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DOI: 10.1177/0090591702239440 2003; 31; 92 Political Theory

David Scott Culture In Political Theory

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10.1177/0090591702239440POLITICAL THEORY / February 2003Scott / CULTURE IN POLITICAL THEORY

CULTURE IN POLITICAL THEORY

DAVID SCOTTColumbia University

To see the Other as culturally different is no cause for applause and self-congratulation. . . .This marks not a moral nor an intellectual victory but a great trivialization of the encounter withthe Other. . . . To say then that since we now see the non-European Other democratically asmerely having a different culture, as being fundamentally onlyculturally different, we have amore just idea of her, a less prejudiced and truer idea of her than did the nineteenth century whosaw her on the horizon of historical evolutionary development, the Enlightenment who saw heron the horizon of ignorance, or the Renaissance who saw her on the horizon of the demonical,would be merely to reaffirm the Eurocentric idea of the progress of knowledge; i.e., it would beto instantaneously, retroactively, and totally transform this work from being an archaeology ofthe different conceptions of difference into being, once again, a history of the progress ofanthropological knowledge and an affirmation and celebration of the teleology of truth.

Bernard McGrane, Beyond Anthropology, p. 129

It may be one of the paradoxical features of conceptual antagonisms thatthe determined rival to an existing hegemon, beginning with a bold and dra-matic sense of contrast, and of critical distinctiveness, grows over the longcourse of seeking to overcome its nemesis, to much look like it. I have beenintrigued for some time now by the contemporary inflation of culture, thatis, the post-1970s culture-as-constructed-meaning concept of culture; thegradual elevation of it into a sort of general-purpose concept such that in acurious way it has come to resemble (in some respects at least) its old and nowenfeebled antagonist, Reason. Not so very long ago, comparatively speaking,knowledge-claims about the Wests Others (I am using an admittedly crude

92

AUTHORS NOTE: An early version of this essay was read as a public lecture at Virginia Poly-technic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia, 15 March 2001. I am grateful toAnanda Abeysekera for organizing the occasion and to Stephen White for his provocative ques-tions and comments. I would also like to thank Talal Asad, Partha Chatterjee, Carlos Foment,Ritty Lukose, and Mahmood Mamdani for the extended critical conversation around this essay.Beyond Anthropology: Society and the Other, by Bernard McGrane, 1989 Columbia Univer-sity Press. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher.POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 31 No. 1, February 2003 92-115DOI: 10.1177/0090591702239440 2003 Sage Publications


shorthand here) were made and adjudicated in the rarefied name of this uni-versalistic view-from-everywhere Reason. Today this is easily recogniz-ableand rightly deploredas Eurocentrism, and therefore ruled inadmis-sible in any sophisticated discussion. Things have considerably changed inour historical and epistemic worlds and now culture has recommended itselfas the conceptual site both of the critique of Enlightenment Reason, and ofthe assertion and security of the epistemological privilege of local knowl-edge. I am, needless to say, the last person to deny the virtues of this displace-ment. Indeed I can hardly not-inhabit it myself. But I have been concerned tooffer a doubt that what culture-as-constructed-meaning (in either its morestandard Geertzian edition, or that of the postmodernists) has inaugurated isreally a new egalitarian era of knowledge-relations between the West and itsOthers. I have offered the contrary view and urged that the new democraticculture is as complicit with the assumption of the moral and epistemologicalprivilege of the West as Reason was. In my view, it too, if in altered historicalcircumstances, underwrites a liberal conception of how differences are to beviewed and regulated.1

In what follows I want to extend this argument somewhat. Here I aminterested in the way in which, in recent years, this concept of culture-as-constructed-meaning has assumed a special, even vital, place in Anglo-American political theory. A large and growing number of Western politicaltheorists now seem to feel compelled to take account of culture in order topursue and sustain a critical reflection on liberalism and democracy. It nowappears that fairness demands more than the neutrality offered by Rawlss ATheory of Justice, and that considerations of justice, freedom, citizenship,equality, and political community require respect for difference understoodas cultural identity. Such concepts as cultural rights, multiculturalism,the claims of diversity, the politics of difference, the politics of recogni-tion, and so on, mark the new preoccupation with culture among politicaltheorists. A little belatedly, some might think, nevertheless culture has nowvirtually become a term of art in the science of politics.

