Ethnocentric Political Theory: The Pursuit of Flawed Universals

By Bhikhu Parekh

Western political theory has many great strengths but also a few weaknesses. Among the latter should be included its ethnocentricity, its tendency to universalize the local. The political theorist makes universal statements about human beings, societies and states without making a close study of them, and about reason, tradition, human nature and moral ideals without appreciating how differently these are understood in different societies and traditions. These statements are often an uncritical universalisation of his society’s modes of thought and experience. This book traces this tendency in different areas of moral and political life, and argues that a critical engagement between different perspectives offers one possible way to counter this tendency. Seeking universally valid knowledge is a legitimate ambition, but Western political theory cannot realise it without the help of the non-Western as its critical interlocutor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Apr 12, 2019
• ISBN: 9783030117085

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© The Author(s) 2019

Bhikhu ParekhEthnocentric Political TheoryInternational Political Theoryhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11708-5_1

1. Introduction

Bhikhu Parekh¹  

(1)

Politics and International Relations, University of Hull, Hull, UK

Bhikhu Parekh

Keywords

Political theoryBiasEthnocentrismDialogue

It is difficult to imagine a society or a civilisation without political thought and even political theory . Living in an organised society, human beings cannot avoid asking questions about its objectives, the basis of its authority, its relation to other societies and its right and duties. In the course of answering them they generate a body of ideas or political thought which shapes their beliefs and conduct and forms an integral part of their collective life. Their political thought is never entirely consistent or coherent. It is not the product of a single mind and includes ideas developed in response to different situations and contexts. They also conflict and their meanings and implications are not always clear either. These incoherences and inconsistencies need to be removed not only for theoretical reasons but also to render the daily life coherent, stable and manageable. This requires the society to reflect on these ideas and produce some kind of political theory . Like political thought, political theory too is an inseparable dimension of collective life. To imagine a society or a civilization without some kind of political theory is to imagine a people happy to muddle through life with a bunch of heterogeneous and conflicting ideas and lacking the capacity for reflective thinking.

While no society is wholly devoid of political theory , the type and quality of the latter varies a great deal. In some societies it is systematic, comprehensive, deeply thought out, conscious of its assumptions, and sufficiently probing; in others it is far less rigorous and systematic. In some societies it is articulated in a body of clearly stated and logically interrelated propositions; in others it is expressed in stories, myths and aphorisms and needs to be skilfully teased out and made explicit. In some societies political theory prizes philosophical sophistication above everything else and aims to develop an intellectual framework based on carefully defined and related concepts. In others it has a normative thrust and places high value on practical recommendations. Since political theory can take different forms, it is a mistake to take one of them as the model and dismiss the rest as not really political theory or declare them defective to the extent that they depart from the model. As long as an attempt is made to analyse, order and relate diverse ideas and offer a general perspective on political life, we have a political theory . What defines political theory is its orientation and level of reflection, not the particular form it takes.

Political theory took a particular form in classical Athens, the birthplace of Western political theory . Almost from the very beginning, it was three dimensional in nature. It was analytical in the sense that it interpreted and organized political life in terms of a clearly defined body of concepts. Concepts were its tools of analysis, and the novelty of a theory was judged by the novelty of its concepts or its interpretations of them. Secondly, it was explanatory in the sense that it related its concepts to the structure of political life, showed how its different parts were related, and explained its institutions and practices accordingly. Thirdly, political theory was normative in the sense of articulating a vision of the good society and providing principles and values to guide choices and actions. All three were important, and they were all closely related. Conceptual analysis, for example, was by itself highly formal and even pointless unless it was part of an explanatory framework, and the normative dimension was little different from sermonizing that others need not take seriously unless it was embedded in the analytical and explanatory concerns. The classical Greek view of the nature and task of political theory formed the basis of an impressive, what for convenience is called the Western, tradition that has grown up over the past two and a half millennia. Given its origins and self-understanding the tradition has certain distinguishing features, such as that it is argumentative, centred on individual thinkers, focused on the Polis, aware of the continuity of its concerns, and given to claiming periodic real or imaginary breaks or discontinuities.

