The Ethics of Authenticity

Charles Taylor's The Ethics of Authenticity diagnoses three modern malaises — individualism, instrumental reason, and the soft despotism of technocratic politics — while arguing that authenticity is a genuine moral ideal that has been debased, not one to be abandoned. Taylor calls for recovering the moral horizon that gives authenticity its point.

Distinguished between the authentic ideal itself and its debased popular forms (narcissism, self-absorption), showing that a richer concept of authenticity requires orientation toward a moral horizon beyond the self — a critique of both conservative cultural pessimism and liberal relativism.