In a liberal democracy, the state is committed to treat all citizens as free individuals and to treat all individuals as equals. For such a regime to be intelligible to the governed, the members of a liberal political community must, to some extent at least, come to see themselves and one another as free and equal individuals. This means that they must see themselves and others as not entirely defined and encompassed by family, ethnic or religious identifications. This means that they must be able, at least for certain purposes and on certain occasions, to put aside measures of human worth based on those family, ethnic and religious identifications and to adopt a very different ranking system, one based on their identification as citizens. Needless to say, this is an extraordinary requirement. The earliest and strongest identifications formed by human beings are shaped by family life and by the broader ethnic, class, and religious community within which the family in turn gains its identification. These identifications are woven into the very fabric of human desire and only with great difficulty can distance from them be achieved. But, unless such distance can be achieved by significant numbers of persons, a liberal democracy cannot even be established, let alone flourish. Factions will destroy it. Every liberal democracy, therefore, must generate some form of countervailing civic culture that has the power to create and sustain civic identities. Further, educational processes must be invented that will insure the effectiveness and reproduction of that civic culture.

When citizens of North Atlantic liberal democracies speak of culture, civic or otherwise, they are speaking of a sphere of human interaction in which what they traditionally identify as the rhetorical or persuasive power of speech assumes central importance. Culture encompasses the world views, ranking systems, concepts of virtue and standards of excellence that shape human behavior and self-understanding. Brute force applied to individuals or groups can succeed in procuring from them behavior that meets desired specifications, but it cannot, by itself, secure their adherence or commitment to norms or to a conception of the good life. To gain and retain such adherence, an ongoing process of persuasion is necessary. This ongoing process of persuasion takes different institutional, representational, and discursive forms in different types of communities. But whatever forms such processes of persuasion take, they are all subject to analysis and criticism in rhetorical terms, i.e., in terms of their logical, ethical and emotional appeals, their style, occasion and intention.

What is true of the sphere of culture in general has special application to the specific form of culture I have called civic culture. A very special kind of persuasive process is required to gain and retain adherence to the norms proper to the standpoint of liberal democratic citizenship. As I have noted, a civic culture is a type of countervailing culture. Liberal democracy as a form of political association is defined by the rather unusual assumption that the citizens of any particular liberal democracy will disagree fundamentally in their conceptions of the good life. As members of the civic community, citizens will also be members of one or more particularistic cultural communities. A civic culture, then, has a very special sort of persuasive task and must have a very special sort of persuasive force. A civic culture consists of a set of institutional, representational, and discursive means of persuasion. As such, it must be conceived of in terms of its rhetorical intention and effect. As in the case of all efforts of persuasion, the persuasive means available to any civic culture are addressed to a specific audience, an audience defined by a specific set of historical, economic, and social circumstances. But, generically, the sort of audience that any civic culture must address is one composed of persons who already adhere to some specific conception of the good, some specific totalizing world view or way of life. The task of any civic culture is to win the adherence of that sort of audience to a secondary set of norms that must necessarily stand in a relationship of tension with the primary set of norms to which the audience remains committed.

The first step toward addressing successfully the crisis produced by the contemporary demise of modernist liberal civic culture is to understand clearly the sort of persuasive or rhetorical effort involved in gaining adherence to any particular form of civic culture. A full understanding of this sort of rhetorical effort requires us (1) to recall at every step the rhetorical character of the very inquiry about civic culture that we are now undertaking, and (2) to grasp clearly the rhetorical character of the modernist liberal doctrines whose failing credibility is at the root of the contemporary crisis of civic culture. Let us here briefly address in a general way both of these tasks.

The most deadly misunderstanding possible regarding the nature of any inquiry about civic culture, including this one, is that such an inquiry is some sort of exercise in pure theory, i.e., an attempt simply to state what is the case, to state the truth for the sake of truth. An exercise in pure theory, by definition, leaves all rhetorical considerations behind — or at least makes all rhetorical considerations a matter external to the subject matter, a question of the greater or lesser charm of the language in which the truth is clothed. However they may be expressed, truth claims produced by a purely theoretical inquiry carry the force and implications of the hard metaphysical "is" of traditional Western propositional logic. Characteristic of truth claims expressing the hard metaphysical "is" is the assumption that both the truths being asserted and the subject matter being discussed exist independently of any audience. Pure theoretical discourse, in other words, does not understand itself primarily as a rhetorical activity, an activity aimed at winning the adherence of a particular audience for a particular purpose, an activity whose outcome is valid or invalid — i.e., whose conclusions are "true" — only to the extent that they win audience adherence. Construed as an assertion bearing the hard metaphysical "is," for example, a statement like, "The liberal doctrine of the priority of the right over the good is a political and not a metaphysical doctrine," would be read as claiming that the doctrine in question is and always was essentially a political doctrine, regardless how it may ever have been otherwise understood.

Inquiry about civic culture, however, can never be properly understood in this way as an exercise in pure theory. Civic culture itself, like every other form of culture, is created, transformed and reproduced by processes of persuasion. The norms proper to civic life must be embraced and internalized by citizens as a matter of conviction, a conviction produced by the rhetorical power of the persuasive resources available to some specific form of civic culture. The truth claims asserted in any inquiry about civic culture must not be understood as asserting audience-independent truths about an audience-independent subject matter. The "is" proper to inquiries about civic culture is not the hard metaphysical "is" of pure theoretical discourse, but rather the soft metaphorical "is" of rhetoric. A metaphor is an act of linguistic aggression through which a speaker seeks to transform his or her audience’s understanding and behavior by means of a redescription of the subject matter at hand. If the audience agrees with the metaphor and transforms their speech and behavior accordingly, the subject matter is thereby transformed. The statement above, about the political nature of the liberal doctrine of the priority of the right over the good, should be construed in this way. It should be construed as embodying a soft metaphorical rather than a hard metaphysical "is," as an attempt to transform the understanding and behavior of an audience through an aggressive act of redescription. If the discourse supporting this act of redescription is successful, the very subject matter itself that the discourse addresses will be transformed. Thus, an inquiry about civic culture has for its goal not changing minds so that they will conform more exactly to the nature of things, but rather changing minds in such a way that new ways of talking about and behaving with respect to civic norms first come into being.

If in this way all inquiry about civic culture must itself belong to the sphere of civic culture and therefore to the sphere of persuasive speech, then such inquiry is subject to all the usual categories of rhetorical analysis. The basic categories of rhetorical analysis are determined by the basic components of the rhetorical situation — speaker, audience, rhetorical intention and occasion. A rhetorical analysis of any discourse can ask about the self-definition of the speaker and the speaker’s standpoint, the characteristics of the audience addressed by the speaker, the rhetorical effect the speaker wishes to achieve, and the specific circumstances that shape the occasion of the discourse. Such categories of analysis are irrelevant to the content of a purely theoretical discourse that aims only to state what is the case. A purely theoretical discourse is addressed to a particular audience on a particular occasion only accidentally. The subject matter addressed by a purely theoretical discourse is viewed as existing independently of audience and occasion. On the other hand, for a proper understanding of discourse about civic culture, analysis of the discourse in terms of rhetorical categories is crucial. Regarding any particular discourse about civic culture, we must ask about the speaker’s definition of the rhetorical situation — the speaker’s self-defined standpoint, intention and definition of the audience and occasion.

These categories of rhetorical analysis are of course no less essential to a proper understanding of this present inquiry about civic culture. To address the crisis produced by the contemporary demise of modernist civic culture is to adopt a specific standpoint, to define a specific audience, to offer an interpretation of the occasion for the inquiry and to intend to produce a specific transformation of the subject matter at hand. The description of our present circumstances as a "crisis produced by the contemporary demise of modernist civic culture" is thus properly understood not as a claim about some audience-independent state of affairs, but rather a definition of the rhetorical situation that must be taken up and affirmed by its intended audience in order to exist in any sense at all. One central task of this inquiry is to make this description of our current situation a plausible one. The aim of this inquiry is to mark out a path of response to this crisis. If the redescription of our contemporary circumstances as a crisis of civic culture remains implausible, then the proposed response to it will obviously have no application.