The Western tradition of political theory has predictably exercised considerable influence on the rest of the world, and that influence has been overwhelming during the past three centuries. Three factors have been largely responsible for this. First, since it had the unique advantage of being practised almost continuously for over two and a half millennia by some of the most talented men, it has developed great analytical rigour, addressed a wide range of questions, and acquired methodological self-consciousness not to be found in most other traditions of political theory .

Second, for almost the past three centuries the West has politically, economically and culturally dominated the rest of the world and used its economic, military and political power to propagate its ways of life and thought. Its ideas travelled with its goods, were sometimes supported by its military power, and acquired enormous prestige and respectability. Almost every non-Western country was a supplicant at the Western court, and its spokesmen could hardly expect to be heard, let alone taken seriously, unless they spoke its standard language in an approved accent.

Third, since the West substantially recreated much of the non-Western world in its own image, its political ideas were inscribed in and formed an integral part of the latter’s institutional structure and practices. Although they were sometimes crossed with the indigenous ways of thinking and underwent changes, they remained a dominant presence in the political life of the non-Western world whose political practices and institutions could not be fully understood without reference to the Western categories of thought.

All three factors were important. No amount of political and economic power would have given Western political theory such influence if it had not possessed considerable intellectual strength and vitality. During the colonial struggle for independence it was subjected to a searching critique by some of the ablest minds of the non-Western world, and would have been rejected or at least vigorously resisted if it had been found incapable of defending itself. And neither the intellectual strength of its political theory nor its enormous political and economic power would have given the West this degree of influence if its conceptual framework had been wholly irrelevant to the experiences of the non-Western world. Indeed the latter would have found it totally unintelligible.

The hegemonic position of Western political theory has had two unfortunate consequences. First, many a writer in the non-Western world either imported the readymade Western conceptual packages without examining their relevance, or ‘indigenised’ them without asking how the ideas conceived and systematised in one context could be nativised and adapted to another quite different. Like the trade in material goods, the terms of intellectual exchange have largely remained one-sided. The non-Western world exports the raw material of experiences and imports the finished theoretical products from the West. As a result its indigenous traditions of thought largely remain unfertilised by its novel political experiences. What is more, its past and present either remain disconnected or are misconnected by the mediation of a relatively alien mode of thought, leading in one case to historical amnesia and in the other to ideological schizophrenia.

Second, even as individuals fail to develop their powers of imagination and critical rigour without constant interaction with their equals, a tradition of thought lacks vitality and capacity for self-criticism without the probing presence of an independent ‘other’. In the absence of a critical dialogue with other traditions, Western political theory , despite its great intellectual achievements, has remained parochial, narrow, Western not only in its provenance but also its assumptions and concerns. Since it has enjoyed for the past three centuries the almost divine privilege of shaping the rest of the world in its own image and universalising its forms of thought without being seriously challenged, it remains unable and unwilling to allow non-Western experiences to speak to it in their native tongues and deepen its insights into the range and variety of human experiences and possibilities. Marxists, feminists, animal rights champions and others have highlighted its economic, sexist, anthropocentric and other biases. It is just as important to uncover its deep-seated ethnocentric biases as well.

