Liberal democracies were established in England, America and France in the name of universal and natural human rights. These rights were claimed for all human beings, regardless of their religious beliefs, ethnicity, social class or nationality. Such claims were justified by modernist liberal political theories that produced demonstrations showing how liberal moral and political ideals are deducible from universally valid metaphysical conceptions of nature or reason. This dependence of liberal democracy, in its very self-conception, on the vocabulary and world view of the Enlightenment is what accounts for the peculiar difficulty involved in the project of recovering the particularistic cultural identity of the West. What gives the West its contemporary identity as a distinct civilization is its commitment to the political institutions and moral ideals of liberal democracy.
Western culture is today above all a culture of liberal democratic citizenship.
Yet, from its modern beginnings, this culture of citizenship has defined itself exclusively in terms of a universalist world view that rejects the cognitive and moral validity of culturally particularistic beliefs and moral ideals. All rights reserved.