Misreading One’s Sources: Charles Taylor’s Rousseau Jonathan Marks Carthage College This article challenges Taylor’s defense of community by criticizing his reading of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Taylor, who adheres to the old charge that Rousseau is at bottom a totalitarian, neglects several points of resistance to the claims of the community that are present in Rousseau’s political thought. Such points of resistance prove, on close examination, to be unavailable to Taylor. Taylor inadvertently offers a theoretical attack on individualism and a foundation for social tyranny more powerful than any to be found in Rousseau’s thought. T his article challenges Charles Taylor’s defense of community by criticizing his reading of Jean- Jacques Rousseau. There is nothing surprising about this approach, since Rousseau is a pivotal figure in Taylor’s understanding of the history of modernity, one to whom he frequently refers and who arguably “had a major impact on his thinking” (Abbey 2000, 5). But this approach is also questionable, especially when applied to Taylor, whose aim of diagnosing our culture’s ills depends on understanding the forces a thinker and his follow- ers helped set in motion, not on understanding what the thinker meant to say (1989a, 536, n. 2). On the other hand, Taylor does think it worthwhile to retrieve the philosophic past insofar as it enables us to get beyond recent attacks on and defenses of modern life, which share a narrow understanding of what modernity is, and to overcome the “cramped formulations of mainstream philosophy” (1989a, x–xi, 107). The study of the history of ideas is, for Taylor, at least one means of becoming acquainted with richer sources of argument and inspiration than the ones we know. That claim leaves open the possibility that there is still more to learn from studying Rousseau with a view to what he meant than from studying the assorted “men- talities” to which he may or may not have contributed. Taylor himself thinks that Rousseau did no more than Jonathan Marks is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Philosophy, Carthage College, Kenosha, WI 53140-1994 (jmarks@carthage. edu). I am grateful to Ruth Abbey, Wendy Gunther-Canada, Steven Kautz, Roger Masters, and Joseph Reisert for commenting on early versions of this article. A discussion with my colleague Dan Magurshak helped me complete the final version. I am also grateful to the Symposium on Science, Reason, and Modern Democracy at Michigan State University and the Earhart Foundation for their generous financial support. Finally, I would like to thank my anonymous reviewers and the editors of this journal. 1 Rosenblum argues that this characteristic is widely shared among communitarians: “The communitarian purpose in opposing community to atomistic individualism is not the traditional one of transcending the self through identification with a group or nation. On the contrary, the object is to recover strong, expressive selves, to make ‘thin’ selves ‘thick’” (1989, 218). Rosenblum’s characterization certainly applies to Sandel (1982, 175–83). articulate “something that was already happening in the culture” (1991, 27). I am not a good enough historian to defend Rousseau’s originality. But I do intend to show that Taylor’s selective reading and misreading of Rousseau obscures the challenge Rousseau’s political thought poses to his own. Taylor concedes that Rousseau is a relative but only a kind of crazy uncle from whom he would like to dis- tance himself. Like Taylor, Rousseau is concerned at one and the same time with community and authenticity, which at first appear to be opposed concerns. 1 He is “one of the points of origin of the modern discourse of au- thenticity,” but he understands that complete indepen- dence from social opinion is impossible for individuals; consequently, he becomes “one of the originators of the discourse of recognition” (Taylor 1994, 44–49). On this reading, Rousseau is a trailblazer for all those who, like Taylor, value authenticity but recognize that it is grounded in community. However, Rousseau, who blazes so many trails, ultimately follows just one to its end, and it leads to a political community characterized by “a tight unity of purpose that seems to be incompatible with any kind of differentiation.” That political community, described in the Social Contract , is a model for “the most terrible forms of homogenizing tyranny, starting with the Jacobins and American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 49, No. 1, January 2005, Pp. 119–134 C 2005 by the Midwest Political Science Association ISSN 0092-5853 119