I trust it is not too late to enter a political demurer against the spread of democracy from the United States and Western Europe to Eastern Europe and Asia — and perhaps Africa, Central and South America and, beyond, to any lands that have not been mentioned. Talk of "democracy" is something of a coded discourse linked (nowadays) to facilitating access to, and enlargement of, new investments, trade, spheres of power, normalized markets and the price of admission to all that is ticketed as the endorsement of certain forms of representative government and security of property and person. I am not opposed to such measures as a matter of principle; but the easy spread of "democracy" masks its inevitable deformation. We have now, at the end of the century, entered a phase of recolonizing the world that we cannot fully fathom. "Democracy" is pretty nearly its political currency, just as English is its lingua franca. I make its beginning approximately from the end of the Gulf War, when, in a candid moment, the American President, George Bush, proclaimed, "We’ve won!" by which I understood him to have meant, in effect, that the world would henceforth find itself drawn, more and more explicitly, to trade in the two currencies just mentioned, in ways favorable to the imperial interests of the United States.

Of course, it would be a mistake to exaggerate the importance of the Gulf War. It could not possibly have had the significance I assign it if the World War II had not turned out as it did, if the resources of defeated Germany and Japan had not been recruited by the Western democracies, if the Soviet empire had not been dismantled, if American political and economic power had not been adequately sustained, if the oil states had not remained weak clients of the West, and if there had not been a nearly total dearth of fresh political vision and debate during the last 50 years of the post-War world. The looming importance of China and neighboring "lesser" states has had almost no conceptual bearing on the political philosophies of the West: the notion of liberal democracy has, in an unprecedented way, become (partly by default, partly by convenience) the fatigued but well-nigh uncontested idiom of humane politics around the world. Tienanmen Square, for instance, is a metonymy for an uneasiness that seeks reassurance from China that its political and trading intentions will not violate a certain threshold of gathering global tolerance. It expresses itself in terms of strong human rights and the rights of dissidents, but that is surely a verbal deflection from its true concern. Similarly, in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, where disputes about democracy make no sense at all, the best strategy is to produce as much silence on the matter as can be managed. By contrast, Eastern Europe is eminently — even willingly — permeable to the West, a kind of complicit membrane altering its old chemistry for the sake of politically untried nutrients that it cannot now refuse. The promise is that, on a selective basis, Eastern Europe may yet participate in the new dreamed-of hegemonies the West is contemplating.

But what of liberalism and democracy and liberal democracy and human values? If, within the terms of the strange graftings and inseminations now being tried out, it pays to reflect on older conceptual questions regarding the human condition, then I may have some well-worn conversation beads to share. These may be collected in two baskets. One draws attention to the unpredictable effects of applying the abstract forms of one tradition to the alien practices of another; the other draws attention to the late paradoxes and inflexibilities of the same forms applied, at home, to new puzzles that they cannot easily be made to fit. The two baskets are rightly judged to have a good deal in common, once it is observed that the alien applications of the first resemble the new native applications of the second. There is a need for care, here, because, however cynical we may choose to be about what liberal democracy has come to mean, we cannot entirely ignore the fact that we must make the best of our political life. Faute de mieux, we must consider what is normatively possible in the liberal tradition.

Let me put my instructional beads before you as openly as I can. I concede they are all quite banal. What redeems them is that they seem to have been — and continue to be — largely neglected. That also reduces, of course, the likelihood that they are merely arbitrary or idiosyncratic. (That’s a gain and a distinct advantage.) Everything I have to say stems from the truism that liberal democracy is an unstable mix of disparate elements: liberalism and democracy point in entirely different directions; so much so that liberalism may well subvert particular political "democracies," and "democratic" states may have little or no interest in "liberal" norms and values.

What more I have to say depends on the supplementary truism that there cannot be an assured fit between the utopian or ideal claims of liberalism and democracy, or of liberal democracy, and the historical actualities of political life. If you add to these indisputable distinctions the problems, already acknowledged, of attempting to apply the abstracted regularities (along liberal or democratic lines), drawn from some home tradition, to a very different tradition, you may reasonably expect to collect all the strains of our late age pertinent to absorbing Eastern Europe within the protective mantle of the West. Once again, the successful exemplars of this strategy go back to the end of the World War II — to the deliberate "democratization" of Germany and Japan.

