Segmented Foundations and Pluralism 227under sustained critical assault from a range of conventionalist theories. However,
the critique by conventionalist theories was not simply a negative assessment of thin
universalist liberalism. It was also, oddly, partly a defence of liberalism and lib-
eral values. In this sense, many of the conventionalist arguments (examined in Part
Three) tried to defend liberal values by showing them as deeply embeddedwithincer-
tain communities. Consequently, a number of unexpected compounds developed
during the 1980s and 1990s, such as liberal nationalism or liberal communit-
arianism, which exemplify this embedding process. Although partly abandoning
thin universalist themes, an attempt was still made to ‘shore up’ the foundations
of theory by focusing on the values within particular communities, nations, or
republics.
One important implication of this argument has been that communities and
nations have been seen as relatively self-sufficient and self-determining entities. The
concept of self-determination is important here. Each nation, community, ethnie,
or republic is seen as requiring the right to freely determine its own destiny. The
analogy of the group with the human individual is strong here. As the free human
individual must be able to determine his or her own action, so a free community,
ethnie, or nation (especially one which embodies liberal values), must analogously
also be able to determine its own actions. However, as suggested, this conventionalist
argument carries a subversive internal logic—a logic mapped out in this chapter—
which creates the potential for further social segmentation. Consequently, prioritizing
the autonomy, right, and self-determination of the particular group, has given rise,
in turn, to a subversive cultural or group rights logic.^31
Within late twentieth-century political theory, the major disagreements between
liberal pluralism, liberal multicultural, and difference theories, were largely over the
significant ‘particles of difference’. For most liberal pluralists, the key particle of
difference was the human individual.^32 For multicultural pluralists, the particle of
difference became the individualas shaped by the group culture. In stronger forms
of multiculturalism, the shift was made to cultures and groups as the key organic
particles. In 1990s difference theory, the incommensurability thesis accelerated even
further. Each fragmented group was seen as distinctive and wholly different. The
background for this latter concept of difference focuses on complex developments in
anthropology, feminist theory, postmodern, postcolonial, and agonistic arguments.
Particles of difference shifted between cultural, ethnographic, gendered, linguistic,
historical, and psychological factors.^33
In conclusion, the basic argument made in this chapter can be put quite simply:
it is that the logic of conventionalism does not cease at the level of the nation, eth-
nos, republic, or community. Every community, nation, or ethnos is constituted by
multiple sub-communities, sub-ethnie, and sub-cultures. Thus, the argument about
conventions (and social and moral meanings) is pushed several steps backwards,
ultimately into the potential incoherence of difference theory. If the logic of the argu-
ment is that each group is significant and potentially self-determining (to a degree),
then pluralism, multicultural pluralism, and difference theory further fragment the
foundational concerns of political theory, in some cases to the point of incoherence.