The term ‘ethnocentric’ does not quite capture what I have in mind, but it comes nearest to it and should do in the absence of a better alternative. ¹ It is centred on the ethnos, an ethnocultural community. I use it widely to refer to any kind of community, be it religious. political or cultural as well as to a body of thought. The term ‘ethnocentrism ’, as used in this book, refers to uncritical generalization of the experiences and modes of thought of a particular ethnos in my extended sense of the term, and looking at other communities, cultures , traditions of thought through their prism. The form of a mode of thought is general but its content is parochial. No ethnocentrism is involved if no universal claims are made, or if one is able to show in a noncircular manner that one’s modes and categories of thought do have universal applicability. Ethnocentrism occurs when the particular is illegitimately or uncritically generalized and appears in a universal form, that is, when the concepts, questions, modes of inquiry suited to understanding one’s own or metropolitan societies are deployed as a grid with which to understand the rest of the world. For example, to say or to proceed on the assumption that a religion properly so called must have a deity, a text revealing his will and a prophet, and that one that does not is not a religion in the ‘true sense’ of the term, is to universalise a view of religion derived from the three Abrahamic faiths and to ignore a very different view of it informing Hinduism, Buddhism , Jainism and other dharmic faiths. No noncircular argument is advanced to justify this view of religion , and those that are advanced are unconvincing. It is not necessary to belong to a particular ethnos, culture or religion to universalise its modes of thought as one might genuinely think them self-evident or have been conditioned into taking such a view by professional pressure and disciplinary induction.

Ethnocentrism is a common danger in inquiries aiming to make universally valid statements, political theory being one of them. Political theory often claims to offer an universally valid understanding of its subject matter and is articulated in terms of abstract statements from which all marks of their local provenance are erased. It assumes that the less a theory refers to anything local and the less time and space bound it is, the less parochial it is, and conversely that the more it is locally embedded, the more parochial it is. The assumption is false because simply erasing local references does not make a statement or a theory universal. In fact it conceals its particularity and does not overcome it. It lulls the theorist and his readers into thinking that a formally universal statement or theory is also universal in its content, and that clearly is not the case. Since much of the past and present political theory does not examine its ethnocentric biases, it is an uneasy blend of parochial content and universal form, and is debilitated by their tension.

The limitations and even the dangers of ethnocentrism are too obvious to need elaboration. It ignores the contingency and particularity of what it universalises, and in so doing de-historicises and absolutises it. It makes unsubstantiated universalist claims on behalf of the latter and turns it into a model all should emulate. Rendered blind to its own limitations, it is unable to take a radically critical view of itself and forecloses the possibility of a mutually beneficial dialogue with others. As for other societies and cultures , it assimilates them to its own modes of thought and shows no respect for their differences and identity . It subjects them to an alien and often inappropriate conceptual framework, judges them by irrelevant standards, asks them questions that often make little sense to them, and wholly misunderstands them. Indeed when it has the power to do so, the ethnocentric tendency seeks to mould other societies and cultures in its own image and reveals its violent streak. When that is not so, it involves resorting to subtle or crude forms of intellectual bullying, and puts them under enormous pressure to conform to its expectations.

India illustrates this point well. Used to the dharmic view of ‘religion ’, its people, especially though not only the Hindus , have traditionally taken an inclusive and relaxed view of religion . One can be both a Hindu and a Buddhist, a Sikh, a Jain, or even a Muslim or a Christian. When the colonial rulers introduced the religious census in India , they relied on the Abrahamic view of religion and asked people to indicate which particular religion they belonged to. Indians who were used to a multiple religious identity were required to define themselves in terms of one exclusive religious identity and asked to make choices that made little sense to them. Furthermore since they could now be enumerated in terms of one identity , it led over time to the ideas of Hindu majority and non-Hindu minorities expected to behave as homogenous wholes. Furthermore the dominant idea of what a proper religion should be like led the slighted Hindu leaders to turn theirs into one. They selected a particular text, be it the Vedas or the Gita as their Bible, a particular individual , be it Krishna or Rama, as their prophet, reduced the mass of Hindu beliefs to a few simple doctrines, and so on, leading to the obliteration of the integrity of their ‘religion ’. All this encouraged religious nationalism and the currently dominant Hindutva ideology. Not that the process was easy and straightforward or that the changes might not have occurred otherwise, but rather that the alien and inapplicable view of religion propagated by the ethnocentric Christian missionaries and colonial rulers played an important role. Similar things happened in many other areas as well such as the ‘proper’ or ‘rational’ form of the state , the individual , rights , civil society , political party and democracy . Such resistance as was put up in India and elsewhere did not last long because of several factors such as its own inadequacies, internalisation of what it was rejecting, and above all relentless external pressures.

