A postmodern civic culture will no doubt differ in many significant ways from the form of civic culture that developed under the influence of modernist liberal political theory. But in whatever other ways a postmodern civic culture may differ from its predecessor, it definitely must differ in two respects. (1) It must provide a new conception of the nature of liberal democratic citizenship, one that can successfully address the intelligibility problems produced by modernist liberalism. (2) It must provide new rhetorical resources for motivating citizens to develop civic identities, resources that can successfully address the motivational problems produced by modernist liberalism. We must keep in mind what these two tasks specifically require.

(1) In order to address the intelligibility problems produced by modernist liberal political theory, a postmodern civic culture must provide a conception of citizenship thoroughly independent of foundationalist epistemological modes of thought. As we have seen, modernist liberalism, in its rhetorical use of Enlightenment conceptions of reason and knowledge — i.e., in its use of the anti-rhetorical rhetoric of pure theory — established and worked from an analogy between the normative standpoint of liberal democratic citizenship and the standpoint of the autonomously rational objective knower. This connection generated an essentialist and universalist conception of the standpoint of citizenship that represented civic identity as anthropologically and metaphysically prior to communitarian identity.

Among the negative consequences of this twofold attribution of priority were, first, the systematic neglect of civic culture as a factor in the production and reproduction of civic values and, second, the widespread belief that civic moral ideals were somehow dependent for their legitimacy on a proof demonstrating their deducibility from timeless and universal principles — whether these principles be drawn from some imagined natural human condition or from the imagined traits of the faculty of pure practical reason. A postmodern civic culture must sever once and for all this connection between the normative standpoint of citizenship and the standpoint proper to an autonomous faculty of reason. A postmodern civic culture will no longer require the services of epistemologists or metaphysicians. It will take as its point of departure a rejection of the anti-rhetorical rhetoric of pure theory — or, more positively, it will embrace rhetorical practice and analysis as instruments and resources for the production and reproduction of civic values. In short, a postmodern liberalism must take a rhetorical turn. It must start from a rejection of the essentialist and universalist conception of the normative standpoint of citizenship identified with modernist liberalism and an affirmation of the historically-situated and particularistic nature of civic values.

(2) In order to address the motivational problems produced by modernist liberal political theory, a postmodern civic culture must offer resources for motivating citizens to develop civic identities and capacities that are no longer dependent upon the essentialist and universalist conception of citizenship proper to modernist liberalism. As we have seen, this essentialist conception of citizenship had the effect of undermining and disparaging particularistic conceptions of the good life. The communitarian identities shaped by particularistic conceptions of the good were represented by modernist liberalism as arbitrary and groundless. This basic strategy of motivation was embodied in the two most influential moral standpoints generated by modernist liberal political theory — what I have called the civic ethics of authenticity and the civic ethics of autonomy. These moral ideals differed from the moral ideals identified with particular ethnic, class, and religious communities not only by their claim to universality, but also by their peculiarly formal nature.

The civic ethics of authenticity — largely associated with Lockean styles of modernist liberalism — motivated citizens to achieve the normative civic standpoint of free and equal individuality by representing, as an ideal, the free standing individual of the pre-political natural condition. But the free standing individual of the natural condition is represented in social contract narratives as motivated only by the goal of self-interest in general. A person motivated to pursue only his or her own self-interest is not motivated to pursue any specific goal or move in any specific direction. From the admonition to be authentic alone, no specific conception of the good or ranking system or concept of excellence can be inferred. The same formalism also characterizes the civic ethics of autonomy. The civic ethics of autonomy — largely associated with Kantian styles of modernist liberalism — motivated citizens to achieve the normative civic standpoint of free and equal individuality by representing as an ideal a pure self-determination analogous to that of the autonomous rational knower. Once again, the purely self-determining individual is conceived of only as an autonomous chooser. The actual content of the choice remains undetermined. From the admonition to be autonomous alone, no specific conception of the good or ranking system or concept of excellence can be inferred.

Thus, both the modernist civic ethics of authenticity and autonomy were characterized by a peculiar formalism or lack of specific content. As moral ideals, they mandated not a particular way of life, but rather universal ways of choosing and living a particular way of life. This formalism was expressed in modernist liberal political theory in the doctrine of the priority of the right over the good. In different ways, both the civic ethics of authenticity and the civic ethics of autonomy embodied this doctrine. They were non-teleological: they mandated a particular how of action rather than a particular why or end of action. At the extreme, as we have seen, these moral ideals even called into question the value of all particularistic conceptions of the good — affirming the priority of the right by calling attention to the contingent and arbitrary character of all particularistic and historically-conditioned conceptions of the good.

At the extreme, then, the moral ideals generated by modernist liberal civic culture represented the worst of both worlds. They required citizens to develop a skeptical attitude toward the values of the particular ethnic, class, and religious communities to which they belonged and to adopt as their primary stance in life the purely formal and vacuous identity of an authentic self or an autonomous chooser. A postmodern civic culture must take as its point of departure a rejection of this modernist conception of the priority of the right over the good. It must begin with the affirmation of the ideal of citizenship as a particularistic moral ideal capable of giving life particularistic content and direction. As a particularistic moral ideal, it is not a merely empty and formal mandating of a particular how of choice, but rather the mandating of a specific what — i.e., a specific life ideal, a specific conception of the good life. In short, a postmodern liberalism must take a teleological turn. It must reinterpret the modernist liberal doctrine of the priority of the right over the good in a way that both gives the notion of moral rightness specific ethical content and, at the same time, makes the affirmation of moral rightness compatible with respect for and pursuit of particularistic cultural conceptions of the good.

In TJ, Rawls set out to uncover, make explicit, and refine the principles of justice that he believed were operative in the moral intuitions of reasonable persons. A theory of justice would consist, then, at least in a statement of those principles, along with an argument in their support. A correct theory of justice would be one whose principles yielded judgments that conformed to the moral intuitions of reasonable persons. This test for determining the truth of a theory of justice determined the methodology that Rawls adopted in TJ. The theory would be arrived at through engaging in a process of mutual adjustment between stated principles and the intuitive judgments of reasonable persons. When a state of reflective equilibrium between moral intuitions and stated principles had been achieved, the resulting principles would be established as the content of the true or correct conception of social justice. This true conception of social justice could then be applied or appealed to in disputed questions of political morality. This is, roughly, how Rawls conceived of his philosophical project in 1971.

For present purposes, the actual principles of justice Rawls arrived at in his 1971 inquiry are less important than his conception of the theoretical enterprise itself and how that conception has changed since then. Although Rawls later rejected this interpretation, there is no doubt that most readers of TJ understood the book to present a theory of the essence of political morality. If true, the theory of justice as fairness would state the criteria by which the justice or injustice of any political regime, existing at any place and time, are to be judged. In other words, using Rawls’s later vocabulary, most readers interpreted TJ as offering a metaphysical, rather than a political conception of justice — i.e., a conception of justice claiming universal truth known for its own sake. Admittedly, there are many passages in A Theory of Justice that support this interpretation. Even now, as I shall note later, Rawls himself has not yet completely freed himself at least of a certain style of thought, a certain rhetoric, that supports a metaphysical interpretation of his work. Nevertheless, the book’s central argument, as well as its peculiar methodology, resist this metaphysical interpretation and point in the direction that Rawls followed in his published writings after 1980.

In that 1985 article (whose content was largely incorporated later into his book, Political Liberalism), Rawls defined the "reasonable people" whose intuitions provided the subject matter and standards for the method of reflective equilibrium as those persons whose self-understanding and moral standards had been decisively shaped by the institutions and political culture of a modern constitutional democracy. The moral intuitions that serve as both data and control for his project were, thus, no longer to be understood simply as the moral intuitions of reasonable people in general, without regard to any particularistic or historically-conditioned assumptions that may have influenced them. On the contrary, the relevant moral intuitions were identified as precisely those that had been produced by an historically specific political culture — they were identified as the moral intuitions specifically of those persons who had been shaped by the civic culture of contemporary liberal democracies and who, as a result, had, to some degree, developed the intellectual and moral capacities proper to citizenship.

Given this reinterpretation of the starting point of Rawls’s project, its subject matter and goals had to be reinterpreted accordingly. If the relevant data are the historically-conditioned intuitions of members of a specific type of political regime, then the principles underlying those intuitions are no less historically conditioned. The theory of justice as fairness, therefore, cannot be understood as a statement of the principles of justice as such, as a claim about the universal essence of political morality or as a revelation of the truth about an objective moral order. Rather, the theory of justice as fairness seeks to articulate only those principles and assumptions actually operative in the intuitions of persons influenced by the public culture of modern constitutional democracies.