Further, the standpoint from which any such response is to be proposed must be appropriate to both occasion and intent. If we citizens of North Atlantic, liberal democracies face a crisis of civic culture today, then we face that crisis not as members of some particular ethnic, class, or religious community or as scholars pursuing one or another professionalized field of inquiry, but rather as citizens. The standpoint from which this crisis is addressed must, therefore, be defined simply as the idealized or normative standpoint of citizenship itself. In this present discourse, the appropriate self-definition of both speaker and intended audience is that proper to all citizens of contemporary liberal democracies — even though, needless to say, all citizens will not be equally preoccupied with the purely conceptual dimensions of the cultural crisis that concern us here. The aim of the present discourse, then, is to redescribe and thereby to transform fundamentally the very standpoint that both speaker and audience of the discourse occupy within the intended rhetorical situation, i.e., the normative standpoint of liberal democratic citizenship. To the extent that this redescription is successful, the standpoint of liberal democratic citizenship itself will be transformed in such a way as to make possible a creative response to the cultural crisis first identified by this redescription.

A self-conscious understanding of this present inquiry’s rhetorical topography is necessary for two reasons. First, the demise of Enlightenment conceptions of reason and knowledge calls into question the very possibility of a purely theoretical discourse, i.e., a discourse asserting audience-independent truths about an audience-independent subject matter merely for the sake of asserting those truths. We must subject this inquiry to rhetorical analysis because, in the emerging post-Enlightenment period of American and European culture, every inquiry must be so subject. This requires of us all a new sort of rigor, a new intellectual discipline of which we are still scarcely capable. Second, a clear understanding of the rhetorical character of this inquiry is necessary because the modernist liberal conception of civic culture that it seeks to replace was defined, above all, by a systematic denial and concealment of its own rhetorical character. The description of our present situation as a crisis of civic culture — indeed, the very notion of civic culture itself as it emerges here — gains plausibility only to the extent that we begin to perceive the anti-rhetorical stance of modernist liberalism as, itself, an unacknowledged rhetorical strategy.

As we have seen, a civic culture is a body of narratives, representations and discourses that serve to render intelligible and support the effective internalization of the norms proper to liberal democratic citizenship. The norms themselves clearly belong to the sphere of culture — i.e., they belong to the sphere of personal and shared collective conviction. When a civic culture is effective, large numbers of nominal citizens actually develop the capacity to adopt the standpoint of citizenship, the capacity effectively to treat themselves and others as free and equal individuals. On the other hand, a civic culture is a countervailing culture. It is a culture that requires citizens, at least occasionally and temporarily, to step out of the perspectives within which they normally view the world and see things from a different point of view. The narratives, representations and discourses that make up the civic culture of a particular historical period provide a specific interpretation of that shift of viewpoint. In offering this interpretation of the standpoint of citizenship, a civic culture also provides a particular set of resources for motivating citizens effectively to assume that standpoint. This clearly involves a persuasive process. Modernist liberal political theories are constitutive components of a body of discourses that, for more than three hundred years, have defined modernist civic culture. As such, modernist liberal political theories offered an interpretation of the standpoint of citizenship, an interpretation that also served as a justification and motivation for the adoption of civic norms. Modernist liberalism, in short, was a central component of the process of persuasion by which modernist civic culture succeeded in producing and cultivating civic attitudes and values.

My goal here is to make clear the central importance of the unusual rhetorical means used by modernist liberalism in its contribution to this process of persuasion. Modernist liberal political theories, as discursive components of modernist civic culture, offered an interpretation of the normative standpoint of liberal democratic citizenship. But, to a very large degree, these doctrines succeeded in achieving their intended rhetorical effect by claiming a status that denied their rhetorical character. Modernist liberal political theories, in other words, presented themselves as sets of purely theoretical propositions about the nature of human political association, the nature of human reason and the nature of the world itself. I hope that it is evident by now that, when I characterize modernist liberalism in this way, I am not making some sort of new theoretical claim about the history of modern culture. To say that modernist liberalism achieved its rhetorical effect by a certain dissemblance, by a masking of its own rhetorical character and function, is to offer a genealogical diagnosis of our present cultural crisis. I am saying that it is good for us, as citizens of late twentieth century North Atlantic democracies, to learn to redescribe modernist liberalism in this way and to make the appropriate inferences. It is good for us because it will help us, as citizens, to maneuver with less confusion and panic through the landscape of the post-Enlightenment cultural world that is now emerging. With this goal in view, then, let me briefly elaborate the redescription of modernist liberalism that I am recommending.

If a civic culture is bound to be a countervailing culture, one whose norms and perspectives to some degree stand in a relationship of opposition to and tension with the values and world views that otherwise shape the lives of citizens, the question is, how did the discourses of modernist liberalism support that countervailing culture? How did they achieve their intended rhetorical effect? Let us keep in view the general characteristics of the doctrines we today identify as defining modernist liberalism. For our purposes, it is fair to classify modernist liberal political theories into two general types. Both varieties of modernist liberalism sought to support liberal democratic norms by offering arguments that, in a broad sense, could be described as foundationalist — i.e., modernist liberals offered theoretical discourses designed to show that liberal democratic norms are founded upon or derived from universal principles and objective truths. The two varieties of modernist liberal political theory differed from one another only with respect to the particular foundationalist style they adopted for carrying out this derivation.

To honor the most notable practitioners of each style, let us call one of these styles "Lockean" and the other "Kantian." Lockean liberal theorists generally sought to deduce the standpoint proper to citizenship — i.e., the standpoint of the free and equal individual — from what they conceived to be the universal condition in which all human beings find themselves prior to political association: the so-called state of nature or natural condition. The utilitarian variation on this style usually took a naturalistic/psychological turn and derived norms proper to civic life from the natural laws governing human sensation and the universal human experience of pleasure and pain. On the other hand, Kantian liberal theorists found reference to historical narratives, supposed states of nature or psychological laws to be inadequate as sources of a sufficiently strong moral obligation to motivate the development of civic attitudes and submission to the standards of civic justice. Kantian liberal theorists generally favored a more tightly logical, a priori style and sought to deduce the norms proper to liberal democratic citizenship from some conception of universal human reason — in some cases following Kant himself in discovering those norms in the principles of pure, practical reason and later, in other cases, following Hegel in discovering those norms in the manifestations of reason’s irresistibly progressive self-realization in history.

Whichever of these styles (or mix of these styles) modernist liberal theorists favored at one time or another, the important point for present purposes is that they all saw as their task the production of purely theoretical discourses designed to justify or legitimize the norms proper to citizenship by grounding those norms upon supposedly universal metaphysical or epistemological principles. A theoretical discourse, as I have characterized it, is one that intends more or less self-consciously to set forth, merely for the sake of doing so, a set of audience-independent truths about an audience-independent subject matter. In other words, to a theoretical discourse the categories of rhetorical analysis apply only externally, if at all. A theoretical discourse aims not at persuasion, but rather simply at saying of what is that it is.

Surely it is apparent that there is something strange here. Civic norms exist only by being effectively internalized and faithfully adhered to in practice. Such internalization and adherence must be motivated, particularly when we are speaking of norms that to some extent must always stand in a relationship of tension with values rooted in totalizing ethnic, class, or religious world views. But do the norms proper to civic life become any more intelligible or attractive as a result of being derived from the state of nature or from the principles of pure practical reason by a theoretical discourse? Furthermore, if we already find civic norms attractive and are, thereby, committed to the form of political association that embodies them, do we really care whether those norms can be justified theoretically? If it would turn out that there is some logical mistake in the theoretical justification, would this lessen our commitment to liberal democratic values? Thus, it would seem, at first glance, that the universalist theoretical discourses of modernist liberal political theory would offer rather meager rhetorical resources to a persuasive process aimed at motivating a particular audience at a particular time to develop and exercise the capacities proper to citizenship.

