WENDY BROWNthe external ideal or leader. If the fall into primitivism is a fall away from super-egoic self-
regulation, ‘‘civilization’’ becomes coterminous with self-regulating individuals and the
diminution of groups inherently dominated by a leader or ideal on the one hand, and
unrepressed instincts on the other. Individuation (vis-a`-vis one another and authority)
represents the throwing off of ontogenetic and phylogenetic ‘‘childhood’’ and the acquisi-
tion of instinctual repression, deliberation, conscience, and freedom.^36 In this light, the
gleeful mob violence against the American security workers in Fallujah appears icono-
graphic of an absent liberalism—such violence appears as the rule rather than the excep-
tion for an order construed as desperately in need of the very liberal democratic
transformation that it is resisting. Indeed, such violence becomes vindication of George
W. Bush’s newfound liberation theology, his mission to free the unfree world both in the
name of what is good for others and in the name of what makes the world a safer place.^37
By this account, to be without liberalism is not simply to be oppressed but to be excep-
tionally dangerous.^38 Conversely, American and British torture and humiliation of Iraqis
at Abu Ghraib was rendered as sheer aberration: ‘‘not the America I know’’ as Bush put
it. Or, in the words of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, ‘‘what we came to put an end
to, not to perpetrate,’’ a formulation that deftly reverses the source of violence, attributing
it to Iraqi political culture while ruling it out of character for the Western occupiers.^39
This argument implies that the individual must be cultivated and protected and that
group identities of all kinds must be contained insofar as they represent both the absence
of individual autonomy and the social danger of a de-civilized formation. Organicist or-
ders are not only radically other to liberalism but betoken the ‘‘enemy within’’ civilization
and the enemy to civilization. Most dangerous of all would be transnational formations
imagined as organicist from a liberal perspective, which link the two—Judaism in the
nineteenth century, communism in the twentieth, and today, of course, Islam.^40
Liberalism and Its Other: Who Has Culture and Whom Culture Has
The governmentality of tolerance as it circulates through civilizational discourse has, as
part of its work, the containment of the (organicist, non-Western, nonliberal) other.^41 As
pointed out earlier, within contemporary civilizational discourse, the liberal individual is
uniquely identified with the capacity for tolerance, and tolerance itself is identified with
civilization. Nonliberal societies and practices, especially those designated as fundamen-
talist, are not only depicted as relentless and inherently intolerant but as potentially intol-
erable for their putative rule by culture or religion and concomitant devaluation of the
autonomous individual, in short, their thwarting of individual autonomy with religious
or cultural commandments. Out of this equation, liberalism emerges as the only political
rationality that can produce the individual, societal, and governmental practice of toler-
ance, and, at the same time, liberal societies become the broker of what is tolerable and
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