ABSTRACT
This chapter describes lucid, subtle, and provocative formulations of the current debate in political philosophy that focuses on Hegel, a figure about whom Charles Taylor has written with great insight. The most desirable feature of a free society for Taylor is one in which there is a public space wherein reciprocal recognition and valuation creates and constitutes common bonds and allegiances of a participatory citizenry that fully exercises its self-realizing and self-determining capacities. In fact, his magisterial scholarship has contributed greatly to the historicist turn, the problematizing of liberalism and the critical inquiry into the cultures of liberal societies. For the first time in American legal studies, the crucial roles of race and especially gender are receiving wide attention as legitimate spheres of legal inquiry into what constitutes the ways of life that circumscribe the operations of power in the legal systems of liberal societies.
