NOTES TO PAGES 312–14- If contemporary liberal political rationality articulates such a subject, it also stumbles over
and even rejects several of the implications of this articulation. First, the idea that only nonliberal
peoples are organized by a ‘‘common way of life’’ features so blatant a conceit about the civiliza-
tional maturity of Europe and the primitivism of others that even liberals are embarrassed by it and
will quickly correct themselves when these implications of their positioning of culture as always
elsewhere from liberalism are reflected back to them. Second, if liberals fully endorse the privatiza-
tion of culture defined as a ‘‘way of life,’’ this concedes a stark thinness to public life in liberal
societies. Indeed, it concedes that liberal public life is no way of life at all but only a set of juridical
principles combined with a set of market principles, which work independently of any actor. This
condemns public life to a culturally impoverished, morally relativistic state, oriented by nothing
more than legislators, lawyers, manipulated public opinion, and market forces. It confesses as well
the absence of a public bond among citizens, other than that rooted in fealty to the nation-state,
on the one hand, and that driven by diverseprivatizedcultural-religious attachments or economic
interests, on the other. That is, it positions public life as buffeted between private desires andraison
d’e ́tatand without any organized aim, ethos, or purpose of its own. Third, if culture is only ever
something that nonliberal peoples have as a group, if it only belongs to ‘‘less mature’’ peoples, this
cedes something of value—culture in the intellectual and artistic sense, and in the civilizational
sense—to these peoples. Through a linguistic inadvertency that provides a window on the uncon-
scious of liberalism, it admits what we already fear: rights and the market, and nothing more
elevated or substantive, determines what we collectively share as well as what we value.
In short, if, in contemporary liberal democratic parlance, ‘‘culture’’ signifies moral and intel-
lectual advancement and knowledge, it also signifies the absence of moral and intellectual auton-
omy, being ruled by something other than reason. This means that liberalism simultaneously claims
and disclaims culture; culture is part of the greatness of the West and also that which liberal individ-
uals have thrown off in their movement toward maturity and freedom, producing ‘‘cosmopolitan-
ism’’ in its stead. These two crucial and opposed implications of having culture—moral elevation
and the absence of moral autonomy—are not just a happenstance collision of meanings of the word
but a symptomatic one. They represent a deep and fundamental bind of liberalism in modernity, a
bind at the very heart of a project of freedom rooted in reason and individualism. - Benhabib,The Claims of Culture, 105 and 111.
- Avishai Margalit and Moshe Halbertal, ‘‘Liberalism and the Right to Culture,’’Social Re-
search61, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 491–510.. Benhabib tries to have it both ways: culture is both something
to which one has a rightandconstitutive, in the same way that persons are ‘‘self-interpreting and
self-defining,’’ while their ‘‘actions and deeds are constituted through culturally informed narra-
tives’’ (The Claims of Culture, 132). - Even Will Kymlicka, who works assiduously to establish ‘‘cultures or nations [as] basic
units of liberal political theory’’ because ‘‘cultural membership provides us with an intelligible
context of choice, and a secure sense of identity and belonging,’’ formulates the project of ‘‘liberaliz-
ing culture’’ as a legitimate one even for those outside the culture at issue. Liberals, he writes,
should ‘‘seek to liberalize [nonliberal nations]’’ and ‘‘should promote the liberalization of [illiberal]
cultures’’ (Kymlicka,Multicultural Citizenship[Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996], 93, 94–95,
105). The justification for this lies in the distinction between liberal legalism and culture that we
have been considering. Drawing upon Yael Tamir’sLiberal Nationalism(Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1993), Kymlicka depicts liberal nations as having ‘‘societal cultures,’’ which provide
their ‘‘members with meaningful ways of life across the full range of human activities, including
social, educational, religious, recreational, and economic life, encompassing both public and private
spheres’’ (76). Striking in their absence from this list of what ‘‘societal culture’’ comprises, however,
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