Consider, for example, one expression of this new awareness of the rele-vance of culture for liberal-democratic theorizingthat of Amy Gutmann,someone close enough to the middle in the contemporary debate about multi-culturalism. Gutmann suggests that liberal democracies have become, as sheputs it, sites of

controversy over whether and how its public institutions should recognize the identitiesof cultural and disadvantaged minorities.2

What does it mean, she asks,

Scott / CULTURE IN POLITICAL THEORY 93


for citizens with different cultural identities, often based on ethnicity, race, gender, orreligion, to recognize ourselves as equals in the way we are treated in politics? In the wayour children are educated in public schools? In the curricula and social policy of liberalarts colleges and universities?

And she goes on to conclude:

Recognizing and treating members of some groups as equals now seems to require publicinstitutions to acknowledge rather than ignore cultural particularities, at least for thosepeople whose self-understanding depends on the vitality of their culture. This require-ment of political recognition of cultural particularityextended to all individualsiscompatible with a form of universalism that counts the culture and cultural context val-ued by individuals as among their basic interests.3

There may be much in these remarks to comment on, but for my purposeshere I want to note just two features of Gutmanns appreciation of the rele-vance of culture for liberal political theory. The first has to do with the roleculture is to play as a conceptual index. In the view offered by Gutmann thereis a conjunction between culture and disadvantage. For her (as indeed forothers), culture marks an area of damage or injury or marginalization, andsignals simultaneously the idiom of a politics of repair or redress. In a recu-perative move that has become familiar in the human sciences a variety ofputatively harmed communitiesdefined in terms of race, gender, sexualorientation, ethnicity, and so onare thus enabled to find an affirmative shel-ter within the capacious ambit of culture.

The second notable feature has to do with the site of Gutmanns anxiety,namely, the public institutions of the North Atlantic liberal democracies.There is a very interesting way in which the crisis that brings culture to theattention of Anglo-American political theory has less to do with the geo-graphical and moral elsewheres that anthropologists have conventionallystudied,4 and more with the civic and moral centers that give point and sus-taining substance to the forms of life of liberal democracy. To put it anotherway, something of a displacement has occurred such that the contemporaryproblem about culture derives less from anthropologists going to non-Westernplaces (where after all she or he is more an observer of, than a participant in,someone elses way of life), and more from non-Western peoples coming tothe West in large numbers and making material claims on its institutions andresources. This displacement of the site of the problem of culture may bewhat Clifford Geertz (in so many ways the great signifier of the contemporaryage of culture-as-constructed-meaning) is alluding to when he says that todaydifference begins not at the waters edge, but at the skins.5 Indeed, this shiftin the locus of where culture matters may be one reason why anthropolo-

94 POLITICAL THEORY / February 2003


gistswhose disciplinary object culture supposedly ishave had so little tosay in the multiculturalism debate about justice, fairness, citizenship, andso on.6

