselves. It is of course important
to notice if a view of a group is presented that is extremely intolerant to the
differences within the group. But once these things are said the conflicts are
going to remain between very fuzzy groups with their very different posi-
tions and they have to be somehow arbitrated and worked over. Similarly
personal identities can come in all sorts of colours, some people have
personal identities that are relatively loosely linked to the various groups
and cultures they pass through, others have very thick identifications with
them. The real world we are entering is going to have the gamut of these.
Some people are going to be more freischwebend and moving between
cultures and others are going to be much more deeply rooted in where they
have been brought up. We live in a world in which these kinds of different
people have to find a modus vivendi, that’s the real difficulty. So I really do
not feel I’m assuming any of these anachronisms.
HR/AL: What about the argument of Sennett that we might lose our
capacity to retain long-term identities, to narrate our live and to have
something like a life-project because there is so much contingency and
mobility in our present world that might corrode our character?
CT: I do not quite see the danger because what the thread of the narrative is
can be very different. In some people’s lives the important thread of their
narratives does not pass through their different jobs. Certainly a lot of
people are going to be forced not to make their thread of the narrative that
they work for General Motors, but there was life before GM and there will
be one after.
Aspects of intellectual and political biography

HR/AL: We would like to return to The Pattern of Politics and its context.
This book of yours is largely forgotten today, and you hardly refer to it
yourself. It clearly is the most political and radical book of yours, and
apparently a reaction to your defeat in a 1968 general election in Canada to
Pierre Trudeau, whom you criticize sharply. What is your view of the book
today?
CT: That was very much, as you say, an occasional book and at that time I
was so angered, not by Pierre Trudeau who is an old friend of mine, but by
the level of the debate. That does not mean that I did not think those things
and do not think some of them now. But as a book about general politics it
has certainly aged a lot after more than three decades.
HR/AL: We were also surprised when reading it because it was pretty much
arguing along class lines.
CT: It is not precisely class, but I still think that there is a very important
division in our societies between the better-off and the worse-off, in other
words there is a series of issues that really appeal to people whose interests
normally get neglected.
HR/AL: Since we are already talking about your political history – Otto
Kallscheuer claims that you have been a member of the British Communist
Party, Lin Chun says you were not – who is right?
CT: I was never a member of any communist party, I was a member of the
British Labour Party. There was this odd constitutional fact that for a long
time, and probably still today, members of the Commonwealth countries
have voting rights, if they can get into the United Kingdom. When I was in
Britain for a long time doing my graduate work I was also a citizen and I
was involved with the New Left Review and I also joined the Labour Party.
But how does it come that Kallscheuer thinks that it was the Communist
Party? Maybe it is because this movement, which became the New Left
Review was made up for one part by more radical people in the Labour Party
like Stuart Hall and myself on one hand, and made up for another part by
disgusted communists who just slammed the door on the Communist Party.
The context is 1956 when you had at one and the same time a wave of anger
in Britain against the invasion in Suez, but also great anger in the whole
communist world, because of the publication of the report by Khrushchev at
the 20th Party Congress and, of course, the suppression of the Hungarian
revolt. So a lot of these communists that were already dissidents in the party
at that point finally slammed the door, like E.P. Thompson, John Saville,
Doris Lessing and others including Eric Hobsbawm, who did not slam the
door but actually moved out. We combined together and founded the
review. Let’s face it: those people were much better known than we were.
There was a very interesting age difference because the ex-communists were
reasonably established people in their forties and fifties and our generation
was in its twenties. Nevertheless we did most of the running, or at least our
share of the running. So if you looked at it from Germany you could see this
movement whose more famous members have been members of the
Communist Party and so one could think that these younger punks must
have all been part of the same thing, but it was not that way at all. We
actually had big fights. Even then I was much more critical of Marxism than
they were willing to be. We first had two magazines that we later fused into
one, theirs was The New Reasoner. In 1957 they invited me to write an article
for their magazine and I wrote a text on “Marxism and Humanism” that was
published with replies.12 I always found the whole communist project just
horrifying and thought that the greatest disaster for democracy in the
twentieth century was Lenin, and they still could not take that. Nevertheless
they were people with tremendously interesting ideas and great courage
and so we collaborated.
HR/AL: Were you active in politics during those years apart from writing
in those magazines?
CT: Yes, I was living in Britain until 1961 and I was very involved in the
Labour Party, in the whole run-up to the nuclear disarmament-movement
and in the issue of race-relations in the constituency I was in in West
London. In 1956 I also was in Vienna for a while helping Hungarian
refugees and trying to get them into other countries and then later we
organized the ‘Jan Hus’-underground university in Czechoslovakia.
HR/AL: How do you think these years and your connections to the British
Left have influenced your later thinking?
CT: I think that this definitely left marks on my thinking, certainly in the
case of the whole issue of capitalism, socialism and culture. The issue of in
what directions culture could develop in a socialist society has been totally
neglected or has been treated in a very wooden Marxist way. A lot of the
new ideas in this area came from people that had not been in the Com-
munist Party, but of course also from people like E.P. Thompson. So that
way of thinking about politics not in a narrow and technocratic way but in
a broader way really changed my outlook. I do not think that I have ever
changed from that. Then I began to think on certain issues in the context of
an Auseinandersetzung with Marxism, which I am still working on today,
especially the question of how we understand ourselves and history, the
way it moves and changes.
HR/AL: Alasdair MacIntyre belonged to the New Left Review-group at that