Further, the modernist notion of theory suggests that this discourse is undertaken from a purely impartial standpoint, one that aims at "getting it right," i.e., arriving at the one true or correct understanding of its subject matter — truth for its own sake. This notion of theory assumes that there is a "fact of the matter," and that the facts can and ought to be finally coercive with respect to both the theoretical discourse and its audience. The criteria for ranking rival theories in terms of the degrees to which they give a satisfactory explanation of the data must be determined by the rules of inductive and deductive logic alone. On the basis of purely logical considerations alone, then, if one particular theory, among all its competitors, offers the most satisfactory account of the facts, the theory can be affirmed as true, whether any particular audience happens to affirm its truth or not.

In Rawls’s original conception of his project, the theory of justice as fairness could plausibly be interpreted as a theory in roughly this sense. The field of data consisted in the set of intuitive judgments made by reasonable people regarding disputed questions of social justice. It assumed that these data were "given" independently of any particular theory of justice and that the goal of every theory of political morality was to provide a satisfactory account of the patterns evinced in our intuitive moral judgments. But Rawls’s revised conception of justice is clearly not a theory in this sense. Can there be a correct theory about the historically-conditioned principles used by members of a specific type of historically-conditioned community to decide disputed questions of political morality? In this case, the field of data itself is clearly unstable and subject to variation. The moral intuitions of the better citizens of constitutional democracies are not fixed once and for all, but can be changed through persuasion and may even be influenced by Rawls’s theoretical discourse itself or by the discussion it produces. This means that there exists no theory-independent set of intuitional patterns or regularities about which a correct theory could be objectively correct.

Moreover, a theoretical discourse is thought to aim at truth for its own sake. It assumes that there is a fact of the matter, and the goal of the discourse is to get those facts right. A theoretical discourse is thus to be distinguished from discourse seeking to persuade, discourse that aims at producing a certain rhetorical effect upon its audience. A theory can be true whether or not any particular audience has been persuaded of its truth. But can the conception of justice as fairness, in the light of Rawls’s 1985 reinterpretation of it as a political and not a metaphysical conception, be viewed as a theory in this sense? Could we affirm its truth, even if an audience made up of the most insightful citizens of constitutional democracies does not find it to be a persuasive account of the principles of justice? Would we be willing to say that the members of such an audience are mistaken about their own assumptions and intuitions, that they are victims of false consciousness? And what if the theory of justice as fairness not only were rejected by this audience, but also produced among its members such a negative reaction that they were led to embrace a new set of assumptions and, therefore, a new pattern of intuitive judgments radically incompatible with it? Would we be willing to say that this change in the patterns of intuitive judgments, because it produces patterns different from those explained by the theory, shows that the audience has "fallen away" from the correct principles, and its members are in need of reformation? In short, can there be anything that we would call a theory (i.e., in the traditional modernist sense) about a subject matter that the theory itself can decisively influence and that must win the actual adherence of an audience in order to be considered acceptable as a product of inquiry?

It seems obvious that, understanding the term "theory" in its modernist sense, Rawls quite properly no longer speaks of offering a theory of justice. Not only would the data — i.e., the moral intuitions of reasonable citizens of modern constitutional democracies — of any such "theory" be variable and historically-conditioned, but the explicit goal of inquiry would be to win the acceptance of those reasonable citizens and not simply to arrive at a statement of what is the case. How are we to classify the status of Rawls’s political conception of justice as fairness then? Is it a practical political proposal — an attempt to influence public judgment by proposing a set of principles that reasonable persons who disagree about matters of social justice might find acceptable as a means of settling disputes? This seems to be the interpretation of his project that Rawls embraced in his 1985 article:

Thus, in 1985, although he himself didn’t describe it in these terms (and, for that matter, no doubt still wouldn’t), Rawls, in effect, reinterpreted his philosophical project as a project belonging to the cognitive realm of rhetoric. Traditionally, rhetorical reason defined its cognitive realm as the realm of pistis or belief, as opposed to the cognitive realm claimed by philosophy, the realm of episteme or science. Belief, or pistis, is the state of being persuaded. To the extent that any discourse aims at producing belief, i.e., the uncoerced adherence of its intended audience, to that extent it belongs to the cognitive domain of rhetoric. This is the way it seems that Rawls, since 1985, has conceived of his inquiry into the principles of justice. His aim is no longer (if it ever was) to arrive at a timelessly true statement of the universal principles of social justice, but rather to offer a statement of the principles of justice that might win the uncoerced adherence of the reasonable citizens of a modern constitutional democracy. The principles of justice produced by Rawls’s inquiry are to be judged cognitively not by the standard traditionally identified with philosophy, i.e., the standard of timeless truth, but rather by the standard traditionally identified with rhetoric, i.e., the standard consisting in the successful establishment of a body of uncoerced shared belief. This reinterpretation by Rawls of his philosophical project as a project whose goal is consensus — the adherence of a specific audience, then, I call his "rhetorical turn." It is this rhetorical turn that constitutes the first defining mark and guiding maxim of postmodern liberalism.

There is no question that, at least since 1985, Rawls has adhered rigorously to this reinterpretation of his project as one offering a political rather than a metaphysical conception of justice and of liberal doctrine in general. However, there is also no question that he has failed to adhere rigorously to the full conceptual, stylistic, and methodological implications of that reinterpretation. The rhetorical turn requires the abandonment of the modernist rhetoric of pure theory that characterized modernist liberal political theory. It requires that the doctrines of liberalism be comprehended and analyzed in terms of the categories proper to a rhetorical conception of inquiry. Liberal doctrine, that is to say, must no longer present itself as a body of truth-claims about an audience-independent subject matter, presented by means of a purely theoretical discourse and addressed to no one in particular. Rather, if liberalism is to be conceived of consistently as a body of political (as opposed to metaphysical) doctrine, its proponents must embrace explicitly an appropriately rhetorical understanding and analysis of its content. They must embrace fully an analysis of the content of liberal doctrine in terms of the rhetorical categories of speaker, audience, occasion, and intended rhetorical effect. Rawls stops considerably short of this. This failure leads, in the case of Rawls, (1) to a certain abstractness or rhetorical indeterminacy in his reconstruction of liberal doctrine, and, (2) to a tendency to incorporate into that reconstruction far more of the conceptual baggage of modernist liberal political theory than is consistent with his project. These consequences of Rawls’s reluctance to embrace fully a consistently rhetorical self-understanding and conception of his inquiry are instructive. Let us briefly examine some of these consequences.

(1) First, consider the rhetorical indeterminacy that characterizes Rawls’s post-metaphysical thinking and writing. Any speech or discourse is rhetorically indeterminate when its form and content offer no clear definition of the rhetorical situation to which it is addressed — i.e., offer no clear definition of its intended audience, its occasion, or the role adopted by the speaker or writer. Speaking and writing are communicative actions. Language has a pragmatic or what Austin called an illocutionary dimension. Linguistic communication is not merely a matter of transmitting meanings from one mind to another. Speech achieves its communicative effects through its embeddedness in social and institutional contexts. Speech coordinates interaction within those contexts and does so more effectively to the degree that particular speech acts make explicit, in one way or another, the sort of interactional effects their speakers intend. When a speaker intends a particular utterance, say, as a request, the standard way of making the pragmatic or illocutionary dimension of that utterance as explicit as possible is by labeling the utterance accordingly: "I hereby request that. . ." Speech or writing in which the illocutionary or pragmatic dimension of its content is sufficiently clear I call rhetorically-determinate speech or discourse. Of course, in the case of most speech or writing, various features of context, style, and medium are sufficient to make the content rhetorically determinate.

Discourse governed by the rhetorical imperatives of modernist philosophy — the anti-rhetorical rhetoric of pure theory — represents a somewhat paradoxical instance of this. The rhetorical imperatives of modernist philosophy required any discourse claiming genuine cognitive status to be as rhetorically indeterminate as possible. Modernist philosophy sought to distinguish itself, as the superlatively cognitive or theoretical discourse, from other forms of literature whose success was measured by the capacity to affect audiences in certain ways. Literature governed by the intention to move or affect a specific audience in specific ways cannot be indifferent to the pragmatic or illocutionary dimension of speech. Such literature cannot afford to strip itself of any internalized reference to the rhetorical situation it addresses.

Modernist philosophy, on the other hand, claimed a superior cognitive status. As pure theory, philosophy claimed to be governed only by the intention of stating the timeless and audience-independent truth about a timeless and audience-independent reality. For any discourse to qualify as philosophical discourse, therefore, it had to exhibit a certain style, a style characterized above all by an absence of rhetorical adornment and an absence of any internalized reference to any specific rhetorical situation. Thus, paradoxically, modernist philosophical discourse defined and identified itself rhetorically by its own striving for rhetorical indeterminacy. I think most readers of Rawls’s TJ would agree that the book was characterized by this sort of rhetorically indeterminate style. Whatever its message, stylistically it clearly aspired to meet the anti-rhetorical standards proper to purely theoretical discourse in the modernist sense. Even if the book’s content might be interpreted non-metaphysically, i.e., as offering something approaching a political as opposed to a metaphysical conception of justice, its style was metaphysical through and through.

