What I have called the rhetorical turn in contemporary liberal political philosophy addresses the issue of the intelligibility of liberal doctrine and of liberal democratic citizenship itself. There is such a thing as an intelligibility issue for a post-Enlightenment civic culture, because modernist liberal political theory interpreted liberalism as a comprehensive doctrine or totalizing world view. Such a conception of liberal doctrine misrepresents both its scope — i.e., the range of life issues it encompasses — and its rhetorical function. A political or rhetorical conception of liberal doctrine corrects both of these misrepresentations and therefore, as a component of a postmodern civic culture, can clear away some of the purely conceptual obstacles to the realization of full cultural citizenship. In the same way, there is such a thing as a motivational issue for a post-Enlightenment civic culture, because the motivational resources provided by modernist liberal political theory depended on viewing liberal moral ideals in universalist and essentialist terms. Such a conception of liberal moral ideals misrepresents the real grounds for the desirability of their realization. Moreover, this universalist and essentialist misreading of liberal moral ideals provided motivation by subtly disparaging the moral ideals of particularistic cultural communities. As we have seen, this aspect of the modernist liberalism is particularly damaging to the project of forging an overlapping consensus among those cultural communities in support of liberal democratic political institutions.

Just as what I have called the rhetorical turn in contemporary liberal thought speaks to the issue of intelligibility, so what I have called the teleological turn addresses the issue of motivation. The issue of motivation has to do with the persuasive power of any form of liberal democratic civic culture. It is one thing to understand the nature of citizenship, it is quite another to perceive as something desirable the development and exercise of the moral and intellectual capacities proper to citizenship. As we have seen, modernist liberal conceptions of civic moral ideals did not represent them in terms of their desirability at all. The civic ethics of authenticity and autonomy were expressions of the general principle of the priority of the right over the good. The modernist liberal conception of this principle specified that the criterion of moral rightness — i.e., the conformity of action to law — must not be drawn from any particularistic cultural conception of the good life. The criterion proper to civic justice, in other words, must not have any particularistic cultural content. Moral rightness cannot be based upon the mere desirability of a particular way of life. Moral rightness had to be defined, therefore, in absolutely universal terms, as a matter of conformity to universal law — law applicable to all persons everywhere and at all times. This modernist conception of moral rightness produced an interpretation of liberal moral ideals that was excessively formalist in character. The civic ethics of authenticity and autonomy mandated not the attainment of a particular object of desire, but rather the practice of a certain way of pursuing any particular object of desire whatsoever. The moral ideals of authenticity and autonomy mandated a certain how of action and not a particular what of desire.

These modernist liberal moral ideals have lost their persuasive power. That persuasive power was derived from the belief that it was, indeed, possible to specify a criterion for moral rightness that was free of all contamination from any particularistic conception of the good, a criterion for civic justice that was applicable to all times and places. But with the discrediting of this belief, the liberal moral ideals of authenticity and autonomy also lose their normative and persuasive power. If every criterion of moral rightness is contaminated by particularistic historical and cultural conditions, then so, also, is the liberal democratic moral criterion of rightness. The criterion of civic justice, too, must be derived from some particularistic conception of the good, from an affirmation of the desirability of some particularistic way of life. The teleological turn in contemporary liberal thought takes this recognition as its point of departure. The liberal doctrine of the priority of the right over the good must be interpreted in teleological terms. It must no longer be read as a doctrine establishing a set of universally obligatory laws or principles as constraints on the pursuit of happiness. Rather, it must be recast as a doctrine asserting the priority, under certain circumstances, of a particularistic object of desire, a particularistic happiness ideal, over other equally particularistic objects of desire and happiness ideals. This means that we must learn to see liberal democracies as perfectionist regimes of a very special type. A liberal democracy, that is to say, is a form of political association aimed at the realization of a substantive, particularistic conception of the good, and the success of any particular liberal democracy is to be measured by the degree of its success in providing conditions for the attainment of that good. The liberal state, thus, cannot in principle be properly conceived as occupying a standpoint that is culturally and morally neutralist.

The persuasive power of a postmodern form of liberal democratic civic culture will depend on the clarity and insight of its definition of the nature of this civic good. A teleological conception of liberal doctrine must provide that definition. What is the unique good that can be achieved only through the attainment of full cultural citizenship? Why is the attainment of full cultural citizenship desirable? What sort of case could be made to any nominal citizen that could succeed in persuading him or her to undertake the difficult moral and intellectual work involved in developing and exercising the capacities proper to liberal democratic citizenship? Before we take a first cut at providing an answer to this question, two further points must be noted.

(1) First, a conception of the civic good, to be effective as a component of civic culture, must be represented as a final and not merely as an instrumental good. One readily available and familiar type of answer to the question as to why liberal political arrangements are desirable — the answer offered by so-called modus vivendi versions of liberal doctrine — conceives of that desirability in purely instrumental terms. According to modus vivendi liberalism, the benefit offered by the liberal forms of political association becomes apparent, above all, in situations of protracted political and cultural conflict. That benefit is civil peace. Faced with the threat of unremitting civil war, it is in the mutual interest of all the opposing parties to find some way to live and let live. When no single community is strong enough to impose its cultural and political will on all others, then a prudent political compromise, some institutional means of sharing political power more or less equitably, will be the best outcome any group can hope for.

This kind of answer, basic to all forms of modus vivendi liberalism, is perhaps less a philosophical response to the question of motivation than it is an instinctive political strategy triggered by conditions of chronic cultural and civil strife. For modus vivendi liberalism, citizenship is, indeed, a good — but merely an instrumental and not a substantive or final good. Citizenship defines a relationship between members of different particularistic cultural communities that establishes a regime permitting peaceful coexistence among those communities. For modus vivendi liberalism, liberal political institutions have as their cultural basis a compromise among antagonistic cultural communities, a compromise that places certain limits on the public conduct of their members, in exchange for a guarantee of noninterference by outsiders on questions of how those communities handle their internal affairs. For modus vivendi liberalism, then, citizenship is a good only as a means to an end — i.e., the pursuit of a particularistic way of life in peace. The interest any citizen would have in that status would be basically similar to the interest a person would have in securing any other resource necessary for the realization of his or her conception of the good life.

As a sort of minimalist case for the establishment of liberal political arrangements, of course, modus vivendi liberalism can be a conceptually coherent and effective persuasive strategy, particularly in times of great civil conflict. But the problem with modus vivendi liberalism is that it is far too minimalist to provide the basis for an effective civic culture and a program of civic education. Modus vivendi liberalism sees the standpoint of citizenship as qualitatively indistinguishable from the standpoint of membership in a particularistic cultural community. To be a citizen means simply to observe certain behavioral constraints — the behavioral constraints specified by the law, i.e., by the liberal state — over and beyond the behavioral constraints imposed by any membership in a particularistic cultural community. Those additional constraints are observed in the interest of maintaining social conditions conducive to the peaceful pursuit of private happiness. Thus, for modus vivendi liberalism, the standpoint of citizenship represents a merely external and accidental modification of the standpoint of membership in a particular cultural community. But the standpoint of citizenship can never be properly understood in this minimalist way. Active and effective citizens can never be produced and supported by a civic culture appealing to such a minimalist conception of citizenship. In fact, because this minimalist conception of citizenship requires no internalization of the perspectives and principles that make legal constraints on behavior intelligible, it cannot even produce citizens dependably obedient to the law.

Adoption of the standpoint of citizenship requires, at the very least, the capacity to comprehend the most general principles on which the laws of a liberal democracy are based. Those principles, whatever their specific content in any given liberal democracy, affirm that all citizens are to be treated as free and equal individuals. The capacity to comprehend those principles requires more than the mere readiness to submit to the law as part of a compromise aimed at achieving private goals — it requires some internalized understanding of the perspective articulated by the principles, the perspective within which citizens are, indeed, viewed as free and equal individuals. An internalized understanding of this perspective involves the learning of skills and the development of attitudes and dispositions that are new, i.e., that cannot be reduced to merely external and accidental modifications of attitudes and dispositions proper to members of particularistic cultural communities. In short, liberal democratic principles of justice and political arrangements cannot really be understood where no cultural basis exists for the development of a bond of civic friendship among all citizens. Modus vivendi conceptions of liberalism cannot provide such a cultural basis. While it is certainly better for warring groups to stop killing each other and find some basis for mutual accommodation, a peaceful society composed of groups living at peace together in a state of mutual isolation, suspicion, and incomprehension would bear little resemblance to an ideal liberal democracy.

With the waning of the normative and persuasive force of the modernist liberal moral ideals of authenticity and autonomy, modus vivendi liberalism has emerged as one of the few motivational resources left to modernist civic culture. But the meager resources of this impoverished and minimalist form of liberalism cannot contribute much to the reconstruction of liberalism and the invention of a viable postmodern civic culture. What we need is a new and far more positive way of addressing the issue of motivation, of answering the question of the value of citizenship — a new way of understanding the sense in which citizenship is not merely an instrumental good, useful insofar as it furthers the pursuit of private happiness, but also a final and substantive good, desirable in itself.

(2) A second point we must keep in mind as we explore the ramifications of the teleological turn in contemporary liberal political philosophy is that the motivational resources proper to the liberal democratic public sphere are necessarily limited. Civic culture is a "thin" culture. The conception of the civic good that depends on the cultural resources available only within the public sphere, i.e., within the perspectives shaped by the basic political arrangements of any liberal democracy, is bound to be insufficient by itself to provide the sort of motivation required to support large numbers of citizens in their pursuit of full cultural citizenship. The motivational resources that cannot be provided from the cultural perspectives proper to the public sphere alone must be provided from the cultural perspectives of particularistic cultural communities.

This is the import of the concept of an overlapping cultural consensus. In any liberal democracy, most of the motivational cards are held by the particularistic cultural communities that comprise it. Members of those communities are also citizens, some of them citizens in the full cultural sense — i.e., citizens who have a clear understanding of the nature of the civic good. It is the civic responsibility of such citizens to shape their local cultural traditions in ways that support the development of civic moral and linguistic capacities. In addition to whatever motivational resources are provided by the general civic culture, these citizens must identify and strengthen the doctrines, themes, and practices within their local cultural traditions that can provide additional normative and persuasive resources in support of liberal moral ideals. Different cultural traditions possess such resources in different degrees. But where such resources are weak or absent, they can always be strengthened or invented. This is the sort of cultural work that must be carried out by citizens if an overlapping consensus supportive of liberal political arrangements is to be realized and maintained.