I maintain that it is time for us to take as our starting point the admission that the characteristically modernist project of justifying liberal democratic values theoretically is a problem. If we begin with this admission, our first question then becomes: By what mechanisms did modernist liberal political theory actually come to play such a central role in modernist civic culture? One answer to this question is the one I have already stated as my thesis here — namely, that the foundationalist, anti-rhetorical posture assumed by modernist liberal political theory is, indeed itself, a rhetorical strategy, a strategy that carried considerable persuasive force at the time of its adoption. Our problem is that it has by now ceased to carry this persuasive force. To the extent that contemporary civic culture remains dependent on this modernist rhetorical strategy, to that extent the countervailing effectiveness of contemporary civic culture is undermined and weakened. Let me now briefly elaborate this diagnostic redescription of modernist liberalism.

A civic culture, as I have noted, is necessarily a countervailing culture. Liberal democracy assumes that citizens are adherents of particularistic conceptions of the good life. It assumes that citizens are members of ethnic, class, and religious communities with competing interests and clashing world views. The rhetorical task of any civic culture is to win the allegiance of all citizens to a common set of civic values that requires citizens to modify in a certain way and to interpret differently their commitments to the totalizing world views of their primary cultural communities. This rhetorical task, proper to any civic culture offers us a basis for understanding the rhetorical mechanisms by which the theoretical discourses of modernist liberalism managed to have persuasive impact.

Modernist liberal doctrines arose in the seventeenth century during a period of intense ethnic, class, and religious warfare. In the social and economic upheavals of the period, warring parties and factions ruthlessly struggled for power, pursuing victory for their particular causes at the expense of the common good. Language was a weapon and a captive of this civil war. Rhetoric — understood broadly as the cultural tradition, the linguistic self-consciousness, the skills and methodologies brought into play in shaping the convictions of particular audiences — was a powerful weapon in the struggle of community against community, world view against world view. Rhetoric, thereby, came to be viewed by the proto-liberals of the seventeenth century as the tool of particular interests and, therefore, as linguistic fuel for the fires of civic conflict. Of course, it was very easy to interpret the largely bourgeois and Protestant proto-liberals themselves as just one more party, as but one more set of economic and political interests, competing for power. If the liberal democratic cause was to prevail and an effectively countervailing civic culture to be established, it was necessary for liberals to neutralize this perception of their own agenda as but one more particularistic, interest-driven program.

One standard rhetorical strategy that may always be used to neutralize this sort of perception is to present one’s agenda as supported and even dictated by universal principles and timeless truth. This is the strategy that the proto-liberals of the seventeenth century adopted. Blatantly persuasive speech makes appeals to the passions and interests, the particularistic commitments and allegiances, of its audience. If the liberal democratic program was to succeed — i.e., be persuasive — and establish a common ground on which adherents of opposing interests and world views could meet, it had to distinguish its own rhetoric from the rhetoric of party and faction. It had to strip its own discourse of all appeals to passions and interests. It had to adopt the voice and persona of pure reason. It had to assume a self-consciously anti-rhetorical stance. By the mid-seventeenth century, the model for this kind of discourse — found in the writings of Galileo and Descartes — was already established and widely known. The task of the liberal party was to fit this model to the requirements of political speech.

Specifically, this meant adapting the foundationalist style of argumentation to discourses advocating the establishment of certain kinds of political institutions. The foundationalist style of argumentation required, for maximum persuasive force, the identification of one or more absolutely self-evident premises as the basis for demonstrating the timeless, "objective" truth of what were in fact a set of political prescriptions. This method could only with some awkwardness be applied to political subjects, but the first full-scale and self-conscious attempt at this application — Hobbes’s Leviathan in 1651 — met at least with some conceptual success. Hobbes, though no liberal democrat himself, at least showed that political philosophy, by adopting the rhetoric of foundationalist epistemology, could credibly take on the appearance of being a purely theoretical discourse. Hobbes showed, in short, that the political rhetoric of pure theory could work.

Needless to say, I am not claiming that seventeenth century, proto-liberals adapted the rhetoric of foundationalism to political philosophy with the full awareness that it was but one rhetoric among others — a rhetoric that worked, above all, because it claimed to abstain from, and constantly criticized, the manipulative and ornamental tricks for which rhetoric was then notorious. No, early liberal theorists and later adherents of both Lockean and Kantian varieties of liberal political philosophy, no doubt, actually believed that the rhetoric of pure theory was not a rhetorical strategy at all. They really believed that, with the right cognitive method, they could, in fact, adopt a standpoint toward political affairs and toward the world in general from which they could issue discourses whose truth claims were not conditional upon the assent of some particular historically-situated audience, discourses that set forth for all times the audience-independent truth itself. Seventeenth century proto-liberals were supported in this belief by the entire array of assumptions that we now identify as basic to the cultural project of the Enlightenment. Enlightenment conceptions of reason and knowledge were built upon the rejection of what was taken in the seventeenth century to be the cognitive inadequacy of explicitly rhetorical modes of speech. Partisans of pure reason, seventeenth century proto-liberals laid the groundwork for modernist civic culture by affirming the possibility of a mode of speech free of the cognitive and moral defects of self-consciously rhetorical speech, a purely theoretical mode of speech issued from a standpoint that could, in principle, be adopted by any human being at any time, in any place.

Were these partisans of pure reason simply self-deluded? Were they simply incorrect, mistakenly using the words "reason" and "knowledge" to refer to things nonexistent or, at least, other than what those words properly refer to? Hardly. To characterize Enlightenment conceptions of reason and knowledge in this way as mistaken or incorrect would be to reaffirm the very assumptions that we must seek to put aside today. In the context of seventeenth and eighteenth century social and economic struggles, the invention of a standpoint of pure reason provided the basis for a rhetorical strategy that, from our point of view today, worked — i.e., worked to influence events and shape lives in ways that we approve. While we might be inclined today to look upon this modernist rhetorical strategy as appropriate only to a more innocent and less self-critical age or, perhaps, even as a bit mendacious, we must not forget that any such judgment is a reflection of our own rhetorical situation, our own cultural and political exigencies. The cultural project of the Enlightenment, after all, constituted a powerful historical form of belief that served the interests of freedom and equality for almost three hundred years.

The only basis for criticism of Enlightenment conceptions of reason and knowledge is that today they at best serve these interests badly. Citizens of North Atlantic liberal democracies have been shaped by Enlightenment culture and by modernist liberalism. It is with eyes that were given vision by Enlightenment culture that they look back upon modernist liberalism and find its anti-rhetorical stance naive and mendacious. Such a judgment does not constitute a rejection of the Enlightenment, but rather signifies arrival of what, in Nietzsche’s vocabulary, we can describe as the Enlightenment’s moment of self-overcoming. It is time now to find new rhetorical resources to support and motivate the cultivation of civic freedom and equality, resources not so subject to easy refutation and even ridicule as are those that were generated by the modernist rhetoric of pure theory.

In the effort to discover such resources, however, we are not able simply to turn our backs on modernist liberal political theory and move on. This project — the project of inventing a postmodern, post-Enlightenment civic culture — must confront at every step the continuing influence and lingering effects of the earlier successes of the modernist rhetoric of pure theory. The ideas of modernist liberalism were centrally important components of modernist civic culture. As we have seen, a particular historical form of civic culture has two functions: it provides cultural resources that serve (1) to render intelligible to citizens the values and standpoint proper to liberal democratic citizenship, and (2) to provide citizens with motivation to develop the moral capacities required for citizenship. Modernist liberalism carried out both of these functions effectively, but in a way that, from the standpoint of our late twentieth century experience of citizenship, is bound to create continuing problems both for the task of rendering the standpoint of citizenship intelligible and for the task of motivating the development of civic capacities and values. In the remainder of this chapter, I will briefly outline and examine a few of these problems of intelligibility and motivation that are the consequences of modernist liberalism.

