WENDY BROWNplace, that is, what binds them within and makes them hostile without? What makes
group identity based on culture, religion, or ethnicity, as opposed to other kinds of differ-
ences, an inherent site of intolerance? Within liberal society, what are culture, religion, or
ethnicity imagined to contain within and repel without that makes their borders so sig-
nificant? What do we imagine deposited in these sites such that they feature a relatively
solidaristic inside and inherently hostile outside? Given a liberal account of human beings
as relatively atomized, competitive, acquisitive, and insecure, what makes common beliefs
or practices a site for overcoming this prickliness? What kinds of beliefs are thought to
bind us, and is it something in the nature of the beliefs themselves or is the binding
achieved through an order ofaffectattached to belief? Put differently, what is the relation
between the binding force of the social contract and the binding force of culture or reli-
gion? Why isn’t the social contract sufficient for reducing the significance of subnational
group hostilities?^4
In short, what, according to liberal theory, makes multiculturalism a political prob-
lem that tolerance is summoned to solve? And from what noncultural, nonethnic, or
secular place is tolerance imagined to emanate for this work? These are not easy questions
to ask, or even to formulate properly, from within a liberal, modernist, or rationalist
paradigm. This is partly because the methodological individualism of liberal theory pro-
duces the figure of an individuated subject by abstracting and isolating deliberative ratio-
nality from embodied locations or constitutive practices. The formulation of rationality
that has nonreason as its opposite presumes a Cartesian splitting of mind from embodied,
historicized, cultured being. Across Lockean, Kantian, Millian, Rawlsian, and Haberma-
sian perspectives, rationality transcends, or better, exceeds embodiment and cultural loca-
tion to permit a separation between rational thought, on one side, and the constitutive
embodiment of certain beliefs and practices, on the other. For deliberative rationality to
be meaningful apart from ‘‘culture’’ or ‘‘subjectivity,’’ the conceit must be in play that the
individualchooseswhat he or she thinks. This same choosing articulates the possibility of
an optional relationship with culture, religion, and even ethnic belonging; it sustains as
well the conceit that the rationality of the subject is independent of these things, which
are named as context rather than constitutive. But if the deliberative rationality that gen-
erates choice entails the capacity of the subject to abstract from its own context, then
individuation itself posits a will (to reason as well as to other things) that enables such
independence. The idea of individuation is thus enabled on the one side by rationality
and on the other by a notion of will; together they produce the possibility of the autono-
mous liberal subject.
The quintessential theorist of this formulation, of course, is Kant, for whom intellec-
tual and moral maturity consists in using ‘‘one’s own understanding without the guidance
of another.’’^5 Rational argument and criticism, indeed, the rationality of criticism, is not
simply the sign but also the basis of the moral autonomy of persons, an autonomy that
presupposes independence from others, independence from authority in general,andthe
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