In Chapter Five, I will offer a model for this sort of project, suggesting a way in which a postmodern understanding of the doctrines of one particular, but numerically very significant cultural community — the Christian community — might be shaped to offer motivation for the pursuit of civic moral ideals. In this chapter, however, I want to focus on the motivational resources that might be drawn from the cultural perspectives proper to the liberal democratic public sphere alone. The motivational resources offered by the public sphere, i.e., by the perspectives shaped by participation in civic life, address all citizens in a moral language that all citizens can speak and understand. These motivational resources are "non-denominational." They make a case for the civic good that presupposes only adherence to the ideals of one particular form of political association — liberal democracy — and are, otherwise, independent of all reference to particularistic cultural belief. Even if such a case for the civic good can never be motivationally sufficient, it must be the starting point for the project of constructing an overlapping consensus, for the work of shaping particularistic cultural traditions in ways that support liberal moral. What, then, is the nature of the civic good that can be expressed in moral language that all citizens, regardless of their other beliefs and moral ideals, can equally embrace?

As we noted in Chapter Two, Rawls’s teleological conception of moral personality provides a basis for an answer to this question. This conception of moral personality defines the traits that every citizen must assume to be possessed by other citizens when engaging in civic discourse. Rawls distinguishes two such traits, which he calls moral powers: (1) the capacity to pursue rationally a conception of the good, and (2) the capacity for an effective sense of justice. Conceptually inseparable from these two moral powers, according to Rawls, are two highest-order interests in exercising and fully developing those powers. A highest-order interest is one that is given priority over all other interests. In any ranking of interests, it is given the highest ranking. This means that a citizen, i.e., one who must be expected to possess the traits proper to moral personality, is one who, in fact, ranks his or her interests in this way, identifying as his or her highest interest the full development and exercise of the moral powers proper to citizenship, even if the pursuit of that interest requires the sacrifice of interests or desires generated by membership in one particularistic cultural community or another.

Rawls’s answer to the question of the value of citizenship, thus, would be given in terms of this conception of the highest-order interests proper to moral personality or full cultural citizenship. The status or role of citizen is good not merely instrumentally, as in modus vivendi liberalism — i.e., not merely because it is useful for the realization of a particular, non-civic conception of the good life. Rather, for those who are citizens, for those who have adopted the standpoint of citizenship and have acquired the traits of moral personality, full cultural citizenship is a substantive, final, or intrinsic good. Once a human being has acquired the traits and developed the highest-order interests belonging to moral personality, then, for that person, the legal status of citizenship is good in itself, because only through the possession of that status can the highest order interests proper to that status be achieved.

However, to the extent that Rawls’s conception of moral personality addresses the question of the value of citizenship, it addresses that question only from the standpoint of those who have already developed the moral powers proper to that status. Citizenship is a final good only for citizens who are citizens in the full cultural sense. But what about those who have not yet fully realized the ideals proper to the status of formal citizenship, i.e., who have not yet acquired the moral powers and highest-order interests specified by the conception of moral personality? What sort of case for the value of citizenship could be made to those who still regard it externally, from the standpoint of membership in one or another particularistic cultural community? It is above all such citizens that a civic culture must effectively address. Modus vivendi liberalism carries considerable persuasive power when viewed as an argument addressed to an audience with this pre-civic or external standpoint. But it is precisely this external way of raising the question of the value of citizenship that is relevant when considering the issue of motivation.

Civic education is a persuasive enterprise. It is addressed to those who have not yet fully developed the moral powers proper to citizenship. It is addressed to those whose self-understanding continues to be shaped primarily by the ranking systems of particularistic cultural communities. This means, of course, that the motivational resources of civic culture are addressed at every moment to every citizen, because no citizen can ever claim to have fully developed or to have exercised unfailingly the moral powers proper to citizenship. Civic education is aimed at motivating nominal citizens to acquire the moral powers and highest-order interests that define citizenship in the full cultural sense. From this point of view, the question of the value of citizenship becomes the question of why any member of a particularistic cultural community, any adherent of an exclusivist, totalizing world view, would want to embrace the status of citizenship and develop its appropriate powers, interests, and perspectives. Rawls’s conception of moral personality supplies an adequate provisional conception of the civic good. But it remains much too abstract to make clear its attractive power. Why would any human being desire to develop fully a sense of civic justice and a capacity to pursue rationally a conception of the good? Assuming the provisional acceptance of Rawls’s conception of moral personality as an adequate conception of the civic good, what is at stake for anyone in the question of whether or not that civic good is actually attained? This is the question that the teleological turn in postmodern liberal political philosophy requires us to answer.

Let us observe once again that answering this question about the intrinsic value of citizenship is no easy task. Liberal democratic citizenship is in many ways a difficult and peculiar way of life. Even the minimalist citizenship called for by modus vivendi liberalism — the citizenship that requires no more than the cultivation of an attitude of live and let live, a posture of benign mutual indifference in the name of civil peace — can be difficult for many who have strong commitments to totalizing life ideals. Such people often find intolerable the experience of being surrounded by people of alien belief and behavior, even when the political arrangements producing that experience, otherwise, hold important advantages. If such minimalist citizenship can be burdensome to many, then even more difficult is practice of the full cultural citizenship that alone insures the success of liberal political institutions. As we have often noted, the most complete development of the two moral powers defining full cultural citizenship introduces tensions and complexities that far exceed those produced by the requirements of simple modus vivendi tolerance. To answer the question of the intrinsic value of citizenship, we must understand anew how the inherent benefits of full cultural citizenship outweigh the burdens that come with it. The abstract question of the nature of the civic good can, thus, be reduced effectively to the question of what sort of case can be made for the desirability of full cultural citizenship in the light of the unsettling and even dangerous process involved in its attainment. Before attempting to lay out such a case, let us make sure we understand clearly the sort of burdens and dangers that attend the pursuit of civic moral ideals.

At first glance, the discontents of citizenship seem painfully obvious. Viewed from the standpoint of a citizen of a modern constitutional democracy, a life passed within the cultural framework of a single ethnic, class, or religious community — say, a peasant village — seems to have an enviable sort of simplicity and tranquillity. Life within such a community is passed among people with the same general view of the world, people who share the same set of values and who agree in principle about the proper way to address the general human life issues of sex, friendship, work, suffering, sin, death, and salvation. Identities in such communities are shaped by stable and well-known assignments of duties and responsibilities. Conduct is evaluated by ranking systems, by virtue concepts, by standards of excellence and achievement that are relatively unambiguous and unquestioned. Human desire is nurtured and given definite direction toward a clear and generally attainable set of goals. In such monocultural communities, the everyday speech addressed to others from this standpoint gains a special intelligibility, effectiveness, and even profundity through its constant implicit appeal to and dependence upon a host of shared and unspoken background assumptions. Within such communities, whatever other problems arise to disrupt life and cause suffering — plague, invasion, oppression, famine — this monoculturalism generally prevents the emergence of problems focusing on questions of meaning and purpose, value and responsibility.

This fact alone makes it easy to understand why, among citizens of liberal democracies, there is never a shortage of communitarian nostalgia for this monocultural way of life. The establishment of a liberal form of political association breaks open irreparably the tranquil world of monocultural solidarity and exposes its former inhabitants to a whole new range of problems focusing precisely on questions of meaning, purpose, and value — what I will call problems of narrative coherence and intelligibility. To understand how these problems arise with the transition from membership in a closed monocultural community to citizenship in a liberal democracy, let us briefly examine the educational process necessary to make that transition. I want to consider first one aspect of the process in particular: the process through which a capacity for civic freedom is developed. What sort of transformation in outlook, character, and self-understanding is necessary if a capacity for civic freedom is to be acquired?

What I call a capacity for civic freedom is linked to one of the two powers of moral personality distinguished by Rawls — the power to pursue rationally a particular conception of the good. We must note carefully the full significance of two of the terms central to the definition of this moral power. First, the power in question is the capacity to pursue a particular conception of the good rationally. Second, the power in question is the capacity to pursue a particular conception of the good. Properly understood, these two terms together define what makes this capacity specifically a capacity proper to citizenship in a liberal democracy. To pursue a particular conception of the good rationally is to pursue a life plan or life ideal critically, rather than blindly or obsessively. This means not only that the methods selected for the attainment of the life ideal are subject to critical scrutiny, but also that reasons for the pursuit of the life ideal itself also require examination. Further, to pursue a particular conception of the good as a particular conception of the good is to pursue a life plan explicitly as one among many other possible life plans, rather than as an inescapable fate or a divinely ordained mission. This means that the life ideal being pursued is explicitly understood as an option, as an object of choice. To pursue a life plan either obsessively or as an inescapable fate is not to pursue it freely. Thus, the moral power to pursue rationally a particular conception of the good can be described as the capacity for civic freedom. Rawls tells us that: . . . citizens are free in that they conceive of themselves and of one another as having the moral power to have a conception of the good. This is not to say that . . . they view themselves as inevitably tied to the pursuit of the particular conception of the good which they affirm at any given time. Instead, as citizens, they are regarded as capable of revising and changing this conception on reasonable and rational grounds, and they may do this if they so desire. Thus, as free persons, citizens claim the right to view their persons as independent from and as not identified with any particular conceptions of the good, or scheme of final ends.

Thus, in order to move from the standpoint of a member of a monocultural community to the standpoint of liberal democratic citizenship, a person must acquire the capacity for freedom, the capacity effectively to define him or herself independently of any single life plan or life ideal. Developing this kind of independence is far easier said than done. Its basic requirement is that persons make the Socratic distinction between the good by itself and any particular conception of the good to which they might adhere at one time or another. As we have noted, this distinction is generally absent in monocultural communities. Its absence, in fact, defines monocultural community. The particular conception of the good life pursued by members of such communities is indistinguishable from the good itself. It is not a conception of the good life that they pursue, it is simply the good life. The members of a monocultural community bear identities that are wholly defined by the particularistic standards of excellence, the virtue concepts, the ranking system, the ascriptions of rights and duties grounded in the totalizing world view of their community. Those who have been shaped by a single monocultural life ideal typically cannot conceive of themselves or imagine their lives apart from it. They typically understand the local cultural vocabulary they use to describe self and world not as one cultural vocabulary among others, but rather as the vocabulary that alone expresses the very nature of things. Members of other communities, to the extent that their ideals and behavior cannot be comprehended by this vocabulary, seem hopelessly alien.