The specific historical form of civic culture shaped by the ideas of modernist liberalism gives rise, as we have seen, to problems of intelligibility and motivation, as Enlightenment conceptions of reason and knowledge lose their credibility. These problems of intelligibility and motivation derive directly from the adoption by modernist liberalism of the modernist rhetoric of pure theory. Adoption of this rhetorical strategy by modernist liberals generated an interpretation of the countervailing character of civic culture that linked in various ways the normative standpoint of liberal citizenship to Enlightenment conceptions of reason and knowledge. This link must be broken if we are to succeed in gaining a new and a renewed insight into what liberal citizenship demands of us today. Let us examine, first, the problems of intelligibility produced by this link and, then, the problems of motivation that flow from these.

In discussing the problems of intelligibility and motivation we inherit from modernist liberalism, it is important to keep in view the rhetorical task specific to any liberal democratic civic culture.

A civic culture is composed of discourses, narratives, and representations of various sorts, invented by and addressed to citizens for the purpose of rendering intelligible and motivating attainment of the normative standpoint of citizenship. A civic culture is necessarily a countervailing and secondary culture. Liberal democracy, as a form of political association, assumes and even requires that citizens adhere to one or more particularistic conceptions of the good life. Liberal democracy assumes that citizens are first, and will always remain, members of particular ethnic, class, and religious communities. It assumes that the identities of citizens are first defined and will continue to be shaped by the totalizing world views and value systems associated with those primary communities. On the other hand, in order for liberal democratic political institutions to function properly, citizens, as members of particular ethnic, class, and religious communities, must also internalize the values proper to the encompassing civic community. A liberal democracy is an association of free and equal individuals. In order to qualify as citizens in the full cultural sense, the members of particularistic cultural communities must develop the capacity to view themselves and others as free and equal individuals and to act accordingly — even as they maintain their primary adherence to the beliefs and practices of the particularistic cultural communities to which they belong.

Attainment of this capacity is the central cultural and moral task that citizenship imposes on all members of the liberal democratic political community. It is a cultural and moral task of great complexity. It requires citizens to develop and cultivate identities that involve standpoints intrinsically opposed to one another and that must be distinguished as clearly as possible. Every citizen must develop and cultivate not only an identity shaped by the values or ranking systems of some particularistic cultural community, but also the identity of a free and equal individual, i.e., an identity defined by a certain kind of independence of any particularistic set of values. Let us call the first type of identity a communitarian identity and the second a civic identity.

To complicate matters further, citizens who have achieved the identity of a free and equal individual exercise that identity primarily through participation in activities related to the public sphere of their particular civic community. The public sphere of any particular liberal democracy is roughly defined by those types of interests, interactions, activities and discourses in which the norms — the standards of excellence, the virtue concepts, the obligations — proper to citizenship apply. This sphere is never defined once and for all. Rather, its parameters are always a matter of dispute and consensus, growing and shrinking as social, cultural, and economic conditions change. Definition of its exact boundaries at any given time is, in fact, one of the most fundamental issues that citizens enter the public sphere in order to decide. In the process of participating in the political processes that define the boundaries of the public sphere, citizens must be able to call into play both their civic identities and their communitarian identities. As bearers of a civic identity, they must be concerned to uphold the norms of civic justice wherever they apply. As bearers of a communitarian identity, they must be concerned to defend particularistic cultural beliefs, values, and practices against possible intrusive action by the liberal democratic state on behalf of some temporary electoral majority.

Thus, to develop a capacity for liberal democratic citizenship is to develop a capacity for maintaining, cultivating, distinguishing, and exercising as appropriate both civic and communitarian identities. Citizenship requires persons to strike some kind of precarious balance between these two opposing standpoints. The rhetorical task of any liberal democratic civic culture is to provide resources that can be used to persuade citizens that this precarious, cultural balancing act is not only possible, not only desirable, but even obligatory. To the extent that any particular historical form of civic culture effectively carries out this rhetorical task, a viable liberal democratic public sphere or civil society is constituted and liberal democratic political institutions can function as intended. Modernist liberal political theory, as a component of modernist civic culture, generated discourses that provided a characteristic set of resources and strategies for carrying out this rhetorical task. It provided a very specific interpretation of the relationship between civic and communitarian identities.

Modernist liberal political theory, presented in foundationalist theoretical discourses, defined the standpoint of citizenship in essentialist terms — i.e., they defined the civic standpoint of free and equal individuality as the essential or natural standpoint proper to every human being. In this essentialist interpretation, modernist liberalism, in fact, reversed the developmental relationship between the standpoint proper to citizenship and non-civic standpoints. This led to, among other things, the characteristically modernist failure to recognize the importance of a civic culture for the support of liberal democratic political institutions.

Lockean varieties of modernist liberal political theory, for example, defined the standpoint proper to citizenship as prior in an historical or anthropological sense. Social contract theories of the liberal state and of political obligation derived their conceptions of civic norms from narratives supposedly describing the first establishment of political association. In social contract narratives, liberal theorists told some version of the story about how individuals, while living under natural or pre-political conditions (the "natural condition" or the "state of nature"), joined together to decide upon mutually advantageous conditions of political association. Such negotiations, of course, would be carried on by free individuals (or at least family heads) subject to no common power, individuals whose identities would, therefore, be shaped by the natural condition alone, rather than by a set of historically-contingent political arrangements. The primary question all parties would face in such negotiations would be how much of their natural liberty to relinquish for the sake of maximizing the benefits of association. Such negotiators would, of course, want to insist upon placing strict limits on governmental authority and on the state’s power to coerce. They certainly would not grant to the state the power to institute any sort of regime that would impose on citizens a particular conception of the good life. In other words, such negotiators would definitely insist on constitutional recognition of their natural liberty to pursue happiness as they saw fit.

The graphic clarity and simplicity of such contract narratives carried great rhetorical force. Those narratives gave plausibility to the notion that the natural human condition — the universal condition of all human beings prior to political association — is a condition of liberty, a condition of free individuality unencumbered by limits imposed, or obligations incurred, by membership in particularistic ethnic, class, or religious communities. However any particular liberal theorist represented the outcomes of this imagined negotiation, the social contract narrative itself gave the general idea of the priority of human liberty an aspect of self-evident truth. The social contract narrative licensed claims affirming natural human rights — i.e., claims that certain legal protections and entitlements were mandated by the original or pre-associational condition of human liberty. As in the earlier tradition of natural law (influenced by classical metaphysical conceptions of nature), the standard of justice or the principle of right was affirmed by modernist liberal political theory as existing prior to the establishment of every particular historical regime. But, in the case of Lockean varieties of modernist liberalism, this priority was conceived of historically rather than metaphysically, in terms of a narrative of cultural and material progress. The principle of right was derived from the purported natural or spontaneous form of life that would be followed by human beings not subject to the power of governments. Since the establishment of a government would then be a voluntary act, it must be represented as an improvement upon the natural condition, as a story of progress. These were the minimal narrative rules imposed upon Lockean or contractarian varieties of liberal political theory.

Thus, Lockean varieties of modernist liberal political theory attributed to the normative standpoint of citizenship — i.e., the standpoint of free and equal individuality — an historical or anthropological priority to other cultural standpoints. Once again, as a rhetorical strategy, this attribution of priority was very effective in the context of seventeenth and eighteenth century political struggles. It allowed liberals to claim that civic values were grounded in human nature and in nature generally, as opposed to the artificial and arbitrary values of court and Church. But it also interpreted the standpoint of citizenship in a very specific way — as a standpoint that was universally accessible and available to all human beings, provided that certain impediments to its development be removed. Properly understood, social contract narratives were educational devices that helped persons formed by various ethnic and religious cultures to imagine what it would be like to be the free and equal individuals who were described as parties to the social contract. Ideally, by imagining themselves in that role, they could imaginatively strike the attitudes and demand the political arrangements compatible with it. But, paradoxically, social contract narratives could have this educational and empowering impact only by denying their rhetorical status as educational devices and by claiming the status of theoretical discourses about the nature and origins of political association. To admit that the social contract narrative was merely an educational device — a component of civic culture — would have been to admit that the standpoint of citizenship was a constructed and an acquired cultural standpoint, just like any other. To admit the artificiality of that status would have been to lose the rhetorical edge gained by the claim that civic values, unlike those of court and Church, were grounded in the nature of things.