time as well. How would you summarize the differences between your
philosophical position and that of MacIntyre?
CT: Alasdair has been through a series of phases and has changed his
direction, but the main differences today result from the fact that he is more
negative about modernity and tries to point out what modernity has
forgotten. I do not think that this can be the basis of an adequate theory of
modernity or that you could even understand how it came about unless you
see is as an attempt of a positive construction of a new understanding of
human existence. So I would look at the development of modernity more in
the terms of the development of social imaginaries rather than in terms of a
loss of a certain sense of depth. But I have, of course, always learned a great
deal from Alasdair because in terms of criticising the more narrow philo-
sophical approach of the world we have both been in I agree with most of
his views and feel very close to him.
HR/AL: Can you tell us something more about your intellectual and
philosophical development – which teachers have inspired you the most,
which books were decisive for the turns your philosophical career has
taken?
CT: When I first went to Oxford and got more deeply into philosophy I was
in this very narrow positivistic world against which I reacted strongly. Its
driving centre was an epistemological take on things and Merleau-Ponty
whom I began to read at that point was a tremendous breath of fresh air and
I immediately had the sense that this person has a way of climbing out of
that old epistemological framework. I only met Merleau-Ponty once but by
the time I got to Paris and had the chance to meet him he was already at the
Collège de France. As you know it is the best job in the universe because you
only have to give a certain number of public lectures a year and you no
longer have to cope with students, so he made it very clear that it was very
nice to have a talk with me but that I should not expect more. He also told
all sorts of funny anecdotes about Oxford philosophers he knew and so on.
He died very shortly after that and very prematurely. Secondly, Emmanuel
Mounier who was another kind of intellectual and not an academic has been
very important. He was the editor of Esprit, which was the journal of that
whole movement of more or less Catholic Leftists in France in the Thirties
and I picked up on it in the Forties. I never met Mounier, because he died
too early, but I met others and I am still in touch with them, like with Olivier
Mongin, who is editing the journal now. Thirdly, in another way the novels
of Dostoyevsky were very important for me. These are three very different
kinds of influences.
HR/AL: What about Isaiah Berlin? What role did he have?

CT: When we got together I was already on a certain path and we interacted
very well on that path. At that time it was already too late, because I was
already on the path, that he would have set me on, so I was delighted to
exchange with him.
HR/AL: What was your relation to Iris Murdoch?

CT: I really appreciated Iris Murdoch. When I was just starting to write my
graduate thesis I was terribly confused and she was a great listener. She
could not get me out of my confusions, but she listened so creatively that it
was a great help and I really liked her work and admired her a lot. So it was
an influence too, but not as seminal as the three people I mentioned earlier.
Practical reason, moral realism and persons