More recently, the same democratizing effort has been extended to a newly minted Russia, where one sees (more clearly than in Japan and Germany) the awkwardness and alien quality of the intended fit. The United States has, for years, been intoning the victorious truth that, except for Cuba, the Hispanimerican world is now substantially "democratic"; but that same pronouncement affords fair warning that the criteria in question cannot fail to be distinctly relaxed. It could not be otherwise, if you reflect on the paradoxes of liberal democracy in the United States itself. And, of course, if you think of the meaning of the verdict when applied to Haiti or Guatemala (or Bosnia), you see the sense in which it pays to be as clear as possible about our supposed principles and what might count as their right application.

Consider the following incongruities, then. Liberalism is not initially occupied with the structure of any political state or government; democracy is essentially a form of government. Liberalism is primarily a theory of normative individual life; democracy is primarily a descriptive category: it need not be normative at all; and where it is it may (as with Rousseau) be read in collectivist as easily as individualist terms. In its classical Western forms (Enlightenment, Kantian, Habermasian, Rawlsian), liberalism is ahistorical, committed to an essentially changeless or species-specific model of reason apt for discerning the proper norms of human life; democracy is little more than a taxonomic category for a family of historically limited, very different exemplars in the ancient and modern world. Again, when democracies (in the modern sense) are pointedly construed as committed to the protection of human rights (or of positive rights approximating to human rights), democracy becomes a very different hybrid structure — a "liberal democracy" — which diminishes the collectivist or communitarian forms of "democracy" and ambiguously disallows applying the term to states that fail to feature individual human rights in certain formal (constitutional) respects (for instance, so-called "Confucian democracies"). Finally, liberalism — a fortiori, liberal democracy — is a utopian or ideal conception, whereas democracy is normally not utopian at all, no more than a procedural or descriptive conception. This last distinction bears in an important way (as we shall see) on some of the more baffling paradoxes of "democracy" and "liberal democracy."

Now, it is entirely possible to construe liberalism merely ideologically. On that reading, there would be no point to a philosophical defense of the American Declaration of Independence or its constitutional application in the Bill of Rights (appended to the American Constitution) or the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. But that would be absurd, seeing how important and controversial such documents are: we cannot possibly ignore the question of their legitimation, if we regard their validity as separable from the local historical times in which they were formulated. Nevertheless, the prospects must be slim indeed, now at the end of the century. For there is hardly a plausible defense of the double claim (whether theoretical or practical) , viz. : (i) that human nature or human reason is changeless over history, and (ii) that natural or practical reason is apt for determining the objective norms of human life--in particular, essential human rights.

No doubt the theory has considerable appeal as well as a prudential and notably humane use. But is the doctrine valid? To insist that it is would signify that all those who deny the rational or ontic validity of the claim — even if they were willing to support positive rights — would be backing a demonstrably false claim, possibly a necessarily false claim. That certainly seems unlikely.

Notice that if liberal values were treated as artifacts of history, we could never legitimate liberalism in its classic form. For, if it were historicized, it could not be changeless; there would be little reason to suppose that the different forms of enculturing "human nature" would effectively converge to support any single or any favored set of changeless norms. It would be implausible to suppose that societies with very different histories from those of our would-be exemplars could straightforwardly accommodate full liberal values, except on very loose, very dubious grounds or at very considerable cost to their own entrenched practices. The Czech Republic, for instance, might well be a more tractable candidate than, say, Russia or Bulgaria.

There is no compelling argument confirming the fixity of practical reason or its capacity to discern or decide the universal validity of liberal norms (or, for that matter, any alternative such values). At the end of our century, the project has been called into fundamental question. There is no assured changeless structure of humanity or its changeless norms! The sheer variety of the world beggars its pretensions. The Hegelian critique of Kant (and the companion critique of Hegel) still stands: that is, first, that any purely formal version of universalizability (the Kantian view) can be made to support any internally consistent policy; and, second, that if the norms of practical reason are culturally variable, the very search for universal norms must be misguided or mischievous.

Of course, theorists like Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls, the current champions of liberalism, have succeeded in capturing versions of the generic liberal doctrine. But they cannot legitimate their own ideologies. Eastern Europe, attracted to one or another form of compliance with the West’s hegemony, can hardly pretend that whatever "version" it may favor could possibly legitimate its moral "choice" by "rational" means or by reference to its counterpart history.

