WENDY BROWNholidays, or ways of dress). But this means liberalism cannot feature culture as a public
good or even a public bond. The closest liberals generally come to the notion of a publicly
shared culture is ‘‘national culture,’’ which conveys a loose link between particular na-
tional histories, social mores, and habits of thought, or ‘‘market culture,’’ which, ironi-
cally, redounds to the physicalist meaning of culture as a form of husbandry or cultivation
that exceeds individual choice and that produces conditions of subsistence and existence.
Some liberal theorists also speak of ‘‘Western culture,’’ by which they are usually alluding
to the habits of life and thought organized by liberalism, Christianity, and the market.
The conceptual positioning of culture as extrinsic to the liberal subject (and to the
liberal state, about which more shortly) is exemplified by the normative conditions Seyla
Benhabib sets out for the resolution of multicultural dilemmas, each of which presumes
the capacity to grasp and negotiate culture from the outside: universal respect, egalitarian
reciprocity, voluntary self-ascription, and freedom of exit and association.^46 Benhabib is
attempting to establish limits to the claims of culture that would respect individual auton-
omy without violating the fabric of culture, certainly an admirable endeavor. But in order
to assess and limit the claims of culture according to such criteria, it must be possible to
grasp culture as knowable and as containable from some noncultural place. Similarly,
Benhabib speaks about limiting minority cultural claims in terms of the ‘‘rights’’ they
have over their members: these ‘‘communities donothave the right to deprive their
children of humankind’s accumulated knowledge and civilizational achievement.... they
dohave a right to transmit to their children the fundamentals of their own ways of life
alongsideother forms of knowledge shared with humankind.’’^47 Again, the very language
of rights implies an ability to isolate various parties—the culture and the individual, re-
spective forms of cultural knowledge—that rests upon an autonomous, precultural, Kan-
tian subject to whom such judgment and assertion is available.^48
From such ground, it is not surprising that a range of contemporary theorists of
tolerance—Bernard Williams, Joseph Raz, Michael Ignatieff, Will Kymlicka, along with
the Rawlsians and the Habermasians—tacitly or expressly argue that a tolerant worldview
is only available to peoples or societies with a deep value and practice of individualization,
an investment in individual rather than group identity. If collective identity, linguistically
denoted as ‘‘culture’’ today, is affirmed as important to human beings by these thinkers,
it is also problematic for liberalism’s attachment to the secularism that guarantees both
individual autonomy and deliberative rationality. Culture represents not simply a local
claim upon the individual and, in this regard, an attenuation of individuality and auton-
omy, but it undermines the aspiration to a public rationality that overcomes cultural
particularism in favor of putatively acultural concerns with justice as fairness. Thus, even
as a deliberative democratic theorist such as Benhabib struggles to recognize cultural
belonging and identity in excess of what is offered by the nation-state and dismisses
as ‘‘institutionally unstable and analytically untenable’’ efforts to separate ‘‘background
culture’’ from ‘‘public political culture,’’ she also insists upon a set of norms, metanorms,
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