This successful modernist rhetorical strategy has, today, become a liability. The primary task of citizens of developed North Atlantic liberal democracies is no longer to fight for the initial establishment of liberal political institutions, using, against the entrenched power of court and Church, all the ideological weapons available. Rather, the task today is to maintain a supportive liberal democratic civic culture, one capable of strengthening in oneself and others the dispositions and attitudes proper to citizenship. In short, the task consists in creating cultural means for the effective reproduction of cultural values.

To the extent that it attributed to the normative standpoint of citizenship an historical and anthropological priority, modernist liberal political theory, does not serve well the pursuit of this task. By claiming this sort of priority for the standpoint of free and equal individuality, modernist liberalism suggested that the primary obstacles to the development and reproduction of civic values are cultural and political in nature. It suggested that a civic identity is, somehow, the native and original identity of persons, and that civic identity emerges somehow spontaneously once impediments deriving from accidental cultural and political circumstances are removed. Because it, at least implicitly, assigned to civic identity a metaphysical status, modernist liberalism systematically discouraged reflection about civic identity as a cultural construction. It also systematically discouraged reflection about the sort of cultural resources that are required for the development and maintenance of civic identities.

This is one way in which modernist liberal political theory, to the extent that it continues to influence our understanding of liberal democratic citizenship, generates for us what I have called problems of intelligibility. An effective civic culture must provide resources for rendering intelligible to citizens the tasks involved in developing the values and attitudes proper to citizenship. With respect to this function, modernist liberal political theory today produces confusion rather than clarity. It produces confusion, above all, by its denial that the process of developing the capacities proper to citizenship is a particularistic cultural process requiring particularistic cultural support. By representing the standpoint of citizenship, the standpoint of free and equal individuality, as the universal standpoint of all human beings in their natural or pre-associational condition, modernist liberalism represented the standpoint of citizenship as a standpoint stripped of all particularistic cultural attributes. The process of developing a civic identity was, thereby, defined as a process of stripping away the culturally accidental in order to arrive at a supposedly culture-neutral, natural, and universal standpoint.

This way of understanding the developmental and anthropological relationship between civic and communitarian identities not only misrepresents our contemporary experience of citizenship, but also positively impedes our efforts to insure the cultural reproduction of civic values and attitudes. Today we encounter regularly in the media the inescapable facts of global cultural diversity. Awareness of this cultural diversity makes it all too clear to us that civic values and civic identities are particularistic cultural constructs that have emerged from and still are largely local to North Atlantic European traditions. Modernist liberal political theory reversed the actual developmental and anthropological priorities when it represented the standpoint of the free and equal individual as the natural and universal standpoint of all human beings prior to political association. The civic standpoint of free and equal individuality, where it is widely attained at all, is one that presupposes and emerges from historically specific communitarian cultural standpoints. It can be successfully attained by large numbers of persons only under the most favorable cultural, economic, and political conditions. This understanding of the culturally contingent and particularistic nature of citizenship must be incorporated into the civic culture that succeeds modernist liberal civic culture. If one of the central tasks of any liberal democratic civic culture is to render intelligible liberal democratic citizenship as an ideal to be realized, a postmodern civic culture must represent and affirm citizenship as an ideal that is contingent, particularistic, and culturally constructed.

If modernist liberal political theory continues to generate problems of intelligibility because of its doctrinal content — i.e., by virtue of its representation of the normative standpoint of citizenship as historically and anthropologically prior to other cultural standpoints, it also continues to generate problems of intelligibility because of the conceptual and rhetorical common ground it shared from the beginning with modern foundationalist epistemology. That common ground was defined by the doctrine of the autonomy of reason. Foundationalist epistemologists conceived of the faculty of reason itself as the origin of the critical standards it brought to bear in the assessment of cognitive claims. For them, reason was autonomous in the assessment of truth claims, subject to no authority other than itself. Modernist liberal political theory saw the theoretical justification of political arrangements as work proper to this autonomous faculty of reason in its practical application. More importantly, modernist liberals sought to establish a connection between the standpoint of autonomous reason and the attitudes, dispositions and values proper to liberal democratic citizenship. They sought to extend the notion of a rationally autonomous knower from the cognitive into the political realm and use it to define the normative standpoint of liberal democratic citizenship. Modernist liberalism, thus, not only attributed to the standpoint of citizenship an historical and anthropological priority, but also an autonomy in matters of political morality analogous to the autonomy of reason in matters of truth. This historical and conceptual link between modernist liberal political theory and foundationalist conceptions of knowledge continues today to generate confusion about the nature of liberal democratic citizenship — the sort of confusion that still compels some to view adherence to civic values as groundless and unjustified, if those values cannot be shown to be the expression of an autonomous and universal faculty of reason.

In order to free ourselves from such confusions, it is important to see that the modernist liberal conception of liberal democratic citizenship, as a function of an autonomous faculty of reason, was not just a mistake. It is quite possible to construct an illuminating analogy between the normative standpoint of citizenship and the purported standpoint of an autonomous rational faculty. But while this analogy may have played a useful role in the context of modernist civic culture, today, in view of the contemporary demise of the modernist doctrine of the autonomy of reason, it invites only misunderstanding. The project of inventing a viable postmodern civic culture requires that we find a new way of understanding the nature of liberal democratic citizenship, one that no longer commits us to viewing citizenship as involving the exercise of reason in some metaphysically or epistemologically privileged sense. The modernist liberal conception of the citizen as "man" of reason was grounded in a metaphor that has lost its power to illuminate the practice of citizenship. But to free ourselves from the influence of this metaphor, it is important to understand how it could ever have been illuminating.

The modernist doctrine of the autonomy of reason received its first and most influential formulation as the methodological point of departure for Descartes’s project of providing the new mathematical physics with an absolutely secure metaphysical foundation. That project arose in the early seventeenth century partially in response to the ethnic, class, and religious warfare that erupted in Europe following the Reformation. By 1620, Europe had suffered over one hundred years of civil strife provoked by disputes about religious doctrine and authority. One cultural response to these conflicts over opposing truth claims was the reemergence of a Pyrrhonian skepticism regarding all truth claims. This skepticism — identified today above all with Montaigne — was steeped in the spirit of tolerance and openness that the rhetorical culture of the Renaissance engendered. Descartes’s response took a quite different tack. Skepticism and religious warfare seemed to him to feed off one another. If reason can provide no criterion for assessing opposing doctrinal truth claims, then rational discourse is useless in the resolution of doctrinal disputes, and force can plausibly be seen to have a legitimate role in resolving socially divisive disputes over matters of truth. Descartes’s project was to rehabilitate rational discourse by an attack on skepticism. He set out to show that reason, by itself, does, indeed, provide a criterion for assessing opposing truth claims, a criterion that infallibly distinguishes true statements from false and the knowable from the unknowable.

Descartes discovered that infallible criterion of truth by giving free rein to skepticism, permitting himself to doubt every truth claim that in any way proved to be anything less than fully self-validating. If, after letting skepticism have full sway, he could, indeed, identify a proposition immune to skeptical argument, a proposition whose truth all who consider it must acknowledge, then Descartes could declare skepticism to be defeated and reason to be in possession of a criterion of truth. The self-validating proposition that Descartes claimed to have discovered was, of course, "I think, therefore I exist." Descartes took this proposition to be a statement about the world, a statement affirming the actual existence of a particular entity, a particular thinking being. He took it to be a true proposition whose truth depended in no way upon any contingent state of affairs or personal religious commitments, a proposition that is necessarily true each time it is affirmed, regardless of the time and place of its affirmation — for to affirm a proposition is, in fact, an act of thinking and no act can exist without an existing agent. For Descartes, the truth of this proposition was necessarily self-evident to every human being capable of affirming any proposition whatever. Perception of its truth did not depend on the possession of prudence, special experience, or any other quality that persons possessed only by virtue of membership in one or another ethnic, class, or religious community. Perception of the truth of this proposition depended only on the capacity to inspect carefully the content of any proposition without regard to the pleasurable or painful consequences of affirming it, or the particular authorities asserting its truth, or the veneration in which it is held by friends and relatives — that is to say, without regard to its rhetorical dimension or the rhetorical situation it addresses. This was a capacity for a special kind of reflection, a capacity for inspecting the content of a proposition without taking into account the context of its utterance, a capacity requiring the deliberate adoption of a standpoint imagined to be external to every particular rhetorical situation and, therefore, unaffected by any particular set of cultural assumptions. For Descartes, this was the standpoint intrinsic to reason itself, the "natural light."