What is the implication of all this? Certainly, at least our practical norms cannot be entirely independent of the sittlich structures of our history and that history cannot be enough to those or any norms. To suppose the sittlich requires no further justifying rationale than would instantly obviate the entire legitimative question. As soon as one acknowledges the consensual support of Nazism and Stalinism, one sees the difficulty for any ideology, no matter how popular.

We must concede the following, then: (i) there are no evident, "natural," neutral, objective, universalized, essential or necessary norms of moral and political life; (ii) there are also no plausible grounds for promoting political revisions that are not legibly grounded in our sittlich sources; and (iii) there is no way to admit (i) and (ii) that would justify construing the legitimation of our liberal norms as any less improvisional or any more reliable than our original sittlich norms. The upshot of accepting (i) - (iii) is tantamount to accepting Plato’s advice (in Statesman) that political and legislative visions and reforms, whether utopian or not, can never be more than "second-best."

Any neutral vision of essential human nature is beyond our powers and utterly meaningless. If so, then liberalism and democracy must submit to the same verdict. That political norms are "second-best" — no more than second-best — signifies (in Plano’s terms) that they can never be confirmed by reference to the eternal Forms of what is good and right or the fixed essence of human nature or human reason. There cannot be any uniquely correct way of proceeding in human affairs; and whatever we judge to be a fair revision of our political practice cannot fail to depend on some projection from the same sources from which the questioned norms had originally issued.

We are not at an impasse here, however; the verdict is neither circular nor paradoxical. It simply diminishes the presumption of political and moral philosophy. Would-be "applicant" societies from Eastern Europe and elsewhere are hereby forewarned.

Beyond all this, there are difficulties of a more insistent gauge. They return us to what I had earlier dubbed two "baskets" of political beads. One concerns liberalism as such; the other, liberal democracy. Each bears on the reasoned critique of acknowledged liberal societies as well as societies that aspire to be liberal by dint of a considerable transformation; but they do so in two entirely different ways. One draws attention to puzzles that lie beneath the level at which liberalism normally functions; the other draws attention to unforeseen complexities that go beyond the expected range of liberal policy. Their joint admission suggests that liberalism and liberal democracy may yet prove to be transient forms of wider political conceptions that have not sufficiently congealed to attract us in their service. Merely to broach the possibility is to suggest that the improvisational art by which societies claim to confirm their democratic or liberal credentials — now at the end of the century, when every society aspires (on the optimistic argument: George Bush’s, for example) to be liberal or democratic or both — signifies that the new alliances that the next century will permit or require may be better served by alternative inventions that we have still to hit on. The history of Western liberalism and democracy may actually be too shallow, too confined, to guide us plausibly in the next age.

There are some examples of the characteristic inflexibilities of liberal theory drawn from recent American political experience. In offering them, I mean to encourage application (by analogy) to the local practices of somewhat alien aspirant societies (Poland and Hungary, say) that must look to their own Sitten for similar potential complications.

It may come as a surprise to Europeans, for instance, that the notorious Rowe v. Wade decision of the American Supreme Court favoring abortion rights for women does not actually address the abortion issue directly in terms of fundamental human rights. It could not, according to the formalities of liberal thought! The curious reason is this: there is (and can be) no admissible way — as matters now stand in the United States — to defend abortion rights as such. One must subsume them, qua rights, under a guise that has nothing to do with the abortion question. The trouble with the defense of abortion as a possible fundamental right is that its defense would have to make reference to the biological differences between men and women; but that would mean construing the rights doctrine in terms of sub-species-wide distinctions. On the usual Constitutional interpretation, that would "signify" denying the equality doctrine! As a consequence, the defense of abortion in Rowe v. Wade is crafted in terms of an individual’s (any individual’s) right to privacy! Which is to say, crafted in a way that ignores the biological complexities of pregnancy and abortion in order, precisely, to make it possible to defend it on liberal grounds.

Similarly, in the 1996 Presidential, Congressional, and state-wide elections in the United States, a certain referendum (known as Proposition 209) passed in California, which, it is claimed, effectively repudiates all forms of so-called "affirmative action" — which is to say, all public policies that seek to restore a measure of politically effective equality in the face of extreme inequality among the races and between men and women in terms of educational and economic opportunity. The defeated corrective practices proceeded by way of "reverse discrimination": by introducing "corrective" inequalities meant to dislodge deeper forms of resistance to equality. The referendum therefore does concede longstanding de facto inequalities but adopts a "strict" or utopian view of the rights doctrine — which effectively thwarts its own realization and is known to do so.

