HENT DE VRIES(such as the leader or some collective ideal) represent ‘‘a condition—whether temporary
or enduring—of barbarism’’ (p. 304). Brown analyzes this conception of group identifi-
cation as regression less in light of its considerable explanatory value for nationalism and
facism than as it continues to inform ‘‘liberal figurations of the inherent intolerance and
dangerousness of organicist societies’’ (p. 308). With liberalism and the Kantian concep-
tion of individual autonomy and reason on which it is based, Freud’s pathologization of
groups shares the conviction that cultural beliefs are more volatile if they are ‘‘public’’
rather than ‘‘private’’ or ‘‘familial,’’ an assumption that immediately slips into the claim
that ‘‘to be without liberalism is not simply to be oppressed but to be exceptionally dan-
gerous’’ (p. 310). In sum, liberalism is structurally incapable of appreciating culture and
collective identities—in their group-related and, strictly speaking, public dimension—as
a potentially, let alone intrinsically common good. Culture, in the liberal view, can be
judged and justified only as ‘‘optional’’ and from a ‘‘noncultural’’—indeed, a moral or
formal and deliberative—point of view. Political liberalism, by contrast, aspires toward
‘‘a public rationality that overcomes cultural particularism in favor of putatively acultural
concerns with justice as fairness.’’ But this alleged ‘‘solution,’’ Brown concludes, ‘‘involves
a set of interrelated ideological moves in which religion and culture are privatized and
the cultural and religious dimensions of liberalism itself are disavowed.’’ This presupposes
an analytical move in which culture is defined as ‘‘extrinsic to the individual, as forming
the background of the individual, as that which the individual ‘chooses’ or has a right to’’
(pp. 312–13).
Following the itinerary set out in her earlierThe Return of the PoliticalandThe
Democratic Paradox,^140 Mouffe develops a model of pluralism that she terms ‘‘agonistic.’’
She argues that it would provide a better framework than contemporary theories of politi-
cal liberalism and deliberative democracy for accommodating the continuing and re-
newed role played by religion in the formation of personal and collective identities, and
in the symbolic ordering of social relations. The concept of ‘‘agonistic pluralism’’ would
allow one to articulate an understanding of democracy—indeed, of ‘‘the political’’—no
longer based on the assumption of an eventual and consensual, that is to say, argumenta-
tive or procedural, resolution of conflicts. The assumption of procedural resolution
ignores the perpetual need to resort to nonformalizable and ‘‘substantial ethical commit-
ments’’ or, more broadly, ‘‘normative concerns’’ (pp. 321, 320), whose genesis and struc-
ture Mouffe analyzes with the help of the late Wittgenstein’s invocation of the ensemble
of practices called ‘‘language games’’ and the agreement in judgments grounded in shared
‘‘forms of life.’’
This, Mouffe concludes, suggests that ‘‘a specific type of ethos’’ or, more precisely,
‘‘comprehensive doctrines’’ cannot in principle be kept out of the realm that Rawls defines
as ‘‘political liberalism,’’ just as they cannot be separated from his procedural and deliber-
ative conception of ‘‘justice as fairness.’’ In consequence, there can be no strict neutrality
of the state, even though (or precisely because) it is premised upon specific values associ-
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