Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991, 142 pp. (ISBN 0-674-26863-6); reissued 2018 (ISBN 978-0-674-98769-2). The publisher’s digital edition carries DOI-10.4159/9780674237117, which Crossref dates 31 December 1992; the DOI is carried as the citable identifier, and it names the Harvard edition, not the Canadian one.
The two editions. The Harvard edition’s title-page verso, as Open
Library transcribes it, reads: “Originally published in Canada in 1991
under the title The malaise of modernity”. The Malaise of Modernity
(Concord, Ont.: House of Anansi, 1991, 135 pp.) is in the series “CBC
Massey lectures, 1991”; secondary sources describe it as an extended
version of the five lectures broadcast on CBC Radio’s Ideas in November
1991. The brief’s account of the editions is right. No source gives a day
or month for either printing, so published: carries 1991 as the first of
January. The two are one text under two titles; this entry stands for
both, and nothing should be filed for The Malaise of Modernity separately.
Key takeaways
Not a reading. No publisher’s description could be fetched (see below), so what follows is the book’s argument as it is commonly summarized, including in the search-engine summaries I saw. It is a placeholder for a reading and should not be cited as Taylor’s text.
- The claim. Contemporary individualism and subjectivism, and the loss of shared horizons, produce what Taylor calls malaises of modernity; yet the ideal behind them, authenticity, being true to oneself, is a genuine moral ideal to be retrieved, not dismissed as narcissism or indulged as relativism.
- What authenticity needs, on the same summaries: horizons of significance against which some choices matter more than others, and the recognition of others, because identity is formed in dialogue.
- The book is also widely summarized as naming three malaises (self-fulfilment that narrows lives, the primacy of instrumental reason, and a loss of freedom in public life). That is from my prior knowledge of the book, not from any source fetched here; a reading should confirm or correct it.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-03 at the owner’s request, as the canonical philosophical statement of authenticity as an ethical ideal. It is moral and social philosophy with no instruction for machine-learning practice, so no anthology topic holds it. The Anthology of the SOTA does not hold it: a grep of its literature.d for “Taylor” and “authenticity” found nothing by him.
The book rule. The owner welcomes replacing a long book with a shorter, lawfully readable work by the same author that does the same job. The book is already short (142 pages, five lectures expanded). I looked for a shorter Taylor text stating the same argument: “The Politics of Recognition” (1992), which restates the ideal of authenticity and the dialogical formation of identity, is the obvious candidate, but no lawful open copy turned up; his 1992 Tanner Lecture (“Modernity and the Rise of the Public Sphere”) is about the public sphere, not authenticity. So nothing was read in its place, and the book is filed itself, because it is the citation anyone writing on authenticity reaches for, and the record would lose the philosophical side of the batch without it.
Where it would bear, once read. The batch’s psychology measures authenticity as a trait or state in individuals: Kernis and Goldman’s four components (LIT-574), Wood and colleagues’ Authenticity Scale (LIT-592), and the true self-concept of Schlegel and colleagues (LIT-606). None of those constructs includes a horizon of significance: a person scores as authentic by acting on what he takes to be his own values, whatever they are. Sheldon and Elliot (LIT-589) meet the problem from the other side: they concede that a goal can be fully self-concordant and evil, and that a complete model must address “the what of striving” as well as the why. That is Taylor’s objection to self-determining freedom stated by psychologists about their own construct. SDT’s integration (THEORY-054) is the nearest psychological analogue, since it says some values are “not integrateable”, but it grounds that in organismic needs, not in shared horizons. A reading should say whether Taylor’s horizons are a condition on authenticity itself or on its being worth having.
Priority for a reading: medium. It would give the record a first-hand philosophical account of authenticity to set against the psychologists’, but no THEORY in the record waits on it.
Access when seeded:
- Crossref record for the Harvard digital edition (DOI above).
- Open Library edition records for both titles, including the verso note quoted above.
- Internet Archive item ethicsofauthenti00tayl: metadata only; the scan is access-restricted (lending).
- De Gruyter’s front-matter PDF returned an empty response with status 202 (a bot check), and the Harvard catalogue URL tried returned 404.