This standpoint of pure reflection provided Descartes with the absolutely autonomous criterion that he needed in order to distinguish, (1) statements that, in fact, carry truth claims from those that do not, and (2), among statements actually bearing truth claims, the true from the false. Applying this criterion, only those propositions carry truth claims whose content can be clearly and distinctly conceived from the culture-neutral standpoint of pure decontextualized are candidates for admission into the realm of cognition. Thus statements advanced as true only for certain purposes or in certain contexts or for certain audiences (e.g., a particular community of religious belief) do not, strictly speaking, carry truth claims at all. Discourse consisting of such statements does not qualify as cognitive. Such discourses are to be measured by other standards derived from the external contexts and accidental circumstances to which they are addressed. Those standards are arbitrary and dependent. When such standards are applied in evaluating statements, reason is not being used autonomously for the standards are drawn from rules and principles external to reason itself.

Accordingly, if only those statements carry truth claims that can be conceived clearly and distinctly from the context-free, culture-neutral standpoint of autonomous reason, the truth or falsity of such statements must be determined solely by reference to the rules and principles inherent in that standpoint — the rules, as we would say today, of deductive and inductive logic. These rules are inherent in reason itself in the sense that they are rules for connecting sentences to one another intelligibly without regard for their contexts of utterance, without regard to rhetorical considerations of speaker, audiences, intent, and circumstances. Thus, implicit in the methodological starting point of Descartes’s project of overcoming skepticism is an unambiguous affirmation of the doctrine of the autonomy of human reason.

Once this notion of an absolutely autonomous faculty of reason gained some credibility and acceptance, it was then used to license a whole range of new cognitive discourses that appealed to autonomous human reason as their sole basis and claim to authority. As we noted earlier, Hobbes was the first to extend the vocabulary and style of argument proper to these new cognitive discourses into the field of political affairs — the first to attempt the construction of a political and moral science that based normative political claims on criteria purportedly drawn from reason alone. But it was perhaps Kant who provided the most perspicuous expression of the modernist linkage of liberal political norms to the doctrine of the autonomy of reason.

In his famous article, "What Is Enlightenment?", Kant answered the question posed in its title in such a way that his audience could have no doubt that liberal political norms were dictated by and were alone consistent with the exercise of autonomous human reason. "Sapere aude! ‘Have courage to use your own reason!’ — that is the motto of enlightenment." Needless to say, Kant here was not identifying enlightenment with just any person’s capacity to think clearly about his or her particular interests and welfare as a member of a particularistic cultural community. Of course, members of particular ethnic, class, and religious communities differ in their ability to master the vocabulary and apply the ranking systems that prevail in their particular communities. The application of general conceptions grounded in particularistic cultural world views definitely involves what we now call reasoning skills, and some people develop these skills to a greater degree than others. But Kant’s call to enlightenment was clearly not a call to develop reasoning skills of that sort. He was not interested in encouraging persons to become more thoroughly self-consistent and self-critical Lutherans, Prussians, or peasants.

For Kant, as for all modernist liberals, the use of human reason in the honorific sense involved the use of critical standards that were drawn not from particularistic loyalties and commitments, but rather from reason itself. To the extent that a person strives to think in an orderly way about any subject matter merely as a member of a particular ethnic, class, or religious community, that person is not, in Kant’s vocabulary, using his or her own reason. Such a person, for Kant, would not be enlightened. To be enlightened, one must think and speak from a very different standpoint or identity, one no longer subject to particularistic ethnic, class, or religious ranking systems and world views.

Kant’s injunction to use "one’s own reason," thus implies the existence of a critical standpoint external to all historically-conditioned and particularistic world views. To think for oneself, i.e., to think independently of the rules laid down by Pope, prince, employer, class, profession, village, and nation, is to adopt this standpoint. It is this standpoint that Kant identifies with the faculty of reason. To whom, then, is the Kantian injunction addressed? It is certainly not addressed to any person insofar as he or she is the bearer of what we have called a communitarian identity. A person bears a communitarian identity insofar as he or she accepts or answers to descriptions using the vocabulary and ranking systems proper to a particular ethnic, class, or religious community. Kant’s injunction to use "one’s own reason" is thus an injunction to regard the reasoning that goes on in the pursuit of particularistic conceptions of the good life as not "real" reasoning and, thereby, as not one’s own — which is to say that it was an injunction to regard one’s communitarian identity as external to one’s "real" self. What then is "real" reasoning and what is it that defines the "real" self?

The answer that Kant gives in his article, "What Is Enlightenment?" is, of course, famous. Enlightenment is about the free use of reason. Reason is free only when subject to its own rules and criteria. The free use of reason is the use made of it by the scholar. The scholar issues purely rational discourses, i.e., discourses governed by the criteria derived from reason alone. As discourses governed by reason alone, the scholar’s speech is genuinely cognitive speech. The scholar is one who possesses knowledge that is universal. The scholar speaks not as a member of one or another ethnic, class, or religious community, but rather as one who stands outside all such particularistic communities. The scholar is the quintessentially public person. To use "one’s own reason," therefore, is to speak as a scholar to the public. It is to speak to the whole community as a world-community, a community of persons not differentiated by particularistic ranking systems and world views. It is to speak from what we have called one’s civic identity, i.e., one’s identity as a member of the civic community.

In this famous article, then, Kant clearly takes as a given the metaphorical link between the autonomous standpoint of pure reason and the normative standpoint of citizenship. The social embodiment of autonomous reason is the autonomous scholar or intellectual. The autonomous scholar is another name for the autonomous citizen. Here the faculty of cognition and the capacity for political liberty are defined as mutually implied and interdependent. Here, too, civic identity is given a new sort of priority over communitarian identity. Just as social contract narratives attributed to the normative standpoint of citizenship an historical and anthropological priority, the metaphorical assimilation of the standpoint of citizenship to the standpoint of autonomous reason attributed to civic identity the sort of priority to communitarian identity that, in the defunct language of foundationalist epistemology, the transcendental ego had to the empirical ego. Just as the Kantian transcendental ego is the ground or underlying permanent reality of the conditioned and finite empirical ego, so, also, the civic self is the ground or underlying permanent reality of the conditioned and finite communitarian self. As the discourses that are genuinely cognitive and as the world that is genuinely known take priority over subjective impressions and the world of popular opinion, so, also, does civic identity take priority over communitarian identity. In this article, this peculiar cognitive/metaphysical common ground shared by modernist epistemology and by modernist liberal political theory could not be more obvious. The doctrine of the autonomy of human reason in the sphere of cognition mandates, when translated into the political sphere, the doctrine of political liberty. The normatively free citizen is also the cognitively free thinker — in Kant’s terms, the scholar or intellectual. The foundationalist epistemological arguments that underwrite claims to objective truth also ultimately underwrite demands for the rights of citizenship.

This analogy between the standpoints of the ideally autonomous citizen and the ideally autonomous knower defined modernist liberal political theory and determined the character of the modernist form of civic culture that it generated. Like all great metaphors that succeed in shaping history, it gave rise to a comprehensive interpretation of the world by equating two very unlike things in a way that, nevertheless, illuminated both and gave both a new kind of intelligibility. The modernist conception of the purely objective and autonomous knower was drawn from classical conceptions of the contemplative life. The modernist liberal conception of the normative citizen was drawn from classical conceptions of the political or active life. But, in the seventeenth century, for whatever historical reasons, these two ideals were intertwined in ways entirely unfamiliar to classical philosophy. Whereas for Aristotle, pursuit of the contemplative life led the philosopher to turn away from political affairs, for modern philosophy, the standpoint of the pure, contemplative knower became a model for the standpoint of the active citizen. It might be the case that this modern appropriation of the classical ideal of pure theory may tell us something about the concealed political significance of the contemplative life as it was classically understood. Without doubt, however, it tells us something important about the nature of modern citizenship.

