SUBJECTS OF TOLERANCEand principles to produce ‘‘free and reasoned deliberation among individuals considered
as moral and political equals’’ as the basis of democracy.^49
Most importantly, if, for liberals, collective identities represent the dangerousness of
the group, liberalism stands for that which has coined a solution to this dangerousness
without abolishing collective identity altogether. Liberalism prides itself on having discov-
ered how to reduce the hungers and aggressive tendencies of collective identity while
permitting individuals private enjoyment of such identity. This solution involves a set of
interrelated ideological moves in which religion and culture are privatized and the cultural
and religious dimensions of liberalism itself are disavowed. Culture and religion are pri-
vate and privately enjoyed, ideologically depoliticized, much as the family is, and, like the
family, situated as ‘‘background’’ tohomo politicusandhomo oeconomicus. Culture, fam-
ily, and religion are all formulated as ‘‘havens in a heartless world’’ rather than as sites of
power, politics, subject production, and norms. In this way, far from being that which
constitutes the subject, culture becomes something that, in Avishai Margalit’s and Moshe
Halbertal’s phrase, one may ‘‘have a right to.’’^50
These analytic moves to situate culture as extrinsic to the individual, as forming the
background of the individual, as that which the individual ‘‘chooses’’ or has a right to,
not merely confirm the autonomy of the individual but also figure culture as inherently
oppressive when it saturates or governs law and politics. In liberalism, the individual is
understood to have, or have access to, culture or religious belief; culture or religious belief
does not have him or her. The difference turns upon which entity is imagined to govern:
sovereign individuals in liberal regimes, culture and religion in fundamentalist ones. The
same move identifies liberal legalism and the liberal state as fully autonomous of culture
and religion. These two forms of autonomy, that of the individual and that of the state,
are importantly connected: liberalism is conceived as juridically securing the autonomy
of the individual from othersandfrom state power through its articulation of the auton-
omy of the state from cultural and religious authority. Liberal politics and law represented
themselves as secular not only with regard to religion but also with regard to culture, and
above and apart from both. This makes liberal legalism at once cultureless and culturally
neutral (even though legal decisions will sometimes allude to standards of ‘‘national cul-
ture’’ or ‘‘prevailing cultural norms’’). Put the other way around, liberalism figures culture
as separable from political power and political power as capable of being cultureless.
These moves render liberal legal principles universal and culture inherently particular, a
rendering that legitimates the subordination of culture to politics as the subordination of
the particular to the universal. These moves also permit principles of liberal democracy
to beuniversalizablewithout being culturally imperialist; as universals, these principles
are capable of ‘‘respecting’’ particular cultures. Conversely, nonliberal orders represent
the crimes of particularism, fundamentalism, and intolerance, as well as the dangerous-
ness of unindividuated humanity.
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