Morality, Identity, and Historical Explanation: Charles Taylor on the Sources of the Self

argued, not on individuals' variant faculties, nor on moral choice as an exercise of free will, but on social processes more basic than individuals. The effect of a moral order was produced directly by social causes. For the most part, sociologists have not carried forward Durkheim's task of creating a sociology of morality. We have tried to sever normative from empirical discourse even more sharply than he did. We have lost sight of the philosophical problems Durkheim thought sociology could solve. And as a discipline we have become unmusical in matters of moral discourse. Yet we remain true to the Durkheimian heritage in our avoidance of strong accounts of human subjects.1 Even symbolic interactionists have largely abandoned Mead's focus on the self, and those sociologists who have turned recently to address (or rehabilitate) the role of in human affairs have largely tried to do so withcat focusing on individual subjects, either stressing instead the more anonymous workings of a decentered collective agency, or sticking to general statements about the importance of agency rather than specific analyses of its historical forms and variations. Conversely, explicitly individualistic sociologies (like the rational choice theory of Coleman 1990) take the individual largely for granted, treating the person as a naturally given entity rather than as a problematic or historically constructed category. In this context, Taylor's Sources of the Self (1989a; hereinafter cited without date) ought to have a major and very salutary impact. It is a book of enormous wisdom, deceptively clear and straightforward in its writing style (if rather casual and meandering), but subtle and profound in its argument. Sources of the Self continues a line