Full cultural citizenship requires a break with this sort of monoculturalism. Citizens must acquire the moral power to pursue a particular conception of the good as a particular conception, i.e., as one among others. They must learn to distinguish the good as defined by their current particularistic life ideal from the good as such. The first step in the process of developing this power, the first step in the process of civic education, is learning how to address properly the Socratic question, "What is the good as such?" The capacity for freedom, the realization of full cultural citizenship, grows as the experienced distance grows between the good as such and one or another local conception of the good. As the experienced space between local good and the good as such increases, the citizen grows in the capacity to separate his or her own identity as a citizen from attributions based on the ranking system, virtue concepts, and standards of excellence defined by any one particularistic conception of the good. This space is the space of civic freedom, the space of civic discourse. Within this space, citizens grow in the capacity to describe and address one another in terms of categories that do not give precedence to any one particularistic life ideal over others. They learn to address one another as free and equal individuals. Adherents of incommensurable world views or life ideals often find one another’s speech and behavior alien and unintelligible. However, as they learn to meet and address one another within the space of civic freedom and civic discourse, a special sort of mutual understanding and even friendship becomes possible, even though full mutual understanding beyond that space may remain impossible.

Attainment of this capacity for civic freedom is always a matter of degree. The difficulty involved in acquiring this capacity for freedom is that it involves, at the same time, both independence from and adherence to a particular conception of the good. The capacity for civic freedom does not imply an absence of wholehearted commitment to a particular conception of the good or a renunciation of membership in a particular ethnic, class, or religious community. On the contrary, the practice of civic freedom assumes such commitment and presupposes such membership. We must remember that the perspective proper to the practice of civic freedom does not contain in itself cultural resources rich enough to provide the basis for a comprehensive life ideal. Civic freedom, as a component of the civic good, applies to the part and not to the whole of life. Accordingly, attainment of a capacity for freedom cannot be taken as the sort of good that could ever rival the totalizing conceptions of the good proper to particularistic cultural traditions. Even less can it be identified with the good as such. The function of totalizing world views is to nurture human desire as a whole and to direct it toward some achievable set of goals. This sort of direction cannot come from the practice of civic freedom. Civic freedom, as a component of the civic good, exists only through its difference from every particularistic happiness ideal. To move from the standpoint of a member of a particularistic cultural community to the normative standpoint of citizenship, a person must both retain his or her adherence to one or another particular conception of the good, while at the same time adopting an attitude of critical independence toward all such adherence, viewing such adherence in all cases as subject to revision and revocation.

A capacity for civic freedom, thus, requires an almost self-contradictory attitude in the pursuit of a particularistic conception of the good. It requires both a continuing commitment to a particularistic life ideal and, at the same time, an affirmation of its revocability, an affirmation of the purely voluntary nature of that commitment. What makes this stance difficult is the central role played by totalizing life ideals in the nurturing and direction of human desire. Human desire flourishes most completely not by being satisfied, but rather in the anticipation of its satisfaction. Human desire is a form of animal desire that is intensified by the expectation of fulfillment and diminished by the expectation of frustration. In despair, for example, a sense of the futility of all desire diminishes desire itself, engendering apathy and self-destructive impulses. On the other hand, a sense of promised future satisfaction has the opposite effect, enlivening the senses and making the experience of desire itself ever more desirable. All this is to say that human desire is a form of animal desire that is bound up with a representation of time — with primacy given to the representation of the future. Human desire, for this reason, flourishes most completely when the objects of desire are clearly identified, attainable, and unquestioned in their desirability. It is the biological function, so to speak, of comprehensive doctrines or totalizing life ideals to provide this identification of the objects of desire and to represent those objects as attainable.

The development of a capacity for civic freedom, however, runs counter to the central role played by totalizing world views in the fostering and direction of human desire. This is because the capacity for civic freedom is the capacity to adopt a standpoint that is independent of any specific totalizing world view or life ideal. But the attainment of this sort of independence requires a certain externalization of the standpoints and attitudes defined by one or another particularistic life ideal — an externalization, therefore, of the cultural perspectives that nurture and direct desire. Development of a capacity for civic freedom is, thus, bound, at the very least, to introduce into the quest for the good life a certain ambiguity and complexity. This complexity and ambiguity affects the very intelligibility of desire itself.

To the extent that human desire is a form of animal desire that is bound up with the representation of time, the intelligibility of human desire — i.e., the way in which human beings achieve self-understanding as desiring, living beings — is embodied linguistically through narration, in the form of the life story. Life stories are narratives of desire in both the subjective and objective senses of the genitive. Life stories are narratives of desire in the sense that they provide a linguistic representation of the quest for the good, the quest for the object of desire. But life stories are narratives of desire, also, in the sense that they constitute the way in which desire itself becomes intelligible to itself as human desire. The story of his or her life that a particular person relates to others (including self as other) is a construction of hope, ordered by a plot that anticipates, as the narrative closure or conclusion, the eventual possession of the object of desire, the eventual realization of some particular conception of the good life. But if human desire gets its intelligibility in this way through narrative interpretation, we must attempt to understand in narrative terms, also, the alteration of desire brought about by the development of a capacity for civic freedom.

The capacity for civic freedom is the capacity to achieve an identity independent of the interpretive framework defined by any particular conception of the good. It is, therefore, a capacity to achieve and maintain an identity that is independent of any narrative representation of the pursuit of a particularistic happiness ideal. An identity whose standpoint is defined simply by its independence of or its externality to any particular narrative representation of desire is one that cannot, itself, become the subject of such a narrative representation. The capacity for civic freedom is, thus, the capacity to achieve and maintain an identity that cannot, itself, be represented in narrative terms, that cannot be rendered intelligible by a narrative of desire. To the degree that this capacity is developed and exercised, this unnarrated and unnarratable identity or standpoint emerges in explicit contrast to the identity whose standpoint gains its intelligibility through narrative representation. The capacity for civic freedom is measured by the degree to which this contrast is incorporated into the narrative representation of desire itself. Development of a capacity for civic freedom, then, is to be understood in narrative terms as the incorporation of a certain counter-narrative principle of intelligibility into the narrative representation of desire itself.

It is this counter-narrative force that gives civic freedom its difficult and even paradoxical character. Full cultural citizenship requires that persons develop a capacity for civic freedom. They must come to consider the development of this capacity a highest-order interest, giving its full realization the highest priority. Citizens must learn, in other words, to desire civic freedom as a good, as a component of the civic good. Yet, what is being desired in the desire for civic freedom is the development of an identity whose defining standpoint cannot be rendered intelligible in narrative terms. This civic identity, as we have seen, exists as a modification of the primary identity that is defined through a particular life narrative. A particular life narrative defines an identity, a self — i.e., the subject or leading character of the life story — in terms of a quest for realization of a particularistic conception of the good. This self or identity is the subject of a life narrative encompassing the whole of life, from birth to death. This narratively-constructed self or identity is one that adopts one or another totalizing perspective upon the general life issues of sex, friendship, work, justice, suffering, sin, death, and salvation.

The capacity for civic freedom, however, requires a modification of this narratively-constructed identity, a modification consisting in the incorporation of what we might call an authorial perspective into every particular life-narrative emplotment — an external perspective that itself escapes definition through any particular narrative representation and from which every particular narrative representation of desire is viewed as constructed or invented. This extra-narrational or authorial standpoint, obviously, cannot itself provide the basis for a narratively-represented identity or self. The author of a fictional narrative can represent his or her own life in a narrative that gives narrative significance to the creation of that fictional narrative. The extra-narrational authorial standpoint proper to civic freedom, however, cannot itself be comprehended this way in narrative terms, for that would in effect incorporate that extra-narrational standpoint into a particularistic narrative of desire. As we have seen, the standpoint proper to civic freedom is one that is external to all particularistic narratives of desire. A highest-order interest in the adoption of this extra-narrational authorial standpoint, i.e., in the development of a capacity for civic freedom, can, therefore, never be an attribute of a narratively-constructed identity or self. Rather, this highest-order interest in the practice of civic freedom must be conceived of as an interest in the incorporation into every narratively-constructed identity or self a recognition and affirmation of its own narrative construction — a recognition and affirmation that every narratively-constructed identity or self can be constructed differently and, therefore, exists only through a responsible authorial choice.

If this authorial standpoint proper to civic freedom is one that cannot itself be represented in narrative terms, it is, nevertheless, a standpoint that can be acquired and maintained only through the cultivation of a special kind of narrative imagination. It is the task of civic education to cultivate this kind of narrative imagination. To understand the nature of this sort of narrative imagination, we must keep in mind, once again, that life narratives or narratives of desire have a rhetorical function different from other sorts of narratives. In general, to tell a story is to define a pattern of relationships between events in the light of a narrative closure, i.e., in the light of an anticipated end of the story. An event taken as a mere brute fact and in isolation from other events, if such a thing can even be conceived of at all, is one that would have no narrative significance whatsoever. Events gain narrative significance only by being incorporated into a coherent story. The closest approximation possible to a linguistic representation of events taken as brute facts, i.e., with all narrative significance stripped away, is the chronicle — in other words, a mere listing of events in temporal order. But even a chronicle, no matter how bare of narrative interpretation, in its selection of detail describing the events chronicled, already suggests, at the very least, an anticipation of the narrative significance that the chronicled events might have for a specific audience.

A narration is thus a human reading of events, a representation of events that first invents and defines their specific narrative significance and connection. The narrative significance of a series of events is invented when those events are incorporated into a story that refers them to an outcome, a narrative closure, to which events "in themselves" — i.e., as merely listed or chronicled — do not intrinsically refer. Thus, when a witness during a criminal trial casts his or her observations of past events in narrative form, the events themselves and the narrative connections between them are defined by their relationship to and relevance for a specific narrative closure — one that consists in the judgment of guilt or innocence. Trial witnesses are asked to construct a coherent story out of the events they have witnessed, incorporating into that story only details that are or may be relevant to the proceedings at hand. In the same way, when a military historian tells the story of a particular battle, the events depicted in the story are defined in their narrative significance by reference to a specific narrative closure — typically, the outcome of the battle and the final outcome of the war.

Life narratives or narratives of desire, on the other hand, differ from narratives such as witness testimonies or military histories in their rhetorical function. Witness testimonies and military histories define the narrative connections between events in accordance with criteria of relevance drawn from socially mandated or conventionally designated narrative closures. Such stories are told for specific socially-defined reasons and are, in effect, speech acts that get their function from the more comprehensive language games or patterns of interaction of which they are components. For example, when a military historian tells the story of a particular battle or campaign, the story aims at representing the narrative connection between events by reference to some specific later consequence of interest to the historian’s audience, as determined by the rhetorical occasion for the narration. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 will be defined in its narrative significance, i.e., will be narratively connected to other events differently, depending on whether the event is viewed in its relevance to the outcome of the Pacific War, to the attainment of Hawaiian statehood, to U.S.-Japanese economic relations in the postwar era, or to the biography of the narrative’s author.

