¹ The literature on the contested history of analytic philosophy has rapidly grown in recent years. See Monk, Ray and Palmer, Anthony, eds., Bertrand Russell and the Origins of Analytical Philosophy (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1996)Google Scholar; Hylton, Peter, Russell, Idealism, and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Richardson, Alan, Carnap's Construction of the World: The “Aufbau” and the Emergence of Logical Empiricism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Beaney, Michael, “Conceptions of Analysis in Early Analytic Philosophy,” Acta Analytica 15 (2000): 97–115Google Scholar; Biletzki, Anat and Matar, Anat, eds., The Story of Analytic Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1998)Google Scholar; and Floyd, Juliet and Shieh, Sanford, eds., Future Pasts: The Analytic Tradition in Twentieth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

² Berlin, Isaiah, “Does Political Theory Still Exist?,” in Concepts and Categories, ed. Hardy, Henry (Oxford: Penguin Books, 1979)Google Scholar. Cf. Shklar, Judith, After Utopia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957)Google Scholar, vii; Strauss, Leo, “What Is Political Philosophy?,” in What Is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1959)Google Scholar, 17.

³ I do not address in this article the broader impact of the Cold War on the development of twentieth-century political theory. See Gunnell, John, “American Political Science, Liberalism, and the Alienation of Political Theory,” American Political Science Review 82, no. 1 (1988): 71–87Google Scholar; McCumber, John, Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011)Google Scholar. Bevir, Mark has detailed the shared themes and dilemmas comprising “modernist empiricism” in “Histories of Analytic Political Philosophy,” History of European Ideas 23 (2011): 243–48Google Scholar; and “Political Studies as Narrative and Science, 1880–2000,” Political Studies 54 (2006): 583–606CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For historical analysis, Bentley, Michael, Modernizing England's Past: English Historiography in the Age of Modernism 1870–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

⁴ Laslett, Peter, introduction to Philosophy, Politics and Society, ed. Laslett, Peter (Oxford: Blackwell, 1956)Google Scholar, viii.

⁵ Others such as Quentin Skinner and Sheldon Wolin have also been viewed as saviors. See Adcock, Robert and Bevir, Mark, “The Remaking of Political Theory,” in Modern Political Science: Anglo-American Exchanges since 1880, ed. Adcock, Robert, Bevir, Mark, and Stimson, Shannon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 208–33Google Scholar.

⁶ Recent examples include Arneson, Richard, “Justice After Rawls,” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory, ed. Dryzek, J., Honig, B., and Phillips, A. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 45–64Google Scholar; Moon, J. Donald, “The Current State of Political Theory: Pluralism and Reconciliation,” in What Is Political Theory?, ed. White, S. and Moon, J. (London: Sage, 2004)Google Scholar.

⁷ Although it would be possible to point to Taylor's early political engagements at Oxford—his involvement with the New Left, Marxism—as well as his occasional self-descriptions as “social democrat” and “civic republican” as somehow disqualifying him as a proper liberal, Taylor has long expressed unwavering commitment to values we would unquestionably count as liberal: respect for individual autonomy and human rights, individual agency, ethical pluralism, the rule of law, and so on. Calling attention to the way that Taylor represents an interpretive, humanist liberal tradition helps to decenter Rawlsian liberalism on the map of contemporary liberal theory and makes it possible to retrieve the concern with theorizing selfhood and identity, as well as closer lineages to idealist and socialist ideas through T. H. Green and other British Idealists, that was discontinued by Rawls.

⁸ Some go further and argue not only that pre-Rawlsian Anglo-American political thought was not as moribund as Rawlsians often assume, but that the moralizing tendency of Rawlsian political philosophy has been out of step with classical liberalism and has been generally unhealthy for the enterprise. See Geuss, Raymond, Outside Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar, chaps. 1–2.