The point, at any rate, is that for Western political theory culture nowseems very much indispensable. Why is this so? What are the conditions thathave occasioned this new demand in political theory? Are they primarilyepistemological conditions (shifts in theory-claims), or historical ones(geopolitical transformations)? It may well be said against the direction ofthese questions, of course, that it is not altogether true that the advent of cul-ture in political theory is a recent development. After all, so it may be insisted,from John Locke to the present liberal political theory has been concernedprecisely with the problem of uniformity and difference. Perhaps, but is theconcept of difference that organized the work of, say, Locke on religious tol-erance in the seventeenth century, David Hume on national character in theeighteenth, John Stuart Mill on individual liberty in the nineteenth, and IsaiahBerlin on value pluralism in the middle twentieth, either identical to eachother or the same as the one that organizes the late twentieth century work ofsuch multiculturalist political thinkers as James Tully, Charles Taylor, andWill Kymlicka? I am not so sure. I suspect that there is (if I may put it thisway) a difference. And indeed I want to wonder whether the difference isnt asignificant one. That is, I wonder whether the late twentieth century conceptof culture and the conditions that sustain it dont exercise a distinctive imper-ative on contemporary political theorists. Consequently it may be necessaryto ask: What is the nature of this demand for culture in contemporary politicaltheory? What are the contours of the concept of culture that it mobilizes toaddress this demand? To what extent are these contours and their generativeassumptions made explicit in the theorization about the political present?And insofar as they are not made explicit, what are the conceptual and ideo-logical effects on arguments about such matters as rights, justice, and com-munity in non-Western societies? These are some of the questions that framemy concern in this essay.

I shall take as my point of departure the argument about culture employedby James Tully in his provocative book, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutional-ism in an Age of Diversity.7 To my mind this book is one of the more signifi-cant attempts on the part of Western political philosophy to think the place ofculture in political theory. This is because Tully seeks to take the culturalclaims on the domain of the politicalas well as the cultural dimension of thepolitical itselfseriously, at least more seriously than many of his disciplin-ary colleagues do. It is true, of course, that thinkers such as Michael Walzer,Will Kymlicka, Chandran Kukathas, Joseph Carens, and Charles Taylor,have all variously mobilized some concept of culture, and sought in more or



less explicit ways to express ideas about what culture is or how it is to beunderstood. But to a large extent these thinkers are less interested in cultureper se than in identifying a culture-concept that best suits their political the-ory of liberal democracy.8 For Tully, however, culture has a measure of con-ceptual autonomy, which is why he pays anthropology the tribute of turningto it for guidance in specifying its field. In his view, there is a question of iden-tifying the kind of political arrangements that serve our best understanding ofthe way culture works.

Moreover, it seems to me that in a distinctively interesting and admirableway Tully wants to face up to the double aspiration of people to be free and tobe rooted, without compromising either to universalism or nativism. As wewill see, Tully is not concerned to simply endorse the liberal story of the rela-tion between culture and politics or between freedom and belonging. Hewaves no flag for liberalism.9 Again, for thinkers such as Walzer, Kymlicka,Kukathas, Carens, and Taylor, what is at stake is rethinking liberal democ-racyor, to put this another way, rethinking from the standpoint of liberaldemocracy. For them, in other words, the privileged status of liberal democ-racy is not itself in question. All that is required is a revaluation of differenceso as to enhance the claims of this particular organization of modern politicalcommunity. Tully, I think, has a wider and more critical agenda. He does notassume the standpoint of liberal democracy. Indeed he has an acute sense ofthe way in which the contemporary purchase of the liberal story, its attractive-ness and its authority, is itself an artifact of a particular (and hegemonic)political history. For these reasons, Tully is a particularly interesting theoristto think with.

At the same time I have reason to raise some questions about the culture-story that Tully employs to do the work of interrupting the authoritative nar-rative of this liberal history. As we will see, the culture-concept to whichTully is indebted is in fact a now familiar constructionist concept, one that hederives in the main from recent and not-too-recent moves in (largely the U.S.tradition of) anthropology. I do not agree that this concept is equal to Tullyshopes. But my aim in this, I want to make quite clear, is not to simply unmaskTullys culture-concept in some way. I am too deeply sympathetic to what, asI understand it, his general project is. I admire his idea of a constitution as aform of accommodation of cultural diversity, and his pursuit of theprocessual idea that a constitution is an intercultural dialogue in which theculturally diverse sovereign citizens of contemporary societies negotiateagreements on their forms of association over time in accordance with thethree conventions of mutual recognition, consent and cultural continuity(Strange Multiplicity [SM], p. 30). I can hardly think of a more attractive con-ception.10 I find congenial too an approach that seeks more to amend and



reconceive than to simply defend or reject existing arrangements sincethis embodies more a both/and than an either/or sort of logic, which seems tome more conducive to grasping a present in which the old rival certaintieshave vanished (SM, p. 31). Nor am I interested in further revising the culture-concept. To the contrary, part of my quibble with Tully stems from the factthat I am not as persuaded as he is that there is something to gain from this.And therefore I am not as enthusiastic as he is about the anthropology hethinks will liberate our understanding of difference and so enable hisreconceptualization of the relation between culture and politics to gain theground he envisages.

