Good Reads

So you've slogged your way through the Taylor? (Feel free to use a different verb to characterize it, of course.) I was very interested in getting a hold of it, until I reread the first half or so of The Ethics of Authenticity, which I found woefully underargued, even for a lecture series. But I did like Sources a lot.

Perhaps you've written about it and I didn't see (not too unlikely, to be honest), but if not, thoughts on it?

Charles Taylor's A Secular Age rocks the house.

John Gray wrote a review of A Secular Age in the January issue of Harper's. Although Charles Taylor says, "the new humanism has taken over universalism from its Christian roots," he modestly frustrates Gray. Here, again, Gray thinks that the Christian belief in an end to history is the defining kernel to modern ideologies. However much he owes to Isaiah Berlin for this belief, Gray makes a specific citation of The Pursuit of the Millennium by Norman Cohn (1957). That book, he suggests, may have shaped much of his thinking on Marx.

Not so much "have slogged" as "am slogging." It's certainly a doorstop of a book. A good bet that somebody at Harvard UP is urging him to do the Daily ShowAge yet but might at some point.

I have a vague memory of reading Gray's review while we were in transit during Christmas -- that issue was on the newstands then -- but don't remember it very well.

The problem with discussing any given influence on Gray's understanding of Marx is, alas, that he does not really know anything about Marx. He would be a good instructor for that Australian philosophy department in the Monty Python sketch: "You can teach any of the great socialist thinkers, as long as you show that they're wrong." Gray just starts out from there and goes looking for "influences" that must have existed. He turns Marx into a follower of Saint-Simon and Comte, for example, which is... well, imaginative.