⁹ I call attention to this particular tradition, which comprises an important but as yet under-plotted strand of modern liberalism. The term “humanist liberalism” has previously been used in two related contexts I know of. First in 1989 by Okin, Susan Moller, whose essay “Humanist Liberalism,” in Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. Rosenblum, Nancy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989)Google Scholar, calls attention to the need for liberal theorists to better understand the pervasive effects of gender roles. In 1994, David Johnston used the term to delineate his preferred alternative to the rights-centered, perfectionist, and political modes of contemporary liberalism—which built on each of their weaknesses in favor of a less “racist,” “sexist,” and “classist” and less utilitarian and more “value-sensitive” liberal theory in his The Idea of a Liberal Theory: A Critique and Reconstruction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994)Google Scholar. For a marvelous defense of the use of the signifier “humanism,” see Bernstein, Richard, The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 1–14Google Scholar. While I wish to pay homage to each of these authors, my use refers to the particular characteristics of Taylor's philosophy I draw out as humanist for the kind of interpretivism it emphasizes, precisely in contrast to the legacy of modernist empiricism.

¹⁰ West, Cornel, “Hegel, Hermeneutics, Politics: A Reply to Charles Taylor,” Cardozo Law Review 10, no. 5/6 (1989): 872Google Scholar.

¹¹ Abbey, Ruth has already pointed out the contested history of contemporary liberalism itself: Abbey, “Is Liberalism Now an Essentially Contested Concept?,” Journal of New Political Science 27, no. 4 (2005): 461–80Google Scholar. Several commentators, including Abbey, have already shown how in his present form, Taylor is some species of liberal. I build on this insight to show that reading Taylor as a (mere) communitarian is a mistake, but this widespread misreading is a symptom of a larger, deeply pervasive, narrative about Rawls and twentieth-century liberalism in the Anglo-American context. Taylor's views on interpretation and philosophical method have received far less attention in the literature; the purpose of this paper is to advance the pivotal role they have in how contemporary liberal theorizing in the Anglo-American context should be understood in the wake of analysis.

¹² Readings of Taylor that categorize him among the “communitarian” critics of Rawls are legion in the literature. One discussion worth mentioning exhibits a version of this misperception, namely, Kymlicka'sLiberalism, Community, and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 47–99Google Scholar, esp. 76, 86–89, where he appears at times to conflate Taylor's social thesis with Sandel's “politics of the common good.” Ironically, it was this work that demonstrated how liberal and communitarian perspectives need be viewed not as antithetical but as mutually dependent, particularly concerning minority cultural rights. A recent example can be found in Sarah Song's reading of what Taylor means by culture “as an irreducibly social good,” which she takes to be a collectivist version of “strong multiculturalism” compared to Kymlicka's “weak multiculturalism” (Song, Justice, Gender, and the Politics of Multiculturalism [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007], esp. 17–22Google Scholar).

¹³ It is in Quine's sense of the collapse of the analytic-synthetic distinction that I take both Rawls and Taylor to be post-analytic figures (W. V. O. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” Philosophical Review 60 [1951]).

¹⁴ Others at Oxford similarly enamored of logical positivism and linguistic analysis continued to work on ethical questions—e.g., H. L. A. Hart on the relationship between law and morality; R. M. Hare on universal prescriptivism; and G. A. Cohen who famously applied analysis to Marxism. Rawls, however, is germane to the liberal context that is the focus of this paper. While Rawls was contemporary with, if not preceded by, Brian Barry, present-day significance puts Rawls at the center of the backdrop in contrast to Taylor.

¹⁵ Nicholas Smith details the impact of the developments of Oxford philosophy on Taylor as a student and in turn how Taylor shaped those developments in his Charles Taylor: Meanings, Morals and Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2002)Google Scholar.