Thus, while it seems to me indisputable that Rawls, in the aftermath of his rhetorical turn, must view his role at least partially as that of a political advocate seeking to convince fellow citizens of the superior reasonableness of his proposed conception of justice, he, nevertheless, in PL, refuses to adopt the appropriate rhetorical voice and persona. He continues to speak as though the process of adopting basic rules for social cooperation is a process of conceptual derivation, rather than an actual political process aimed at achieving an overlapping consensus among diverse social, economic, and cultural groups. Rawls’s abstract and rhetorically indeterminate attitude toward the subject matter is expressed even grammatically. PL is written in a peculiar style, with abstract nouns predominating as agents and the passive voice given an overwhelming presence. Justice as fairness "adopts" an idea of social cooperation, a family of conceptions has been "worked up," citizens "are viewed" as free and equal, ideas "are introduced," a principle of justice "is constructed." Given this predominance of the passive voice and, when the active voice appears at all, the predominance of abstract nouns as agents, the reader of PL not only loses any sense of political advocacy, but any sense of authorial agency, as well. It seems that political conceptions simply unfold, that principles construct themselves, and that the reader is little more than a witness to these magical and anonymous conceptual processes. I believe that this is more than a mere stylistic quirk, that Rawls’s refusal to assume explicitly the rhetorical voice and role proper to political advocacy is itself a rhetorical appeal, an effort to retain the cultural authority of the modernist cognitive ideal of pure theory, while, at the same time, denying that ideal conceptually. It is ironic that, in PL, the anti-rhetorical cognitive ideal of the Enlightenment lives on today as little more than a linguistic trick.

Whether or not Rawls is willing to adopt fully the voice and persona of political advocacy, then, his project in its post-metaphysical phase must in part be conceived of in those terms. But, in PL, that aspect of his project takes a back seat to another aspect. If Rawls, as an advocate of the principles of justice as fairness, assumes at least implicitly the role of active citizen, in PL, Rawls pursues a related but, nevertheless, in rhetorical terms, quite different sort of project, one that in fact places him in a quite different role with respect to his audience. In PL, Rawls speaks primarily as a reflective citizen whose aim is to offer his fellow citizens new and better ways to think about liberal democratic citizenship and about the ideas and ideals of liberal democracy. In other words, PL is much less an attempt to sell justice as fairness than it is a contribution to civic culture. Of course, it is not as if these two different rhetorical projects are totally unrelated. After all, Rawls’s analysis of the nature of liberal democratic ideals and citizenship can generate topoi to be drawn upon in the invention of arguments advocating public acceptance of his favored conception of justice. Nevertheless, the criteria of success proper to these two rhetorical projects are quite different. Rawls’s reflections on the nature of liberal democratic citizenship and the epistemological status of liberal doctrine may well serve to enlighten the self-understanding and the political practice of his fellow citizens even if citizens unanimously disagree with the conception of justice that he might support by use of those reflections in the context of advocacy.

Once again, however, Rawls’s continuing commitment to the anti-rhetorical ideals of modernist philosophical discourse prevents him from explicitly assuming the role and voice proper to the project of public enlightenment. He seems to conflate completely the two very different projects of political advocacy and public enlightenment — or, rather, to remain entirely innocent of any such distinction and to view the entire "family of conceptions" that he offers as belonging to one single project aimed at the conceptual construction of a set of principles of justice. Unfortunately, this general obliviousness to the rhetorical or illocutionary dimension of his inquiry places limits on the contribution that he makes toward the reconstruction of contemporary liberal democratic civic culture.

To the extent that Rawls, in PL, addresses the first conflict at all — i.e., the conflict between the partisans of "negative freedom" and the partisans of "positive freedom," he seems to view these opposed conceptions of freedom only as pure theories, as elements of comprehensive or metaphysical versions of liberal doctrine associated with Locke or Mill, in the case of negative freedom, and Rousseau or Kant, in the case of positive freedom. Rawls’s strategy with respect to these two conflicting metaphysical conceptions of freedom is basically to distance himself from both and to insist that liberalism must be understood to be a political doctrine, a doctrine that remains neutral with respect to all metaphysical questions about the essence of human liberty. But as a response addressed to the issues raised for civic culture by these two opposed conceptions of liberty, Rawls’s response is inadequate. By viewing these two opposed conceptions of liberty merely as philosophical theories, without regard to the role they played in modernist liberal civic culture, Rawls fails to grasp their full significance for his project of liberal reconstruction.

These theories are now controversial because affirmation of their claims to truth seems to require rejection of religious beliefs and moral conceptions dear to the hearts of many citizens. This is the sort of complaint against liberalism that the culturally "orthodox" have long made against the culturally "progressive" or "liberal."

Implied in Rawls’s attempt to apply the principle of toleration to philosophy itself, then, seems to be a recognition of, and a response to the conflict between the "progressive" and the "orthodox." Rawls’s reconstruction of liberalism aims at driving a wedge between liberal moral ideals and controversial modernist metaphysical commitments, thereby removing this source of political conflict and promoting the development of a new form of liberal civic culture that may be more hospitable to culture difference. This is the import of what I have called Rawls’s rhetorical turn.

Unfortunately, Rawls’s reluctance to embrace fully the implications of his application of the principle of toleration to philosophy itself limits his success in achieving this goal. Even though PL seems to be inspired by the project of recasting liberal doctrine in such a way as to make it compatible with a real cultural pluralism, throughout the book Rawls adopts the voice and persona, not of a reflective citizen making a contribution to the reconstruction of liberal civic culture, but rather of a Kantian constructivist concerned with setting forth a rhetorically undifferentiated "family of conceptions" from which the principles of justice as fairness can be derived. In fact, Rawls’s formulation of the fundamental question addressed by the book is stated in such a way that it invites a Kantian misinterpretation of the project. When Rawls asks "how is it possible" for there to exist a genuinely pluralistic liberal democratic society, this could be construed as some sort of quasi-transcendental question about the conditions of such a society’s possibility — i.e., about the ideas, the inevitable presuppositions, we must accept, if such a society is to be established or fully realized.

(2) Thus, Rawls’s reluctance to adopt fully a rhetorical conception and analysis of his inquiry limits his effectiveness both as a political advocate of a particular conception of justice and as a contributor to the contemporary reconstruction of liberal democratic civic culture. But this reluctance also places limits on the scope and depth of his rethinking of classical liberal doctrines. As we have noted, Rawls wishes to make liberal democracy more hospitable to cultural difference by offering an interpretation of liberal doctrine and a liberal conception of justice stripped of the truth claims and metaphysical commitments associated with modernist forms of liberal political theory — truth claims and metaphysical commitments that can conflict with religious beliefs and moral ideals adhered to by members of particularistic cultural communities within liberal society. Modernist liberal political theory grounded liberal political principles and moral ideas in totalizing and universalistic philosophical systems, making it seem that acceptance of those principles and ideas demanded acceptance of some particular comprehensive view of the world.

In PL, Rawls wants to offer a version of liberalism that avoids any such suggestion, one that clearly identifies liberal doctrine as a set of ideas addressing only a part and not the whole of life, a set of ideas whose validity extends only as far as the living consensus that supports it. In his conception and execution of this project, Rawls has cleared the path that all postmodern liberal political philosophy must take. My only criticism is that he himself takes that path not nearly far enough. Rawls, in his effort to free liberal principles and ideals from their embeddedness in the conceptual and ideological matrix of modernist philosophy, remains all too faithful not only to the rhetorically indeterminate style and voice of modernist philosophy, but also to attenuated versions of some of its basic metaphysical assumptions.

Such a conception of rhetoric shows little familiarity with the traditions of classical rhetoric. For example, of the three traditional means of persuasion in Aristotelian rhetorical teaching — logos, ethos and pathos — logos or argumentative reason is given the greatest possible weight. Where rhetorical teaching does, in fact, differ from the conceptions of reason found in modernist foundationalist philosophy is in its awareness of reasoning as a dialogical activity, even when it is a silent and solitary activity. The rhetorical tradition always viewed judgments, inferences and the critical examination of evidence as addressed to an audience, even when that audience is not present. Rawls’s adoption of this characteristically modernist way of contrasting reasoning and rhetorical discourse naturally inclines him toward the acceptance of characteristically modernist monological and formalist conceptions of reason. Given this modernist assessment of rhetoric, taken over by Rawls without question, his reluctance to embrace fully and explicitly his own rhetorical turn is little wonder.

