SUBJECTS OF TOLERANCEbe the dividing line between those in favor of a peaceful, civic existence and those inclined
to terror.’’^1 Mamdani credits Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis with conceptually
catapulting culture to the status of a political dividing line between good and evil, progress
and reaction, peaceability and violence. In a 1990 article ‘‘The Roots of Muslim Rage,’’
Bernard Lewis put forward the ‘‘clash of civilizations’’ thesis to describe relations between
what he termed the ‘‘Judeo-Christian’’ and ‘‘Islamic’’ civilizations; a few years later, Hun-
tington generalized the thesis to argue that ‘‘the velvet curtain of culture’’ had replaced
the Cold War ‘‘iron curtain of ideology.’’^2
When political or civil conflict becomes culturalized, whether in international or
domestic politics, tolerance emerges as a key term, for two reasons. The first is that some
cultures are depicted as tolerant while others are not, that is, tolerance itself is culturalized
insofar as it is understood to be available only to certain cultures. The second is that the
culturalization of conflict makes cultural difference itself into a (if notthe) salient site for
the practice of tolerance or intolerance. The border between cultures is taken to be inher-
ently volatile if those cultures are not subdued by liberalism.^3 Thus tolerance, rather than,
say, equality, emancipation, or power sharing, becomes a basic term in the vocabulary
describing and prescribing for conflicts rendered as cultural.
The culturalization of conflict and of difference discursively depoliticizes both, while
organizing the players in a particular fashion, one that makes possible that odd but famil-
iar move within liberalism: ‘‘culture’’ is what nonliberal peoples are imagined to be ruled
and ordered by, but liberal peoples are considered tohaveculture or cultures. In other
words, what Mamdani terms the ‘‘ideological culturalization’’ of politics does not reduce
all conflict or difference to culture in a uniform way. Rather, ‘‘wehaveculture, while
culturehas‘them’ ’’; or wehaveculture, while theyarea culture. Or we are a democracy,
while they are a culture. This asymmetry turns upon an imagined opposition between
culture and individual moral autonomy, in which the former vanquishes the latter unless
culture is subordinated to liberalism. The logic derived from this opposition between
nonliberalized culture and moral autonomy then articulates a further set of oppositions
between nonliberalized culture and freedom, and between nonliberalized culture and
equality. This essay maps this logic in order to reveal how and why liberalism conceives
of itself as unique in its capacity to be culturally neutral and culturally tolerant, and
conceives of nonliberal ‘‘cultures’’ as disposed toward barbarism.
The overt premise of liberal tolerance, when applied to group practices (as opposed to
idiosyncratic individual beliefs or behaviors), is that religious, cultural, or ethnic differ-
ences are sites of natural or native hostility. Tolerance is conceived as a tool for managing
or attenuating this hostility to achieve peaceful co-existence. Yet within a liberal paradigm,
this premise already begs a number of questions: What makes groups cohere in the first
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