In the same way, witness testimonies are stories embedded in a more comprehensive language game governed by criteria of relevance drawn from the judicial process and mandating a specific narrative closure — a judgment of guilt or innocence. The events that occurred before, during, and after, say, a convenience store robbery could be represented in their narrative connection in many different ways, depending on the different narrative closures to which they might be referred. For example, those events will be given different narrative readings, if they are represented in their relationship to some later event in the biography of the store owner or in their relationship to the economic decline of a city. In a court of law, however, society mandates that the relevant narrative closure, with a view to which the events are to be described is the judgment of guilt or innocence. Narrative interpretations of the events surrounding the robbery not relevant to that outcome are, therefore, ruled out. Narratives like witness testimonies and military histories, then, characteristically define the narrative significance of events in terms of a narrative closure or criterion of relevance that is, in one way or another, known, fixed or identified in advance. Let us call narratives like these closed-criterion narratives.

Life narratives or narratives of desire, on the other hand, are open-criterion narratives. Life stories embody the intelligibility of human desire. In life stories, desire becomes intelligible to itself as human desire. Human desire is fostered, shaped, and directed by particular conceptions of the good, by particular totalizing world views that define specific ways of addressing the general human issues of sex, friendship, work, justice, suffering, sin, death, and salvation. Life stories are narratives of the quest for the attainment of the good life, as conceived of by one or another comprehensive doctrine. The attainment of the good, the attainment of a particular happiness ideal, is the relevant narrative closure in terms of which the events related in a life story are given their narrative significance. When a person relates his or her life story to others (including self as other), the events narrated are defined in their narrative significance and connection by reference to the particular happiness ideal that is the ultimate object of desire. The rhetorical function of a life story is to render intelligible and to represent in narrative terms the status of desire with respect to its object — i.e., to represent in narrative terms "how things are going."

Thus, the life story of a person who has lost hope or who has become cynical and embittered in the pursuit of his or her life plan will interpret the narrative significance of past life events accordingly. Such a person will tell a story of defeat, injustice, and ultimate frustration. On the other hand, the life story of a person whose desire flourishes in anticipation of ultimate satisfaction will, also, give narrative significance to past and present events by reference to the expected future fulfillment. Such a person, however, will tell a story that anticipates victory and the consummation of desire. In the case of life narratives, then, the narrative connections between events are not determined by reference to some previously decided or socially mandated narrative closure or criterion of relevance. Life narratives are not closed-criterion narratives. Rather, life narratives define the narrative connections between life events by reference to a state of affairs that is not already decided or socially mandated, but only willed or desired — the attainment of a particular happiness ideal. The function of a life narrative is not to relate events "as they actually happened" (in terms of one or another predetermined criterion of relevance), but rather to render intelligible the present state of desire in relation to its ultimate object.

It is this characteristic of life narratives that makes them open-criterion narratives. In the case of life narratives, the criterion of relevance for the determination of narrative significance, i.e., the narrative closure to which all events are referred, can never be fixed once and for all. The narrative closure of a life narrative remains forever (at least for the person who tells his or her own life story) in the future and, therefore, undetermined. The narrative closure of a life narrative is not a fact, but an object of desire, a wish, a state of affairs that is willed rather than known. Because this is the case, life narratives are uniquely subject to continual reinterpretation and reconstruction. In the case of closed-criterion narratives, this is not the case. In the case of military histories or witness narratives, consensus and even practical certainty can be attained about the narrative order of events, because the criterion that determines their narrative order is undisputed. But in the case of a life narrative, the opposite is true. In the case of a life narrative, the criterion that determines narrative order and significance remains always finally undetermined — even after the completion of the life that is the subject of narration. Thus, the Greek proverb asserting that no one’s life should be judged happy until after death does not even go far enough. The life story that is, today, a story of victory and flourishing desire can by misfortune be transformed tomorrow into a story of tragedy and defeat. But even after a life is over the story of it is not. Those who make judgments about the luck or misfortune of the dead make those judgments in view of their own ongoing and unfinished life narratives. The criterion that they apply to the lives of the dead, thus, also remains open, and the person judged today to have lived a tragically unhappy life may, with the changing perspectives of those who judge, be judged differently tomorrow.

Life narratives, then, are open-criterion narratives because their rhetorical function is to render intelligible the present state of desire with respect to its ultimate object. Because possession or loss of that ultimate object is forever futural, the narrative closure by reference to which the events represented in a life story are given their narrative significance can never be finally determined. In life stories, the criterion for assigning narrative order and significance to events remains always open or subject to revision. The events in a life story are represented in their narrative significance by their relevance to the attainment of one or another particularistic conception of the good. As a person’s conception of the good changes or as a person’s changing life circumstances affect the prospects for attainment of the good, so also, will change the narrative significance attributed to life events. Thus, for example, the bankruptcy whose narrative significance is today understood by a businessman as final ruin, may tomorrow, following his conversion to Christianity, be interpreted as an act of God’s mercy. In such a case, it is not a matter of a false interpretation being replaced by a correct interpretation of the event, but rather a matter of giving a second reading to the event that places it in the narrative context of a different conception of the good and gives narrative representation and intelligibility to a the pursuit of a new object of desire.

The fact that it is possible for human life narratives to be constructed as open-criterion narratives makes possible the cultural construction of a capacity for civic freedom. A capacity for civic freedom consists in a capacity to incorporate into every narratively-constructed identity or self a recognition and affirmation of its own narratively-constructed status. This is to say that the capacity for civic freedom is the capacity to construct a human life narrative as an open-criterion narrative. Note that there is no metaphysical issue here about the possibility of human freedom. There can be no doubt that, even though it is difficult and perhaps rare, human life narratives can, indeed, be constructed as open-criterion narratives. They don’t have to be so constructed. Cultural support for their construction in this way is generally found only in liberal democracies. If it were in fact the case that for some reason human life narratives could not be constructed as open-criterion narratives, then there would be no capacity for civic freedom, and liberal democracy as a form of political association would not exist. The narrative closures of life stories would then be viewed as fixed once and for all — whether by fate, biology, or historical circumstances — and it would be impossible to adopt the authorial perspective on human life narratives that permits recognition of the narratively-constructed nature of human identity.

Once again, with regard to the question of the possibility of civic freedom, the battle between opposing metaphysical theories of freedom and determinism is simply irrelevant. The question of the possibility of civic freedom is a cultural and political one — do we want to teach citizens to construct their life narratives as open-criterion narratives or not? The political health of any liberal democracy, of course, depends on an affirmative answer to that question. Persons who construct their life narratives as closed-criterion narratives — i.e., who represent their destinies as determined by fate, biology, or historical circumstances — have not learned to adopt the extra-narrational authorial perspective on their life narratives that would enable them to view the narrative closure of their lives as a matter of their own responsibility. Such persons can never become free and responsible citizens. The perception that human life narratives are open-criterion narratives accounted for the partial truth of Sartrean existentialism. But the Sartrean conception of freedom misread what is properly understood as a fact about the rhetorical function of human life narratives as a metaphysical property of human consciousness. Civic freedom became, for Sartrean existentialism, a universally defining trait of human beings as such, rather than a linguistic capacity required for the attainment of full cultural citizenship in modern constitutional democracies. In conceiving of civic freedom in metaphysical terms, Sartrean existentialism stripped it of its political function and, therefore, could offer no program of civic education designed to promote its development.

If a capacity for civic freedom is made possible by the fact that human life narratives can be constructed as open-criterion narratives, then liberalism may be understood as a form of political association that, because it requires the practice of civic freedom and responsibility, requires citizens to construct their life narratives in that way. In the case of monocultural communities, the opposite is the case. Monocultural communities — tribal or village communities, in particular — mandate, or at least encourage adherence to a single conception of the good, a single way of life. Life narratives in such communities, therefore, tend to be represented in terms of a limited range of possible narrative closures. Monoculturalism thus supports and even mandates the construction of human life narratives as closed-criterion narratives. Members of such communities tend to see their lives as determined by birth, family, divine command, or fate. Rather than learning to conceive of the events in their lives as open to an indefinite number and range of interpretations, those events seem to express the iron law of necessity. Liberal political communities, on the other hand, are not monocultural, but multicultural. Liberal political communities encourage the cultivation of a multiplicity of diverse and conflicting conceptions of the good among which citizens may choose. The exercise of such choice presupposes an interpretation of human life narratives as open-criterion narratives. It requires a capacity to form an identity that is not wholly determined by one or another particular narrative reading of life events. It requires a capacity to adopt different narrative readings of life events by referring them to a variety of diverse and conflicting ideals of happiness. To develop this capacity, citizens must be taught to develop and exercise a very peculiar form of narrative imagination.

It is the task of civic education to cultivate this form of imagination. Cultivation of this form of narrative imagination is designed to generate the extra-narrational authorial perspective required for a recognition and affirmation of human identities as narratively-constructed. In learning how to adopt this authorial perspective, a citizen must learn to imagine him- or herself credibly as pursuing a number of different ways of life while retaining the same identity. As opposed to this sort of narrative imagination, most narrative imagining, most desire-motivated envisioning of narrative possibilities, is monocultural. It has the effect of binding the imaginer’s desire and identity more closely to his or her current conception of the good life and, therefore, with his or her current narrative representation of life events. Thus, an athlete whose object of desire is athletic glory dreams of victory; a businessman whose ideal of happiness is the possession of vast wealth and financial power dreams of making a fortune in the stock market; the fanatical patriot whose life’s project is the realization of unlimited ethnic or national hegemony has fantasies of glorious conquest; the scholar whose life is invested in the goal of shaping the discourse and self-understanding of future generations dreams of discovery; and so on. In all such cases, the imagination of narrative possibilities serves to bind desire ever more securely to its current object. It serves to increase the imaginer’s bodily investment in, and attachment to, his or her current way of life, wedding both desire and identity ever more completely to the particularistic cultural community and to the world view that currently determine their shape and direction. This kind of imagining is inevitable and plays a necessary role in the pursuit of any particularistic conception of the good. It can intensify desire and inspire hope and confidence. Compared to this kind of imagining, however, the special kind of narrative imagination that produces a capacity for civic freedom can seem to be virtually an exercise in self-contradiction.