HR/AL: We would like to turn to the more straightforwardly philosophical
aspects of your work now. Doubtlessly, the central focus of your work has
been the formulation of a philosophical anthropology. In “The Validity of
Transcendental Arguments”13 you argue that an important line of contem-
porary philosophy, including Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein,
follows Kant in giving transcendental arguments, and that some of the
arguments in your philosophical anthropology belong to this tradition. On
the other hand, however, in “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man”14 you
insist that in the human sciences the best we can have is a circle of inter-
pretations. These interpretations seldom if ever reach anything as strong as
transcendental conditions. And thirdly, in “Explanation and Practical
Reason”15 you hold that practical reasoning is always comparative, ad
hominem reasoning in transitions, which tries to establish, e.g., that a
transition from a former moral position A to a later position B has to be
understood as an irreversible gain. Are these three genuinely different
modes of reasoning and understanding or are they simply three different
ways of saying the same thing? If they are different, are they confined to
different areas (e.g. arguments in philosophical anthropology, explanation
in human sciences, justification in moral debates)? What is the relation of the
three forms?
CT: This is a very interesting question but I am not sure whether my answer
could ever be satisfactory because there is some overlap and mutual
impingement and yet there is a difference. I already said in “The Validity of
Transcendental Arguments” that there is something paradoxical about those
arguments because in the terms in which they are set, they are absolutely
stringent – you cannot possibly go the other way, this must be the case – but
in a paradoxical way this certainty goes along with revisability because they
depend on your raising certain issues. For instance, you start with the
Kantian proof of the second analogy, which really cries out from a modern
perspective for being reformulated in terms of an embodied agent, because
it turns on the difference between what I can effect, and what I cannot effect,
so that should push you all the way to Merleau-Ponty and an understanding
of the embodied agent, but it actually did not. This fact is very important,
because there can still remain a certain dualism, including the idea of the
‘thing in itself’. So you can see that although within the bounds of the
definition of the predicament of this second analogy-argument you really
cannot go the other way, what the whole argument is taken to reveal about
our predicament can be radically changed by a hermeneutical shift, i.e. a
shift in the whole conceptual articulation of the predicament. In this way
those arguments are revisable and there is an odd relation between the
dimension that looks certain and a priori on the one hand and the dimension
that is open to hermeneutic reformulation on the other.
There are other issues, of course, that have more to do with explanation
in the human sciences, for example the debate about the French Revolution
and the Terror between Albert Soboul and François Furet.16 There is a very
complex hermeneutical debate in which Soboul’s position is that you cannot
just explain the Terror by the pressure of the circumstances, the events in the
Vendée for example, and say that the revolutionaries had to act that way
and just went a little too far. In Furet’s eyes this does not really meet the case
because one has to look at the particular discourse, an obsessional discourse
of purity and at the way this discourse got more delirious, and ask how to
explain this. So there seems to be a difference about what the explanandum
is which is hard to put neutrally. From the point of view of Furet, Soboul did
not see that there is a certain explanandum and from Soboul’s position Furet
seemed to make a big thing out of only minor differences. The whole way
the argument works and the way one can go very far in the details to back
up each side’s case reveals that it is exactly a hermeneutical debate with a
hermeneutical circle. There is a reciprocal relation between your whole
picture of what needs to be explained and the particular details you can
bring up. The question is which picture makes more sense of the whole
situation and there one simply cannot say – as in the case of transcendental
arguments – that there is only one way to go.
Reasoning in transitions is another facet in light of which the Furet/
Soboul-debate can be read. If, for instance, you start out being a student of
Soboul and then read Furet and take his arguments on board there is a kind
of irreversibility because when you start to notice the importance of the
discourse of, for example, Robespierre it is very hard to unnotice it again.
One could say that there is a certain irreversibility in moving from one take
to the other and that this move involves an epistemic gain. There are other
debates, which just have to be understood in this way, like the transitions
between different moral positions or paradigm-shifts in the history of
science. MacIntyre has shown this for the move from Aristotelian to Galilean
and Newtonian mechanics. Plainly here the latter position supersedes the
former, the new framework solves the anomalies. But there are also cases in
which all three of these types of arguments can in limine come together.
HR/AL: How strong is your notion of irreversibility in moral debates and in

individual development, as opposed to natural sciences? Sometimes you
seem to say that we just know that we made progress. Is it inconceivable
that because of some additional considerations one can go back to the
former position or at least something that is closer to it?
CT: Maybe you can get back to something closer, but you can never go back
to the first position itself. There is an ambiguity to any position: when you
are looking from an external perspective at whether it was right to vote in
this or that way then in this picture it seems that one could go back to the
first position, but if you identify the first position as that plus the whole
surrounding set of reasons why it was a good thing to do, then you never
get back to the first position as such. You can get back only in the first sense.
Let’s say you first voted centre and then turned to the left and the argument
for your transition was that you moved from seeing politics in a purely
technocratic way to seeing it as having the dimension of justice. Now
imagine that at another stage in your life you are not just concerned with
voting in the right way in the abstract sense but you base your decision in
prudential reasoning and that leads you to vote centre again, so you’ve
moved back to the same position defined in abstraction from the reasons,
but if you define it in terms of all the reasons for the positions then there is
no going back.
HR/AL: There might still be a problem of ‘presentism’: from the new