¹⁶ How one draws this division will depend to some degree on one's purposes. For example, Charles Blattberg emphasizes a version of this opposition that distinguishes between “monists” like Rawls and Dworkin, who fail to “take politics seriously enough,” and pluralists like Berlin and Hampshire, who view incommensurable values as irreconcilable and so take politics as a matter of tragic compromises (Charles Blattberg, “Taking Politics Seriously—But Not Too Seriously,” available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1723387).

¹⁷ Galisanka, Andrius and Bevir, Mark, “John Rawls in Historical Context,” History of Political Thought 33, no. 4 (2012): 701–25Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Pogge's account details how the developments in British and Oxford philosophy—including J. L. Austin, Gilbert Ryle, H. L. A. Hart, Peter Strawson, H. Paul Grice, and R. M. Hare—had a great impact on Rawls's thinking (Pogge, Thomas, John Rawls: His Life and Theory of Justice [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007]CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

¹⁹ Carnap, Rudolf, The Logical Syntax of Language (London: Kegan Paul, 1937)Google Scholar.

²⁰ Thomas Pogge, John Rawls, 17.

²¹ Rawls repeats his view of the independence of moral theory in several places, asserting that normative considerations are autonomous and need not be adjudicated by considerations about human nature or facts about our social condition: Rawls, “Outline of a Decision Procedure for Ethics,” Philosophical Review 60, no. 2 (1951): 177–97Google Scholar; “The Independence of Moral Theory,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 48 (1974)Google Scholar.

²² Elsewhere, I have expounded its main themes, namely, an antinaturalist, vitalist philosophy of human sciences, an antirelativist, antiskeptical stance on the importance of human values, and a deep concern with the political implications of the irreducible plurality of such values in human life. See Choi, Naomi, “The Post-Analytic Roots of Humanist Liberalism,” History of European Ideas 37, no. 3 (2011): 280–92Google Scholar.

²³ Isaiah Berlin, “Verification,” in Concepts and Categories.

²⁴ He writes, “disagreement can arise only about the adequacy of this or that suggested analysis of how material object sentences are to be ‘reduced’ (without residue) to sentences describing both what the observer does, or did, or will observe, as well as what he would, or would have, might or might have, observed under appropriate conditions” (Berlin, “Empirical Propositions and Hypothetical Statements,” Mind 59, no. 235 [1950]: 289–312).

²⁵ See the essay that is widely thought to be Berlin's final contribution to the specific field of analytic philosophy, “Logical Translation,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 50 (1949–50)Google Scholar.

²⁶ IBerlin, saiah, “The Concept of Scientific History,” in The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, ed. Hardy, Henry and Hausheer, Roger (London: Chatto and Windus, 1997)Google Scholar, 34. The broader view of philosophy that Berlin espoused can be found distilled in two essays that appeared in the early 1960s, “The Purpose of Philosophy,” published in the Sunday Times, 4 November 1962, and “Does Political Theory Still Exist?”

²⁷ He argued that our concept of a voluntary, intentional agent is embedded in a network of concepts of space, time, material objects, motion, the perceiving agent, and its perceptual faculties. So tightly woven are these concepts, he contended, that the idea of an observer who is not also an active agent, of a thinker who is not also an actor, is precluded as incoherent (Hampshire, Stuart, Thought and Action [New York: Viking, 1960]Google Scholar).

²⁸ Hampshire, Stuart , “Self-Knowledge and the Will,” Revue internationale de philosophie 7, no. 25 (1953): 230–45Google Scholar; cf. “On Referring and Intending,” Philosophical Review 65 (1956): 1–13Google Scholar.

²⁹ Stuart Hampshire with H. L. A. Hart, “Decision, Intention and Certainty,” Mind 67 (1958): 1–12.

³⁰ Taylor's 1961 DPhil thesis, “Explanation by Purpose and Modern Psychological Theory,” supervised by Berlin, is housed in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. It was eventually published as The Explanation of Behaviour (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964)Google Scholar.

³¹ See A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971)Google Scholar, 21, where Rawls views philosophy as the attempt “to render coherent” our considered moral judgments.