This inclination to conceive of reasoning and rationality in modernist terms puts definite limits on Rawls’s project of rethinking liberal doctrine in non-metaphysical terms. As we have noted, the significance of the rhetorical turn in liberal political philosophy lies in its contribution to the intelligibility of liberal doctrine and of the moral ideal of liberal democratic citizenship. Recall that a liberal democratic civic culture must provide resources to perform two related tasks. It must provide discourses, narratives, and representations (1) that make the normative standpoint of liberal democratic citizenship intelligible to citizens and, (2) that motivate citizens to cultivate civic identities and values. Rawls’s rhetorical turn, i.e., his project of reinterpreting liberalism as a political doctrine, as opposed to a metaphysical doctrine, opens the way to a new understanding of the normative standpoint of citizenship, one that is far more consistent with our contemporary awareness of the indispensable role played by particularistic forms of culture in the production and support of civic identities and civic values.

A rhetorical conception of reason always keeps clearly in view the cultural or dialogical dimension of rationality. It is not inclined to place critical reasoning and persuasive discourse in radical opposition to one another. Because a rhetorical conception of reason views critical reasoning as an activity that is always culturally and historically situated, it is not inclined to view as rationally defective the particularistic cultural supports of civic values — such as religious belief — and it is not inclined to ignore the actual particularistic cultural processes by which civic identities are produced and reproduced. Unfortunately, largely because of Rawls’s continuing attachment to modernist monological conceptions of reason, what we find in PR is the complete absence of any useful account of the ways in which civic values actually have been or can in the future be culturally produced. What is missing in PR, in other words, is the very concept of what I have called a civic culture. When Rawls refers, as he often does, to the public culture of a liberal democracy, he conceives of it as little more than a repository of ideas to be used in projects of conceptual construction.

This lack of the very concept of an effectively countervailing civic culture places PR squarely within the tradition of modernist liberal political theory. As I observed in Chapter One, modernist liberal political theory attributed to the normative standpoint of liberal democratic citizenship both an anthropological and a metaphysical priority. In different ways, both Lockean and Kantian styles of liberal theory made the standpoint of the citizen, the standpoint of free and equal individuality, appear to be the natural and essential human standpoint. Further, given the links between modernist political theory and foundationalist epistemology, both Lockean and Kantian liberals, in different ways, linked the normative standpoint of citizenship with the modernist principle of the autonomy of reason, viewing a capacity for autonomous rationality as the universally distinguishing mark of the human. The result of this attribution of anthropological and metaphysical priority to civic identity and civic values was the systematic disregard of the role of particularistic cultural forms in their production. Modernist liberal political theory tended to regard the standpoint of free and equal individuality as a given. Where no evidence of the operation of this standpoint was found, modernist liberals viewed its absence as something to be explained, usually by political suppression or by a lack of complete civilization.

Rawls, in PL, perpetuates this characteristically modernist disregard of the particularistic cultural supports required for liberal democracy. Of course, Rawls, in the wake of his rhetorical turn, would reject any attribution of metaphysical priority to the normative standpoint of citizenship. But the peculiarities of his favored method of Kantian constructionism allow him to grant civic identity and civic values a certain methodological priority that has virtually the identical impact. Kant himself, the original Kantian constructionist, derived his own conception of the principle of morality from ideas that he understood to be pervasively operative in and essential to all rational beings. Kant was a metaphysical liberal. Rawls, in his own version of Kantian constructionism, draws the ideas, he uses in his "procedure of construction" from the prevailing public culture of modern liberal democracies. Among those ideas he finds a certain conception of personhood, conceptions of the moral powers that distinguish persons from non-persons and conceptions of the reasonable and the rational that are associated with those powers. While Rawls makes no claim that any of these concepts are grounded in the nature of things, his "procedure of construction" allows him to treat these concepts as if they were.

In his construction of a conception of civic justice, Rawls simply starts off by attributing to real flesh-and-blood human beings the moral and intellectual capacities specified by the conception of political personhood he has discovered in the public culture. While he is not thereby committed to any metaphysical view of human nature, he is thereby licensed by his constructionist method to treat those intellectual and moral capacities proper to political personhood simply as givens, just as if they were in fact essentially human faculties in the metaphysical sense. So, throughout PL, reasonableness and rationality, the capacities for a sense of liberal justice and for the pursuit of a particularistic conception of the good, simply "are attributed" to citizens. Rawls does not ask how they got there. He does not ask how they can be produced or maintained. In short, Rawls’s method of Kantian constructionism lends itself no less than did the methods and assumptions of modernist metaphysical liberals to the same disregard of the role of particularistic forms of culture in the production of civic identities and values.

Reasonableness, the capacity for liberal democratic citizenship, is a capacity that involves transformation of content, whether the content in question is the concrete self-understanding or identity of an individual or the doctrines and practices specific to a particularistic cultural community. What I mean by transformation of content is this. The citizens of a liberal democracy first and always remain members of particular class, ethnic, and religious communities. Their identities are shaped by the ranking systems, virtue concepts, and standards of excellence transmitted by the cultural traditions embodied in those communities. The first and primary identity of any citizen is, thus, what I have called a communitarian identity. This is the identity that must be transformed in the process of developing a civic identity. The normative standpoint of citizenship stands in a relationship of tension with the standpoint proper to membership in a particularistic cultural community. To achieve citizenship in the full cultural sense, a person must develop a capacity to adopt, cultivate, and act from both of these opposing standpoints. The development of this capacity requires a transformation, a radical revision of the self-understanding associated with communitarian identity. It requires no less a fundamental rethinking and reinterpretation of the doctrinal content and practices proper to the cultural traditions supportive of communitarian identities. Such transformations cannot in principle be understood as a matter of meeting the formal requirements of Kantian theoretical and practical reason. In Chapter Four, I will argue that this transformation of content is produced by the development and cultivation of linguistic and moral capacities that are not conceived of by modernist philosophy as capacities for reasoning at all. I will argue that what Rawls calls reasonableness is a capacity that can be produced only through the exercise of a certain forms of narrative imagination and self-understanding.

The point here is that, due to his continuing attachment to modernist, and specifically Kantian, conceptions of reason and rationality, Rawls can carry only just so far his reconstruction of liberal doctrine in non-metaphysical terms. It seems that Rawls simply cannot free himself from excessively formalist and quasi-transcendental modes of thought. The project of inventing a postmodern civic culture requires a far more consistent and complete execution of the rhetorical turn that Rawls gives us in PL.

If Rawls’s continuing attachment to modernist conceptions of reason and rationality has the effect of limiting the success of the project he undertakes in PL, it also imposes an additional and perhaps even more significant cost. Rawls sets out to free liberalism as a moral ideal from its associations with any comprehensive doctrine or totalizing world view. Liberal ideals of freedom and equality need no longer be justified by demonstrations deriving them from pure reason or the natural condition. But Rawls, in conformity with the spirit, if not with the letter of the modernist principle of the autonomy of reason, nevertheless seeks to derive liberal moral ideals from a free standing "procedure of construction" that tells us nothing about the countervailing cultural processes actually needed to create and support civic identities and values. As Rawls carries out or, at least, talks us through this "procedure of construction" in PL, what I find notably lacking is any sense of the pathos of liberal democratic citizenship as a form of life, any sense of how liberal moral ideals could ever be or become objects of impassioned aspiration. The moral of this observation is that Kantian constructivism seems not to be the method of choice for an inquiry seeking to understand and to communicate how attainment of a capacity for reasonableness, a capacity for citizenship in the full cultural sense, can ever actually become, for someone, a good worth seeking for its own sake.

The issue I am raising here speaks to the second major task that any liberal democratic civic culture must perform: it must provide resources for motivating persons who enjoy the legal status of citizens or nominal citizenship to develop the capacities proper to full cultural citizenship. What I have called the rhetorical turn in postmodern liberal political philosophy speaks to issues of intelligibility. Citizens cannot aspire to the realization of ideals they don’t understand. The rhetorical turn opens the way to a new understanding of the moral ideal of citizenship, one no longer encumbered by analogies and metaphors drawn from now discredited traditions of modernist epistemology and metaphysics. But the issue of motivation remains. Once we have gained a new understanding of the moral ideal of citizenship, one no longer burdened by the multitude of confusions produced by modernist liberal political theory, we still must generate, from this new understanding, resources for motivating citizens to pursue the attainment of that moral ideal. What sort of motivational resources might a post-metaphysical interpretation of liberal doctrine offer?