As we have seen, to learn how to adopt the extra-narrational authorial perspective on all life narrative representation required for the practice of civic freedom is to learn how to incorporate into a particular narratively-constructed self or identity a recognition of its own narrative construction. Without this recognition, a person cannot pursue a particularistic conception of the good, either freely or rationally — i.e., with the readiness to examine critically and dispassionately both means and ends. This sort of rationality can be fully developed only by the practice of a form of narrative imagination that can liberate desire from its narrative identification with its current object. The sort of narrative imagination I have in mind is the sort that can sometimes be generated by exposure to fictional narratives. In reading themselves into a fictional narrative, persons sometimes can learn to imagine credibly the possibility of pursuing different ways of life or the possibility of giving very different narrative readings to the events in their own lives. These possibilities are imagined credibly when they raise the possibility of actually desiring differently, when they imaginatively evoke and nourish a desire for a different set of life goals. The practice of this kind of narrative imagination can serve to loosen rather than tighten the bonds that tie identity and desire to the particularistic cultural community and totalizing world view that currently determine their shape and direction. By this kind of imagining, for example, the athlete might come to imagine the possibility of actually desiring the satisfactions proper to the scholarly life; the businessman might come to imagine the possibility of actually desiring the satisfactions proper to the life of religious seclusion; the patriot might come to imagine the possibility of actually desiring the satisfactions proper to the life of the creative artist; and so on.

Let us call this kind of narrative imagination the practice of life-narrational de-centering, since its function is not so much to lead to the actual choice of a different way of life as it is to cultivate the capacity to give different narrative readings to the "same" life events. The purpose of cultivating this capacity is to liberate desire from total and exclusive narrative investment in its current object. As we have noted, human desire gains its intelligibility and direction from narrative representation. Life stories are narratives of desire in that a particular narrative reading of life events constitutes a particular linguistic embodiment and self-interpretation of desire. But when the narrative investment of desire in its current object becomes total and exclusive, when the force and vitality of human desire become too dependent upon or even identified with a particular narrative reading of life events, desire itself can be threatened.

For example, the birth of a child usually occasions a narrative investment of desire on the part of the child’s parents. The bond between parents and child is a bond of desire, a bond forged by shared hopes and common goals. But, as a bond of desire, it is also a narrative bond, a bond whose very life consists in the ongoing construction of a common life story in which the lives of parents and child are narratively interwoven. The death of a child under such circumstances can produce a profound disruption in the narrative self-understanding of the bereaved parents. To the extent that their desire and their identities were heavily invested in narratives of parenthood and child-rearing, a child’s death can produce in the bereaved parents something like a state of life-narrative shock. Narratives of parenthood and child-rearing can no longer provide meaning and direction to their desire. They must "put their lives back together," i.e., construct new life narratives embodying new hopes and goals, life narratives that do not invest desire heavily in narratives of parenthood and child-rearing. But what if, in some particular case, this cannot be done? What if, in such a case, the investment of desire in narratives of parenthood and child-rearing were so great that no other narrative reading of life events were possible?

Desire that has been narratively captured in this way by its current object is at risk when events occur that threaten the narrative intelligibility and coherence of life. Such exclusive and total investment in a particular narrative reading of life events can produce obsession, apathy, and despair when something happens making that reading no longer tenable. The practice of what I have called life-narrational de-centering is designed to prevent this sort of total and exclusive narrative investment of desire in its current object. The practice of this form of narrative imagination can elicit and nurture a sort of desire that is immune to capture by any particular narrative reading of life events. It achieves this by constructing narrative representations of desire that credibly and persuasively render alternative objects of desire — i.e., alternative life plans, happiness ideals, and conceptions of the good — in their desirability. These representations of alternative desires are credibly and persuasively rendered to the degree that they suggest different possible narrative readings of a particular course of life. Imaginative explorations of alternative narrative readings of life events are also imaginative explorations of different possible identities that could be constructed by those narrative readings. The practice of this form of imagination, then, promotes, in this way, recognition of the narratively-constructed nature of human identity in general.

Here, in the liberating effects of this form of narrative imagination, is revealed the narrative basis of civic rationality, as well as civic freedom. As we have seen, the capacity for civic freedom is the capacity to incorporate into every narratively-constructed self or identity a recognition and affirmation of its own narrative construction. The practice of civic freedom is the practice of adopting an extra-narrational authorial perspective on all life narrative construction, viewing the subject of every life narrative, i.e., one’s own narrative identity in particular, as tentative and as subject to responsible narrative reconstruction and redefinition. To the extent that desire gets its primary intelligibility not from some particular narrative reading of life events, but rather from a relationship to this extra-narrational authorial perspective, desire is immune from capture by any particular narrative reading of life events. But this form of desire also constitutes the basis of civic rationality. To pursue a particularistic conception of the good rationally is to pursue it with a readiness to examine that pursuit critically with respect to both means and ends. Critical examination of the pursuit of a particularistic conception of the good is impossible to the extent that desire is narratively invested in that pursuit totally and exclusively. The liberation of desire from its narrative capture by its current object, therefore, constitutes the condition for the development of a capacity for civic rationality.

Western philosophy has typically neglected the role of narrative imagination in both its conception of rationality and in its characteristic methods of training others in the use of reason. Since Plato, the faculty of reason has been identified with a capacity for logical inference, and the primary educational means for developing this capacity has been restricted to training in logic, dialectic, or argumentation. However, if we understand rationality as the capacity to examine critically the means and ends involved in the pursuit of a particularistic conception of the good, then we must view logical inference and argument as playing a secondary role in the production and exercise of this capacity. There is no doubt that the critical examination of the means and ends of action requires a capacity for logical inference and the exercise of argumentative skills. But these come in during the process of deliberation, when alternative means and ends are being considered. Before the powers of logical inference and dialectic can have any role to play, alternatives must be identified and affirmed as real possibilities. To the extent that desire has become exclusively and totally invested in its current object of pursuit, however, no other real alternatives can enter the field of decision-making, and there will be nothing to deliberate about. Accordingly, in our conception of rationality and in our pedagogical means of cultivating a capacity for reason, the narrative liberation of desire must take priority. One way that this narrative liberation of desire can be achieved is through what I have called the practice of life-narrational de-centering. This means that the postmodern reconstruction of civic education must place no less an emphasis on the cultivation of this form of narrative imagination than it places on the cultivation of logical and dialectical skills.

Any attempt to use this form of narrative imagination in the development of capacities for civic freedom and civic rationality, however, must come to terms also with the difficulties and dangers attendant upon the narrative liberation of desire. We must understand that the complete narrative liberation of desire — i.e., its complete disinvestment in any particular narrative reading of life events — is no less a danger than its exclusive investment in one such reading. A delicate balance must be struck between the detachment and the attachment of desire. Human desire flourishes most completely, as we have noted, not in being satisfied, but rather in the anticipation of its satisfaction. Human desire flourishes most completely when its objects are clearly identified and represented in narrative terms as attainable. The role of life narratives is to provide the linguistic means for this flourishing of desire. This means that, to some extent, human desire must, indeed, heavily invest in a narrative reading of life events that provide the conditions for its flourishing. On the other hand, exclusive and totalizing investments in such narrative readings make civic freedom and civic rationality impossible.

This leaves unanswered the difficult question we originally asked. In what sense can we understand civic freedom, as a component of the civic good, to be itself an object of desire, a substantive and final good? To the extent that the narrative over-investment of desire in its current object represents a danger, we can understand civic freedom, as the liberation of desire, as a good worthy of pursuit. But to the extent that civic freedom, itself, can produce a narrative detachment from all objects of desire, it represents a threat. Civic freedom is a component of the civic good. If we are to understand the civic good as a final and substantive good, it must provide some measure for determining the limits and boundaries of the liberation of desire. That measure can perhaps be provided by the second component of the civic good, the exercise of a capacity for civic justice.

Unfortunately, the development and exercise of a capacity for civic justice generates problems of its own for the narrative intelligibility of desire. Let us keep in mind the distinction made earlier between civic justice and communitarian justice. The life issue of justice, in general, arises from the specifically human desire for self-respect or for a socially recognized and confirmed sense of relative worth. The rule of justice in general is "equals to equals," — i.e., persons considered of equal rank, achievement, or desert, in some respect and with regard to some standard, should be treated equally. Civic justice is distinguished from communitarian justice by the unusual criterion of equality it applies.

The criteria of equality applied in judgments of communitarian justice are grounded in the way of life and the ranking systems of a particularistic cultural community. The criteria of equality applied in judgments of communitarian justice will, therefore, differ from community to community. Moreover, within any given particularistic cultural community, criteria of equality will differ depending upon the life context and circumstances involved. Thus, in a community dependent upon agriculture for its livelihood, a communitarian standard of justice might dictate that the best farmers (other things being equal) be given priority in the overall, community-wide distribution of scarce goods and honors. It would dictate that farmers equal in merit (probably in this case as measured by productivity) be treated equally in the distribution of such goods and honors. However, in other life contexts within that same community — for example, in the contexts of family relations or religious practice — a communitarian standard of justice would typically dictate application of different ranking systems or criteria of equality. In the context of family relations, a communitarian standard of justice would typically dictate that qualities such as blood relationship or personal loyalty, rather than agricultural productivity, provide the basis for determining equal treatment. In the context of religious practice, a communitarian standard of justice would typically dictate that piety and faithful religious observance, rather than agricultural productivity, provide the basis for determining equal treatment. In meting out communitarian justice, then, i.e., in meting out equal treatment to equal persons within the various contexts of a particularistic cultural community, all such contextual nuances must be taken into account.

Thus, the development of an effective sense of communitarian justice requires the effective internalization of the system of overlapping and embedded ranking systems or equality criteria that are applied contextually within a given particularistic cultural community. This internalization of ranking systems typically occurs during the processes of acculturation and education to which all community members are subject. In general, an ability to interpret and apply successfully the context-sensitive ranking systems and equality criteria proper to any community pretty much defines full cultural membership in that community. These standards of communitarian justice are grounded in, and reflective of, the total way of life of the community. They are embodied in its institutions, traditions, and mores. They articulate the community’s totalizing view of the world, its comprehensive style of responding to the general human life issues of sex, friendship, work, suffering, sin, death, and salvation. As in the case of all other cultural factors that serve to give meaning and direction to human desire, these standards of communitarian justice also have a narrative dimension and function.

