WENDY BROWNThis distinction and presumed separation between politics and culture within liberal-
ism is crucial to sustaining the fiction of the autonomous individual and the fiction of its
imagined opposite—the radically de-individuated, culturally or religiously bound crea-
ture of a fundamentalist order. Seen from the other direction and in a more deconstruct-
ive grammar, the liberal construction of its fundamentalist other as one ruled by culture
and religion enables liberal legalism’s discursive construction of culture as a form of
power only when it is formally imbricated with governance, which is how this discourse
represents most nonliberal regimes. The autonomy of the state from culture is therefore
just as important as the autonomy of the individual from culture in distinguishing liberal
orders from their other. Nonliberal polities are depicted as ‘‘ruled’’ by culture or religion;
liberalism is depicted as ruled by law, with culture dispensed to another domain, a de-
politicized and voluntary one. In this way, individual autonomy is counterposed to rule
by culture, and subjects are seen to gain their autonomy not through culture but against
it. Culture is individual autonomy’s antinomy and hence what the liberal state presumes
to subdue, de-power, and privatize, as well as detach itself from.^51
The twin conceits of the autonomy of liberal legalism from culture and the autonomy
of the self-willing and sovereign subject from culture enable liberal legalism’s unique
positioning as fostering tolerance and liberal polities’ unique position as capable of bro-
kering the tolerable. Tolerance is extended to almost all cultural and religious practices
seen to be ‘‘chosen’’ by liberal individuals but may be withheld for those practices seen to
be imposed by culture inscribed as law, as it may be withheld for whole regimes consid-
ered to be ruled by culture or religion. This logic effectively insulates all legal practices in
liberal orders from the tag of ‘‘barbarism’’ while legitimating liberal aggression toward
non-Western practices or regimes deemed intolerable. And this logic allows for the dis-
avowal of the cultural imperialism that such aggression entails because the aggression is
legitimated by the rule of law and the inviolability of rights and choice, each of which is
designated in liberal discourse as universal and noncultural. Ubiquitous in all liberal theo-
retical discussions of tolerance and the intolerable, this logic was succinctly expressed by
George W. Bush during the initiation of the U.S. war on Afghanistan in 2002:
We have a great opportunity during this time of war to lead the world toward the
values that will bring lasting peace.... We have no intention of imposing our culture.
But America will always stand firm for the non-negotiable demands of human dig-
nity: the rule of law, limits on the power of the state, respect for women; private
property; free speech, equal justice; and religious tolerance.^52None of these ‘‘non-negotiable demands’’—which do not hail from the United States
but from a paradoxically transcendent or sacred place called ‘‘human dignity’’ where the
individual is a priori—are portrayed as cultural, not as conditioned by the sovereignty of
states or nations.^53 Instead, each is set out as a universal political principle both indepen-
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