Needless to say, Rawls does not himself pose the question in these terms. Nevertheless, his writings since 1980 do suggest, I believe, something like the beginnings of an answer to it. In order to appreciate the novelty and to grasp the promise of what we might take as Rawls’s response to the question of motivation, we must keep in mind the general features of the characteristic way this issue was addressed by modernist liberalism. As we noted in Chapter One, modernist liberal political theory generated two primary motivational visions of the normative standpoint of citizenship — what I have called the civic ethics of authenticity and the civic ethics of autonomy. These two civic moral ideals must be distinguished carefully from the sort of moral ideals generated by particularistic cultural world views — or what we might call communitarian moral ideals. These modernist civic moral ideals differed from communitarian moral ideals in two noteworthy ways — first, in the way that all civic moral ideals differ from communitarian moral ideals, i.e., by virtue of the very different cultural tasks civic and communitarian moral ideals perform, and second, by virtue of the specific historical content and character of modernist civic moral ideals. Let us examine these differences briefly.

(1) Modernist civic moral ideals must be distinguished from communitarian moral ideals in general because, like all civic moral ideals, they have a very different sort of cultural task to perform. The task of a civic moral ideal is to present the normative standpoint of citizenship — the standpoint of free and equal individuality — as an ideal worthy of realization, as an object of desire worthy of attainment. This is a tougher sell — or more difficult conviction to generate — than it might seem. Liberal democratic civic culture is always a countervailing culture. It is addressed to citizens who have already been shaped in their desire and self-understanding by the moral standards of the particularistic cultural communities to which they belong. The inculcation of communitarian moral ideals begins virtually at birth, in the context of family life. Because families generally belong to larger ethnic, class, and religious communities, the values and world views proper to those communities are transmitted by the earliest processes of socialization. They are learned along with the learning of a first language and begin to shape desire, feeling, and self-understanding long before powers of critical reflection develop. By comparison, civic educational processes generally begin to be felt (if at all) relatively late. The language associated with civic moral ideals is always a second moral language and, as is always the case in the learning of a second language (unlike the learning of a first language), the effort involved in learning it requires special justification.

Thus, civic moral ideals are a tough sell because they always address an audience previously and continuously shaped by diverse and conflicting communitarian moral ideals. But they are a tough sell, also, for a more important reason. Civic moral ideals are not designed to replace communitarian moral ideals. The process of adopting and internalizing civic moral ideals is not a process of conversion from one totalizing conception of the good life to another. Rather, civic identity exists only as a modification of communitarian identity. The secondary moral language associated with civic moral ideals is parasitic upon the primary moral language associated with communitarian moral ideals. The secondary moral language presupposes and remains dependent upon the primary, but renders that primary moral language richer, more complex and more ambiguous. Full attainment of a civic identity requires the adoption of a standpoint and a set of norms that remain in a more or less permanent state of tension and conflict with the standpoint and values proper to communitarian moral ideals. For liberals, this state of tension and conflict is good. Explaining to non-liberals why it is good is something else.

Civic moral ideals are not designed to replace communitarian moral ideals, because the normative standpoint and moral language proper to citizenship pertain only to membership and participation in the public sphere of a liberal democratic political community, a community that encompasses a multiplicity of diverse primary cultural communities. Such a political community comes into existence in order to achieve and maintain the conditions for a just and free pursuit of happiness. It would be pointless for such a civic community to come into existence only then to force upon its members a particular ideal of happiness. A liberal democracy leaves that question largely undecided. It does not require its members to pursue any specific totalizing conception of the good life. On the other hand, the opposite is true in the case of particularistic cultural communities. They are defined by a global way of life, governed by an encompassing conception of the good, united by a common sense of what is important in life and what is not. Their traditions of belief and practice provide an interpretive framework within which the fundamental issues of human life — sex, friendship, work, suffering, sin, death, and salvation — are given specific order and meaning. From the viewpoint of the civic community, such cultural communities exist in order to nurture, direct, and support the pursuit of happiness. Such communities generate moral ideals, ranking systems, hierarchies, virtue concepts, and standards of excellence that shape and order human desire. It is always to an audience whose desire and self-understanding has previously been and is continuously being shaped by such communities that civic moral ideals must persuasively speak. The message that they must successfully deliver is not an easy one either to hear or to accept.

The members of particular ethnic, class, and religious communities are first of all, say, French, bourgeois, and Catholic. Such communitarian identities are inseparable from the communitarian moral ideals and local traditions that have produced them. The moral language proper to such identities and moral ideals is teleological — i.e., it defines the most basic and encompassing perspective of life as a field of aspiration, in terms of a hierarchy of ends. It assigns meaning and rank to human qualities and actions by referring these to a final good. This moral language provides the vocabulary and generates the descriptions that guide everyday life.

Civic identities and civic moral ideals differ, above all, in this respect. The civic community exists in order to secure the conditions for a just and free pursuit of happiness. The moral language associated with civic moral ideals is a moral language that provides the vocabulary and generates the descriptions appropriate to this political purpose. It is the moral language proper to the public sphere of a liberal democracy. Within the public sphere, citizens, who are, otherwise, members of particularistic cultural communities, meet and cooperate in order to realize and maintain the conditions for a just and free pursuit of happiness. As participants in the liberal democratic public sphere, citizens must not understand themselves primarily as French, bourgeois, and Catholic (or whatever), but rather as free and equal individuals. In order to become citizens who are qualified to participate in the public sphere and to act positively to achieve the goals proper to it, they must learn to treat themselves and one another as free and equal individuals — i.e., as persons whose identity and rank is not wholly, exhaustively, or finally determined by identities and ranks assigned to them within particularistic cultural communities. The task of civic moral ideals is to provide the motivational resources that nurture, direct, and support this civic transformation of desire and self-understanding.

As we have noted, this is a large order. The dispositions and attitudes that a civic moral ideal must nurture and support require of citizens a complex moral, intellectual, and linguistic balancing act. While affirming and remaining deeply committed to their communitarian identities and moral ideals, they must be able to externalize or put aside those identities and ideals sufficiently to speak to, to respect, and to act in concert with fellow citizens whose communitarian identities and ideals differ greatly from theirs. Attainment of this capacity to put aside or to unplug the primary moral language and moral identity that give meaning and direction to everyday life is an extraordinary moral and linguistic accomplishment. The struggle to achieve the insight and judgment necessary to develop this capacity fully is fraught with danger and difficulty. This struggle is the source of the profound moral pathos of citizenship. The rhetorical task of a civic moral ideal is to produce in citizens a desire for this accomplishment strong enough to permit them to persevere in this struggle.

(2) Modernist liberal civic moral ideals, assigned this task proper to any civic moral ideal, naturally possessed a character very different from communitarian moral ideals. Civic moral ideals serve in the cultural production of free and equal individuality. Accordingly, both the civic ethics of authenticity and the civic ethics of autonomy were silent on the question of what sort of happiness to pursue or what the nature of the good life ultimately is. Both mandated only that happiness be pursued in a certain way — namely, as a pursuit whose object was freely chosen by the individual. Communitarian moral ideals, identities, and conceptions of the good life are ordinarily not first perceived as objects of choice. Ordinarily, they are understood as ways of being rather than as matters of choice. The communitarian identity of a person is simply who he or she is. The communitarian world view simply describes the world as such. The moral language associated with a particular communitarian moral ideal is simply identified with the language, as such, that is spoken by the community.

Full cultural citizenship, however, requires the introduction of difference in all these spheres. It requires persons to develop the capacity to make a distinction between communitarian and civic identities, between their particularistic cultural world view and the world as such, between the primary moral language that they speak and the language that they share with citizens who speak different primary moral languages. But the capacity to perceive and apply these distinctions does not amount to the adoption of a new conception of the good or a new comprehensive world view. Accordingly, neither the civic ethics of authenticity nor the civic ethics of autonomy mandated acceptance of a specific conception of the good. What they did mandate was the development of a capacity to speak a primary moral language from a standpoint external to every primary moral language — the standpoint of the free individual, the standpoint of a speaker capable of viewing every primary moral language as if it were a freely chosen second language.

This general feature of all civic moral ideals accounts, in part, for the peculiarly abstract and reflective character of the civic ethics of authenticity and autonomy. The civic ethics of authenticity required of its followers not the choice of a specific conception of the good, but rather a choice of a conception of the good that conformed to their own intrinsic individual natures or selves. Of course, this promoted a belief in the existence of such a thing as an intrinsic individual nature, or self, and encouraged the pursuit of its discovery. In the same way, the civic ethics of autonomy required of its followers not the choice of a specific conception of the good, but rather a choice of a conception of the good whose pursuit could be rendered consistent with the principles or rules inherent in pure theoretical and practical reason. This promoted, of course, a belief in the existence of such universal human faculties and encouraged attempts to discover their principles.