position you always seem to understand the old position but that does not
mean that the new position is really better than the old one. When I am an
orthodox Christian, for example, and after a time I become a Marxist and
then I think that I completely understand everything about why I was a
Christian first, because of the ideologies and so on, and then after a time I
might go back and become a Christian again and then think that it was the
devil who made me think that the Marxist perspective was right. So how
could you exclude that and say that there is definite proof that position B is
superior and the transition irreversible?
CT: Surely the analysis I am making is correct here. Only if you take it at its
most abstract level – in abstracting from the reasons – it is the case that you
have gone back in the strict sense. Take into account what your position
before the shift to Marxism is, where by hypothesis you are completely even
unaware of the possibility of ideological consciousness and then your
position after you have been a Marxist when you see a dimension of
Marxism you did not see before. This makes for a double sophistication like
in the case of voting centre again. It is an identical position from one point
of view but not from a deeper point of view.
HR/AL: Would you say that in moral debates it is possible to give tran-
scendental arguments as well?
CT: I do not see how that could be the case. Transcendental arguments only
work, as I have said in my paper on that topic, because we call on our
agents’ knowledge that these are the necessary conditions of our doing what
we are all knowing we are doing. But I do not see how this would work in
the moral sphere. You cannot have an argument in the same sense because
transcendental arguments very much turn on the idea that you cannot have
A without B, so that B is a necessary condition for A. What comes nearest to
that in the moral sphere is that we try to awaken things that we take the
interlocutor to know, we expect him to be already at some level sensitive to
morality but having a blockage in the moment. That is of course the form a
lot of moral persuasion takes: ‘Do you really want to do that?’ and then you
paint the picture of what this means for that person. That is a very important
part of moral argument but it does not have the structure of proving X by Y.
HR/AL: You insist on being a moral realist. Nevertheless you clearly hold
that our conceptions of the good and our ethical frameworks are dependent
on our language, culture and form of life, and they radically change over
time and space. So why is this a position of moral realism?
CT: Well, moral realism of course does not mean that for every set of moral
positions you can find a ranking. It just means that there is an answer to
what the ranking is, but the answer might be that these are unrankable or
that there is a real dilemma, that one cannot dissolve by delegitimating one
position. So moral realism does not mean that every single issue can be
determined, it just means that there is no bar in principle to our working
through and understanding rationally that one position is better than
another, or that they are unarbitrably different. The reason why I hold that
view, or one of the things that gives me the confidence, is the power of the
kind of supersessional transitional arguments we talked about. In the

predicament we are in when we meet somebody with a totally different
take, we never get to the point where we just have to say: ‘Well, you hold
this view and I hold that one.’ We can, of course, say so but it means only
that we can abandon the whole enterprise. We are, however, never forced to
do that, there are always things that we can say further to push the argu-
ment on. It is like that in any important hermeneutical debate, for example
we will probably go on arguing about the French Revolution and the Terror
until the end of time. There is no point at which we see that we are logically
in a situation were you are just assuming this and I am assuming that and
we reach an impasse. The shape of my realism thus is that there is no place
where we just logically have to stop, whereas when you say that you just
like strawberry ice-cream and I like vanilla ice-cream it is clear that there is
just nothing further to say. We never get to that point in moral argument. I
am against all forms of anti-realism, which try to give us completely bogus
a priori reasons why we will be stuck somewhere, and that itself makes me
suspicious. Realism does not say that all moral debates are arbitrable, it just
holds that there is no point at which they are logically stopped. That means
that moral dilemmas are perfectly compatible with moral realism.
HR/AL: You have argued that Platonic and naturalist versions of moral
realism share a false assumption, namely that moral realism must pre-
suppose a moral reality independent of human beings. You try to avoid this
false assumption by stressing that moral reality is constituted in relation to
human experience and articulation. Nevertheless, does not your notion of
‘constitutive goods’ that human beings relate to presuppose the independent
existence of it?
CT: The concept ‘independent of human beings’ is an ambiguous concept
and I maybe did not make it clear enough. If it means that in a world
without human beings there would be a right or wrong action, then this is
obviously hard to make sense of. If it, however, means something like: there
is something beyond human beings and the best realistic take is to say that
we owe something to it, or that we receive a call from it, then how could one
ever say that a priori? It is just something that one has to see by looking at
the way you could best make sense of your most profound and believable
moral experience. My personal feeling is that there is something like that.
When I wrote about this topic I was reacting to the way this issue is often
put by anti-realists or naturalists like John L. Mackie. It is obviously absurd
to think that moral realism means that there is something out there in the
universe like the law of gravity. So we need another view, namely that those
goods make sense in relation to us, but that does not mean that they are
necessarily dependent on us. These demands only make sense because they
are demands on us, they only make sense in relation to us.
HR/AL: Perhaps the central concept of your moral theory is that of ‘strong
evaluations’. It has been understood in a variety of ways. It clearly does not
mean that one wants something very strongly. Can you give us a handy and
clear formulation of this idea?
CT: It just means that you see your valuing X as something that is itself right
or valuable. Ask yourself what it would be like if you lost this preference. In
the case that the preference is for ice-cream you may not care about losing it,
but what if it is for caring about people being tortured? Would you want to
degenerate to that point? The other side of this is expressed in moral
admiration. You admire people that have a certain valuation and as a
consequence you would hate yourself, if you would stop caring about
people being tortured.
HR/AL: You have also stressed the role of authentic identity in Modernity.
If conceptions of the good are understood in a moral realist fashion, can the
‘authentic’ personal aims and personal attachments to values make a
difference? If I am, say, vegetarian for ethical or strongly evaluative reasons,
does it mean that everyone ought to be? And if not, are my own reasons
merely weakly evaluative, or not reasons at all?
CT: The issue of identity is just part of another important set of issues for
people and that can be distinguished from moral issues. There are, for
example, two kinds of vegetarians. The first kind are people like Peter Singer
who are saying that animals have rights and that we carnivores are violating
those rights. Plainly in this case when you are a vegetarian you say that
everybody should be a vegetarian. The second kind of vegetarian could say
that being a vegetarian just fits my way of being. There would of course be
very strong objections to being forced to eat meat, that would be going
against their way of being, it would be outrageous from their viewpoint of
authenticity; but yet they are not saying that everybody should be vegetar-
ian. Authentic identity-claims normally have that form for us.
HR/AL: If the identity-claims have the form that they just fit my way of
being can we still say that they are strong evaluations?
CT: I meant the notion of strong evaluation to be broader than simply what
we think of as moral because there is a whole range of evaluations that we
make, that have this feature of being strong and to which we are not
indifferent. They are not confined to the area of morality but range over
areas like aesthetics and personal style. What we call the moral is just one
domain in a very broad continent and a lot of issues arise about its place in
that continent, for example whether it can be simply thought that moral
claims are overriding all other claims, an issue which I think is much more
complicated than is often supposed.
HR/AL: One could think that there is a certain ambivalence in your position
on the relativism-realism issue and that it might be the result of an inherent
tension in your work between your philosophy of the social sciences and
your moral philosophy. On this reading, the tension arises from the uneasy
fit between your notion of self-interpretation, which points towards cultural
relativism, and the concept of strong evaluation. Strong evaluations
ultimately are dependent on constitutive goods, which are taken to be
inherently good because of an ontological grounding, independent of our
actual will and understanding. The idea of radical self-interpretation, which
brings into being what is to be interpreted, and the notion of strong
evaluation do not easily go together. Would you agree that there is a tension
here, and would you agree to the observation that your position has
somewhat changed over the years from a more relativist position based on
the notion that human beings are ‘interpretation all the way down’ to a more
universalist or realist position in and after Sources of the Self 17?
CT: I do not exactly see the tension, because these differences of authentic
identity are complex and conflicting with each other, but they do not give
rise to an interesting kind of moral relativism. It is not a conflict like that
between two cultures where in one human sacrifices are allowed and in the
other not. I do not see myself as committed to believing that this latter kind
of difference is just unarbitrable. It is an issue that can in principle be
arbitrated by reason. But maybe I got lost in your question, I don’t see where
the conflict is.
HR/AL: Is it not the case that my realization that I am a self-interpreting