What you see here is an unavoidable dilemma: in the name of basic rights, proposition 209 has the effect of stiffening resistance to the actual recovery of equality. It makes the inequality of rights invisible to the political eye, and it actually defeats the correction of inequalities by the use of the rights doctrine. There seems to be no way to break out of these reversals, once we admit a principled disjunction between abstract rights and quotidian politics.

Liberalism and liberal democracy are completely utopian conceptions. They defeat their own political purpose when "strictly" applied. If, then, you think to extend the rights doctrine to the treatment of homosexuals, or in support of assisted suicide for the terminally ill, or for the special treatment of genetically impaired offspring, or even (less controversially) to reduce poverty, to provide for medical needs, to make education affordable, you begin to see that the rights doctrine cannot be relied on (cannot even be strategically adjusted) for the new contests that are taking form.

All this has to do with sub-species-wide distinctions. The trouble is that, now, at the end of the 20th century, there are fewer and fewer contests that are likely to confirm the adequacy of the strictest forms of liberalism. I have no wish to deny the immense humanity historically codified in documents like the American Bill of Rights and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. Constraints against arbitrary imprisonment, torture, confiscation of property and conviction for crimes without benefit of trial cannot fail to remain among the permanent targets of enlightened states. The paradigms are reasonably in place. But, plainly, on the argument offered, there is no reliable prospect that further constitutional formalisms of the same sort can be extended to the newer disputes — about abortion, gay rights, assisted suicide, euthanasia, racial and gender equality — or to come to the most telling challenge, the elimination of the enormous global inequalities involving the control and use of the material goods of the earth. These obviously escape the resources of the rights doctrine and rely almost entirely on captive perceptions of justice.

Consider, for instance, of the internment of United States citizens of Japanese origin during the World War II, nor is there need to draw parallels to recent Bosnian history. The point is simply that if, say, Eastern Europe has had, as indeed it has, an altogether different constitutional history from that of the United States and Western Europe (allies in the Second War), then whatever may be made of liberalism and liberal democracy in Eastern Europe will be more a function of sittlich habits and the drive to recover power, under altered circumstances, than of utopian or constitutional intentions.

You may see this as cynicism, but it is not. For, on the one hand, there is no principled defense of any essentialist or rationalist version of liberalism; and, on the other, there are plausible ways of recovering something of the values and more that the liberal tradition has regularly favored, without attempting to restore putatively necessary rights. The doctrine of "unalienable" human rights belongs to the intellectual ethos of the Enlightenment. At a certain moment in history, the overthrow of the privileged estates plausibly led to the doctrine of universal reason and essential human rights. That is certainly what marks Kant’s important standing in the liberal tradition — and marks it still in the philosophically dampened ("heroic") liberalisms of Habermas and Rawls two centuries later.

Yet, already in the eighteenth century, the comparative linguistic and anthropological inquiries that attracted Humboldt had fatally questioned the fixity of human nature; the intuitions of Rousseau had found an insuperable paradox at the very heart of democratic doctrine — a fortiori, at the heart of the radical individualism that liberal democrats would never dislodge. By the end of the eighteenth century, de Maistre had already attacked the pure fiction of essential "man" in the Declaration of the Rights of Man appended to the French constitutions of the 1790s; and the very concept of democracy (that is, the "identity" of rulers and ruled) would henceforth be obliged to shuttle between les volontés de tous and la volonté générale.

There is a sense in which democracy need not be liberal at all — the sense in which, following the perception of figures like Karl Schmitt and Heidegger, the World War II, as well as the struggle between the Soviet empire and the West, might reasonably be construed as two phases of the same contest between radically opposed visions of democracy! The possibility is all but absent from the American political horizon.

When, after the Gulf War, President Bush pronounced his fateful finding, "We’ve won!" he had no idea of the deeper "communitarian" pressures "democracy" would bring to bear on the supposedly stable elite liberal democracies of the West. He did not realize — in general, Americans do not realize — that the sheer mobility and mingling of diverse ethnic peoples (having few, if any, historical ties to 18th century liberalism) would, as immigrants, threaten to drown the individualistic model of liberalism (and liberal democracy) in a sea of multicultural forces.

