Geertz’s Challenge: Is It Possible to Be a Robust Cultural Pluralist and a Dedicated Political Liberal at the Same Time?

We seem to be in need of a new variety of politics, a politics which does not regard ethnic, religious, racial, linguistic, or regional assertiveness as so much irrationality, archaic and ingenerate, to be suppressed or transcended . . . . It depends on developing a less simplistically demonizing, blankly negative attitude toward it as a relic of some savage or some early stage of human existence. It depends on adapting the principles of liberalism and social democracy, still our best guides for law, government, and public deportment, to matters with respect to which they have been too often dismissively reactive or uncomprehending; philosophically blind . . . . That is, a new approach depends on our gaining a better understanding of how culture, the frames of meaning within which people live and form their convictions, their selves, and their solidarities, comes to us an ordering force in human affairs.1