animal whose self-interpretation has been shaped and guided by sometimes
quite gruesome historical and political events undermines my belief in the
independent validity of my notions of the good? Would it be enough for
strong evaluations to say that they just fit my way of being or is the differ-
ence between weak and strong evaluations that the first means that I want
this and the latter that this is worthy of being liked, i.e. the thing itself is
worthy, so if I come to understand that I think it is worthy because of some
historical development does not that undermine my strong evaluation?
CT: No, because the thing that is worthy here is living my authentic mode of
being. But to come back to the tension you mentioned in the earlier question.
Suppose that you make the purely theoretical point that the present set of
views that I currently have is obviously partly the result of my development
and my history. That opens me the possibility that if I would get access to
other insights I might say: “Oh why have I been living like this all these
years”. Of course I have to admit that can happen. But what am I expected
to do with that insight? I mean, here I am. Then there is the actual challenge,
which is particularized. Take the example that you belong to a civilization in
which people become totally insensitive to nature. When you realize this
you can start working on this particular challenge and marshal arguments.
This resembles the supersession-arguments I wrote about in “Explanation
and Practical Reason” in the sense that you never know that you are at the
end of the process, that you have reached something unrevisable. You just
cannot know until the next challenge comes along and even if you beat
down that one, you cannot know that there will not be further challenges, to
which the only appropriate response might be to acknowledge the powerful
objection and to modify your position. That’s why the generalized criticism
can’t worry me very deeply: I can’t do anything with it, but I can’t throw it
off either. We sort of walk backwards, but that’s the human condition. I
think it is a very deep fact about the human condition, that you cannot know
these things in advance.
HR/AL: When one reads “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man” or “Self-
Interpreting Animals”18 one has the impression that we interpret ourselves
against the background of a certain culture, a language and a set of practices
and that this makes it inevitable for us to have a strong belief in some
constitutive good, in something which is good and to which we relate. There
are different cultures, languages and forms of life and thereby a plurality of
different self-interpretations and different goods, but the notion of strong
evaluation seems to require that the constitutive good is real in a sense
superior to the plurality.
CT: But why should it be superior to the plurality? The concept of strong
evaluation applies to the particular kinds of beliefs and stances that people
have. It is a test for a strong evaluation that if, for example, someone would
offer me a pill, which would have the effect, that I would not care about X
any more, then I would recoil in horror as opposed to trying it. There are, to
be sure, many different positions that are in this way strong evaluations in
the lives of different people and there does not have to be conflict involved.
This understanding, however, points to the existence of different moral
ontologies, to God or Nirvana, for instance, and these moral ontologies can
conflict.
HR/AL: Would we just have to accept that there is a plurality of moral