At this point, we begin to bring into view what made the civic ethics of authenticity and autonomy distinctive and distinctively modernist as civic moral ideals. What made these moral ideals distinctively modernist was the interpretation of the normative standpoint of citizenship that they drew from modernist liberal political theory. As I pointed out in Chapter One, modernist liberal political theory attributed to the normative standpoint of citizenship an anthropological and a metaphysical priority. Lockean versions of modernist liberalism viewed the standpoint of free and equal individuality as the standpoint proper to the natural condition — i.e., the condition of all human beings prior to political association and, in some versions, prior to any form of association at all. Kantian versions of modernist liberalism viewed the standpoint of free and equal individuality as the standpoint proper to the autonomous faculty of human reason — i.e., the standpoint governed only by the universally binding laws of pure theoretical and practical reason. In both cases, the relationship between civic identity and communitarian identity was defined as a relationship between the humanly essential and the accidental.

This way of attributing anthropological and metaphysical priority to the normative standpoint of citizenship governed formulations of modernist liberal political theory’s most general and distinctively modernist moral doctrine — the doctrine of the priority of the right over the good. In different ways, both the civic ethics of authenticity and autonomy embodied this doctrine. This doctrine states that the free pursuit of happiness must be subject to limits as defined by law that is applicable equally to all individuals as individuals. This doctrine is designed to rule out morally any political and legal order in which moral rightness — i.e., an action’s conformity to law — is defined by the conformity of action with some particularistic conception of the good. Every cultural community is governed by a set of rules to which all members are subject. These rules, usually informal and unspoken, coordinate and direct the action of community members in their common pursuit of a particularistic conception of the good. These rules derive from and express the totalizing world view and life ideal that all community members share. In a monocultural political community, i.e., a community that is culturally homogeneous, there is usually no distinction between the legal order and the moral order grounded in particularistic cultural values and rules. In such a monocultural political and legal order, moral rightness, as the conformity of action to law, is determined by the conformity of action to a particularistic conception of the good and a particularistic cultural world view. Think, for example, of traditional Islamic law or of any other regime in which the legal order rests upon a foundation of particularistic religious belief.

The doctrine of the priority of the right over the good establishes and requires a distinction between moral rightness and the conformity of action to a particularistic conception of the good. Liberal democracy assumes cultural heterogeneity. A civic community is generally a multicultural, rather than a monocultural community. For this reason, a liberal democratic political and legal order must apply a criterion of moral rightness distinct from criteria derived from or dependent upon any of the particularistic world views adhered to by the cultural communities that comprise it. The doctrine of the priority of the right over the good, then, affirms the priority of this criterion of moral rightness over all criteria derived from communitarian moral ideals and world views. But, because the liberal democratic criterion of moral rightness is not derived from or based upon communitarian moral ideals, every liberal democracy must offer some account of precisely how the specifically liberal criterion of moral rightness is to be explained and justified. Modernist liberal formulations of this doctrine linked the criterion of moral rightness to philosophical theories that attributed an anthropological and metaphysical priority to the normative standpoint of citizenship. Modernist liberal political theory thus claimed to derive the liberal democratic criterion of moral rightness from the nature of things. It identified the civic standpoint of free and equal individuality as the universal and essential standpoint of all human beings, whether that standpoint be defined in Lockean terms as the standpoint proper to the natural condition, or in Kantian terms as the standpoint proper to the faculty of autonomous reason. For modernist liberalism, then, the liberal doctrine of the priority of the right over the good was to be read as a doctrine affirming nothing more controversial than the philosophically obvious priority of the humanly universal and essential over the humanly arbitrary and accidental.

The civic ethics of authenticity and autonomy offered different interpretations of this reading of the doctrine. On the one hand, Lockean styles of liberal political theory conceived of the humanly essential — i.e., the natural condition — as a condition of liberty, a condition free of all cultural and legal constraints on individual will. But, if the natural condition is a condition of liberty, then, in order to claim derivation from that condition, any legal constraints on the free standing individual’s will could be imposed only by gaining the individual’s uncoerced consent. For Lockean styles of liberalism, the individual’s uncoerced consent became the ground of the principle of right. The basic content of the liberal criterion of moral rightness was then defined as the basic rules of cooperation that an individual in the natural condition of liberty would freely accept as binding. In accordance with the doctrine of the priority of the right over the good, adherents of the civic ethics of authenticity would then be licensed to pursue any conception of the good consistent with their own intrinsic individual natures (i.e., the qualities that would emerge spontaneously in the condition of natural liberty), subject only to the constraints imposed by the rules of association that would be voluntarily adopted by all free standing individuals pursuing the same formal goal of authentic self-realization.

On the other hand, Kantian styles of liberal political theory conceived of the essential — i.e., a faculty of pure reason subject only to its own logical and practical laws — as a condition of pure self-determination, a condition free of all constraints except those dictated by reason itself. But if pure self-determination is the mark of the faculty that constitutes human nature, then, in order to claim the authority of autonomous reason, any legal constraints on the individual’s will must be consistent with the principles of pure theoretical and practical reason. Thus, for Kantian styles of liberalism, conformity with the rules intrinsic to the universally human faculty of autonomous reason becomes the ground of the principle of right. The content of the liberal criterion of moral rightness can be determined by an examination of the principles of pure practical reason. A will that accepts the constraints imposed by a criterion of moral rightness derived wholly from the principles of pure practical reason actually obeys only itself and, thereby, remains autonomous. In accordance with the doctrine of the priority of the right over the good, then, adherents of the civic ethics of autonomy would be licensed to pursue any particularistic conception of the good at all, so long as, in their actions, they observed the limits imposed by a legal order grounded in the principles of pure practical reason, i.e., grounded in the basic rules that the autonomous will gives to itself.

Thus, the civic ethics of authenticity and the civic ethics of autonomy amounted to two different universalist and essentialist interpretations of the liberal doctrine of the priority of the right over the good. Both of these civic moral ideals offered powerful rhetorical resources for motivating the development of civic attitudes and virtues, rhetorical resources drawn mainly from their essentialist and universalist philosophical underpinnings. The aim of both of these civic moral ideals was to produce in citizens the capacities proper to full cultural citizenship. Persons who have developed the capacities proper to citizenship are those who understand and act in accordance with the liberal doctrine of the priority of the right over the good. In their judgments and actions, such persons apply the liberal criterion of moral rightness and give precedence to it over any competing criterion of moral rightness deriving from particularistic conceptions of the good.

In order to understand, let alone apply, a liberal conception of moral rightness, however, citizens must first achieve an understanding of themselves as free and equal individuals. If persons who have become citizens in the full cultural sense can be identified by their acceptance and application of the liberal criterion of moral rightness, the condition for their attainment of full cultural citizenship is the attainment of a civic identity, the attainment of a standpoint involving a certain detachment from or externalization of their communitarian identities and moral ideals. The task of a civic moral ideal is to provide rhetorical resources powerful enough to persuade citizens that this detachment from and externalization of their primary moral identity and moral language is a goal worth pursuing. The essentialism and universalism of modernist liberal political theory provided the civic ethics of authenticity and autonomy with two powerful and simple themes that could be exploited in this persuasive effort.

Unfortunately, these themes could be exploited effectively for persuasive purposes only by drawing a contrast between civic and communitarian moral ideals that, at least implicitly, tended to depreciate and disparage particularistic cultural beliefs and practices. Given the anthropological and metaphysical priority attributed to the normative standpoint of citizenship by modernist liberal political theory, modernist civic moral ideals could claim that the ideals of authentic and autonomous individuality were written into human nature itself. To be an authentic individual meant to choose a way of life or conception of the good that conformed to the essential properties of one’s own real self — i.e., those properties that would presumably have emerged spontaneously in the natural condition of liberty, a condition free of all arbitrary cultural and political constraints. To be an autonomous individual meant to choose a way of life or conception of the good that conformed to the universal principles of pure practical reason and, therefore, to take one’s direction and bearings not from prince, Pope, habit, or appetite, but rather from laws deriving from principles inherent in one’s innermost metaphysically real self. Further, to the extent that a person had become either authentic or autonomous in these senses, they could claim also to pursue a way of life free of all cultural particularity or ethnocentricity, a way of life not only accessible to all human beings equally, regardless of the accidents of ethnicity, class, and religion, but also expressing most purely the universal nature of humanity, as such.

This essentialist and universalist conception of the ideals of authenticity and autonomy provided ample and powerful means of persuasion to modernist civic culture. These modernist civic moral ideals represented free and equal individuality not as a cultural requirement for full membership in a particular contingent and very unusual sort of political community, but rather as a standpoint conforming both to human nature, as such, and to the individual nature of each human being — a perfect wedding of the universal and the particular. Thus, in becoming an authentic or an autonomous individual, a person could claim not only to have fully realized his or her innermost metaphysically real self, but also to have, thereby, achieved identification with all human beings everywhere.