I am interested rather in something else, namely, trying to understandwhat some of the conditions are that make the new cultural turn sounreflexively attractive toindeed so casually seductive fordemocraticpolitical theorists like Tully. I am interested in the curious fact that Tully isinattentive to the ideological history of anthropologys culture. For if it is truethat Tully has no share in the triumphalist tone of so much contemporary lib-eral theorizingfrom Samuel Huntington to Richard Rortyhe neverthe-less certainly has a share (a large one) in the main background assumptionsabout the new naturalized space of culture. The suspicion that I would like toexplore here is that part of the appeal of the new culture-as-constructed-meaning concept is that it comports well with the new end-of-ideology con-ditions of liberal democratic discourse and practice; it comports well, that isto say, with what, in a different moment of cultural pluralism, Ruth Benedictcalled a world made safe for differences.11 I want to suggest that a morereflexively critical attentiveness to cultures conceptual history (indeed of thesort that Tully applies so rewardingly to his own discipline) would yield anappreciation of the conditions and possible limits of anthropologys culturefor political theory, and press us in the direction of more promising concep-tions of the relation between historically constituted ways of life and organi-zations of political community.

THE POLITICS OF CULTURAL RECOGNITION

To respond justly to the strange multiplicity of culturally diverse voices that have comeforward like so many Antigones to demand a hearing in the gathering dusk of the impe-rial age it is necessary to call into question and amend a number of unexamined conven-tions, inherited from the imperial age, that continue to inform the language ofconstitutionalism in which the demands are taken up and adjudicated. (SM, p. 34)

This is the central aspiration that governs James Tullys Strange Multiplicity.And it is especially suggestive of the direction and quality of Tullys preoccu-



pations and commitments, I think, that in articulating it he invokes theAntigone of Sophocles, because, as is well known, that tragedy thematizesprecisely the clash between two rival conceptions of justiceon the onehand, Antigones kin-centered and antistatist conception embodied in herdemand to bury the corpse of her dead brother Polyneices, and on the other,Creons authoritarian and secular rationalist conception embodied in hisrefusal to allow it on the grounds of Polyneices treachery against the city ofThebes.12

Strange Multiplicity is a work of theoretical reflection deeply indebted toCharles Taylors now famous essay The Politics of Recognition (first pub-lished in 1992), an essay of immense importance for the contemporary philo-sophical discussion of multiculturalism.13 Indeed Tully is indebted to muchin the humanist and pluralist spirit of Taylors political philosophy, and too, tomuch in his conceptual language and thematic preoccupations.14 Like Taylor,Tully is concerned to find an adequate theoretical response to the conditionsof the contemporary age, and in particular a way of engaging the politicaland constitutional problems thrown up by an acknowledgment of the irreduc-ible plurality of cultures and values. But Tullys work has other crucialsources and affiliations as wellamong them, Wittgensteins idea of lan-guage games,15 Michel Foucaults notions of genealogy and governmental-ity,16 Quentin Skinners rehistoricization of Europes political traditions,17and more recently Hannah Arendts conception of freedom and activecitizenship18sources and affiliations that take him some distance awayfrom the kind of endorsement of the Enlightenments rationality and Chris-tian teleology to which Taylor subscribes.19 So that although he does not sayso exactly (and perhaps would not say so), Strange Multiplicity can be read asan argumentfriendly yet critical, agonistic yet respectfulwith the yieldand the limit of Taylors philosophy of pluralism.