The point is this: there is no accessible liberal canon for accommodating in our time the collective "entitlement" of multicultural — would-be communitarian — democracies within the terms of liberal democracy itself. The idea is an oxymoron. The only option liberal democrats admit is one of temporizing, of assimilating ethnic populations by political reduction (the "melting pot"). If the human rights doctrine holds, they believe, then immigrant populations — Pakistanis, Cubans, Haitians, Mexicans, Palestinians, Koreans, Cambodians, Russians, Nigerians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Turks, Serbs, Sikhs and Amerindians — must bring their local Sitten into compliant accord with the conditions of entitlement regarding essential rights. That means the new immigrants must subordinate their ethnic solidarity to individualism. But they are resisting more effectively than ever before.

We already have seen the weakness and inflexibility of the natural rights doctrine as well as the ambiguity of what to count as democracy. Political prudence could hardly fail to favor communitarian interests. Now, notably in the "English-speaking" world, we face the prospect of accelerating forms of immigration that favor the forces of ethnic solidarity, favor values hitherto unfamiliar with, and to, political liberalism, convictions that cannot fail to challenge or obscure, even if innocently, every liberal effort to extend the rights struggle beyond the usual scope of 18th and 19th century events, movements that increasingly pit the forces of "communitarian" democracy against the forces of liberal democracy. So the prophetic tensions of the French Revolution are, for the third time in the twentieth century, gathering for an unheard-of struggle for global hegemony. It is in that setting that the advocates of liberal democracy contemplate the local extension of their favored order throughout Eastern Europe — through the whole world, if possible.

The novelty of the present practice of liberalism in the United States — by all odds the most extreme champion of liberal democracy — lies with its deliberately intruding the human rights doctrine, however opportunistically enlarged and distorted, into all its dealings regarding international trade. Recall the Contras’s adventure in Nicaragua; the embargo on Cuba; the attempt to use the dissident issue, state abortion policies, the prison labor question, in trade negotiations with China, when the obvious priorities lay with opening up Chinese markets to American exports. American liberalism has, now, in its latest phase, begun to experiment with enlarging its canon — most adventurously, in pressing the abortion issue (for instance, in shaping economic aid to India) — that reflects not so much the classic human rights issue as the politico-economic incorporation of sittlich or communitarian or even explicitly religious concerns. These maneuvers are only very dubiously connected with individual rights.

We need not make too much of particular episodes, of course. But the fact remains that, both in the United States and abroad, American liberalism is being increasingly interpreted in terms that depend on the same "communitarian" issues of American history (remember godless communism!) that Tocqueville had already noted at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Adding to this the import of new immigration patterns and the paradoxes of liberalism at home and one begins to see that the extreme individualism of the classic liberal thesis may not be able to withstand the onslaught of the ascendent forms of ethnic solidarity, without yielding ground at the close of the century.

It may be that the attempt of the Western liberal democracies to ensure their global standing politically and economically may oblige them to submerge more and more of their liberal convictions in the service of policies that are obviously "communitarian" in a hegemonic sense. The Europeans have always been more inclined in this direction than the Americans: that is surely the lesson of the World War II and the shifting fortunes of the old contests involving the Soviet empire. Now, at the end of the century, American liberalism begins to seem more and more arbitrary and parochial as well as more and more somnambulistically informed by its own peculiar sittlich solidarity. In any event, the international community is not likely to be hospitable if it can effectively resist American muscle.

It needs to be remembered that although human beings cannot be convincingly denied in our time some minimal measure of political protection regarding "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" (or "property") , such provisions need not be cast in terms of "unalienable" rights or the individualistic language of liberalism. There are many other idioms in which positive rights or protections may be promulgated in states that enjoy a measure of uncoerced loyalty; yet that loyalty may have nothing to do with the peculiar essentialism invoked to legitimate liberal claims.

