A Book Review
This post was originally posted on BitterHarvest.info.
“The Malaise of Modernity”, by Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, is a foundational critique of liberalism and offers insights into the root causes of our dire modern plight. The book is based upon his 1991 Massey Lecture, an annual five-part series of lectures given in Canada by distinguished writers, thinkers, and scholars who explore ideas and issues of contemporary interest. It was later republished by Harvard University Press under the title, “The Ethics of Authenticity.”
Three Malaises
At the outset, Taylor lists three malaises that plague modern society: individualism, the primacy of instrumental reasoning, and soft despotism.
Individualism
The first malaise mentioned by Taylor is extreme individualism or an emphasis on “authenticity”, where authenticity is defined as “self-fulfillment” or “being true to oneself”.
At the extreme, this individualism results in a loss of meaning and the “fading of moral horizons“. Taylor borrows his definition of “authenticity” from Lionel Trilling, “that the moral ideal behind self-fulfilment is that of being true to oneself, in a specifically modern understanding of that term.” (Taylor 15)
This results in a relativism that Taylor says is a profound mistake and “even in some respects self- stultifying. It seems true that the culture of self-fulfillment has led many people to lose sight of concerns that transcend them. And it seems obvious that it has taken trivialized and self- indulgent forms. This can even result in a sort of absurdity, as new modes of conformity arise among people who are striving to be themselves.” (Taylor 15) This relativism means that “the vigorous defence of any moral ideal is somehow off limits.” (Taylor 17)
With respect to this monomaniacal search for self-fulfillment, he says,
It’s not just that people sacrifice their love relationships, and the care of their children, to pursue their careers. Something like this has perhaps always existed. The point is that today many people feel called to do this, feel they ought to do this, feel their lives would be somehow wasted or unfulfilled if they didn’t do it. (Taylor 17)
Primacy of Instrumental Reasoning
Taylor identifies the primacy of “instrumental reasoning”, that is, thinking that focuses exclusively on efficiency, means, and results, rather than the value or morality of the goals themselves, as a second malaise of modernity. It is concerned only with the means and treats the “end” as a given and focuses entirely on the technical calculation of how to achieve it with the least cost or effort. In Taylor’s thought, it not in and of itself problematic, but rather its domination in modern thinking that is a malaise. It results in what Taylor calls “the eclipse of ends.” (Taylor 10)
Soft Despotism
The third malaise is largely a product of the first two and is a loss of freedom.
Taylor refers to Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1840 work, “Democracy in America (Volume II)”, and specifically to Tocqueville’s warning in Book 4, Chapter VI in that work that the American experiment could lapse into a soft despotism. Taylor says, “It will not be a tyranny of terror and oppression as in the old days. The government will be mild and paternalistic. It may even keep democratic forms, with periodic elections. But in fact, everything will be run by an “immense tutelary power,” over which people will have little control.” (Taylor 9)
Here we return to the third area of malaise: the fear articulated by Tocqueville that certain conditions of modern society undermine the will to democratic control, the fear that people will come to accept too easily being governed by an “immense tutelary power.” (Taylor 112, Tocqueville)
Think “nanny state.”
What will cause this? Taylor says that “The danger is not actual despotic control but fragmentation—that is, a people increasingly less capable of forming a common purpose and carrying it out.” (Taylor 112)
Fragmentation arises “when people come to see themselves more and more atomistically, otherwise put, as less and less bound to their fellow citizens in common projects and allegiances…A sense grows that the electorate as a whole is defenceless against the leviathan state; a well-organized and integrated partial grouping may, indeed, be able to make a dent, but the idea that the majority of the people might frame and carry through a common project comes to seem utopian and naive. And so people give up.” (Taylor 113)
He opines that “The operation of market and bureaucratic state tends to strengthen the enframings that favour an atomist and instrumentalist stance to the world and others.” (Taylor 111)
Recovering the good
Despite the many “deviant forms” resulting from individualism and instrumental reasoning, Taylor advocates “espousing the ideal of authenticity at its best, and trying to raise our practice up to this level”. (Taylor 75) Moreover, he believes that “(1) that authenticity is truly an ideal worth espousing; (2) that you can establish in reason what it involves; and (3) that this kind of argument can make a difference in practice—that is, you can’t believe that people are so locked in by the various social developments that condition them to, say, atomism and instrumental reason that they couldn’t change their ways no matter how persuasive you were.” (Taylor 72)
Conclusion
Taylor’s three malaises of modernity can be expressed as three losses: a loss of meaning, an eclipse of the consideration of the ends, and a loss of freedom. The loss of freedom is the result a fragmentation which we might refer to as an atomization or polarization that prevents solidarity and allows a “tutelary state” to arise.
I am not convinced, however that reasoning alone will ameliorate the malaise. With respect to extreme individualism, “authenticity”, and perhaps also to to the primacy of instrumental reasoning, which tempts us to view persons as objects, I find this statement from the Second Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World to be most apt:
Man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself. (Gaudium et Spes 24)
Works Cited
“CBC Massey Lectures.” Massey College, 2024, www.masseycollege.ca/cbc-massey-lectures/. Accessed 11 Feb. 2025.
Paul VI. Gaudium et Spes [Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World]. The Holy See, 7 Dec. 1965, www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html.
Taylor, Charles. The Malaise of Modernity. House of Anansi Press, 1991.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America — Volume 2. Translated by Henry Reeve, Project Gutenberg, 21 Jan. 2006, www.gutenberg.org/files/816/816-h/816-h.htm.dd