ontologies?
CT: Oh you mean that we can never get further than that? Yes, that’s also
possible, moral realism does not ensure us that we get any further. We could
be in a similar position about the grand theory of everything in physics. It
could turn out in the next 50 years that there are two big theories, that can
both make sense of it all and the human race would be divided in believing
in one of the two. But in such a situation we would not have to abandon the
belief that there is a right answer, maybe a third one. So even in the case in
which we have two possibilities between which we cannot arbitrate – and
we may never be able to do so – we can still have every reason to think that
there is only one right answer. There must be limits to human power, so
maybe the limits to human power will come there. Maybe if we could
perceive faster than the speed of light we could answer it, but we cannot.
I read this article the other day, that apparently all galaxies are receding
from each other and at certain point we might arrive at a situation in which
all the things, that aren’t beyond our event-horizon are in our own galaxy-
cluster and everything else is beyond our reach. Think about that. A lot of
what we surmise about the first three minutes is based on our having quite
far perceptions. Apparently, if this view is right, history is going to be
unkind to us and we are going to have less and less of that. There may
become a point where the crucial evidence that would settle this is beyond
the event-horizon, so what do we do, we’re stuck. So we have every reason
to think there is an answer but no way of ever knowing for sure. That’s a
perfectly good possibility. The issue of whether there is an answer, whether
there’s a right and wrong here, is quite independent of our power to find an
answer.
HR/AL: There seems to be a very interesting parallel between your

approach and Foucault’s approach. Foucault aims at a genealogy in which
he tries to lay bare the origins of our values and convictions as a result of
struggles for power, of errors, mistakes and repressions. The consequence of

this undertaking inevitably seems to be a loosening of our adherence to
those values and convictions. Conversely and yet similarly, you also aim at
exploring the origins of our notions of the good and our self-understanding,
but you do not concentrate on their relation to struggles for power, but on
the empowering, inspiring and enabling ideas and ideals which lay at their
origin. Martin Seel therefore has called this an ‘anti-genealogy’19, which tries
to re-empower our allegiance to our modern moral sources, to fill the ‘half-
collapsed lungs of the spirit’, as you say in Sources of the Self.20 Now, isn’t it
apparent that yours and Foucault’s versions of genealogy are much more
complementary than contrary, since the power-struggles and repressions as
well as the empowering moral visions lie at the ground of our moral
convictions, and only a combined analyses can give us the full picture?
CT: Yes, I think that this is true. I am probably more optimistic and tend to
stress the positive side and Foucault tends to stress totally the other side. I
think, however, that this will be worse news to Foucault than to me because
he had more invested in keeping off the positive dimension. If you add
Foucault to my kind of approach you can come to grips with why some of
these big changes happened whereas he was forced to understand these big
changes as coming out of nowhere, which seems to me wildly implausible
if you look at these changes in detail. Although it was not my intention I
may have concentrated on the more positive side of the developments and
I have certainly been made aware by reading Foucault of a lot of things I
agree with. In a way one could say the following, which I once wrote in an
article on Foucault21: in Discipline and Punish he all the time writes about the
Prussian parade square and the people incarcerated, but what about the
New Model Army? This is an example of a tremendously empowering
revolutionary force. The answer is of course that both are part of the story
and you must not stick with only one.
HR/AL: Finally, one more question which is yet of another kind. You
distinguish between humans as organisms and humans as persons. Now,
some philosophers claim that on the one hand there could be persons
outside the human realm and on the other that not all human beings are
actually persons. Would you say that all persons are humans and all
humans are persons?
CT: All humans are persons because we have the concepts of the species and
of potentiality. The fact that someone is in an irreversible coma does not lead
us to deny his personhood. This points to the fact that we for a variety of
moral reasons redefine ourselves as having to think of people via their

belonging to the species. Being a person has something to do with the
powers of the species in general. We do not cancel this attribution when
someone totally or even irreversibly fails to show those powers. So all
humans are persons in that sense. The other way around it depends on what
we are talking about. If we are talking about potential Martians I have
nothing against that but if we are talking about these machines and robots
there really is something very wacky about that. There are some slipped
disks in the reasoning. I am not saying that it would not be possible because
how can you a priori say that, but there is no more reason to believe that
some machine like Hal in Kubrick’s 2001 has any kind of mental state than
to think that my pocket calculator has mental states. It is of course much
more sophisticated and complicated but consciousness and feelings do not
supervene on complicated calculations. Potentially my gut is going through
all possible complicated calculations but it does not have a set of views
about the universe. These people call themselves naturalists but there is
something so disembodied in this way of thinking. What we know is that
feeling arises in organisms like this and that consciousness arises out of
feeling along evolutionary processes or along ontogenetic processes of the
growing child but we have absolutely no reason to think that things like
transistors have them. What is going on here is very weird because one of
our possible functions, the function of reasoning in a very tight formal way,
is taken in an abstract way and from the fact that we can make these operate
for calculative purposes in machines they think that this is a reason to
suspect that these things are capable of mental states. This is wild compared
to what we know about the development of the capacity of feeling. This
mental slip of disks is a deep fact about our culture that needs some
profound explanation.
HR/AL: Maybe one candidate for personhood could be other animal

