Charles Taylor

Lore & Background

Charles Margrave Taylor was born in Montreal, Quebec, on November 5, 1931, to a Roman Catholic Francophone mother and a Protestant Anglophone father, and was raised bilingually. His father, Walter Margrave Taylor, was a steel magnate from Toronto; his mother, Simone Marguerite Beaubien, was a dressmaker. His sister was Gretta Chambers. Taylor attended Selwyn House School from 1939 to 1946, then Trinity College School from 1946 to 1949.

He earned a BA in history from McGill University in 1952, then went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, receiving a BA with first-class honours in philosophy, politics and economics in 1955, and a DPhil in 1961 under Sir Isaiah Berlin. As an undergraduate, he started one of the first campaigns to ban thermonuclear weapons in the UK in 1956, serving as first president of the Oxford Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Recent research has explored his engagement with socialist politics during this time.

Reader's Guide

Taylor succeeded John Plamenatz as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford and became a fellow of All Souls College. For many years, both before and after Oxford, he was Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at McGill University, where he is now professor emeritus. He was also a Board of Trustees Professor of Law and Philosophy at Northwestern University for several years after retiring from McGill. In 1986, he was elected a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 1991, he was appointed to the Conseil de la langue française in Quebec, where he critiqued Quebec's commercial sign laws. In 1995, he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada. In 2000, he was made a Grand Officer of the National Order of Quebec. In 2007, Taylor and Gérard Bouchard headed a one-year commission of inquiry into reasonable accommodation for minority cultures in Quebec.

Taylor calls himself a 'monomaniac,' concerned with developing a convincing philosophical anthropology. He rejects naturalism and formalist epistemology, and is part of the Canadian idealism tradition including John Watson, George Paxton Young, C. B. Macpherson, and George Grant. In 'To Follow a Rule,' he argues, following Wittgenstein, that all interpretation of rules draws upon a tacit background of 'forms of life' and practices incorporated into our bodies as habits, dispositions, and tendencies. Taylor was a candidate for the social democratic New Democratic Party in Mount Royal three times in the 1960s: in 1962 he came third, in 1963 second, and in 1965 he also lost.