If you grant that much, you will see at once that there is nothing intrinsically sinister, politically, in the growing implausibility of classical liberalism. By the same token, "communitarian" thinking need not be strengthened by liberalism’s decline if, by communitarian thinking, one means either (i) to endorse a genuinely collective "entity" having its own normative needs, interests or "rights"; (ii) to subordinate in a principled way the norms and values governing individual lives to the norms and values of collective entities; or (iii) to claim that there are rational or revealed grounds for championing either (i), (ii) or both. Communitarian provisions tend to be totalitarian (fascistic in extreme cases) wherever items (i)-(iii) are strongly favored. Still, so-called "Confucian democracies" (Singapore, for instance) are communitarian, lack a natural rights doctrine, provide humanely for individual citizens and subjects (at least on comparative grounds), without being fascistic.

Generally, such states are not fascistic when, in the deepest sense, communitarian matters are confined to predicative concerns. What that means, quite simply, is that collective properties are rightly assigned to aggregates of individual citizens or subjects. We must do the same when we attribute linguistic aptitudes to ourselves. There are no selves or persons but the apt members of homo sapiens who have suitably internalized the language and practices of their native societies. If so, then the denial of a "communitarian" dimension to human life is, effectively, the denial of human "nature" itself — the denial of that "second-natured" nature that emerges from our biological aptitudes and transforms them.

To admit selves and human nature, then, is to admit the endless diversity of sittlich life, without benefit of any essential norms by which political alternatives can be strictly shown to be right or wrong. Here we touch on the deepest stratum of the puzzle. For, if essentialism — in particular, an essentialism regarding political and moral norms — cannot he vindicated, then the regulative fixities of both liberal and communitarian democracy will be placed at risk. That is not to say that political habits will unravel, only that no modal legitimation will prove viable or even "possible".

The short argument is plain enough: give up Platonism among norms, and you will (as Plato remarks, in Statesman) be bound to fall back to a "second-best" state, that is, a state validated only by the frank construction and reconstruction of whatever norms our sittlich history deems "objective," "neutral," "reasonable," "rational" for a time. Liberalism is more vulnerable, here, than democracy, for there is no way to legitimate the first if Platonism is false. Any form of democracy may be legitimated, as a "second-best" state, if it can be legitimated at all. Hence, positive rights or positive protections can be equally managed by liberal and communitarian means. Nothing need be lost. What is lost is liberalism’s pretension to be more than ideology. We now see that to be impossible. Hence, the drift toward 21st century history cannot be counted on to strengthen liberalism specifically. Its fortunes will be the fortunes of the global market.

I come now to a final set of puzzles. These have to do with the effect of trying to accommodate "multicultural" rights (or, more narrowly, collective or communitarian goods) within the terms of liberal democracy. Straight off, one realizes that, strictly speaking, there cannot be any collective rights within the terms of the classical formula; there would be a contradiction at once. Still, once we admit the sittlich standing of rights and norms — in effect, the artifactual "nature," the "second nature" of selves (or persons) — we see that the very institution of norms and values cannot fail to have a "communitarian" cast. The aporia goes to the very heart of human life: viewed predictively, individualistic norms are as communitarian as multicultural norms. They are sittlich in origin: they are norms claiming multicultural validity, pretending, by Platonist devices, to be grounded in something quite other than our collective practices. They could not otherwise claim independent standing. But the fact remains, we cannot possibly legitimate Platonist pedigrees.

The picture is a muddled one. For one thing, if selves are "second-natured," that is, first formed by submitting the infant members of Homo sapiens to the enculturing processes of a natural language — so that a self (a human subject or human agent) is the apt site, biologically individuated, for the exercise of certain collectively defined competences — then persons are individuals only by virtue of sharing collectively defined powers. That is already incompatible with a purely liberal ontology. Once granted, theorists as diverse as Hobbes and Locke and Jefferson and Kant and Mill and Rawls and Habermas may well have been summarily defeated.

Liberalism has no ontological validity: natural rights make no sense except when transmuted into positive rights, that is, when they are historically promulgated and enacted. But then, the success of a rights policy does not depend on the autonomy or normative fixity of reason, but on the convergence of historical critiques along prudential lines. If so, then there is no principled conflict between the doctrine of individual rights and the admission that rights have a sittlich source. But there is a conflict between the historicized grounds for actually advancing a rights policy and the liberal vision of the universalized neutrality by which reason necessarily endorses it. Philosophical liberalism is completely indefensible. Liberal democracy, however humane, is little more than a fictionalized political practice officially blind to the dynamics of actual political life.

