ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests what consequences for politics might follow from unpacking the idea of narrative identity. Some aspects of narrative identity as have described it are already recognized in or supported by political theory. However, as the citations in the substantive chapter suggest, these connections or correlations are widely scattered across the range of what can be labelled political theory; they are not generally followed through or brought together in such a way as to interrelate with a full and coherent account of narrative identity. The chapter suggests that some political theorizing could profitably begin from narrative identity, seeing what then follows. Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self and The Ethics of Authenticity combine these two meanings inasmuch as they seek to establish the modern self as a being with specific features of identity which demand recognition as affirming that identity, with 'authenticity' as a function of self-affirmation of that identity.