Classical republicanism and classical conceptions of the political life presupposed a community united by a shared conception of the good. Modern liberalism presupposes the opposite. Modern conceptions of citizenship assume that the civic community will be composed of a number of diverse ethnic, class, and religious communities, defined by conflicting world views and ranking systems. Membership in such a civic community makes very different demands on citizens. Citizens must strive to attain a far greater degree of detachment from their particularistic value commitments. In order to address one another as free and equal individuals within the liberal democratic public sphere, citizens must cultivate a far greater critical distance from their communitarian identities than classical citizenship required. The model for this extreme detachment became the detachment of the pure philosophical knower, the transcendental ego — the standpoint of a person who has embraced an identity completely separate from all particularistic commitments and beliefs, in order to gain a knowledge of universal truth. This is what is illuminating about the modernist liberal identification of the normative citizen with the pure knower: it makes clear the degree of detachment from adherence to totalizing particularistic beliefs and values that modern citizenship requires.

This identification also served well as the basis for a form of civic culture. It provided a clear measure of, and clear direction for, development of the capacities proper to modern citizenship. In effect, modernist liberal civic culture invited citizens of liberal democracies to become citizens in the full cultural sense by learning to adopt the standpoint of the pure knower, i.e., the universal standpoint of one who has resolved to adopt only those criteria of truth that are applicable to all persons, without regard to their membership in particular ethnic, class, or religious communities.

While this identification between ideal citizen and pure knower produced and supported a most effective form of civic culture for over three hundred years, it has now become a liability. The cognitive enterprise that originated with Galilean mathematical physics has by now become an enterprise that would no longer even be recognized by its founders. The Cartesian doctrine of the autonomy of human reason was designed as an explanation and defense of that earlier cognitive enterprise. But, in an age when science is anything but the province of autonomous knowers, when cognitive enterprises have become well-financed, internally complex, multi-audience, nationally organized, economically necessary, militarily vital, professionalized research enterprises, the doctrine of the autonomy of human reason is simply obsolete, marginally useful today perhaps only as an ideology supportive of the independence of research institutions. Science, in short, has become something vastly different than anything that Descartes could have imagined. The myth of an autonomous faculty of human reason has retained whatever currency it continues to have because it has played such a central role in modernist civic culture. This doctrine has, so far, been the most effective cultural support for the production and reproduction of civic values in contemporary liberal democracies. But this usefulness is now at an end.

For us today, the doctrine of a universal and autonomous faculty of human reason has lost its credibility. The analogy between the ideal citizen and the pure knower no longer illuminates our contemporary experience of citizenship. We must, today, think beyond this analogy if we are to succeed in the invention of a new form of liberal democratic civic culture that will succeed the old. But this analogy, up until now, has provided the basis of the political vocabulary identified with liberalism as such. The first task in the project of reinventing liberalism must be to free liberalism as a conception of citizenship and political life from this modernist vocabulary. Because of the origins of that vocabulary in the myth of an autonomous faculty of reason, the reinvention of liberalism requires a radical shift in the way we speak not only about citizenship, but also about reason and cognition.

In any civic culture, the linguistic and representational resources that help make the normative standpoint of citizenship intelligible to citizens also provide resources for motivating them to make the effort required to develop civic identities and to cultivate civic virtues. An effective civic culture must make clear not only what it means to be a citizen, but also why it is good or desirable to be a citizen. The civic culture shaped by modernist liberal political theory provided motivational resources supportive of citizenship that were drawn from its peculiar interpretation of citizenship. As we have seen, on the question of the nature of citizenship, modernist liberalism answered in two ways: (1) with respect to political authority, citizenship is a political standpoint analogous to the standpoint that might be imagined to prevail among free and equal individuals in the natural condition, prior to their voluntary submission to political authority; and (2) with respect to beliefs and values, citizenship is a political standpoint analogous to the radically detached cognitive standpoint of the pure theoretical knower.

In both of these ways of defining the nature of citizenship, modernist liberal political theory represented the normative standpoint of citizenship in essentialist terms. It represented civic identity as the anthropologically and metaphysically prior identity of persons. The answer offered by modernist liberalism to the question of motivation — the question of why anyone should go to the trouble of developing civic identities and cultivating civic virtues — was dictated by its essentialist conception of citizenship. Its answer was that free and equal individuals, radically autonomous minds, define what all human beings everywhere really are. Thus, for the civic culture shaped by modernist liberal political theory, the motivation to develop civic identities and cultivate civic virtues was defined as a certain type of self-realization, where the move from communitarian identity to civic identity was represented, at once, as a move from the generic to the individual and as a move from the particular to the universal.

The two different wings of modernist liberal political theory — Lockean and Kantian — tended to offer slightly different versions of this essentialist and universalist interpretation of the ethics of citizenship. However, the effect of both versions of civic ethics was to undermine the validity of, and even to disparage, particularistic cultural world views and value systems. Lockean forms of liberalism tended to specialize in representing the move from communitarian identity to civic identity as a move from the generic to the individual, i.e., as a move from the subjection of persons to various kinds of group authority and norms to the standpoint of the freestanding individual imagined in social contract narratives. For this reason, forms of modernist civic culture heavily influenced by Lockean liberal theory — in particular, the civic cultures of England and America — tended to motivate development of civic attitudes by motivating the development of a kind of individualism that easily conformed to the logic of market systems of production, where economic competition licensed behavior that often placed individual self-interest above loyalty to local cultural community. At the extreme, Lockean forms of civic culture became virtually indistinguishable from the culture of possessive individualism.

On the other hand, Kantian forms of liberal theory tended to specialize in representing the move from communitarian identity to civic identity as a move from the particular to the universal, i.e., as a move from the immersion of persons in merely contingent and local cultural world views to the standpoint of the all-embracing and purely self-determining individual identified with the autonomous objective knower. For this reason, forms of modernist civic culture heavily influenced by the Kantian or rationalist style of liberal theory — say, the civic culture of France — tended to motivate development of civic attitudes by motivating a quest for a condition of pure, universalist self-determination, a quest that was no less hostile to the restrictive laws of the market than to the constrictive values of local ethnic, class, and religious cultures.

What is important for us today is that both Lockean and Kantian varieties of modernist liberal political theory generated forms of civic culture whose motivational resources tended to undermine the validity of, or even to disparage, particularistic cultural conceptions of the good life. Modernist liberal civic culture tended to present the culture of citizenship as a totalizing culture to which all particularistic ethnic, class, and religious cultures were subordinate both cognitively and morally. The contemporary consequence of this subordination is that, as the Enlightenment world view that gave modernist liberal conceptions of citizenship their persuasive power progressively loses its credibility, we are now experiencing, in reaction, a reassertion and resurgence of particularistic cognitive and moral belief. The impact of modernist liberal civic culture upon religious communities was to weaken orthodox claims to the possession of exclusive doctrinal truth and absolute moral standards. The impact of modernist liberal civic culture on ethnic and class communities was to weaken particularistic identification. But today, as modernist liberal civic culture gradually loses its motivational power, we see the emergence everywhere of a new politics of orthodoxy and a new politics of ethnic and class identity, where demands are raised that particularistic cultural values be given priority over civic values. It is this development that presents possibly the most daunting challenge to the project of inventing a viable postmodern civic culture. The first step we must take toward meeting this challenge is to identify clearly the way in which modernist liberal political theory attributed to the culture of citizenship an entirely inappropriate motivational primacy over cultures grounded in particularistic ethnic, class, and religious world views.