³² Such is his view for any of the standard meanings of the term “metaphysics” (Rawls, “Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 14, no. 3 [Summer 1985]: 223–51Google Scholar).

³³ Theory of Justice, Part One; Rawls, “The Priority of Right and Ideas of the Good,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 17, no. 4 (1988): 251–76Google Scholar; Arneson, Richard, “The Priority of the Right over the Good Rides Again,” Ethics 108, no. 1 (1997): 169–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Freeman, Samuel, “Utilitarianism, Deontology, and the Priority of the Right,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 23, no. 4 (1994): 313–49Google Scholar.

³⁴ Rawls's concern with procedural justification can be seen from his earliest formulations in “Justice as Fairness,” Philosophical Review 67, no. 2 (1958): 164–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “The Sense of Justice,” Philosophical Review 72, no. 3 (1963): 281–305Google Scholar; “Fairness to Goodness,” Philosophical Review 84, no. 4 (1975): 536–54Google Scholar.

³⁵ Rawls displaces the metaphysics in Kant's doctrine of human dignity with a combination of a Lockean contract and a Humean conception of “rough equality” as the basis for cooperation. See Hampton, Jean, “Contracts and Choices: Does Rawls Have a Social Contract Theory?,” Journal of Philosophy 77, no. 6 (1980): 315–38Google Scholar.

³⁶ Kymlicka offers a useful narrative of the specifically American historical context of the moral commitments that motivated Rawls's thinking about justice (Kymlicka, “The Americanization of Political Philosophy in Canada,” Oxford Literary Review 28, no. 1 [2008]: 79–89)Google Scholar.

³⁷ Taylor, Charles, “The Nature and Scope of Distributive Justice,” in Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 289–317Google Scholar.

³⁸ Rawls, John, “Social Unity and Primary Goods,” in Utilitarianism and Beyond, ed. Sen, Amartya and Williams, Bernard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)Google Scholar, 172; cf. Theory of Justice, 91 and 396.

³⁹ Particularly following Sandel, Michael, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ Alejandro, Robert, “Rawls's Communitarianism,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 23, no. 1 (1993): 75–100Google Scholar; Schwarzenbach, Sibyl, “Rawls, Hegel, and Communitarianism,” Political Theory 19, no. 4 (1991): 539–71Google Scholar.

⁴¹ Mulhall, S. and Swift, A., Liberals and Communitarians (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992)Google Scholar.

⁴² Rawls clarifies this point in “Justice as Fairness,” 223–51.

⁴³ Ibid. Rawls repeats this position in several papers: “Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical,” “The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus,” and “The Priority of the Right and Ideas of the Good,” in Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 388–414, 421–48, and 449–72, respectively.

⁴⁴ Taylor, Charles, “The Concept of a Person,” in Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)Google Scholar, 97.

⁴⁵ Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992)Google Scholar, 3: “To give a good first approximation of what this [“modern identity”] means would be to say that it involves tracing various strands of our modern notion of what it is to be a human agent, a person, or a self. But pursuing this investigation soon shows that you can't get very clear about this without some further understanding of how our pictures of the good have evolved. Selfhood and the good, or in another way selfhood and morality, turn out to be inextricably intertwined themes.”

⁴⁶ Charles Taylor, “What Is Human Agency?,” in Philosophical Papers, vol. 1, chap. 1. For basic outline of Taylor's concept of strong evaluation as an essential aspect of selfhood, see Nicholas Smith, Charles Taylor: Meaning, Morals, and Modernity, 87–121. See also Ruth Abbey, Charles Taylor, 55–100.

⁴⁷ Rawls's theory always had ontological assumptions that are social; see especially Part Three of Theory of Justice.