A good deal of past and present Western political theory has a strong ethnocentric orientation evident in its views on human nature, rationality, conceptual framework and methodology. For the Greeks all who did not speak like them were ‘barbarians’. The Greek modes of reasoning and speaking were the universal norms by which all human beings and societies were to be judged. Although less ethnocentric than their latter day successors, they were not free from it and reflected it at cultural, political and other levels. St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas judged other religions in terms of Christianity and found them wanting. The followers of other religions were all doomed unless they saw the Christian light and converted to it, For these philosophers and many others, even the Jews , the original followers of Christ and from whose ranks he had emerged, were deeply suspect, and tolerated largely because they proclaimed his arrival and could be used to legitimise Christianity .

This tendency to universalize the experiences and forms of thought of a particular ethnic group, religion or culture became even more pronounced with the rise of modernity , especially the beginning of the European empires. The experiences that form their point of reference and the view of human beings in terms of which they are analysed are basically European in their origin and orientation. History is seen as a journey with only one destination, and only one route to get there. Modern European standards of rationality are the ones all human beings are expected to live up to, the modern Western state is the only way to organise every polity, and the current form of liberal democracy is the only true way to run its affairs. Hobbes ’ ‘natural’ man presented in universal terms is largely an uncritical generalisation of the individual emerging in his society during his period, and the nature attributed to him is an accentuated version of the desires, fears and attitudes characteristic of the latter. Those such as the American Indians who do not fit Hobbes ’ description are seen as primitive, backward, not entitled to the rights others enjoy until they have been civilised by their white superiors. Locke defines human beings in such a way that the American Indians fall outside its range, and they neither enjoy collective independence nor does their land acquire the status of inviolable private property. Bentham’s ‘arithmetical’ view of reason , which is basically unreflective and only at home in the accountant’s world of addition and subtraction, generalises that of the petty bourgeois Englishmen of his time, as do his views of human motivations, attitude to life, and sources of pleasure and pain.

To his credit Montesquieu sympathetically understands other societies but remains rooted in the European norms. As a result he concentrates on aspects of these societies where they differ from Europe and exoticises them. He highlights their oddities and differences, implies that nothing better can be expected of them, and says little about their strengths and virtues. John Stuart Mill values autonomy , freedom of criticism, display of energy, go-ahead character and ambition characteristic of contemporary Europeans above almost all other human qualities, and on their basis gives Britain the right to ‘civilise’ and colonise the ‘dark Africa’ and the ‘whole of the East’. Hegel takes contemporary Germany as the resting place of the Absolute, and other societies as places where it was partly or wholly unselfconscious. Christianity is for him the highest form of religion , Reformation represents the highest stage of Christianity , and the constitutional monarchy as it was developing in nineteenth century Prussia was, with some modifications, the most rational form of the state . He studied India fairly closely but used it mainly to discredit German romanticism, his formidable intellectual rival, rather than to offer an objective and faithful account of India . With all his compassion and genuinely universalist ethos, Marx treated the ‘brutal’ British colonialism as the only way to end India’s ‘oriental despotism’ and ‘static’ pre-bourgeois mode of production. For him and for many others modernization, the telos of history, was a package of several inseparable items, all of which had to be introduced together as they had been in Europe, thereby excluding the possibility of different countries developing their own forms of alternative modernity .

Although Max Weber aimed to provide an ‘unconditionally valid type of knowledge’ that must be acknowledged as correct ‘even by a Chinese’, his writings are suffused with and uncritically universalize liberal individualism , the Abrahamic view of religion , and the bourgeois rationalist view of human behaviour. ² At a different level Isaiah Berlin’s two concepts of liberty largely generalise the English and the Continental European views on the subject and show little awareness of or respect for the Chinese or the Indian views where liberty is understood in terms of self-regulation and social harmony. Michael Oakeshott’s account of human conduct makes little sense outside Europe or rather England as he himself concedes when he says that an Englishman enamoured of collectivism betrays his heritage. His view of tradition shows little awareness of how it operates in other societies and is narrowly English. Rawls theory of justice with its associated ideas of individualism , veil of ignorance, choice , and generalised self-interest has little applicability outside the West, especially the US, and predictably enjoys little popularity there.