species?
CT: That is the kind of Peter Singer-question of rights. It is of course not
possible to deny that animals have certain feelings, desires and intentions.
The issue is whether we want to treat them as persons and give them rights.
Do we always want to speak in terms of rights, and give trees rights, as
some people suggest? But that may not be the best way to deal with the
really important issue of whether we can deal with our environment as we
see fit or whether we owe some treatment to it. I think that there are limits
and restraints but it is not necessarily the best way to think of them in terms
of rights.
HR/AL: Professor Taylor, thank you very much for this very illuminating
interview!
Notes
1
The interview took place at New School University, New York, December 3,
2001. The German translation of this interview, ‘Tocqueville statt Marx. Über
Identität, Entfremdung und die Konsequenzen des 11. September’ appeared in
Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie. Zweimonatsschrift der internationalen philosophischen
Forschung 50 (2002) 1, 127!148. The interview was transcribed by Robin Celikates
and Arto Laitinen.
2
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1989.
3
See also Charles Taylor, “Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate”,
in Nancy L. Rosenblum (ed.), Liberalism and the Moral Life, Cambridge, Mass./
London, Harvard University Press, 1989, pp. 159!182, reprinted in Philosophical
Arguments, Cambridge, Mass./London, Harvard University Press, 1995, pp. 181!
203.
4
Charles Taylor, “Marxism and Humanism”, in The New Reasoner, Nr. 2, 1957, S.
92 ff., “Socialism and the Intellectuals”, in Universities and Left Review, Nr. 2 1957, S.
18 f., “Alienation and Community”, in ibid., Nr.5, 1958, S. 11 ff.
5
Charles Taylor, The Pattern of Politics, Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1970.
6
Charles Taylor, “The Nature and Scope of Distributive Justice”, in Philosophy and
the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
1985, pp. 289!317.
7
Nancy Fraser & Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?: A Philosophical Ex-
change, Verso Books, forthcoming.
8
Axel Honneth, Kampf um Anerkennung. Zur moralischen Grammatik sozialer Kon-
flikte, Frankfurt/M, Suhrkamp, 1992. English translation, The Struggle for Recognition:
The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, Cambridge, Polity, 1995.
9
Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and The Politics of Recognition, Amy Gutmann
(ed.), Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1992. Republished with additional
commentaries as Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, Amy
Gutmann (ed.), Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1994.
10
“Legitimation Crisis?”, in his Philosophy and the Human Sciences, pp. 248!288.
11
Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in
the New Capitalism, W.W. Norton & Company, 1998.
12
See fn. 4.
13
“The Validity of Transcendental Arguments”, in Philosophical Arguments, pp.
20 ff.
14
“Interpretation and the Sciences of Man”, Review of Metaphysics 25 (1971), 3!51.
Reprinted in his Philosophy and the Human Sciences, pp. 15!57.
15
“Explanation and Practical Reason”, in Philosophical Arguments, pp. 34 ff.
16
See for example Francois Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1981. Albert Soboul, The French Revolution, 1787!1799:
From the Storming of the Bastille to Napoleon, Random House, 1975.
17
For a defence of this reading, see Hartmut Rosa, Identität und kulturelle Praxis.
Politische Philosophie nach Charles Taylor, Frankfurt/M., New York, 1998, ch. 9.
18
Charles Taylor, “Self-Interpreting Animals”, in Human Agency and Language.
Philosophical Papers 1, Cambridge, 1985, pp. 45 ff.
19
Martin Seel, “Die Wiederkehr der Ethik des guten Lebens”, in Merkur 45 (1991),
pp. 42 ff., here p. 49.
20
Sources of the Self, p. 520.
21
“Foucault on Freedom and Truth”, in Political Theory 12 (1984), 152!183. Re-
printed in Philosophy and the Human Sciences, pp. 152!184.
Note on Contributors
Ruth Abbey is a senior lecturer in political theory at the University of Kent

at Canterbury, UK. Her publications include Charles Taylor (2000) and
Nietzsche’s Middle Period (2000). She is the editor of Contemporary Philosophy
in Focus: Charles Taylor (forthcoming).
Heikki Ikäheimo works as an assistant in philosophy at the University of

Jyväskylä and as a researcher of the Academy of Finland. His publications
include Self-Consciousness and Intersubjectivity: A Study on Hegel’s Encyclopedia
Philosophy of Subjective Spirit (2000) and “On the Genus and Species of Recog-
nition” (Inquiry, 2002).
Jussi Kotkavirta is a university lecturer of philosophy at the University of

Jyväskylä and leads a research project on the concept of a person funded by
the Academy of Finland. His publications include Practical Philosophy and
Modernity. A Study on the Formation of Hegel’s Thought (1993), and Right,
Morality, Ethical Life: Studies in G.W.F. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (ed., 1997).
Arto Laitinen is a researcher in philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä

and the Academy of Finland. His publications include “Interpersonal Re-
cognition: A Response to Value or a Precondition of Personhood?” (Inquiry,
2002), and Strong Evaluations (forthcoming).
Irma Levomäki is a researcher in philosophy at the University of Helsinki.