In considering Tullys argument, I shall not be concerned to set out anexhaustive account; only so much of it as will allow me to trace the lines of histraffic in culture.20 Strange Multiplicity is animated by the following ques-tion: What are the conditions for the constitutional recognition of culturaldiversity in a postimperial age? This, says Tully, is the most difficult andpressing question at the dawn of the twenty-first century. And he proceeds toanswer it by first articulating what he takes to be the new constitutionaldemands that characterize the politics of cultural recognition in the age ofdiversity. Careful to delineate the terms of his engagement, Tully advisesthat by politics of cultural recognition he means to gather together thebroad and various political activities which jointly call cultural diversity intoquestion as a characteristic constitutional problem of our time (SM, pp. 1-2).There are several such forms of political activity. Among these are nationalist



movements, multicultural (or as Tully prefers, intercultural) claims, femi-nist movements, and the demands of Aboriginal or Indigenous peoples. InTullys view, however, the struggles of Aboriginal peoples of the world, andespecially those of the Americas, for cultural survival and recognition are aspecial example of the phenomenon of the politics of cultural recognition(SM, p. 3), and it is these he focuses on.

These varied struggles are distinctive, Tully argues, because of the cul-tural claim they make on the domain of the political. Prior claims to recogni-tion have been offered in the all-embracing language of universalism. Bycontrast, these struggles for cultural recognition constitute, as he says, anaspiration for appropriate political forms of self-government. It constitutes ademand, in other words, to govern themselves in ways they deem consonantwith their traditions. From the point of view of these struggles, therefore, cul-ture is not separable from politics but is, on the contrary, an irreducibleaspect of it. Consequently, so far as these struggles are concerned, the institu-tions of modern constitutional society are unjust precisely to the extent thatthey do not enable the political embodiment of cultural traditions. As Tullyphrases it:

The diverse ways in which citizens think about, speak, act and relate to others in partici-pating in a constitutional association (both the abilities they exercise and the practices inwhich they exercise them), whether they are making, following or going against the rulesand conventions in any instance, are always to some extent the expression of their differ-ent cultures. A constitution can seek to impose one cultural practice, one way of rule fol-lowing, or it can recognize a diversity of cultural ways of being a citizen, but it cannoteliminate, overcome or transcend this cultural dimension of politics. (SM, pp. 5-6)

However, the problem, Tully maintains, is that the dominant traditions ofconstitutional interpretation have tended to assume an essentialist relationbetween cultures and nations, and between these and states. It is this assump-tion, he urges, that stands in need of revision. The principal reason why theseassumptions are flawed

is that they mis-identify the phenomenon of cultural diversity we are trying to under-stand. According to the concept of a culture (or nation) that developed with the formationof modern constitutionalism from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, a culture isseparate, bounded and internally uniform. Over the last forty years this billiard-ball con-ception of cultures, nations and societies has undergone a long and difficult criticism inthe discipline of anthropology. (SM, pp. 9-10)

This is the conjuncture for both the new demand and the new possibility of cul-ture for political theory, and it is the story Tully tells about it that interests me.



There are a number of authoritative sites for the new anthropologicalunderstanding of culture that Tully invokes, among them the work of MichaelCarrithers, (the late) Eric Wolf, Clifford Geertz, and James Clifford.21 On thenew view, cultures are now understood to be overlapping, interactive andinternally negotiated (SM, p. 10). However, they do not simply overlapgeographically:

Cultures are also densely interdependent in their formation and identity. They exist incomplex historical processes of interaction with other cultures. (SM, p. 11)

Moreover,

cultures are not internally homogeneous. They are continuously contested, imagined andre-imagined, transformed and negotiated, both by their members and through their inter-action with others. The identity, and so the meaning, of any culture is thus aspectivalrather than essential: like many complex human phenomena, such as language andgames, cultural identity changes as it is approached from different paths and a variety ofaspects come into view. (SM, p. 11)

As a consequence of the overlap, interaction, and negotiation of cultures, theexperience of cultural difference is internal to a culture. This, Tully says, isthe most difficult aspect of the new concept of culture to grasp:

On the older, essentialist view, the other and the experience of otherness were by defi-nition associated with another culture. Ones own culture provided an identity in the formof a seamless background or horizon against which one determined where one stood onfundamental questions. . . . On the aspectival view, cultural horizons change as onemoves about, just like natural horizons. The experience of otherness is internal to onesown identity, which consists in being oriented in an aspectival intercultural space. (SM,p. 13)

The trouble, however, is that despite the transformation in the understandingof cultures made possible by contemporary anthropology,

[political] theorists tend to continue to uphold variations of the old view, inherited fromthe age of imperialism, of humans as situated in independent, closed and homogeneouscultures and societies, and so to generate the familiar dilemmas of relativism and univer-salism that accompanied it. (SM, p. 14)

As I have said, I have elsewhere offered my skepticism about this new con-structionist conception of cultureboth the version of it associated withClifford Geertz as well as the one associated James Clifford. Withoutrehearsing the details of that argument here I will simply reiterate that this



characterization of culture is open to the question: For whom is culture par-tial, unbounded, heterogeneous, hybrid, and so on, the anthropologist or thenative? Whose claim is this, theorys or that of the discourse into which the-ory is inquiring? For surely on the very antifoundationalist grounds estab-lished by the new theory itself, the unboundedness or otherwise of culturecannot be something given but must, rather, be something that gets estab-lished in forms of authoritative discourse. So that whereas to stand on the apriori claim that culture is now partial rather than whole works well as a sub-versive claim turned against older essentialisms, as part of an ironic undoingof the meta-narratives of the West, it does less well as a principle upon whichto seek a new positive yield for a politics of difference.22

But I am less interested here in this incoherence than in the rather surpris-ing fact that Tully uncritically adopts the once-upon-a-time story about cul-ture it plays a role in. Where in the old daysbetween Hobbes and Rawls,lets saypolitical philosophy depended upon a falsethat is, essentialistconception of culture, now thanks to recent hard-won developments inanthropology there is a new and correct conception that will at once freepolitical philosophy of its prejudices and enable it to more adequately refor-mulate the problem of constitutionalism. The story has about it a curiouslyjust-so character. Between the seventeenth century inauguration of constitu-tionalist theory and the late twentieth century revolution in anthropology, sothis story goes, political theorists operated with the fallacious notion that cul-tures were internally homogeneous, immobile, self-enclosed, seamless, andso on. On this false conception of culture were built the great constitutionaltheories that have defined our political modernity. Indeed these constitutionaltheories are themselves false insofar as they have depended upon this errone-ous conception of culture. Now at last, however, we know what culture reallyis, namely, fluid, heterogeneous, partial, and so on. And therefore we can nowbegin to reconstruct a more adequate political theory of community for ourage of multiculturalism.

But what is all the more surprising and telling about this story is that wherethe language of constitutionalism is concerned Tully is incisively critical ofthese very progressivist assumptions, and employs a form of historical inves-tigation aimed precisely at making visible its ideological history. So that inturning his attention to the problem of the historicization of constitutional-ism, Tully urges the deployment of a form of historical critique developed byQuentin Skinner and John Dunn at Cambridge:

It consists in the historical application of Wittgensteins method of dissolving philosoph-ical problems not by presenting yet another solution, but by a survey which brings to crit-



ical light the unexamined conventions that govern the language games in which both theproblem and the range of solutions arise. (SM, p. 35)

This, of course, is not only an application of Wittgensteins doctrine regard-ing the background language game or form of life, but a version of R. G.Collingwoods notion that to properly understand any proposition it is neces-sary to grasp the question to which it is an answer. Skinner, in the well-knownreply to his critics, has acknowledged how crucial this idea has been for hishistorical method.23 Like Foucaults genealogy, this form of historical cri-tique is aimed at disrupting the seeming transparency of the present; it aims,as Skinner has put it in a more recent formulation, to liberate us from any onehegemonal account of values, and to enable us to stand back from the intel-lectual commitments we have inherited and ask ourselves in a new spirit ofenquiry what we should think of them.24 In the context of his own particularconcern, Tully argues, the application of this method

consists in a survey of the language employed in the current debate over recognition inorder to identify the shared conventions (the distinctions, concepts, assumptions, infer-ences and assertability warrants that are taken for granted in the course of the debate)which render recognition problematic and give rise to the range of conflicting solutions.(SM, p. 35)

This methodological move is then crucial to the story Tully tells about thelanguages that constitute contemporary constitutionalism: the story of therise of the hegemonic modern language on the one hand, and of the subor-dinate common language on the other.