This narrative dimension is evident in the very way that communitarian equality criteria and ranking systems are typically taught and communicated. Equality criteria are taught and expressed most effectively by storytelling. Stories in general, whatever else they do, provide model life narratives for their audiences, life narratives into which audience members can project themselves as the lead character and, thereby, apply to their own lives. Stories of communitarian justice and injustice in particular give narrative embodiment to equality criteria and ranking systems. Standards of communitarian justice are internalized through the internalization of the model life narratives that represent them. These model life narratives show by either positive or negative example how a life story shaped in accordance with standards of communitarian justice is to be recognized and constructed. Such morality tales show the consequences of injustice, but also provide model narrative reconciliations of conflicting moral standards within the community, i.e., cases in which the ranking system to be applied in one life context conflicts with ranking systems applied in others. Further, in their use in teaching a community’s equality criteria or ranking systems, stories of communitarian justice and injustice also articulate the overall conception of the good life proper to the community, providing narrative representations not only of community standards of justice, but also of the community’s pursuit of a shared ideal of happiness. In this way, stories of communitarian justice and injustice are organically related to the larger set of narratives that tell the story of the community’s pursuit of the good life from its founding to the present. In internalizing the model life narratives of communitarian justice and injustice, members of a particularistic cultural community thus internalize also elements of the life narrative of the community as a whole — the life narrative that provides the basis for the community’s narrative solidarity, its collective sharing of a story of origins and of the pursuit of a common good.

Community or collective life narratives, like individual life narratives, are open-criterion narratives that have as their rhetorical function the representation of the current status of desire with respect to its object. They differ from individual life narratives in that community life narratives provide meaning and direction for a desire whose object is shared with others. Thus, ideally, community life narratives generate a sense of solidarity among those engaged in the pursuit of the same ideal of happiness. Because human desire flourishes most readily in anticipating satisfactions that are clearly defined and believed to be attainable, a community life narrative that, in fact, generates a sense of narrative solidarity in the group serves desire by providing a collective confirmation of the definition, desirability, and attainability of the shared goal. Members of a community develop and nurture bonds of narrative solidarity with its other members by incorporating their own individual life narratives into the larger collective life narrative of the group.

The narrative closure of such an ongoing collective life story typically consists in the community’s attainment of the good life, as its members currently define it. To support bonds of narrative solidarity, the collective good sought after typically must be broad enough in scope to define ranking systems in all or most of the general contexts of human life — the contexts of sex, friendship, work, suffering, sin, death, and salvation. Thus, lovers, families, villages, tribal or ethnic groups, trades, professions, religions, and nationalities construct stories of struggle and hope offering narrative readings of life events that create and support the sense of a common destiny. These stories are collective narratives of desire in which are inscribed individual narratives of desire. Because human desire gains its intelligibility, meaning, and direction from narrative representation, no bonds are stronger than those that can be created by the sharing of a common life narrative.

Thus, standards of communitarian justice are designed to nurture and support both the desire of individuals and the narrative solidarity of the group. The criterion of equality proper to civic justice, however, has a different function. Standards of civic justice, as components of a countervailing liberal democratic civic culture, are designed to weaken or at least modify in a certain respect the communitarian bonds of narrative solidarity. If not understood properly, standards of civic justice can even destroy those bonds. Just as the development of a capacity for civic freedom requires the achievement of an identity that is independent of any particularistic conception of the good, so also the development of an effective sense of civic justice requires the achievement of an identity freed of narrative definition by any shared life story governed by particularistic criteria of equality — i.e., it requires the achievement of an identity capable of affirming the equality of all citizens. Insofar as capacities for both civic freedom and civic justice require the adoption of a standpoint independent of particularistic cultural conceptions of the good, both of these capacities are produced and strengthened by the practice of what I have called life-narrative de-centering. However, in the case of civic justice, the focus is less on the imaginative practice of desiring differently than on the imaginative practice of evaluating self and others differently, through the application of a different sort of ranking system. Therefore, development of a capacity for civic justice entails the practice of a slightly different form of narrative imagination.

A community or collective life narrative, i.e., a life narrative whose rhetorical function it is to produce narrative solidarity, assigns meanings and values to persons in accordance with the particular ranking systems established by the community’s current conception of the good. Accordingly, persons who are represented in collective life narratives as great or supremely significant are typically those who reflect the overall priorities and aspirations of the group. In a particular family narrative, for example, the character of a father may be assigned greatest importance or value, a grandparent or uncle a lesser importance, a neighbor virtually none. In the history of a particularly warlike tribe or nation, the stories of successful warriors or military leaders will typically be assigned greatest importance, the stories of tradesmen or producers less, the stories of domestic workers or slaves none at all. Thus, community life narratives, in their emplotment and selection of subject matter, reflect communitarian criteria of equality. A community life narrative can successfully create a bond of narrative solidarity only by reflecting in this way local, particularistic standards of justice.

The criterion of equality proper to civic justice is different. The criterion of equality applied in judgments of civic justice is defined by the identical relationship that all citizens, as such, have to the basic institutional structure of a liberal democracy. Since all citizens as citizens stand in the same relationship to that basic institutional structure, all citizens are equal in that respect, whatever may be their relative value or status as assigned by one or another communitarian ranking system. To affirm this equality and act accordingly, a citizen is required to develop and maintain two opposing evaluational frameworks for dealing with questions of justice. As a member of a particularistic cultural community, a citizen must apply to self and others the relevant local standards of justice — those standards of justice that give meaning and structure to community life narratives and that, thereby, forge the bonds of narrative solidarity. But, upon entering the public sphere, the citizen must put aside all such local standards of justice and call into play a very different evaluational framework, a framework that defines all citizens as equals. This means, however, that, to apply this egalitarian evaluational framework, the citizen must externalize or step outside the narrative perspective proper to particularistic community life narratives. The citizen must develop the capacity to tell a different story about family, village, profession or religion — a story that does not embody local communitarian criteria of equality in its emplotment and selection of subject matter. Thus, the father whose significance looms so large in the collective life narrative of a particular family must at the same time be imagined to be, as citizen, neither more nor less valuable or significant than a distant uncle, or a far-off neighbor. The military leader whose story looms so large in the history of a nation must at the same time be imagined to be, as citizen, neither more nor less valuable or significant than a neighborhood merchant or a household domestic. Let us call the practice of this sort of narrative imagination the practice of life-narrational equalization.

Let us note the differences between the practices of what I have called life-narrational de-centering and life-narrational equalization. Life narrational de-centering promotes development of a capacity for civic freedom by preventing the narrative over-investment of desire in its current object. In this form of narrative imagination, the goal is to recognize and affirm the narratively-constructed character of all human identity. Practice in giving different narrative readings of the "same" life events, by referring them to different narrative closures, can produce the realization that human life narratives are open-criterion narratives. Only a person who has developed an external, authorial perspective on all life narratives can construct a particular life narrative freely and responsibly.

The practice of life-narrational equalization, on the other hand, promotes the development of a capacity for civic justice by preventing the over-investment of desire in one particular narrative-embodied ranking system or in an exclusive bond of narrative solidarity. Community or collective life narratives embody in their selection and representation of subject matter social hierarchies based on particularistic communitarian standards of justice. A citizen must be able to adopt an external perspective on all such social hierarchies if a capacity for civic justice is to be developed. The criterion of equality proper to civic justice is a countervailing criterion. Unlike the criteria of equality proper to communitarian justice, it has no content in itself. The entire point of applying the egalitarian evaluational framework proper to civic justice is to neutralize particularistic local ranking systems, so as to create a space independent of all social hierarchies wherein citizens can treat one another as equals.

Let us keep in mind that those who are to be treated as equal fellow citizens within the space of civic discourse are, also, those who, as members of one particular community or another, have been assigned either higher or lower rank in terms of local communitarian standards of justice. This rank or status does not simply disappear when citizens enter the public sphere. In fact, the egalitarian evaluational framework proper to the public sphere, can be properly applied only in its difference from or in its contrast to the hierarchical evaluational frameworks defined by communitarian standards of justice. Civic equality is a property that persons gain only when they enter the liberal democratic public sphere and that property is attributed to them by their fellow citizens always in spite of the rank or status those persons have within one particularistic cultural community or another. Civic equality does not abolish hierarchical rank or status, but achieves its force through the recognition of it, affirming the equality of general and private, CEO and worker, billionaire and derelict, Pope and layperson, champion and also-ran, precisely in spite of, and with a view, to the large differences in their local status.

Further, the treatment of fellow citizens as equals is not merely a formal procedural matter, but, to be fully effective, requires its own special bond of affection. We call this bond civic friendship. The bond of civic friendship differs greatly from the bond of communitarian solidarity. Because the liberal democratic public sphere, where the equality criteria of civic justice have their application, is itself limited in scope, so also is the bond of civic friendship limited in scope. The bond of civic friendship unites persons who share the same relationship to the basic institutional structure of a liberal democratic society. They may share nothing else, but they may often, also, share membership in a particularistic cultural community and, thereby, ties of communitarian solidarity. Here we see the complexity that is introduced into every relationship by liberal democratic citizenship. In a liberal democracy, every person has at least a twofold relationship with every other person. First, every person is related to every other as either a member or a nonmember of a particularistic cultural community. That relationship is governed by the equality criteria and ranking systems proper to communitarian justice. Second, every person is related to every other as citizen, a relationship governed by civic friendship and the standards proper to civic justice. Within particularistic cultural communities, to act justly, one must treat with appropriate respect persons assigned high status by local ranking systems. As citizen, on the other hand, to act justly, one must treat as equals both high-ranking and low-ranking members of every particularistic cultural community, including one’s own, regardless of their local rank. In short, a citizen must learn to cultivate with members of his or her own community not only the hierarchical bond of narrative solidarity, but also the egalitarian bond of civic friendship.

The practice of life-narrational equalization is designed to produce the capacity for developing and maintaining this twofold relationship to fellow citizens. This practice consists in giving alternative narrative readings to life events — to those events, above all, whose stories represent differentials in communitarian rank as properties inherent in the persons ranked. Any narrative reading of life events that represents differentials in communitarian rank as objective properties of persons is always the product of a particularistic narrative perspective or standpoint — the standpoint of narrative solidarity with the particularistic cultural community doing the ranking. The practice of life-narrational equalization is designed to lead to a recognition and affirmation of this narratively-constructed nature of all communitarian rank differentials. This form of narrative imagination is designed to promote the realization that different narrative readings of the "same" life events can always be given, readings that overturn or at least reinterpret any differentials in communitarian rank assigned to persons as their inherent properties. These other readings adopt different narrative standpoints and apply different ranking systems — ranking systems either belonging to different life contexts or identified with different cultural communities altogether.

