Tailing Taylor

Julian Sanchez | March 29, 2006

The Washington Post reports that Charles Taylor has been apprehended in Nigeria and will soon be handed over to the U.N. to face war crimes charges. Now, I'm the first to cede that Charles Taylor's communitarian thought has many unattractive features—from the abstract privileging of "forms of life" that are held to constitute "embedded" persons over the dynamic individuals who shape and recombine and give personal meaning to those forms, to the policy-level folly of reading "multiculturalism" as requiring giving coercive power to culture-groups so they can sustain themselves. But really, "war crimes"? I mean, Sources of the Self is actually a penetrating and useful book.

Sorry, what? Oh, that Charles Taylor. Well, serves him right, then.