But evidently Tully does not think that he is obliged to make the samehistoricizing move for anthropologys object, culture, that he deems neces-sary for political philosophys. Unlike political philosophys object, the con-stitution, so it appears, culture has an unproblematic history, one is tempted tosay, an almost natural history. It is simply there, unfolding, having alreadybeen revolutionized, having already, perhaps, had its unsettling and revivify-ing encounter with Wittgenstein. There is apparently no need to inquire intothe shared conventions (the distinctions, concepts, assumptions, and so on) ofthe language or the discourse of culture that lend it the enabling or converselydisabling qualities it is assumed to have. It is enough to affirm (by invokingthe names of a number of distinguished anthropological authorities) that apositive shift has taken place that has finally and gratifyingly supplied culturewith the conceptual character it should have had all alonga shift apparentlyperceived as a matter of progress in intellectual history. Whereasconstitutionalism has its ruses, culture is transparent.



Now, again, my concern here is not to suggest that (say, speaking as ananthropologist) Tully has gotten culture wrong. Indeed, the trouble, I fear, isthat he has culture rightthat is to say, he is speaking the now normalizedtruth of (anthropologys) culture. My concern, rather, is to understand how sodiscerning and insightful a thinker as Tully is where political history is con-cerned could be so blind to cultures history. What concerns me here, there-fore, is less whether this view of culture is warranted or coherent, and morethe surprisingly unreflected-upon progressivist assumptions this story of theavailability and accomplishments of the new culture concept rests ontheassumption, for example, of the particular privilege of the vantage of the pres-ent that makes it possible for Tully, at the end of the twentieth century, to seewhat Hobbes, that great seventeenth-century inaugurator, did not.25 I believethat part of the problem here is that in a curious way Tully has overlooked partof the ideological history of his own present. But before I come to what seemto me the dimensions of this present overlooked by Tully, I want to make adetour through a kind of historicization that brings into relief the larger prob-lem of the contemporary naturalization of culture.

DOES CULTURE REALLY EXIST?

As my epigraph will have suggested, Bernard McGrane would like toinspire some misgivings about the kinds of assumptions that underlie Tullysjust-so story about culture. More than a decade ago he wrote a short andunsettling book titled Beyond Anthropology.26 Hardly anyone seems to havenoticed it. An almost fiercely Foucauldian book (after the fashion of TheOrder of Things), McGrane was concerned to write an epistemic history ofthe different conceptions of difference between the sixteenth and the earlytwentieth centuries. It was, he said, an archaeology of anthropology formu-lated around the question: Does culture really exist? In other words, in thesame way that Foucault set out to question the seeming positivity or self-presence of man within the human sciences, McGrane sought toproblematize the seeming positivity or transparency of culture within theauthoritative discourse of difference.

In the democratic imagination of contemporary anthropology (indeed inthe democratic imagination of contemporary Western discourse generally)the being of culture, the otherness of the Other as culture, is taken for granted.We now, literally, experience difference as culture. However, the differenceof the non-European Other, McGrane argues, deploying the early Foucaultsschema of historical discontinuity has not always been interpreted on thehorizon of culture. Within the Renaissance order of knowledge, for example,



the difference of the non-European Other was experienced and interpreted onthe horizon of Christianity, specifically the Christianity lacked by the Other.In the Enlightenment an alteration took place in the paradigm for interpretingand experiencing the Otherness of the non-European Other and differencecame to be experienced on the horizon of Ignorance, the absence of reason. Inthe nineteenth century, this paradigm altered once more. As McGrane puts it,there occurred a vast hemorrhage of time: geological time, evolutionarytime, developmental time lodged itself between the European and the non-European Other. Race, famously, is the master concept of this organizationof difference.

