MARKHA G. VALENTAdirectly violent) action.^50 The French government’s recent decision—in the name oflaı ̈ci-
te ́—to ban allostentatible(‘‘conspicuous’’) public religious expression, directed particu-
larly at Islamic veils, comes immediately to mind. Believing its commitment to the
principle of secularism threatened by the principle of freedom of religion, the state moved
decisively to curtail such freedom.
The second weakness in Taylor’s argument derives from the fact that he implicitly
structures his account of the beginnings of modern secularism according to a teleological
vision of Western progress that not only posits an advance from violence to peace but
links it to the shrinking of Christian demands in the public sphere. This not only fails to
account for the persistence of Western violence and for the crucial role Christian societies
and theologians played in creating and enabling that very public sphere—a widespread
error, as insidious to Habermas’s account, for example, as to Taylor’s^51 —but also for the
extent to which it was the development of secularism itself that transformed conversion
from a marginal consideration into one of Western modernity’s central tropes and
mechanisms.
The confusion in Taylor’s representation of Western democracy foregrounds the ex-
tent to which our problem is that, as nations and societies, we still lack the adequate
concepts and tools to thinkcollectivelyabout our democracies’ current flaws, about the
ways in which and the extent to which they remain unrealized. Certainly, there exists an
extensive body of scholarly and popular works energetically criticizing our societies’ fail-
ures. The problem in this case, however, is not only that the existence of such critique is
itself used to validate the idealized vision of democracy—‘‘see, we’re an open society
composed of independent, critical individuals free to state our minds’’—but that these
critiques are all too often made in the name of a likewise idealized democracy. Disagree-
ment, then, primarily comes from divergent views concerninghowto achieve the ideal,
while that ideal itself remains underarticulated and undertheorized, as if we all—not so
much political theorists as the public at large—knew what we mean by ‘‘democracy.’’ The
question becomes one about meansrather thanends, when what we need is the rigorous
challenge of reconfiguringbothmeansandends.
The dramatic global changes of the past fifty years—the vast human migrations; the
immediacy of travel, communications, and weapons technology; the new diasporic, trans-
national and international communities to which this has given rise; the (thus far unsuc-
cessful) pressures on the West to extend its democratic commitments to international
economic and socio-political relations; the vast mass and influence of American cultural
productions and their imbrication with American global economic-political intentions in
the name of ‘‘benign imperialism’’—all these emphasize the need fundamentally to recon-
sider our conceptions of democracy. Can, in such a setting, democracy still be ‘‘represen-
tative,’’ or do we need a new mechanism and logic for articulating and authorizing power?
Is the concept of ‘‘citizen’’ still the right one for naming an individual’s relation to the
most significant socio-political institutions structuring her life? And how can we best
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