LAI ̈CITE ́other. As a specification of what is necessary to avoid fanaticism, such a generalized claim
concerning how an individual should relate to tradition should be rejected, for it is ques-
tionable that there is an either/or choice between distancing oneself from one’s tradition
and being subjected to it. The phrase repeats the freedom of conscience, but now makes
it something assigned by the state. This spills over into a concept of ‘‘liberal’’ individual
autonomy that is incompatible with recent moderate liberal views of the ‘‘reasonable
pluralism of the good life.’’^22 Moreover, fanaticism is not intrinsically linked to profound
religious beliefs. Those who seek to formulate normative views of society should reflect
on the social and political conditions of freedom rather than attempt to indicate how an
individual should conceive of an ‘‘individual movement of freedom.’’
Perhaps a more important question is whether this normative stance on how individ-
uals should relate to their tradition is appropriate for Muslims in France. The Stasi com-
mittee interprets demands for the right to wear headscarves in public schools in terms
not of a premodern traditionalism but of political religion as a reaction to modernity, as
an act of will. With Islamism, we are not talking about thecapacityto distance oneself
from one’s tradition, but about thewillto do so. The committee claims, for example, that
the scarf was affirmed in the Muslim world as a new tradition in the 1970s with the
emergence of radical political-religious movements, and that the scarf appeared in French
schools only at the end of the 1980s.^23 The committee does not reflect on this transition
in the interpretation of the scarf, from being a sign of premodern traditionalism to signi-
fying a postmodern refusal to distance oneself from one’s constructed tradition. In its
normative explanation of whatlaı ̈cite ́requires, the Stasi committee refers to tradition
rather than to this political-religious movement of postmodern identity politics, merges
traditional religion with specific forms of political religion, and falls back into a general-
ized distrust of religion.
Moreover, the interpretation of the scarf in terms of postmodern identity politics
suggests that those who do not endorse the laı ̈cist frame either cannot distance themselves
from their tradition or have constructed a political religion from scratch. This again does
no justice to the intricacies of actual religiosity, nor, for that matter, to the intricacies
of secularity. For both religious and nonreligious persons, elements of autonomy and
heteronomy, of being defined by (a fragmented but partially transcendent) tradition and
by oneself, are always entangled and interdependent. The ideological turn of the debate
lies in the way we conceive ‘‘modern’’ French people as being able to distance themselves
from their traditions ‘‘rationally,’’ while, when others do the same and partly construct
and transform their traditions, they are considered as exacerbating their cultural identi-
ties, if not worse.
We encounter the heritage of a dichotomy between belonging and freedom in expla-
nations of the function of the public school in terms oflaı ̈cite ́. The neo-republican philos-
opher Cathe ́rine Kintzler, for example, recently formulated the republican idea of the
public school as a place pupils attend not as consumers or in order to enjoy our rights
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