On the other hand, the civic ideals of authentic and autonomous individuality painted a rather grim picture of those who failed to realize these ideals. If authentic individuals are those who have discovered and realized their own true selves, then inauthentic individuals are those who have been shaped passively by the social and cultural environment, those who have mistaken as their real selves the internalized descriptions applied to them by others. If autonomous individuals are those who are governed by rules issuing ultimately from their own intrinsic rational nature, then heteronomous individuals are those who are governed by rules imposed by external and arbitrary authority — those who are in effect metaphysically enslaved by accidental cultural and political arrangements. There is little doubt that citizens who were exposed to and who took seriously moral discourses employing these modernist distinctions between authentic and inauthentic, autonomous and heteronomous individuality had little trouble in telling which of the presented alternatives it was most desirable to realize.

Thus, the modernist civic moral ideals of authenticity and autonomy offered abundant rhetorical resources for motivating citizens to achieve full cultural citizenship. But they carried disadvantages and dangers, as well. Both the civic ethics of authenticity and the civic ethics of autonomy were subject to self-destructive dialectics or confusing paradoxes rooted in their essentialist and universalist claims. For example, in their claims to universality, both of these civic moral ideals made ethnocentrism or cultural particularism a bête noire. Yet nothing could be more ethnocentric than Western claims to cultural universalism. Persons motivated to attain authentic or autonomous individuality because they were attracted by the universality of this ideal were, thus, defeated at the very moment at which they achieved their goal. Again, in their claims to embody only the essential, both of these civic moral ideals impugned the culturally arbitrary and circumstantial. Yet the ideals of authentic and autonomous individuality were purely formal. They mandated only a way to be and not specifically what to be. In choosing specifically what to be, i.e., a specific conception of the good or a specific way of life, a person has only limited options, options that just happen to be available at a particular place and time — that is to say, options that are arbitrary and circumstantial. Persons motivated to attain authentic or autonomous individuality, because they were attracted by its claims to embody only the essential, were thus defeated at the very moment when they achieved their goal.

These paradoxes reflected more fundamental contradictions and more dangerous implications lurking deep within the universalist and essentialist logic of modernist civic moral ideals, contradictions and implications whose culturally and politically destructive impact are only now beginning to be widely felt. As we have seen, for the moral ideals of authenticity and autonomy, the paradigm of the authentic and autonomous person is the person who no longer recognizes as final the authority or legitimacy of any culturally particularistic moral ideal, recognizing instead only those claims to moral authority based upon purely universal principles. Given this understanding of authenticity and autonomy, it follows that the paradigm of the inauthentic and heteronomous person is the person who in fact does recognize, as final and sufficient, claims to moral authority based only upon particularistic cultural beliefs and practices. The problem is that the vast majority of human beings on this planet happily fit this paradigm of inauthenticity and heteronomy. The remainder, i.e., adherents of the moral ideals of authenticity and autonomy, also fit this paradigm (though unhappily), insofar as the claims to moral authority asserted by those modernist civic moral ideals are also based upon particularistic cultural beliefs and practices — the cultural beliefs and practices of modernist Western liberal democracies.

Thus, the universalist and essentialist logic of the modernist civic moral ideals of authenticity and autonomy carried within itself the seeds of a blanket condemnation and depreciation of all moral ideals, both communitarian and civic, as inauthentic and heteronomous. The more seriously the universalist and essentialist claims of modernist civic moral ideals were taken, the more suspicion was generated about the cultural particularism of even those moral ideals. During the last fifty years, with the discrediting of Enlightenment conceptions of reason and knowledge, we have added to this internally-generated suspicion the full weight of a growing skepticism about the purely intellectual foundations of modernist civic moral ideals. The net effect of these developments today — the net effect of the three hundred-year hegemony of the modernist civic ideals of authenticity and autonomy — is a growing doubt about the value of all moral ideals, a doubt whose entire strength is drawn paradoxically from the culturally particularistic modernist belief that moral ideals in general, to be theoretically justifiable and, therefore, worthy of respect, must be grounded upon purely universal principles. Thus today, at the end of the roughly three hundred-year reign of modernist liberal political theory, the continuing influence of the civic ethics of authenticity and autonomy pushes us in the direction of a generalized cultural nihilism, a generalized sense of the groundlessness and unjustifiability of all moral ideals. Ironically, the very ideas that for three hundred years served to motivate development of the capacities proper to citizenship now serve to confuse and undermine the pursuit of any moral ideal whatsoever. It is this consequence of modernist liberalism that, above all, must be addressed by the project of inventing a postmodern civic culture.

Rawls, in TJ, said little that spoke to this set of issues. That book was largely received as a contribution to modernist liberal political theory. Rawls was not yet a full-blown "political" liberal. He had not yet made what I have called his rhetorical turn. His ambition in that book seemed to be to arrive at a statement of the correct theory of social justice — i.e., in his terms, the theory of social justice that could rightly claim to produce a reflective equilibrium between our moral intuitions and a set of stated principles or criteria of justice. In this project, Rawls drew on the conceptual and stylistic resources of both Lockean and Kantian versions of modernist liberal political theory. But, in his hands, those resources were pretty much stripped of their motivational power.

Consider, for example, the ideas of the natural condition and the social contract. As we have observed, modernist liberals imagined the natural condition of all human beings, prior to political association, to be a condition of more or less complete liberty. Persons in the state of nature were represented as subject to no cultural or legal constraints. They were represented, in effect, as embodiments of the civic ideal of free and equal individuality. We may recognize today that free and equal individuality has much more to do with the moral ideals of liberal democracy than with anything like the natural human condition. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that, as the ideological basis for the civic ethics of authenticity, this modernist identification of the normative standpoint of citizenship with the natural human condition wound up providing powerful motivational resources to modernist civic culture. Again, consider the idea of an autonomous faculty of practical reason. Kantian liberals imagined all human beings to possess such a faculty. This faculty was rational in that it prescribed universally-valid rules for conduct. It was autonomous in that the rules it prescribed were rules originating entirely in itself, independently of any external cultural authority. Persons who lived by those rules could then claim that they lived autonomously — that their lives were governed by rules dictated not by prince, Pope, habit, or appetite, but rather by their own faculty of pure practical reason, their own innermost, metaphysically real self. Once again, we may recognize today that, in this notion of rational autonomy, Kantian liberals misread the normative standpoint of liberal democratic citizenship as a condition of metaphysical self-determination. But here, too, there is little doubt that, as the ideological basis of the civic ethics of autonomy, this misreading offered powerful motivational resources to modernist civic culture.

In TJ, Rawls went just about as far as he could to downplay the anthropological and metaphysical claims associated with the modernist liberal notions of social contract and rational autonomy. The result was the development of a version of those ideas that diminished dramatically the persuasive power of the civic moral ideals based on them, while adding little that was new to modernist liberal conceptions of citizenship. In place of the modernist anthropological concept of the state of nature, Rawls introduced the methodological concept of an original position, a counterfactual state of affairs that required us to imagine the negotiators of the basic terms of political association carrying out their negotiations behind a "veil of ignorance," having no knowledge of their individual life circumstances in the society whose rules of association they were negotiating. The task given to these hypothetical negotiators was to arrive at an uncoerced consensus regarding the principles of justice. Under such negotiating conditions, the reasoning of the negotiators (having nothing else to go on) would be governed supposedly only by the purely formal logic of game theory (Rawls’s version in TJ of a pure or autonomous practical rationality). As a result, the rules of association or principles of justice arrived at by such negotiators would presumably embody an impartial or neutral stance toward all particularistic conceptions of the good life, favoring no particular ethnic, class, or religious cultural community at the expense of any others and insuring that the basic social, political, and economic arrangements would be fair to all.

Thus, in TJ, all the basic metaphors, images and arguments familiarly employed in modernist liberal political theory are called into play. Legitimacy is claimed for a specifically liberal criterion of moral rightness by demonstrating that such a criterion would be the outcome of a discussion among free and equal individuals governed only by the logic of a culture-neutral rationality. While Lockean liberals tended to focus on the circumstances of the discussion and Kantian liberals on the reasoning allowed, Rawls’s deduction of his own favored version of liberal justice incorporated both concerns — he makes sure that his own demonstration gives a lot of attention both to the free and equal status of discussion participants (a.k.a. natural liberty) and to their determination to let a certain kind of culture-neutral reasoning (i.e., the rules of game theory) alone decide the outcome (a.k.a. rational autonomy). But the most striking continuity between Rawls’s version of this modernist liberal style of argument and those of his precursors is also the most fundamental and important.

Modernist liberal political theory was anxious to make it appear that there was nothing arbitrary or contingent about liberal democratic political norms and moral ideals. Modernist liberal theorists could not just come out in favor of those norms and ideals and then go on to make a case for their favorite conceptions of them. No, they had to make it appear that the conceptions of liberal justice and civic values they offered marched irresistibly forth from the state of nature itself or from the bowels of pure reason. So, in order to make sure that their demonstrations and theories would have a happy conclusion, they built their favorite conceptions of liberal moral ideals into their accounts of the social contract and of autonomous reason.

