During the period in which Europe and America enjoyed global hegemony, the cultural vehicle of their economic and political power was the universalist and secularist world view of the European Enlightenment. During that period, Enlightenment conceptions of reason and knowledge spoke with the same authority as Western bombs and machines. Where Western technological and military superiority made itself felt, there spread also the influence of the Enlightenment conceptions of nature, freedom and truth that defined cultural modernity. During this period, economic and technological modernization often seemed, at least to Americans and Europeans, inseparable from cultural modernization. It seemed that mastery of the vocabulary of modernist Western rationalism and naturalism was one of the necessary conditions for economic and technological progress. It seemed, in short, that Western conceptions of cultural modernity defined advanced human civilization as such.

That period in which economic development seemed inseparably linked to cultural Westernization is now over. Non-Western nations — first Japan and Korea in the 1980s, then China, Indonesia, and India in the 1990s — have proven that, in principle, thoroughly modern strategies of economic and technological progress can be adapted to and supported by ancient non-Western cultural traditions. For the time being, Western nations still enjoy technological, military and economic superiority over most non-Western nations. In the future, this superiority is bound to diminish. But, however this balance of power changes, it seems evident that the cultural world view of the European Enlightenment, the world view that Europeans and Americans once viewed as the necessary cultural condition for economic development and technological progress, is becoming increasingly irrelevant in the non-Western world. Most of the world has learned that it is no longer necessary, if it ever was, to speak the cultural language of the European Enlightenment in order to prosper in a global market economy.

It is time now for the West to make this discovery, also. In Europe and America, the world view of the Enlightenment was never alien to native cultural traditions in the way that it was in non-Western nations. It had its roots in traditional European religious and political vocabularies. Yet Enlightenment conceptions of reason and knowledge were no less hostile to those native European cultural traditions from which they sprang than they were to the native religious and political traditions of the non-Western world. The cultural vocabulary of the Enlightenment was hostile to cultural particularism of all kinds. Its claim was to provide a purely universal language for a universal humanity, a language purged of all perspectives grounded in particularistic religious belief and the accidents of local history. Whatever may have been the advantages to the West once gained by the use of this universalist cultural language, today its continued use in Europe and America increasingly places them at a disadvantage in global economic and political competition.

Non-Western nations are now beginning to tap the vast motivational resources of native cultural traditions to support strategies of economic development and technological progress. With this new assertion of cultural particularism — movements of "Asianization," "Hinduization," "re-Islamization" and so on — a world is emerging whose primary divisions are increasingly cultural and civilizational. To understand, let alone compete, in such a world, Western nations must also begin to recover and to cultivate the particularistic cultural perspectives that make them uniquely Western as opposed to Hindu, Islamic, Japanese or Confucian.

The cultural posture of Enlightenment universalism gave all cultural particularism a bad name. Enlightenment conceptions of reason and knowledge led many Europeans and Americans to believe that they could and should adopt a universalistic, culture-neutral, value-free standpoint on all cognitive, moral and political matters. This standpoint dictated a neutral, if not an actually hostile, posture toward native Western cultural traditions, as well. Ironically, with the growing worldwide assertion of cultural particularism, it has become clear that this universalist cultural posture is itself a form of Western cultural particularism. Even worse, it is a form of Western cultural particularism that produces an alienation from its own sources in specifically Western religious and political traditions.

In an emerging global order in which cultural and civilizational particularism is likely to be viewed more and more as a positive good and embraced with a good conscience, the West must learn to embrace its own inevitably particularistic native cultural traditions in a positive way. The difficulty of such a project must not be underestimated. As a distinct cultural or civilizational division within an emerging global community of civilizations, the West is currently defined, above all, by its commitment to liberal democracy as a form of political association and as a way of life.

Liberal democracy arose in the West in the early modern period as a modification of classical republican forms of political association. In its conception and basic values, liberal democracy was profoundly influenced by Christian moral ideals. Yet, from their first establishment, North Atlantic liberal democracies were wedded to the vocabulary and the world view of the Enlightenment. Liberal democracies were established in England, America and France in the name of universal and natural human rights. These rights were claimed for all human beings, regardless of their religious beliefs, ethnicity, social class or nationality. Such claims were justified by modernist political theories that produced demonstrations showing how liberal moral and political ideals are deducible from universally valid metaphysical conceptions of nature or reason.

This dependence of liberal democracy, in its very self-conception, on the vocabulary and world view of the Enlightenment is what accounts for the peculiar difficulty involved in the project of recovering the particular cultural identity of the West. The contemporary identity of the West as a distinct civilization is defined by its commitment to the political institutions and moral ideals of liberal democracy. Western culture is today above all a culture of liberal democratic citizenship. Yet, from its modern beginnings in the seventeenth century, this culture of citizenship has defined itself exclusively in terms of a universalist world view that rejects the cognitive and moral validity of culturally particular beliefs and moral ideals. Thus, the task involved in the project of recovering the particular cultural identity of the West will be to find some way to break this link between liberal democracy and the world view of the Enlightenment — to arrive at a conception of the Western culture of citizenship capable of affirming both its moral validity and its culturally particular status.

The question facing us in the emerging post-Enlightenment period, then, is this: How can the Western culture of citizenship, after being interpreted for three hundred years in terms of the universalist metaphysical world-view of the Enlightenment, be reinterpreted today as defining merely one particularistic cultural way of life among others, a way of life whose norms are valid only for citizens of contemporary North Atlantic liberal democracies? This book outlines one possible strategy for answering this question.