Communitarianism

Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in Western society around 1500, whereas by 2000 unbelief had become not merely possible but, for many, the most natural stance — sometimes the only conceivable one? This is the question that drives A Secular Age (2007), the most ambitious work of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (b. 1931). The book — nearly nine hundred pages that grew out of his 1998–99 Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh and earned him the 2007 Templeton Prize — refuses the easy explanations of secularization and offers, in their place, a historical and philosophical reconstruction of how the very conditions of belief in the West shifted over five centuries. ...

Alasdair MacIntyre Alasdair MacIntyre (1929–2025) was a Scottish-American moral philosopher, the author of one of the most influential works of twentieth-century moral philosophy, After Virtue (1981). His intellectual career was marked by a long pilgrimage: he set out from Marxism in his youth, passed through several positions, and ultimately converted to Catholicism and to Aristotelian Thomism in his maturity. He died in May 2025. MacIntyre diagnosed modern moral language as being in a state of grave disorder — composed of decontextualised fragments of traditions that have been lost — and argued that the “Enlightenment project” of providing an autonomous rational justification for morality had failed, clearing the way for emotivism. His proposal was the recovery of a virtue ethics of Aristotelian-Thomist roots, anchored in communal life and in traditions of enquiry. ...

Charles Taylor Charles Taylor (b. 1931, Montreal) is a Canadian philosopher and professor emeritus at McGill University, widely regarded as one of the most influential voices in contemporary political and moral philosophy. Trained at Oxford, where he wrote his doctorate under Isaiah Berlin, Taylor brings together the continental hermeneutic tradition — especially Hegel, Heidegger, and Gadamer — and Anglo-American analytic debate in a rare synthesis. A Catholic convert, he is often associated with communitarianism, though he resists rigid labels. His work investigates the historical conditions of modern identity, the limits of naturalism in the human sciences, and the place of the religious in secular societies. He received the Templeton Prize in 2007 and the Kyoto Prize in 2008. ...

Michael Sandel Michael Sandel (b. 1953, Minneapolis) is an American political philosopher and professor of government at Harvard since 1980, known both for the rigour of his philosophical critique of Rawlsian liberalism and for the enormous public reach of his course “Justice”, one of the most popular classes in Harvard’s history. Sandel is a central figure in the so-called liberal–communitarian debate of the 1980s, although he himself resists the label. His doctoral thesis, published as Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982), offered one of the sharpest philosophical critiques of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. In the following decades he broadened his scope to the critique of the commodification of social life and of meritocratic ideology. ...