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SUBJECTS OF TOLERANCE

independence of reason itself. From this perspective, a less individuated person, one who
has what social theorists term an organicist identity, appears as neither fully rational nor
fully in command of a will. That is, the liberal formulation of the individuated subject as
constituted by rationality and will figures a nonindividuated opposite who is sobecause
ofthe underdevelopment of both rationality and will. For the organicist creature, consid-
ered to lack rationality and will, culture and religion (cultureasreligion, and religionas
culture–equations that work only for this creature) are saturating and authoritative, while
for the liberal one, culture and religion become ‘‘background,’’ can be ‘‘entered’’ and
‘‘exited,’’ and are thus rendered extrinsic to rather than constitutive of the subject.
Through individuation, so this story goes, culture and religion as forms of rule are
dethroned, replaced by the self-rule of men. But this very dethroning changes the meaning
of culture and religion within liberal and organicist orders. In liberal societies, culture is
positioned as the ‘‘background’’ of the subject, as something one may opt in or out of and
also deliberate about. (This is what makes rational-choice theory intellectually coherent as
a form of social theory for liberal societies, but only for liberal societies.) Put the other
way around, if not only rule but also subject constitution by culture and religion are
equated with organicist orders, this rule and this constitution are imagined to disappear
with the emergence of the autonomous individual; indeed, their vanquishing is the very
meaning of such autonomy. For liberal subjects, culture becomes food, dress, music,
lifestyle, and contingent values. Cultureaspower and especially as rule is replaced by
culture as merely a way of life; culture that preemptively oblates the individual transmog-
rifies into culture as a source of comfort or pleasure for the individual, akin to the liberal
idealization of the domestic sphere as a ‘‘haven in a heartless world.’’ Similarly, religion
as domination, tyranny, or source of irrationality and violence is presumed to transform,
where the individual reigns, into religion as a choice and as a source of comfort, nourish-
ment, moral guidance, and moral credibility. This is the schema that allows President
Bush’s prayers about political matters, his routine consultations with radical Christian
groups on foreign policy, and even his personal conviction that his military mission in
the Middle East is divinely blessed to be sharply differentiated from the—dangerous—
devotion to Allah of a Muslim fundamentalist. Bush’s religiosity is figured as a source of
strength and moral guidance for his deliberations and decisions, while the devotee of
Allah is assumed to be without the individual will and conscience necessary to such
rationation.^6
Moral autonomy, the name liberalism gives to this individuated figure, is widely
understood by theorists of tolerance to constitutetheunderlying value of the principle of
liberal tolerance.^7 Susan Mendus writes, ‘‘the autonomy argument is sometimes referred
to as the characteristically liberal argument for toleration.’’^8 For Will Kymlicka, ‘‘liberals
are often defined as those who support toleration because it is necessary for the promotion
of autonomy.’’^9 And for Bernard Williams, ‘‘if toleration as a practice is to be defended
in terms of its being a value, then it will have to appeal to substantive opinions about the

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