The old vocabulary of citizenship is now defunct. The new one has yet to be coined. As represented by metaphysical liberalism, liberal moral ideals have often seemed to be part of a totalizing world view that was not only in competition with other totalizing world views, but also actively hostile to religious world views in particular. . New Problems with the Intelligibility of Liberal Democratic Citizenship Let us make sure that we understand the connection between what I call the rhetorical turn in liberal political philosophy and the issue of the intelligibility of the standpoint and norms proper to liberal democratic citizenship.
Liberal democracies make extraordinary cultural demands on their citizens.
They require that citizens develop and cultivate attitudes, dispositions, identities and moral capacities that do not just spontaneously occur among human beings. A civic culture is composed of discourses, narratives and representations of various sorts that are designed to promote among citizens the development and cultivation of civic capacities. Among the cultural resources available at least to modern forms of liberal democratic civic culture is the sort of discourse known as political philosophy. What I have called the rhetorical turn is a development affecting this particular discursive resource. I have called this development a rhetorical turn in order to characterize the sort of shift that has occurred.