Civic culture, influenced by Lockean forms of liberal theory, motivated the development of civic attitudes by sanctioning purely self-interested and acquisitive motives, motives imagined to be consistent with those of the solitary individual in the natural condition of perfect liberty. Lockean liberalism attributed to these motives historical and anthropological priority. They were conceived of as authentic human motives — i.e., authentic by comparison with the arbitrary, artificial, and often hypocritical motives that govern the behavior of individuals as members of particular cultural communities. Civic culture, influenced by Lockean liberal political theory, thus, tended to support what I shall call a civic ethics of authenticity. In the civic ethics of authenticity, the normative standpoint of citizenship was represented as the authentically human standpoint. To be a citizen in the full cultural sense was to be a fully authentic human being, a human being whose identity was firmly grounded in the original and inevitable human standpoint of the natural condition, the condition of all human beings prior to their subjection to the artificial limits imposed by the arbitrary authority of particularistic cultural and political communities. The civic ethics of authenticity represented the motives and standpoint proper to the citizen, i.e., to the free and equal individual, as the motives and standpoint native to all human beings, those that would be left, after all particularistic cultural accretions have been stripped away. Of course, different theorists of the civic ethics of authenticity conceived of the content of authenticity differently, depending upon their conception of the state of nature. For Hobbes, human authenticity was identified with the competitive struggle for physical survival; for Locke, with industrious labor aimed at the accumulation of property; for Rousseau, with the primeval innocence and spontaneity of animal life. The point is that, however the ideal of the authentically free and equal individual was conceived in any particular case, realization of that ideal definitely required the citizen to consider all obligations and identifications derived from membership in particular ethnic, class, or religious communities as secondary, superficial, dispensable, and even as spurious.

Civic culture, influenced by Kantian forms of liberal theory, tended to invalidate and disparage particularistic cultural values in a slightly different way. Kantian liberal political theory represented the relationship between civic and communitarian identities as analogous to the relationship between the autonomous rational self-consciousness and the conditioned empirical self-consciousness of foundationalist epistemology. Just as the quest for certainty in modernist epistemology was represented as a quest for self-determination, a quest to escape the realm of belief grounded only upon tradition and the authority of others, so also, for Kantian varieties of liberal political theory, the project of developing civic attitudes was represented as a quest for moral independence, a quest to attain freedom from motivations deriving only from the accidental circumstances of biology, upbringing, and fortune. While Lockean forms of liberalism characterized the process of achieving full cultural citizenship as a stripping away of cultural accretions to reach an original, core individuality, Kantian forms of liberalism characterized the process as an ascent from a conditioned particularistic identity to an autonomous universalized identity.

Civic culture, influenced by Kantian liberal theory, thus tended to support what I shall call a civic ethics of autonomy. In the civic ethics of autonomy, the normative standpoint of citizenship was represented as the only fully self-determining human standpoint, the only standpoint available to persons who wish to escape subjection to historically contingent communitarian identities. Those historically contingent communitarian identities, as viewed by the civic ethics of autonomy, were shaped not only by arbitrary, but also by hopelessly particularistic moral standards, standards promoting rivalry and conflict among the different cultural communities adhering to them. To be a citizen in the full cultural sense, then, was to take over individual responsibility for one’s own identity and moral standards, but in such a way that the self-determining individuality, thereby attained, was one that was free of all historical particularism and, for that reason, constituted the sole hope for moral unanimity and social peace.

The civic ethics of autonomy thus called into question the moral validity of particularistic conceptions of the good in an even more powerful way than did the civic ethics of authenticity. Just as the modernist doctrine of the autonomy of reason had the effect of discrediting all truth claims that could not be supported by the cognitive methodology it mandated (the "scientific method"), so also the civic ethics of autonomy had the effect of discrediting all moral standards that were identified with particularistic cultural traditions and that could not be justified by appeal to the metaphysical ideal of moral autonomy. This meant that persons who were motivated to become citizens in the full cultural sense under the influence of the civic ethics of autonomy were faced with a difficult choice. To the extent that their lives were given direction and meaning by moral ideals and world views associated with some particularistic cultural community, they were forced either to abandon those ideals and world views or to reformulate them in ways that stripped them of their historically contingent and particularistic content.

Schleiermacher’s reinterpretation of Christian theology, heavily influenced by Kantian thought, became the model for this sort of doctrinal reformulation. In his project of making adherence to Christianity once again intellectually and morally respectable in the eyes of its cultured despisers, Schleiermacher stripped Christian doctrine of all elements that were not, in principle, accessible to all human beings everywhere, identifying Christianity not with a set of truth claims regarding events that occurred during the Roman occupation of Judea, but rather with a privileged personal experience that was analogous to, if not identical with, personal experiences available to members of all religions. Members of particular cultural communities who were not willing to reformulate their local moral ideals and world views in this way seemed, as a result, not only to be excluded from full cultural citizenship, but also to be excluded by the civic ethics of autonomy from the cultural mainstream, condemned as cultural and political sectarians incapable of both responsible citizenship and self-determining individuality.

The civic ethics of autonomy, in this way, pressured all particularistic cultural communities to conform to its cultural rule on pain of being vilified as enemies of reason, freedom, equality, moral progress, and social peace. But the civic ideal of individual autonomy also introduced an even more potent and insidious way of undermining the authority of particularistic moral standards by introducing an ascetic theme into modernist civic culture. Any sort of ascetic impulse was comfortably alien to the civic ethics of authenticity. The civic ideal of authenticity motivated persons to achieve full cultural citizenship by throwing off the restraints upon their desire and behavior produced by particularistic moral standards. The goal was represented as a return to the imagined standpoint of the freestanding individual who inhabited the state of nature, the condition of perfect liberty. The civic ideal of authenticity was, thus, entirely compatible with an affirmation of unbridled material self-interest and this-worldliness. On the other hand, the civic ethics of autonomy was laced through with a sense of the futility and vanity of particularistic desire. For the civic ethics of autonomy, human contingency and finitude were the real enemy. To the extent that the civic ethics of autonomy expressed this ascetic impulse, living a life in pursuit of some particularistic ethnic or religious conception of the good was viewed an activity akin to polishing the doorknobs on the Titanic. All historically-conditioned conceptions of the good expressed only inclinations and interests governed by particularistic biological, psychological, social, and economic needs. From the standpoint of the civic ideal of moral autonomy, all such needs were faceless and merely generic. Action governed by them stripped human life of the dignity and worth proper to fully individualized human life — i.e., the ideal life of the citizen. In view of this ascetic evaluation of contingent and finite human life, particularistic moral ideals and world views, thus, could be judged not only as divisive and irrational, but even as intrinsically futile and meaningless.

This is the consequence of modernist liberalism that will no doubt prove the most difficult to overcome, as we, today, undertake to lay the basis for a postmodern liberal democratic civic culture. This is not to say, of course, that a liberal democratic civic culture can ever be free of the conflict between civic identity and communitarian identity. Given the moral and intellectual demands of liberal democratic citizenship, such conflict is inevitable. As I have noted, attainment of the normative standpoint of citizenship requires persons to develop a capacity to put aside the moral ideals and world views that define their communitarian identities whenever they enter the public realm. Citizens must be able to distance themselves from the most basic commitments that otherwise govern their action and give meaning to all aspects of human life.

This balancing act is truly a fantastic requirement, a requirement that only relatively few citizens in any particular liberal democracy will satisfy with great distinction. But modernist liberal civic culture made that balancing act even more difficult by representing the relationship between civic and communitarian identity as something approximating an either-or choice. If a viable postmodern civic culture is to be invented, this needless difficulty must be removed. In our rethinking of liberalism as a form of political association, we must come to see the relationship between civic and communitarian identity, whatever its ineradicable difficulty, as a mutually supportive rather than as a competitive relationship. Perhaps the most important contemporary contribution to this rethinking of liberalism has been made by John Rawls in his work published since 1980. Before we can begin to build on that contribution, we must first turn briefly to an examination of the new conception of liberalism — what he calls "political liberalism" — that Rawls has begun to formulate.