Although otherwise excellent, Will Kymlicka’s Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction is entirely Western in its content, and so are Goodin and Petit’s Contemporary Political Philosophy. ‘Contemporary’ evidently includes only the West, the rest of the world not worthy of being noticed. Sabine’s History of Political Theory, Skinner’s Foundations of Modem Political Thought and countless other histories of this kind have the same structural bias. Eurocentrism, which is one form of ethnocentrism , goes even deeper as Anglo-American thought forms the sole or the overwhelming content of most of these volumes, the French, the German and others barely getting any or much attention. For Foucault Western culture is able to ‘link itself to other cultures in the mode of pure theory’ and possesses scientific rationality and the capacity to relate to the world theoretically. Guided by this belief he makes no effort to understand other cultures and the way in which they approach and appropriate each other. ³

Since the non-West in all these and other cases is rarely studied with the required degree of care and empathy and is largely seen in Western terms, it lacks a clear shape and identity . It remains a shadowy world onto which one can project almost any fantasy triggered by the material supplied by the anthropologists, the explorers and the travellers. It is an intellectual construct, not an object in the real world that can talk back in defiance, and almost entirely at the mercy of the writer. Mill’s ‘East’ is homogenised and devoid of individuality and difference, as is that of Montesquieu . For Locke all Indians are alike, as they are for Hobbes and Grotius . Hegel historicises Greece and Rome and traces their historical development, but treats India , Persia and China ahistorically, as representing an unchanging essence whose destiny is to be dismantled and superseded.

This is not at all to say that political theorists should not entertain universalist ambitions; far from it; rather they need to ask, which few do, why they want to generalise about other societies and whether they can do so without making a close study of them. Do they generalise out of professional habit and disciplinary induction? Or because they are convinced that only such knowledge is true knowledge or worth seeking? Or because it gives them a theoretical grip on other societies and the ability to lecture to them and guide their destinies? The first is lazy universalism and assumes what it is supposed to establish. The second is based on both valid and dubious assumptions which need to be distinguished and defended or rejected. The third is manipulative, aggressive and has a neo-colonial thrust.

Political theorists make universal statements and generalise about societies they have not studied. Prima facie this seems to be a case of intellectual arrogance, even dishonesty. Generally it is not so because it is based on the widespread belief that human beings are substantially the same the world over and that, if one knew one of them well enough, one was entitled to generalise about them all. This belief itself is rarely based on carefully collected evidence. Rather it is derived from, among other things, the assumption that human beings share a common nature and that culture is largely a superstructure built on it and lacking the power to transform it. This assumption assimilates the human to the natural world, and encourages the view that like the objects in the natural world, humans too form a single species, to know one specimen of which is to know others as well.

Other factors also play their part in encouraging the ethnocentric tendency. The political theorist is not a disembodied abstraction but a socio-historical being born and living within a particular social group during a particular historical period and having certain interests, hopes, anxieties and fears. His language, the cultural ethos of his society, his way of life, personal feelings and fears and his Lebenswelt profoundly influence him and structure his approach to the world in a way they do not that of a natural scientist. Furthermore he cannot theorise without an intimate grasp of his subject matter, and there is generally no other community he knows as well as his own. Whether he is defining or relating concepts or looking for examples or evidence, he needs to get his bearings from the real world and instinctively turns to one immediately accessible to him. His community’s problems again are his practical problems in daily life, and tend to become his theoretical problems as well. Since certain views, beliefs and forms of thought are an integral part of his lived world, and arc sometimes too deep for even the most probing self-consciousness, they appear natural and self-evident to him. They shape his hidden assumptions through the prism of which he views the world. At each stage of his inquiry, a political theorist makes assumption about a number of things such as the nature of human beings, rationality, the world around him, human behaviour and so on. He cannot be expected to be fully conscious of and justify all these assumptions which he uncritically takes over from his society. Insofar as this is so, his approach, however rigorous and critical it might otherwise be, remains uncritical, dogmatic and biased. The political theorist often sees the theoretical intellect as a neutral power rather than a socially structured capacity. Not surprisingly he rarely cares to ask who he is, where in history and society he is situated, what his deepest fears and cherished values are, how they shape his experiences and modes of thought and what assumptions he is likely to bring to his study of man and society.

