Abstract
This review-study aims to present a critical exposition of the ground-breaking work in the study of secularisation, Charles Taylor's Secular Age. The study points to the links with Taylor's preceding work, Sources of the Self, which consists above all in the contrast of the porous self and the buffered self.
It also presents Taylor's conception of secularization: secularization is not a retreat of religion from the public sphere, but the widening of the social process that makes it impossible for one world-view to make claim to a privileged status. The study also focuses on Taylor's rejection of modernity which, in the shape of a scientific world-view and a universalistic modernity understood as the hegemony of exclusively-human categories.
In the context of this rejection, the article discusses Taylor's attempt to weaken the "hegemony of the human" by a relation to transcendence.