⁴⁸ Cf. Kymlicka's critiques of Rawls's use of the phrase “the priority of the right” to affirm both neutrality over perfectionism and deontology over teleology: Kymlicka, “Rawls on Teleology and Deontology,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 17 (1988): 173–90Google Scholar; “Liberal Individualism and Liberal Neutrality,” Ethics 99, no. 4 (1989): 886n6Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ Taylor argues that a holist ontology, which can be either individualist or collectivist on advocacy issues, can underpin liberal values and practices. According to Taylor, Humboldt is holist on the ontological question but individualist in advocacy, and, not surprisingly, this is the Humboldt that Taylor finds very attractive. See Taylor, Charles, “Cross Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate,” in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 185Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ Charles Taylor, “Atomism,” in Philosophical Papers, vol. 2, 187–210.

⁵¹ Theory of Justice, 440

⁵² Although in Political Liberalism (181n9) Rawls appears to hint at modifications that would make benefits conditional.

⁵³ Taylor, “Nature and Scope of Distributive Justice,” 302.

⁵⁴ Taylor writes that a modern society “can be judged by independent, mutually irreducible principles of distributive justice” (“Nature and Scope of Distributive Justice,” 312; my emphasis).

⁵⁵ Taylor, Sources of the Self, 77

⁵⁶ Taylor, “What Is Human Agency?,” 38.

⁵⁷ Hedrick, Todd, Rawls and Habermas: Reason, Pluralism, and the Claims of Political Philosophy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Weithman, Paul, Why Political Liberalism? On John Rawls's Political Turn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)Google Scholar; and S.Taylor, Robert, Reconstructing Rawls: The Kantian Foundations of Justice as Fairness (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ Samuel Scheffler writes, “Rawls's work as he now presents it is addressed to modern democratic societies at a certain historical moment. His political liberalism seeks to establish a liberal conception of justice on the basis of ideas that are implicit in the public political culture of such societies” (Scheffler, Boundaries and Allegiances [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001]Google Scholar, 146).

⁵⁹ J. Donald Moon, “Current State of Political Theory,” 20.

⁶⁰ Stuart Hampshire, “Liberalism: The New Twist,” review of Political Liberalism by John Rawls, New York Review of Books, August 12, 1993.

⁶¹ On precisely the issue of the different styles of the politics of recognition and the variety of solutions to the challenge of democratic inclusion, Taylor states, “there are not too many things that one can say in utter generality. Solutions have to be tailored to particular situations” (Taylor, Charles, “Democratic Exclusion (and Its Remedies?),” in Multiculturalism, Liberalism and Democracy, ed. Bhargava, R., Bagchi, A. K., and Sudarshan, R. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999]Google Scholar, 163).

⁶² Taylor, Charles, “Response to Bromwich's ‘Culturalism, the Euthanasia of Liberalism,’” Dissent 42 (Winter 1995): 103–4Google Scholar.

⁶³ White, Stephen, Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Dean, Jodi, “A Politics of Avoidance: The Limits of Weak Ontology,” Hedgehog Review 7, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 55–65Google Scholar; Saurette, Paul, “Questioning Charles Taylor's Contrarianism,” Political Theory 32, no. 5 (2004): 723–33Google Scholar.

⁶⁴ This notion of background conditions that shape but do not themselves determine answers is the main reason that many commentators, such as Stephen White, Ruth Abbey, Nicholas Smith, and myself, read Taylor as a “weak ontologist” as opposed to “strong.” In contrast, other readers, such as Quentin Skinner and Paul Saurette, tend to portray a less historicist, less postmodern Taylor. See Skinner, “Modernity and Disenchantment: Some Historical Reflections,” in Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism, ed. Tully, James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Saurette, Paul, The Kantian Imperative: Humiliation, Common Sense, Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

⁶⁵ Addressing the problem of pluralism by those committed to the idea of publicly giving reasons to justify decisions, policies, or laws has been the central concern of deliberative theorists, whether from a Rawlsian perspective or those more critical of it. For the former, see Freeman, Samuel, “Deliberative Democracy: A Sympathetic Comment,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 29 (2000): 371–418Google Scholar; for the latter, see Bohman, James and Richardson, Henry, “Liberalism, Deliberative Democracy, and ‘Reasons That All Can Accept,’” Journal of Political Philosophy 17, no. 3 (2009): 253–74Google Scholar.

