defining them remains alive and essential. Different theories
may be put forward and contested—and a number have
been proposed in our day20—but the shared assumption of
the different theories is that one such theory is right.
The charge leveled by the most radical forms of the politics
of difference is that “blind” liberalisms are themselves the reflection
of particular cultures. And the worrying thought is
that this bias might not just be a contingent weakness of all
hitherto proposed theories, that the very idea of such a liberalism
may be a kind of pragmatic contradiction, a particularism
masquerading as the universal.
I want now to try to move, gently and gingerly, into this
nest of issues, glancing at some of the important stages in
the emergence of these two kinds of politics in Western societies.
I will first look at the politics of equal dignity.