Charles Taylor's conception of agency has always worn its relation to history on its sleeve. Even his earliest pieces, such as The Explanation of Behavior, which can look like a piece of analytical philosophy of action (or a piece of French inspired phenomenology developing itself into analytical philosophy) was concerned with “retrieving” a teleological model of agency and arguing for its virtues in the context of what was at the time of its writing a widely accepted bias in favor of behavioristic models of explanation. Taylor's more recent books, particularly Sources of the Self, bring the historicist elements of his thought front and center. In Sources, he explicitly joined other contemporary theorists, such as Alasdair MacIntyre, in arguing for the impossibility of a rational philosophical account of agency without also taking into account the various historical embeddings of our ideas of agency. No mere analysis of agency will give us an adequate understanding of agency, since the concepts that are being analyzed can only be understood in terms of their own complex history.

In his writings, and in Sources in particular, Taylor also has a particular point to make about how we are to understand history itself, particularly in terms of the vexing (and perhaps overworked) theme of “modernity.” The overarching theme of modernity in the wider culture is that of triumph and optimism: Modernity is identified with progress, which itself tends to be associated with technological improvements and ethical-political gains (rights for women, rights for minorities, decoupling of church and state, and so forth).