Universals and Particulars: the Case of Liberal Cultural Nationalism

Recent work in liberal political theory has rejected cosmopolitanism to incorporate the empirical agenda of nationalism and multiculturalism. In this article three issues facing cultural national liberalism are first extracted from Rawls's Political Liberalism: the range of reasonable cultural identities under liberalism; the substantive ethical bases of the state; and the possibility of principles of cultural self‐respect. I then examine three works which address these problems, Will Kymlicka's Multicultural Citizenship, David Miller's On Nationality, and Charles Taylor's ‘The Politics of Recognition’. Kymlicka provides principles of cultural self‐respect but is caught between conceptualising culture in universalist and particularist terms. Miller's liberal national state rests on shared meanings, but this serves to complicate the introduction of universal moral ideas. Taylor presents authenticity as an alternative self‐understanding to liberal autonomy, but I argue against the notion of cultural authenticity.