In 1975 Cambridge University Press published a book that was to transform English-language reception of nineteenth-century German philosophy forever. The book, Charles Taylor's Hegel, offered a comprehensive interpretation of Hegel's thought dedicated to revealing the philosophical significance of that thought to readers for whom terms such as ‘dialectic’ and ‘self-positing spirit’ signalled the essential incomprehensibility of analytic philosophy's constitutive ‘other’: the ‘Continental’ tradition of philosophy. It is difficult to overstate the impact Hegel had on young Anglophone readers. For those of us who were interested in post-Kantian German thought but had no philosophical access to it, Taylor's book provided a new orientation that made it possible to begin reading Hegel's texts productively. The current resurgence of Hegelian thought outside Europe – unimaginable forty years ago – would not have been possible without Taylor's pioneering work.

Four years after the publication of Hegel there appeared a much shorter work by Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society. This volume claimed to ‘condense’ the earlier one so as to focus on what Taylor regarded as the part of Hegel's thought most relevant to contemporary concerns: his philosophy of society and politics. The book's thesis was that Hegel's social philosophy attempted to satisfy two aspirations bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment and its Romantic successors: aspirations to radical autonomy and to expressive unity with nature and society. Achieving this aim required Hegel to re-think Enlightenment conceptions of reason and freedom such that individuals’ identity-constituting social attachments could be seen to be compatible with – indeed, constitutive of – their freedom and well-being. One of the important contributions of Hegel and Modern Society is that it combatted prevailing Anglophone post-World War II stereotypes of Hegel as a proto-Fascist apologist for totalitarianism for whom freedom required sacrificing individuals’ interests to the ends of an amorphous, all-determining State. Taylor's Hegel, in contrast, aimed not to deny the rights of individuality but to synthesize them with the intrinsic good of communal membership, which explains why Hegel and Modern Society emphasized the need to preserve differentiation (and to find a place for the individual rights heralded by liberalism) while fostering forms of social life that enable individuals to value their social participation non-instrumentally, as a fundamental dimension of their own good.