The answer to these questions is that, for whatever reason, Rawls in TJ somehow still felt the need characteristic of most modernist liberal political philosophers to portray liberal political morality as if it were not a matter of particularistic belief and practice, but rather a set of claims whose truth or validity could be demonstrated. But, in order to increase his chances of producing a successful demonstration, Rawls felt that he had to jettison the more controversial aspects of modernist liberal political theory — its tendency to claim anthropological and metaphysical priority for liberal moral ideals. Unfortunately, it was just this aspect of modernist liberalism that provided liberal doctrine with its motivational clout and rhetorical fireworks. In stripping liberal doctrine of its metaphysical pretensions, while retaining its literary form, Rawls came up with the worst of both worlds. A citizen will look in vain in the pages of TJ for a vision of the world or of human life that might have the power actually to move him or her to embrace liberal moral ideals more gratefully and enthusiastically. The version of liberal doctrine he produced in TJ was a rhetorically impoverished one. It was a liberalism without passion, an arid procedural liberalism that expressed, if anything, the gray bureaucratic spirit of the culture-neutral liberal welfare state. In short, Rawls, in TJ, initiated a form of liberal political philosophy that has probably done more to worsen than to resolve the motivational crisis of contemporary civic culture.

When we get to PL, however, things begin to be quite different. The first step away from the attenuated modernist liberalism of TJ was Rawls’s more or less determined embrace of an explicitly political or rhetorical conception of liberal doctrine. This move settles once and for all the question about the source and status of liberal moral and political values. It decisively rules out any sort of universalist and essentialist interpretation of the normative standpoint of liberal democratic citizenship. It thereby eliminates the need or compulsion to justify liberal principles by showing that they can be deduced from the universal natural human condition or from the principles of pure practical reason. For Rawls in PL, liberal doctrine is affirmed as a partial political and not a comprehensive metaphysical doctrine. The source of liberal democratic moral ideals is to be found in the public culture of modern constitutional democracies. These ideals just happen to have won many adherents in certain North Atlantic political communities. They are contingent products of history. Their status is defined accordingly. Liberal democratic moral ideals will continue to have adherents, as long as those adherents continue to be persuaded of the desirability of liberal democracy as a form of political association and as a way of life. If the moral ideals of particularistic ethnic, class, and religious communities are arbitrary and accidental historical artifacts, then liberal democratic moral ideals are no less so. More or less implied, then, in Rawls’s reinterpretation of liberal doctrine as political and not metaphysical doctrine, is this denial of the modernist assumption that liberal democratic moral ideals, to be justifiable, must be somehow written into the very fabric of things. But this denial, of course, constitutes only the first step toward a renewal of liberal belief. The next step is perhaps the more interesting and difficult one.

Rawls, in his writing published since 1980, takes this next step also — or at least points in its general direction. Modernist liberal political theory characteristically distinguished between civic moral ideals and communitarian moral ideals, so as to identify civic moral ideals with the humanly universal and the essential and communitarian moral ideals with the humanly particular and the accidental. But, as we noted earlier, linked to these contrasts was another one. Civic moral ideals were viewed as embodying a certain formal conception of moral rightness that carried a special kind of moral obligation. The modernist civic ideals of authenticity and autonomy, for example, required conduct to assume a certain form rather than to have a specific content. They mandated a way to be rather than a what to be, leaving individual desire to determine the what — i.e., the particular conception of the good to pursue. Communitarian moral ideals, on the other hand, were matters of desire, inspired by and grounded in totalizing conceptions of the good. The cultivation and direction of desire were the work of families and of particularistic cultural traditions. Modernist civic moral ideals, however, were to find their work elsewhere. Their job was to establish and support obligatory constraints on desire, obligatory constraints on the pursuit of happiness, that were in accord with liberal principles of justice.

This sort of contrast and division of labor between civic and communitarian moral ideals makes sense, as long as it is believed that civic moral ideals have a metaphysical origin and, therefore, do not really need to be attractive objects of desire. But, once we have abandoned the notion that principles drawn from some imagined natural condition of liberty or faculty of autonomous reason dictate liberal constraints on the pursuit of happiness, then the contrast and division of labor mentioned above ceases to make sense. The distinction between civic and communitarian moral ideals as a distinction between matters of formal obligation and substantive desire collapses. Liberal moral ideals, too, must be thought of as substantive shapers of desire, as final goods defining not only the how but also the what of life. In short, the rhetorical turn, the turn from metaphysical to political liberalism, implies a second reorientation of liberal political thought. This second reorientation involves a fundamental rethinking of the liberal doctrine of the priority of the right over the good. The liberal principle of right must be redefined in substantive, particularistic, and teleological terms. The liberal doctrine of the priority of the right over the good must be recast as a doctrine of the priority, under certain circumstances, of a special object of desire over other objects. The rhetorical turn in postmodern liberal political thought, thus, calls forth what I want to call a teleological turn.

The significance of this conception of the powers and interests proper to moral personhood for present purposes becomes evident above all when the passage is taken in conjunction with the thesis presented in his 1985 essay, "Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical." As long as we understand the conception of moral personhood in the passage above as a political and not as a metaphysical conception, we will read it properly. To say that it is a political conception is to say that, in putting it forward, its author seeks to win the acceptance of his audience — i.e., his fellow citizens of North Atlantic liberal democracies — regarding the issue at hand. The issue at hand is the question of how the normative standpoint of liberal democratic citizenship can most profitably be understood.

In his Kantian constructivist mode, Rawls’s conception of moral personhood plays a role in his design of the original position. But, as noted previously, the standpoint of the hypothetical negotiators of the original position actually amounts to a heuristic definition and representation of the idealized standpoint that citizens are required to adopt as they participate in civic discourse and public life. In his conception of moral personhood, therefore, Rawls is, in fact, offering us his conception of the normative standpoint of citizenship. Rawls is telling us that, in his view, citizenship in the full cultural sense requires the development of two new moral powers and two new highest-order interests. As elements of a political conception, these powers and interests are not to be taken as part of human nature or as universally present faculties in all human beings. They are powers and interests which, if they are to exist at all, must be culturally produced in persons in order to enable those persons are to be full participants in a liberal democratic political community.

Given this interpretation of how Rawls’s conception of moral personhood is to be taken, what is novel and important is the content of the conception itself. According to this conception, citizens in the full cultural sense must develop and exercise (1) a capacity for an effective sense of justice, and (2) a capacity to form, revise, and pursue rationally a particular conception of the good. Further, they must possess an interest in developing and exercising these powers that, in relevant contexts, overrides all other interests. To say that the development and exercise of these powers are highest-order interests is to say that they are experienced as goods and that, in some contexts, they are experienced as final goods whose attainment takes precedence over all goals. It is to say, in short, that the development and exercise of these powers are objects of desire. Here we have the basic ingredients of what I have called the teleological turn in postmodern liberal political philosophy. In Rawls’s conception of moral personhood, i.e., in his post-1980 conception of the normative standpoint of citizenship, citizenship is regarded as an end, as a matter of desire and not merely a matter of following rules and meeting formal obligations. Liberal morality mandates a specific substantive content of life and not merely a form. The ideal liberal democratic community, i.e., one whose citizens all have achieved full cultural citizenship, is itself a particularistic cultural community, one united by virtue of a shared pursuit of a contingent and particularistic conception of the good.

The next question, then, naturally would be: What is the nature of this civic good? If a civic community is a community united to pursue a particularistic conception of the good, what is the relationship between this conception of the civic good and the various happiness ideals and ways of life pursued by the particularistic cultural communities that constitute the encompassing civic community? On these and many related questions, Rawls himself offers little help. Yet it is Rawls, perhaps despite himself, who has opened the perspectives that allow these questions to be asked. If it is true that today, in the aftermath of the wreck of the Enlightenment and the demise of modernist liberalism, we face a motivational crisis in the sphere of civic culture, resources for the resolution of this crisis may be discovered somewhere in the new perspectives that Rawls has opened. Our contemporary task is not just to invent new ways of understanding the ideal of liberal democratic citizenship, but, more importantly, to invent new ways of motivating citizens to realize it in their own lives. The teleological turn speaks to this second, and perhaps most difficult part of our task. It turns us in the direction of new issues and questions, new ways of thinking about liberal political morality. It invites us to begin to think of liberal democratic citizenship as about something more than formal rights and duties. It invites us to begin to think of citizenship in terms of desire and aspiration. It seems to me that only this kind of thinking can effectively speak to the contemporary moral crisis of liberal democracy.