Multiculturalism fares no better than liberalism. The presumption that there are or can be collective rights defined in multiculturalist terms, or communitarian goals that can function legally and politically, as liberal rights, is a conceptual monster. For one thing, to legitimate multiculturalist rights is to assign a veto power (in effect, an overriding right) to some determinate subpopulation within a states’s jurisdiction, on the prior grounds of respecting its sittlich norms; secondly, there can be no autonomous or rational basis for favoring, as such, one contingent history over another; thirdly, the practice leads in the direction of the fascist possibilities of communitarianism; and, fourthly, it makes a shambles of any would-be critical review under which, democratically, sittlich norms might be reasonably altered.

Beyond that, multiculturalist rights cannot possibly be reconciled with liberal rights. Imagine for instance that the right of divorce were defended by an application of a liberal reading of the rights of freedom and privacy. (This mimics the abortion argument in the United States.) Might it not happen that an immigrant population religiously opposed to divorce might sue for the right to practice in accord with its own tradition and, as a consequence, for the right to forbid divorce among its own adherents? It is said, for instance, that the Catholic hierarchy in Poland has been campaigning for a reversal of the legal right of divorce. How could such a conflict possibly be countenanced in liberal terms? Surely, the game would play itself out in the same way with respect to abortion, suicide, physician-assisted suicide, euthanasia, homosexual marriage, separation of church and state.

There are hidden difficulties here. Liberal theorists tend to be "proceduralists" rather than "substantivists": that is, they believe that the advocacy of natural rights and a liberal conception of justice in no way commits a society to any substantive view of virtue or the good life. They think of liberalism as occupied with purely formal or procedural ("rational") goods serving every tolerable form of life. That explains the importance of Kant (of a blind loyalty to Kant) for the liberal cause; it is the point of convergence among the bestknown contemporary liberal theorists: Rawls and Ronald Dworkin in the United States, Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel in Germany. It accounts for the liberal penchant for neutrality and objectivity.

But, of course, the paradoxes of liberalism betray the fiction: there is no determinate procedural payoff in supporting formal rights separated from actual history. That is the lesson one draws equally well from Hegel’s reductio of Kant’s Categorical Imperative and from the self-defeating features of American Constitutional policies on racial equality. Liberals are caught in a dilemma: they fear to countenance the relevance of history because they cannot then confirm any strict neutrality; and they cannot commit to any contingent vision of the good life, for then reason would be hostage to ideological contest.

In this one can see how the proceduralist reading of the liberal doctrine must have been particularly well-suited to the early "melting pot" conception of American democracy. It worked in a fashion because, for one thing, the diverse sittlich practices of immigrant peoples up to about the end of the World War II did tend to dissolve or yield in favor of liberal notions of rights and justice (which is not to confirm the actual victory of liberal values in the same period); and, secondly, because the sittlich values of the politically dominant subpopulation did, during the same interval, provide the effective ground for interpreting liberal doctrines. That has all changed now: liberal theory is confronted with its own paradoxes, under unforeseen circumstances; and immigrant populations can no longer be counted on to yield to the primacy of liberal values in the old way. The result is that, even in the United States, the potential conflict between liberal policies and sittlich actualities can no longer be ignored. Granting all that, the preposterousness of late German liberalism (Habermas’s, preeminently: pure procedural justice, for instance) stares one in the face. Nothing seems to have been learned from the legal trickery surrounding the Reichstag fire! Humane theorists like Dworkin and Habermas cannot possibly be more than the innocent sports of a utopian imagination.

Nevertheless, liberals have, in recent years, attempted to incorporate multiculturalist norms into liberal theory itself. This is an honest effort, let it be said, admitting the import of recent immigrant patterns. The threatening racism of Britain and France and Germany can only be exacerbated by Common Market policies: mounting unemployment at home can only count against absorbing "foreign visitors" (ethnic labor); the rising tide of Turks and Serbs and Bosnians and North Africans and Eastern Europeans threatens to alter permanently the sittlich salience of "native" populations in Western Europe in the same way the influx of Asian and Latin American immigrants threatens the sittlich balance of American life. There is surely no way to halt the trend. But that is precisely the blind spot of utopian liberalism.