From almost its very inception, Western political theory has set itself the task of discovering objective and universally valid truths about human life but without paying sufficient attention to whether and how the knowing subject can measure up to the task. In its view the way to do so is to rely on human reason believed capable of transcending the contingencies of life including self-interest, cultural influences, emotional attachments, and so on. The assumption is suspect because the philosopher is not and cannot hope to become disembodied reason . He grows up within and is shaped by his culture , has a gender, a country to belong to, a language in which he speaks, and attachments to his subject matter that are not contingent and discardable but partly constitutive of him. Given their misplaced confidence in the capacity of individual reason to rise above all human limitations and contemplate the world with divine detachment, political theorists take no steps to guard against and deal with their biases. Many of them think that all they need to do to avoid an ethnocentric bias is to be rigorous in their reasoning. This ignores the fact that their very style of reasoning, language of discourse, and categories of thought, all of which they largely accept uncritically, are often the carriers of the bias.

Another source of bias is their sanitised view of their discipline, which is constantly reinforced by peer group pressure and is built around certain common assumptions about what counts as facts, how to analyse and relate them, what questions to ask about them and what answers to consider satisfactory. Historical and political factors also play a part. Thanks to the legacy of colonialism , some societies and ways of life are considered advanced, representing the future of the backward societies, and enjoying the right to tell them how to lift themselves out of their backwardness. Since their allegedly advanced stage needs no further argument , the right to clothe their ethnocentrism in a universalist language appears self-evident to political theorists.

In spite of ruling over them for two centuries, or perhaps because of it, Western political theorists lack intimate knowledge of non-Western societies, and that too has been an important factor. Unlike the sociologists and even the economists, few political theorists have lived or taught outside the West and acquired direct knowledge of its ways of thought and life. Reading Hobbes , Locke , Rousseau , Kant and more recent thinkers such as Oakeshott , Rawls , Arendt , Voegelin, Nozick or Strauss , one would not know that there was a world outside the West. Not surprisingly their systems of thought remain parochial and West-centric, generalising about large questions of human existence on the basis of limited historical experience. It is striking that those such as Charles Taylor , Fred Dallmayr and others who have spent some time outside the West and maintain keen interest in its currents of thought are generally less prone to ethnocentrism . They tend to be extremely careful when making universal statements, make them only after a most stringent scrutiny, critically examine the deeper structure of thought underpinning their discipline and ensure that it does not institutionalise cultural and ethnic biases.

One other often unacknowledged source of bias today is the dominance of liberalism , basically though not entirely a universalisation of Western modernity and the culture associated with it. It has so deeply shaped modernity including our beliefs and practices that we find them obvious or self-evident, either take them for granted or are satisfied with their perfunctory and largely circular defence, and uncritically universalize them. Much of modern political theory assumes that individuals are the irreducible units of moral and political life, autonomy is the hallmark of their humanity, choice is the emblem of human freedom, reason is the highest human faculty, that justice is the first virtue in a social order, and that we should first work out a theory of justice and then define injustice in terms of it. Each of these is a problematic assertion and finds little support in the writings of Plato , Aristotle , Augustine , Aquinas , Hegel and Marx . One could say that there is no such thing as an individual , a self-contained, singular and internally unified moral agent. The individual is not given but a social construction, for he is necessarily related to other human beings and to nature, and it is a matter of social practice where to draw the boundary between him and them. In a tribal society he is inseparable from his tribe, and in ancient China from his family and ancestors. In the Middle Ages a craftsman’s tools were considered an integral part of him and he was not at liberty to sell them. For most liberals, the naturally given and biologically encapsulated individual possessing the formal powers of reason and will constitutes the individual . Since this is one of several possible ways of defining the individual , and not the most persuasive, it cannot be treated as self-evident and used as the basis of a universalist moral and political theory .

