Abstract

Charles Taylor’s Hegel is a massive, imposing volume whose bulk has doubtless daunted all but the most dedicated Hegel scholars from reading it. Charles Taylor’s Hegel and Modern Society takes material from the larger volume and, in about a quarter of its length and without its formidableness, presents the parts of Hegel necessary to comprehending Hegel’s relevance to modern society. As Taylor says in his “Preface,” the result is a book with “a quite different centre of gravity” and one well fitted to the aim of the series in which the book appears: to demonstrate the intelligibility and importance of contemporary European philosophy to a wide English-speaking audience, especially “those trained in analytical philosophy.”