WORK
Sources of the Self (Work)
Taylor's 1989 magnum opus — a sweeping history of the modern Western self that traces how ideals of inwardness, ordinary life, and expressive individuality came to constitute the moral framework within which modern identity unfolds.
Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Harvard University Press, 1989) is Taylor's most systematic work — a 600-page historical and philosophical reconstruction of how the modern Western self came to be organized around three great constellations of moral sources: the ideal of inwardness and self-responsible reason descending from Augustine through Descartes and Locke; the affirmation of ordinary life as a site of moral seriousness descending from the Reformation through the scientific revolution; and the expressivist turn descending from Rousseau and the Romantics that made self-expression the highest form of authenticity. The book's argument is that modern identity is richer than either its critics or its defenders acknowledge, and that its moral resources have been obscured by the narrowing of contemporary moral vocabulary to the languages of rights, procedural justice, and utilitarian calculation.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book opens with a methodological argument: human beings are