1.Two of the most influential and original projects in recent political philosophy may be fairly described as attempts to breathe new life into what I have called the civic ethics of authenticity and the civic ethics of autonomy. Charles Taylor, in his books Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989) and The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), undertakes to retrieve and reaffirm the pursuit of authentic selfhood as a moral ideal supportive of liberal democratic citizenship. Similarly, one aspect of Jürgen Habermas’s decades-long project of constructing a communicative theory of action involves an attempt to retrieve and reaffirm a version of the civic ethics of autonomy — see in particular Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1990). Both of these projects of retrieval seek to retain some remnant of the universalist and totalizing character of earlier formulations of the ethics of authenticity and the ethics of autonomy. To that extent, both of these projects, in my view, fail to address in its full scope what I have called the contemporary crisis of liberal democratic civic culture.

2. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (PL) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).\

3. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971).

4. John Rawls, "Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical," Philosophy and Public Affairs 14 (1985).

5. Rawls, PL, p. xx.

6. Rawls, "Political not Metaphysical," p. 229.

7. PL, p. xx.

8. See, for example, p. 167.

9. See PL, p. 43.

10. Rawls, PL, p. 44.

11. Rawls, PL, p. 5.

12. For a discussion of this new conflict and its relationship to previous ideological conflicts, see James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991).

13. With concepts of negative freedom, for example, providing justification of laissez-faire capitalism and concepts of positive freedom providing justification for state intervention in markets.

14. Rawls, PL, p. 4.

15. Rawls, PL, p. 154.

16. Rawls, PL, p. 26.

17. Rawls, PL, p. 220.

18. Rawls, PL, p. 49.

19. Rawls, PL, pp. 50-51.

20. Rawls, PL, p. 59.

21. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. xv.

22. Published in John Rawls, "Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory: The Dewey Lectures 1980," Journal of Philosophy, 77 (1980).

23. Rawls, "Kantian Constructivism," p. 525.

24. Rawls, "Kantian Constructivism," p. 525.

25. Rawls, "The Priority of Right and Ideas of the Good," Philosophy and Public Affairs, 17 (1988) p. 252.

26. Rawls, "The Priority of Right," p. 252.

27. Rawls, "The Priority of Right," p. 253.

28. Rawls, PL, p. 134.

29. "Literally meaningful," that is, in the sense of "literal" defined by Hans Frei in his book, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), pp. 1-16.