Let us take another example, the concept of choice so central to liberalism . It presupposes a chooser and a range of alternatives from which to choose, and neither is a matter of choice . The chooser is not a socially transcendental being but the product of a particular society, acquiring a particular character and attachments by the time he is able to make considered choices. His choices do of course reflect a measure of freedom, but equally they are shaped by the unexamined or only partially excavated past influences and never wholly free. As for the range of alternatives, they are created by society and are largely given. Although one can try to expand their range, this is not easy and calls for an organised effort by many which liberal individualism discourages. The ideas of autonomy , reason , rights , etc. too raise difficulties and need a far more careful defence than they generally receive from many a liberal writer.

There are of course many political theorists who do not consider themselves liberals and would disown that label. Probed further they too however are unable to transcend the liberal framework. Communitarians , for example, challenge some aspects of the liberal view of the individual but rarely offer an alternative to liberal democracy , the liberal emphasis on reason and rights , or the liberal approach to morality or functions of the government. Several leftwing thinkers criticise liberalism for its support of capitalism but remain uncritically committed to the liberal views of the individual , liberty , representation and rights . They do not see that these and related ideas provide the links between liberalism and capitalism and need questioning. All this shows how powerful and subtle the liberal hegemony can be and how difficult it is to break out of some of its constitutive beliefs.

Since liberalism has become the dominant standard of moral and political evaluation and all societies, values and ways of thought arc divided into liberal and non-liberal, everyone is anxious to appear a liberal and to legitimise even his radical departures from liberalism in liberal terms. The Marxists, radical socialists, conservatives and others, who were busy only a few years ago mounting powerful critiques of and exploring alternatives to liberalism , seem now to have convinced themselves that they too are liberals, albeit of leftwing or rightwing persuasions. As a matter of fact liberalism is too thin to provide the basis of a well-considered political theory . It is a civil and political doctrine and does not imply a particular epistemology or ontology. Even as a political doctrine, its value is limited. It asks us to choose but not what values should guide our choices, to delight in self-creation but not what kind of self to create, and it has little to say about personal morality and the kind of character one should cultivate and emotions and sentiments one should foster. Since liberalism cannot adequately explain why greed, exercise of dominations over others, possessiveness and accumulation of material goods are unworthy ends, it lacks the resources to criticise capitalism , consumerism, single-minded pursuit of wealth and other worrying features of modern life.

Liberal hegemony, like that of any other doctrine, has had several unfortunate consequences. It has restricted our political imagination , impoverished our psychological and moral resources, and eviscerated our philosophical vocabulary. It has turned liberalism into a metalanguage, enjoying the privileged status of being both a language like others and the arbiter of how other languages should be spoken, both a currency and the measure of all currencies. We find it difficult to cherish such great values as respect for human dignity , freedom, individuality and equality while remaining critical of liberalism , which is really only one way of defining, relating and defending them, or of liberal democracy , which is again one of several ways of institutionalising and living by them. Even as late as the 1960s Strauss , Oakeshott, Arendt , Popper and others valued free society but refused to equate it with liberal democracy . As a way of symbolising their critical distance from it, they called their preferred society not liberal but ‘free’, ‘open’, ‘rational’, ‘politically constituted community’ or ‘civil association’. One wonders if we can do so today without creating confusion or inviting incomprehension. When a philosophical vocabulary becomes identical with an unreflective popular discourse, and its central concepts lose their critical purchase on the prevailing reality, it is a sign that something philosophically and culturally important is lost.

Liberal domination has made liberal democracy a sacred icon one may never criticise. In fact liberal or liberalized democracy is a form of government in which liberalism is the dominant partner and democracy is defined and structured in terms of it.