⁶⁶ Maclure, Jocelyn and Taylor, Charles, Secularism and Freedom of Conscience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011)Google Scholar, 107; Taylor, Charles, “Religion and European Integration,” in Religion in the New Europe: Conditions of European Solidarity, ed. Michalski, Krzysztof (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2006), 16–17Google Scholar; Taylor, Charles, “Conditions of an Unforced Consensus of Human Rights,” in The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights, eds. Bauer, Joanne and Bell, Daniel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 124–25Google Scholar, 143.

⁶⁷ Whether or not one regards the shift in Rawls's thinking over time as an improvement, both iterations exhibit these features. The idea of neutrality I am invoking follows both senses that Raz distinguished: “neutral political concern” and “exclusion of ideals” (Raz, The Morality of Freedom [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986]Google Scholar, 117).

⁶⁸ Taylor adopts Gadamer's notion of “horizon” to emphasize the situatedness of all interpretations occurring within a tradition of discourse; and he employs Gadamer's view of the openness and flexibility of conceptual paradigms through the dialogical process of “fusion,” for which both sides are necessary for greater understanding. See Taylor, Charles, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Gutmann, Amy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 67–70Google Scholar.

⁶⁹ For a concise summary of this theme throughout a number of Taylor's essays, see Abbey, Ruth and Choi, Naomi, “Charles Taylor,” in The Encyclopedia of Political Thought, 8 vols. (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014)Google Scholar.

⁷⁰ Taylor, Charles, “The Dynamics of Democratic Exclusion,” Journal of Democracy 9, no. 4 (1998): 143–56Google Scholar.

⁷¹ Other detractors have argued that Taylor's theory of recognition betrays a liberal tendency to continue misrecognizing some groups of people, e.g., the disabled. See Arneil, Barbara, “Disability, Self-Image, and Modern Political Theory,” Political Theory 37, no. 2 (2009): 218–42Google Scholar.

⁷² Taylor, Charles, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

⁷³ An example of what this might look like can be found in a recent project Taylor helped bring about on the issue of reasonable accommodation for ethnic or religious minorities in secular societies. The Taylor-Bouchard commission sought to inquire into the plural meanings embodied in various cultural practices through town hall meetings and careful cross-cultural dialogue, to better understand the variety of meanings that reflects the underlying goals of particular practices. The Bouchard-Taylor commission's report is available online at http://collections.banq.qc.ca/ark:/52327/bs1565996.

⁷⁴ Friedman, Jeffrey, “The Politics of Communitarianism,” Critical Review 8 (1994): 297–340Google Scholar. Abbey, Ruth has described Taylor as a “theorist of liberal democracy who is both a liberal and a democrat” in “Pluralism in Practice: The Political Thought of Charles Taylor,” Critical Review of International and Social Political Philosophy 5, no. 3 (2002)Google Scholar; cf. Ruth Abbey, Charles Taylor, 125.

⁷⁵ Rawls has maintained that his style of deontological liberalism is one among a range of possible approaches within liberal theory; yet many Rawlsians continue to take his approach to be coextensive with liberalism itself.

⁷⁶ Juxtaposing their contributions to liberal theory furnishes superb resources for thinking about the latter's past and future. This paper draws attention to several themes but in doing so my hope is to inspire further comparative studies, as none have appeared since Rorty, Richard, “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 175–96Google Scholar.

⁷⁷ To my knowledge, there has heretofore been no other study in the scholarly literature that explicitly compares their approaches to liberal theory, or roots their differences in the shared context in which diverse analytic and postanalytic thinkers came to reinvent political philosophy in the Anglophone world.