Her publications include Arvojen moninaisuus tietoyhteiskunnassa (1998),
which deals with the plurality of values in the information society.
Sami Pihlström is a university lecturer of theoretical philosophy at the

University of Helsinki. His publications include Pragmatism and Philosophical
Anthropology: Understanding Our Human Life in a Human World (1998) and
Naturalizing the Transcendental: A Pragmatic View (forthcoming in 2003).
198 Note on Contributors
Hartmut Rosa is an assistant professor of sociology at the Friedrich-Schiller

University in Jena, Germany, and was a visiting professor at the New School
University, New York, at the time of the interview included in this volume.
His publications include Identität und kulturelle Praxis. Politische Philosophie
nach Charles Taylor (1998).
Nicholas H. Smith is a senior lecturer in philosophy at Macquarie Uni-

versity, Sydney, Australia. His publications include Charles Taylor: Meaning,
Morals, Modernity (2002), Strong Hermeneutics: Contingency and Moral Identity
(1997), and an edited volume Reading McDowell: On Mind and World (2002).
Charles Taylor is an emeritus professor of Philosophy at McGill University

and he taught at the New School University, New York at the time of the
interview included in this volume. He has published several books, includ-
ing Explanation of Behaviour (1964), Hegel (1975), two volumes of Philosophical
Papers (1985), Sources of the Self (1989), Philosophical Arguments (1995), Wieviel
Gemeinschaft braucht die Demokratie? Aufsätze zur politische Philosophie (2002).
Thomas Wallgren is a university lecturer of philosophy at the University of

Helsinki and a senior fellow of the Academy of Finland. His publications
include The Challenge of Philosophy: Beyond Contemplation and Critical Theory
(1996) and Transformative Philosophy (forthcoming).
Mikko Yrjönsuuri is an academy researcher at the University of Jyväskylä.

His publications include Obligationes – 14th Century Logic of Disputational
Duties (1994) and Henrik Lagerlund & Mikko Yrjönsuuri (eds.), Emotions and
Choice from Boethius to Descartes (2002). He is at present preparing a book The
Self in Medieval Thought.
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On Identity, Alienation and Consequences of September 11th. An Interview

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10. Tocqueville instead of Marx:

HR/AL: Professor Taylor, what are you working on these days?

HR/AL: Does the terminological shift from ‘interpretations’ to ‘imaginaries’

Communitarianism and the Events of September 11th

HR/AL: How do you understand the events of September 11th more

depends on them having sanctuary and money, so there is an argument of

HR/AL: Commonly, your work is closely associated with philosophical and

Revisiting key concepts in social criticism

CT: I think we are in what I hope is a transition to something better, a

something positive by first of all doing something negative, we can stop

HR/AL: It is interesting that when we were talking earlier about the

HR/AL: You have praised Axel Honneth’s book on recognition8 as a path-

to do because you need a historically sensitive understanding of the

Aspects of intellectual and political biography

HR/AL: Alasdair MacIntyre belonged to the New Left Review-group at that

HR/AL: What about Isaiah Berlin? What role did he have?

HR/AL: What was your relation to Iris Murdoch?

Practical reason, moral realism and persons

HR/AL: How strong is your notion of irreversibility in moral debates and in

HR/AL: There might still be a problem of ‘presentism’: from the new

kind of supersessional transitional arguments we talked about. In the

HR/AL: Is it not the case that my realization that I am a self-interpreting

HR/AL: Would we just have to accept that there is a plurality of moral

HR/AL: There seems to be a very interesting parallel between your

struggles for power, of errors, mistakes and repressions. The consequence of

moral reasons redefine ourselves as having to think of people via their

HR/AL: Maybe one candidate for personhood could be other animal

Ruth Abbey is a senior lecturer in political theory at the University of Kent

Heikki Ikäheimo works as an assistant in philosophy at the University of

Jussi Kotkavirta is a university lecturer of philosophy at the University of

Arto Laitinen is a researcher in philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä

Irma Levomäki is a researcher in philosophy at the University of Helsinki.

Sami Pihlström is a university lecturer of theoretical philosophy at the

Hartmut Rosa is an assistant professor of sociology at the Friedrich-Schiller

Nicholas H. Smith is a senior lecturer in philosophy at Macquarie Uni-

Charles Taylor is an emeritus professor of Philosophy at McGill University

Thomas Wallgren is a university lecturer of philosophy at the University of

Mikko Yrjönsuuri is an academy researcher at the University of Jyväskylä.

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