Apart from the melting pot concept, liberalism has favored two distinct policies regarding the compatibility of multiculturalism and basic rights. All of the options are really broken-backed, however, since they all implicitly concede a potential conflict between "inalienable" rights and the survival of one or another form of cultural or ethnic solidarity. The inevitable failure of the undertaking —reconciling rights and ethnic survival — lies with the utopianisms of the supposed sittlich neutrality of the defense of natural rights policy and the prudential interests of the immigrant ethos. The truth is that the primacy of the rights doctrine requires the primacy of the historically associated Sitten of the population responsible for the first. There cannot be parity among the diverse "communities" that happen to have gathered together within a liberal democracy: on the liberal argument, the demands of "cultural survival" must yield to the requirements of fundamental rights; but, against the liberals, that cannot obtain unless the sittlich priorities that ensure such rights also take precedence, at least effectively. Theorists like Charles Taylor, therefore, who profess to favor liberal values but mean to reconcile such values with the survival of ethnic sub-societies within the compass of a liberal state (Québec, for instance, within Canada; possibly the Flemand and Walloon communities, within Belgium) do not quite grasp the potential conflict between such values. Where collective values prevail, liberalism (but not democracy) must give way; and where liberal values prevail, multiculturalism cannot but be subordinate to the other.

The multiculturalist policies of liberalism, therefore, run as follows: (i) give no quarter — the melting pot model; if immigrants can accept liberal rights and liberal justice, then fine; there is no other admissible accommodation: (ii) protect diversity as far as possible — but not more; priority goes entirely in the direction of the liberal notion; and (iii) admit parity between liberal and communitarian values — hence, admit that liberalism may have to yield to the needs of cultural survival.

The first is championed by Rawls and Habermas; the second, by Michael Walzer; and the third, equivocally, by Charles Taylor. The first is completely utopian; the second is politically realistic on the side of what is dominant in the sittlich way, but utopian on the neutrality of liberalism itself; and the third is unwilling to come to terms with conflicting priorities. In this regard, Taylor’s deliberate avoidance of the central difficulty marks the insuperable weakness of the liberal’s position in the face of a rising communitarian challenge. To acknowledge the validity of ethnic or cultural "survival" as a liberal right is a completely incoherent maneuver. No competent "communitarian" (Alasdair MacIntyre or Michael Sandel, for instance) would ever dream of bringing the two systems together.

It may be, therefore, that liberalism — or liberal democracy strictly conceived — is a hothouse doctrine that has seen its best inning and is likely to dwindle more quickly now than ever before. After all, the very concept of a self has undergone a fundamental change since the time of the French Revolution. The curious thing is, the English-language tradition in philosophy and politics has largely favored the notion of an autonomous, essentially ahistorical, reliably rational agent through the entire two centuries that have elapsed. If Hegel may be thought to have had liberal sympathies — or, more broadly, Enlightenment sympathies — then you must grant as well that Hegel also effectively historicized reason and human nature and, as a result, has obliged us to construe selves as cultural artifacts. The European tradition that runs from Hegel through Marx through Nietzsche through Dilthey through Heidegger through Horkheimer through Gadamer through Foucault has, in the post-Gulf War period, been largely set aside (for more fashionable or merely opportunistic liberal values), all the while its deeper collectivist and constructivist themes have prospered.

It is obvious, therefore, that if the culturally preformative dimension of human existence is not entirely abandoned in the foreseeable future, it is likely that its historicist and contingent implications will be recovered in due time. There is at least one essential truism that will surely dawn on us again: viz., universalism and historicism are incompatible — politically as well as philosophi-cally. At the moment we are in that strange limbo in which a piece of the historicist conception has been detached from historicity itself, namely, the sittlich dimension of human life; so that Western theorists committed to something like democracy, if not liberalism proper — the communitarians: Taylor, Sandel, MacIntyre, possibly even Richard Rorty — are, ultimately, as ahistoricist as the liberals they oppose.

If, as many now foresee, the greatest market activity of the new century will be centered in Asia, then there can be no question that the contest between liberalism and democracy and between individualism and communitarianism will require a revival of historicist distinctions. For, insofar as the United States is now expected to take a leading role in East-West exchange (which, until very recently, had not been anticipated by Asia or Europe) the idiom of early 21st century political debate is bound to be a continuation of the idiom of the past. And then, the ideological reinvention of Eastern European countries along "liberal" or "democratic" lines is bound to define itself in terms of the paradoxes and puzzles of Western political history and theory. It is a good idea to travel with a map in hand.

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