Thus, in the case of a community life narrative of a particular battle or campaign that represents a military leader as an object of respect and represents foot soldiers as a persons of relative insignificance, the practice of life-narrational equalization would seek to recast this story in a way that produces at least a reinterpretation, if not a reversal, of the relative rankings of the individuals described. For example, the story of the battle or campaign could be recast from a narrative perspective expressing solidarity with the combat experiences of the common foot soldier. Told in this way, the story might represent the military leader as insulated from and untested by the rigors of combat and the foot soldier as the true hero. The point of this exercise of narrative imagination would not be to discover the "truth" about some particular set of events or merely to "bring down the mighty" by discrediting great military leadership. The purpose of such a narrative exercise would rather be to develop an external perspective on all communitarian life narratives, one that promotes the capacity to recognize and affirm the rank differentials assigned to persons as narrative constructions, as products of one or another particularistic narrative standpoint that can easily be reversed. To the extent that this sort of narrative exercise actually promotes development of this externalized perspective, it serves to develop a capacity to view all narrative-embodied, particularistic rank differentials as external to those who are ranked by them — thereby holding open the egalitarian space, outside of and against all particularistic ranking systems, within which citizens as citizens can address one another on equal terms and form bonds of civic friendship.

Thus, in different ways, both the practices of life-narrational de-centering and life-narrational equalization promote the liberation of desire, i.e., the narrative transformation of the standpoint of desire that prevents an exclusive or total investment of desire in its current object. The practice of life-narrational de-centering focuses on narrative re-readings of life events in terms of different and conflicting happiness ideals. This form of narrative imagination promotes development of a capacity for civic freedom. It liberates desire by representing in narrative terms the desirability of many different life plans and goals. The practice of life-narration equalization focuses on narrative re-readings of life events that apply different and conflicting ranking systems or criteria of equality. As we have seen, this form of narrative imagination promotes the development of a capacity for civic justice by promoting the recognition that rankings applied to persons in community life narratives are not inherent properties of those persons, but rather are dependent upon the adoption of a standpoint of narrative solidarity with a particularistic cultural community. This form of narrative imagination liberates desire by overturning the narratively embodied social hierarchies and ranking systems in which desire can become over-invested.

This liberation of desire, however, is not an unproblematic good. We have seen how the liberation of desire required for development of a capacity for civic freedom moves in the direction of a general detachment from every particularistic object of desire and, therefore, puts the intelligibility of desire itself at risk. This is because human desire is never desire-in-general. It is always particularistic desire. It is always desire for a particularistic conception of the good whose pursuit can be represented in a totalizing and coherent life narrative. In the same way, the liberation of desire required for development of a capacity for civic justice moves in the direction of a general detachment from every particularistic communitarian ranking system or standard of justice. Such detachment puts desire at risk in a similar way by promoting an attitude of alienation from all particularistic ranking systems — ranking systems that give direction to human aspiration and generate narrative solidarity with others.

When it produces this alienating effect, the practice of life-narrational equalization takes the form of a narrative debunking of every variety of particularistic human greatness and distinction, the sort of debunking typically carried on in scandal-mongering tabloid news stories and in "unauthorized" celebrity biographies. In such news stories and biographies, persons who have been narratively exalted in terms of one ranking systems are brought low by the narrative application of a different ranking system. The practice of life-narrational equalization in such cases becomes a practice of cultural leveling aimed at revealing every notable human achievement to be the result of chance, conspiracy, or moral failure. But this attempt to bring down the mighty by showing all particularistic human distinction to be illusory can also have the effect of stifling aspiration to distinctive human achievement in general. Ironically, this misguided practice of life-narrational equalization can even represent, as fraudulent and ideologically deceived, the aspiration to achieve a superlative sense of civic justice — so that the very practice of narrative imagination that should properly serve to develop a capacity for civic justice can have the effect of undermining the aspiration to achieve it. Thus, just as the practice of life-narrational de-centering can threaten the narrative coherence and intelligibility of desire, so, also, can life-narrational equalization both nullify the basis of narrative solidarity with others and promote a general sense of the futility of particularistic desire itself.

So here, once again, the question of motivation must be raised. The practice of these forms of narrative imagination does not come naturally. Learning to adopt the externalized perspective on life narrative construction is difficult. It is hard to believe that anyone would undertake this project of the narrative liberation of desire without a belief in the goodness or desirability of its outcome. But what makes the civic good — i.e., the development and exercise of capacities for civic freedom and civic justice — desirable? How can this good become an object of desire when the transformation of desire that is required for its attainment can come to cast doubt upon the value of particularistic desire itself?

Let us be sure we understand the full scope of this question. We have taken what Rawls termed the two powers of moral personality as the capacities that define full cultural citizenship. These are the capacity for civic freedom and the capacity for an effective sense of civic justice. The development and exercise of these two capacities constitute the two primary components of the civic good. For those who have fully developed these two capacities, the exercise of these capacities is a highest-order interest. This means that, for such fully-developed citizens, where the civic good attained through the exercise of these two capacities comes in conflict with other goods, the civic good is to be preferred. The full realization of the normative standpoint of citizenship, then, consists in a modification of the effective ranking systems that persons typically bring to bear in daily decision-making. In daily decision-making, all human beings typically rank alternative courses of action in terms of one or another particularistic conception of the good. Their desire for that particularistic ideal of happiness and for the decisions it calls forth is rendered intelligible through the ongoing construction of a coherent life narrative. This life narrative defines a specific identity in terms of the particularistic life ideal or object of desire currently being pursued.

Full cultural citizenship, then, in modifying the ranking systems applied in everyday decision-making, modifies the narrative intelligibility of desire itself. To give highest priority to the civic good is to give highest priority to the adoption of an external perspective on all life narrative construction and, therefore, an external perspective upon every narrative interpretation of particularistic desire. To desire the civic good is to desire this narrative liberation of desire. As we have seen, this narrative liberation of desire can produce a certain detachment or alienation from particularistic ranking systems and forms of narrative solidarity that are necessary to give particularistic desire its meaning and direction. Clearly, the civic good cannot consist in this sort of detachment or alienation. To have a highest-order interest in the attainment of the civic good is not to desire the attainment of a perspective that undermines all particularistic desire. The question about the nature of the civic good is, therefore, the question of how the narrative modification of desire required for the practice of civic freedom and civic justice can itself be understood as an object of desire.

Further, let us keep in mind that, in a viable liberal democracy, citizens are united by their common pursuit of this civic good. Liberal democracy is a form of political association specifically established in order to provide the conditions under which alone this civic good can be attained by its members. It is a form of political association specifically established in order to make it possible for persons to accomplish this modification in the structure of desire, this narrative liberation of desire, that is the basis of the capacities proper to citizenship. Further, liberal democracies, i.e., regimes of civic freedom and civic justice, can exist only to the extent that many or most of their members actually develop these capacities and actually desire the civic good. A proper understanding of this civic good, one capable of effectively motivating desire for its attainment, is, therefore, absolutely essential to the very existence of civic community. The question of motivation is the central cultural question facing any civic community. The contemporary demise of modernist civic culture raises this question in the most pressing possible way. The question of how to motivate pursuit of the civic good is, thus, not a matter of idle philosophical speculation, but rather of the most immediate and urgent political concern. How are we to answer it? What arguments can we offer to one another as citizens that will both make clear the demands of citizenship and effectively motivate the desire to attain it?

Let us keep in mind, also, that the required arguments cannot be generated from the cultural resources provided by civic community or the public sphere alone. As Rawls notes, liberal democratic political institutions must be supported by an overlapping cultural consensus. The diverse cultural communities included within a given liberal democracy must identify and cultivate, within their own traditions, resources supportive of citizenship. For many cultural traditions, this will be difficult or impossible. Cultural traditions wholly wedded to monocultural forms of desire will find that liberal democratic institutions constitute a relentlessly corrosive and hostile cultural environment. Where communities shaped by such monocultural values predominate, liberal political institutions, themselves, are not likely to succeed. Liberal political institutions can flourish only where the particularistic cultural communities subject to them can find a basis within their particular traditions for an affirmation of civic freedom and civic equality. A conception of the civic good, as understood only in terms of the limited cultural perspectives proper to the liberal democratic public sphere, can by itself never provide sufficient motivational resources rich enough to provide a cultural basis of social unity and stability. The civic good is a partial good. Civic culture is a "thin" culture. For citizens in the full cultural sense, attainment of the civic good is a highest-order interest. Yet, pursuit of the civic good alone can never provide citizens with the resources for the creation of a comprehensive way of life.

A liberal democracy, then, requires the support of an overlapping consensus among the particularistic cultural communities that comprise it. However, this is not to say that the cultural perspectives proper to the liberal democratic public sphere can offer no supportive cultural resources at all. Arguments motivating desire for the attainment of the civic good can be drawn, also, from a conception of the liberal democratic public sphere itself. Modus vivendi arguments supportive of liberal political institutions are a case in point. But, as we noted earlier, modus vivendi liberalism is incapable of providing support for anything more than the most truncated and stunted forms of civic identity. Modus vivendi liberalism appeals only to the local self-interest of citizens as members of particularistic cultural communities. Modus vivendi liberalism argues for the support of liberal democracy only as part of a cultural and political compromise aimed at securing civil peace. What makes this compromise desirable is nothing beyond its promise to provide the conditions under which particular ethnic, class, and religious communities may continue to pursue their diverse conceptions of the good life without the threat of interference from others. What modus vivendi arguments do not make clear is in what sense citizenship is itself a good to be desired for its own sake. Such arguments cannot, therefore, generate motivation to undertake the transformation of desire required for full cultural citizenship. While modus vivendi arguments may be a permanent and even indispensable part of the rhetorical arsenal supportive of liberal democracy, taken by themselves in the absence of other means of cultural support, not only are they insufficient to generate the kind of motivation required for citizenship, they can actually weaken the cultural foundations of political community.

Beyond modus vivendi arguments, then, what other arguments can be drawn from the perspectives proper to the liberal democratic public sphere alone that can provide cultural support for the pursuit of the civic good? Perhaps such arguments might be discovered by examining another familiar conception of the goal of liberal democratic political association, one identified with modernist metaphysical conceptions of liberal doctrine. According to this conception, the goal of liberal democratic political association is to secure the natural rights of individuals. If this conception of the civic good is to provide motivational resources for a postmodern civic culture, however, it must be reformulated in such a way as to strip the notion of individual rights of its metaphysical connotations — of any suggestion that civil and political rights are universal and essential properties of human beings as such. That could be accomplished in the following way.

Let us consider the fact that the criterion of equality proper to civic justice specifies that all citizens, as they enter the public sphere, be treated as equals, regardless of their relative rank or status as measured by the ranking systems applied to them in accordance with communitarian standards of justice. As we have often noted, this civic criterion of justice is designed to have a countervailing impact on the hierarchical evaluational frameworks that typically order particularistic cultural communities.

Particularistic cultural communities are governed by totalizing world views and united by narrative solidarity in the pursuit of a shared conception of the good life. As cultural communities that seek to nurture and provide direction to human desire, hierarchical standards of excellence and achievement are necessary. Without such standards, these communities cannot generate and guide the aspirations of their members. However, often within such communities hierarchical ranking systems and standards of communitarian justice are established that have the effect of stifling rather than nurturing particularistic human desire and aspiration. This occurs when members of particularistic cultural communities are excluded from positions of power, respect, and authority within those communities on the basis of quasi-natural traits such as birth, race, gender, age, and class. The establishment of liberal political institutions — the establishment of a regime of civic freedom and civic justice — is designed to free members of particularistic cultural communities from all such quasi-natural constraints on particularistic aspiration and desire. This is the countervailing force and intent of the criterion of equality proper to civic justice.

Let us explore this countervailing force and intent of civic justice a bit further. As we have seen, the development of the capacities for civic freedom and civic justice entails a modification of the structure of desire — what I have called a narrative liberation of desire — that can threaten the narrative intelligibility of desire itself and weaken the sense of narrative solidarity with others. But this liberation of desire in the name of libertarian and egalitarian goals constitutes only one sort of threat to narrative solidarity and to the narrative intelligibility of desire. Another sort of threat to particularistic desire arises within the sphere of communitarian justice. We can understand the establishment of a regime of civic freedom and civic justice to be a response to this other threat.

Ideally, particularistic cultural communities nurture and direct the desire and aspirations of their members. Human desire flourishes most readily when its objects are clearly identified and narratively represented as attainable. The local culture generated by these communities — its narrative-embodied ranking systems, standards of excellence, virtue concepts and so on — serves these goals, focusing desire and nourishing the hope of its satisfaction. The bond that unites members of particularistic cultural communities is rooted in the soil of biological life. Human life, like all life, requires hierarchy, ranking, command and obedience, authority and subordination. Only under these conditions can human desire, as a form of animal desire, flourish. But such communities, rooted as they are in the soil of biological life, can also set up obstacles that are destructive of human desire. This occurs when such communities assign rank, roles of command and obedience, positions of authority and subordination, to members on the basis of quasi-natural traits such as birth, race, gender, age, and class. Members of a community who are systematically excluded from positions of power, respect, and authority on the basis of such quasi-natural qualities — i.e., qualities they can neither gain by effort nor lose by human fault — cannot aspire to those positions. On the other hand, neither can those who hold such positions as a result of birth, race, gender, age, or class aspire to them — or at least their aspiration is limited by the fact that the positions are delivered over to them solely by virtue of their possession of such quasi-natural traits. In this way, the establishment of such obstacles to desire has the effect of blocking the aspirations not only of those whose life possibilities are limited by those obstacles, but also of those who benefit from them.

When any particularistic cultural community establishes such quasi-natural obstacles to the aspirations of its members, justification for such limitation is ordinarily incorporated into the official culture of the community — i.e., into the official world view and community narratives. In some Christian communities, for example, women are excluded from positions of ecclesiastical power and authority by appeal to Biblical precepts and narratives. Again, in modern liberal democracies, racial groups have been excluded from positions of power and respect by appeal to "scientific" genetic theories. Because the justification for quasi-natural obstacles to desire are incorporated in this way into the official world views and narratives of these communities, community members whose aspirations are blocked by these obstacles and who remain in the community have only two choices: (1) they must incorporate those quasi-natural obstacles into their own identities and narrative self-understanding or (2) they must generate counter-narratives and counter-world views opposed to the official culture of the community. In either case, the capacity of the local community culture to carry out its essential function of nurturing and directing human desire is undermined and diminished.

Thus, in the first case, when community members who are victims of this discrimination incorporate into their own life narratives community beliefs about the disqualifying character of traits such as birth, race, gender, age and class, then the life narratives of those community members become the internalized mechanism by which desire is stunted and impeded. Under such circumstances, life narratives fail to carry out the function of rendering human desire intelligible to itself. The life stories of those whose birth, race, gender, age, or class constitute obstacles to aspiration are, inevitably, stories of unjustified desire, forbidden aspiration, and repressed hopes. In the second case, when persons who are victims of discrimination reject their exclusion from positions of power and respect and, in this rejection of the official culture of the community, generate counter-narratives and counter-world views as a response, the basis for the narrative solidarity of the community is destroyed. When this occurs, the local culture of such a community becomes a theater of conflict, a distorting mirror of intergroup rivalry, rather than the medium through which a collective desire for attainment of a shared conception of the good life is made transparent to itself.

Rather than describing the goal of liberal democratic regimes as the securing of the universal human rights of individuals, we can now describe this countervailing intent of regimes of civic justice in a non-metaphysical way. We can say that liberal democracy is a form of political association established for the purpose of eliminating all quasi-natural obstacles to human desire and aspiration. Liberal democratic regimes accomplish this through the creation of a civic culture whose countervailing premise is the freedom and equality of all citizens. The criterion of civic equality is not intended to subvert or nullify the ranking systems, virtue concepts, or standards of excellence proper to particularistic cultural communities. As we have noted, these ranking systems, functioning properly (i.e., as conceived of by liberal doctrine), are absolutely necessary for the nurturing and direction of human desire. Civic equality is a political and not a metaphysical conception. It applies to the part and not to the whole of life. Human beings are defined as equals only in their relationship to the basic structure of liberal democratic society as a whole, only with respect to their participation in the liberal democratic public sphere. The criterion of civic equality is properly applied within particularistic cultural communities only to those local ranking systems that assign roles of power and authority on the basis of quasi-natural qualities, such as birth, race, gender, age, and class. Such ranking systems apply criteria for evaluation based upon human differences that can be neither gained nor lost. Such ranking systems, therefore, establish obstacles to particularistic human desire and aspiration that threaten the narrative intelligibility of human desire and the narrative solidarity of communities.

Civic justice requires that all such obstacles be removed. Liberal democracy makes this demand in the name of the narrative intelligibility of desire itself and for the sake of strengthening the narrative solidarity of particularistic cultural communities. Of course, beyond absolutely clearcut violations of civic equality found in such communities, such as racial segregation and gender discrimination, the principles of civic justice that determine how the criterion of civic equality is to be applied in particular cases can never be specified in advance. In other words, there can be no general "theory" stating the principles of civic justice once and for all. Application of the criterion of civic equality is always a matter of political judgment and civic consensus. In its affirmation of human desire and aspiration, liberal democracy not only establishes an order of civic equality but also affirms and underwrites orders of inequality determined by talent and merit. In liberal democratic societies, ongoing political discussion and conflict has much to do with striking the proper balance between civic equality and social hierarchy. Determining where that line is to be drawn in any particular case or for any particular era is a task for public political debate and not for political philosophy.

This way of reformulating the goal of liberal democratic political assocition can, perhaps, suggest a way of addressing the issue of motivation in the project of inventing a viable postmodern civic culture. As we have seen, if citizens are going to be motivated to develop and exercise capacities for civic freedom and civic justice, the desirability of these capacities must be made clear to them. Development of these capacities requires a modification of the structure of particularistic desire, a certain detachment of particularistic desire from its current object that, if taken too far, can become a general alienation from every object of desire, an alienation threatening the narrative intelligibility of desire itself. The civic good — i.e., the exercise of capacities for civic freedom and civic justice — can be understood as an object of desire only if this detachment of particularistic desire from its current object can be understood as itself an object of desire. But how is that possible?

It is possible only if this detachment is subject to the limits defined by the goal of liberal democratic political association. The point of learning to adopt a standpoint of detachment from every object of particularistic desire, an external perspective on all life narrative construction, is, for purposes of attaining the civic good, not to nullify particularistic desire, but rather to affirm it by removing all quasi-natural, socially-imposed obstacles to its fulfillment. The paradoxical aspect of the pursuit of the civic good is that in order to create and maintain the political institutions capable of removing socially-imposed obstacles to the fulfillment of particularistic desire, a culture is necessary that motivates persons to abandon the standpoint proper to the pursuits of their own particularistic objects of desire. The reason why the civic good can become the highest-order interest of citizens is not because it, itself, has a specific content over and above the pursuit of one particularistic conception of the good or another, but because it consists in the realization of a standpoint capable of affirming all particularistic desire as particularistic desire. To put it in a slightly misleading, but, nevertheless, perhaps useful way, the civic good consists in the attainment of a standpoint from which the desires proper to "this world," i.e., proper to earthly, natural human life, can be affirmed precisely as desires of "this world," precisely as desires for objects that are contingent, of only relative value, and of local significance.

As long as the practices of life-narrational de-centering and life-narrational equalization are undertaken with this purpose clearly in view, they will not produce the general detachment or alienation from all objects of particularistic desire that can produce a sense of the futility of all particularistic desire. Attainment of the civic good is made possible by an abandonment of the standpoint of particularistic desire that, nevertheless, affirms all particularistic desire as such. Thus, liberal democracy, as a form of political association, is grounded upon the most complete possible affirmation of particularistic desire, the most complete possible affirmation of earthly, natural human life. Nevertheless, in the service of particularistic desire, in the name of its narrative intelligibility and for the sake of human narrative solidarity, liberal democracy requires particularistic desire to examine itself critically. According to this conception of the civic good, it is the claim of liberalism that the greatest threat to particularistic human desire lies in its being captured by monocultural forms of narrative solidarity. To attain full cultural citizenship, persons must learn to break open closed cultural worlds and to overturn rigid hierarchies and ranking systems. Persons must learn to do this not in order to destroy those worlds and hierarchies, but rather in order to let them function in the open space of a more encompassing sphere that is free of intrinsic hierarchy and unbounded by any closed narrative horizon.

Is such a conception of the civic good capable of motivating citizens to undertake the uncomfortable work of becoming full cultural citizens? Certainly not. Yet it possibly does provide a basis for such motivation and a framework within which citizens can work, as members of particularistic cultural communities, to discover within their own local traditions richer and more effective sources for motivating the pursuit of the civic good.