In the early twentieth century (which in certain respects, perhaps, is notyet over), the reigning paradigm through which the difference of the Other isinterpreted and explained undergoes another mutation. In this century cul-ture emerges as what accounts for the difference of the Other. Culture nowbecomes the universal ground and grid and horizon of difference. It becomes,so to speak, the commanding natural language of difference. A number offeatures distinguish the new concept from the old one: among them, the inter-nalization of historicity, behavioral determinism, plurality and holistic inte-gration, and epistemological relativism. In the nineteenth century, time was,so to speak, exterior to, or prior to, difference, providing an abstract develop-mental or evolutionary scheme in terms of which difference was seriallyarranged and classified in a progressively ascending order. In the twentiethcentury, by contrast, this vertical model is displaced by a lateral one in whichdifference comes to be organized as a kind of mosaic of parallel ensembles,each constituting an integrated whole with its own rhythm and style, but alloccupying, nevertheless, a single horizontal plane. In this organization ofknowledge, time and history have not been abolished. They have only enteredconcretely into the interior of difference. The story of the inauguration ofBoasian anthropology (or at least, George Stockings splendid account of thecontribution of Franz Boas to the rise of the culture concept) is much the storyof this alteration.27

This new world was now seen to consist of a plurality of historically con-ditioned cultural wholes. In anthropologys autobiography, of course, thisepistemological relativism and the democratic sensibility of pluralism it sus-tains, is represented and appraised as a fundamental emancipation after thelong disgrace of nineteenth-century racism. But the assumptions of thisprogressivist story are precisely what McGrane wishes to query. Forepistemological relativism provided the new concept of culture with its ownspecial theory of privileged representations. The possibility of seeing all dif-ference as merely and fundamentally relative depends upon an omniscientepistemological vantage from which (and of course in relation to which) all



difference is simultaneously available to a detached, surveying gaze whichitself is not relative. And the new concept could achieve this because one ofthe basic values of anthropologys culture, and one of the basic values thatanthropology has in turn enabled it to theorize, is that basic values are rela-tive.28 As McGrane writes:

From the anthropological perspective, one of the basic values of our culture is that it andits basic values are relative, i.e., that it is one culture among many essentially unrelatedcultures. (Beyond Anthropology, p. 120)

In other words, anthropologys culture

knows that it is one-among-many, knows that it is relative, and further, it values thisknowledge (this knowledge is one of its basic values), i.e., it locates its own superiority(knowledge) in this knowledge of its relativity, as it likewise locates inferiority (igno-rance) in ignorance of this relativity. (Beyond Anthropology, p. 120).

Or again:

Our knowledge lies in the fact that we recognize, not, as in the Enlightenment, our igno-rance, but rather our relativity: our relativity and their relativity, whereas their ignorancelies now in their cultural absolutism. (Beyond Anthropology, p. 121)

The new relativism, in short, depended on an old absolutism.It may well be that there is nothing new in this unmasking of relativisms

pretensions to innocence. And McGranes account has its own neat story line,a schematic picture of successive cognitive or epistemic orders unconnectedto any social formation or social practiceall the limitations that ledFoucault to abandon archaeology for genealogy in the 1970s. My point indrawing on this account, therefore, is not to commend it uncritically. Rather itis to highlight the contemporary normalization of the terrain of the culture-concept on which Tully operates, its taken-for-grantedness, its seeming natu-ralness as the idiom in which difference speaks to us, and the progressivismthat this gives rise to. My point is to worry about the curious way in whichTully, a thinker otherwise so self-consciously attentive to what Foucaultwould call the historicity of modes of problematizations, could be troubledonly by the question of choosing between competing conceptions of culture,rather than about the terrain of culture-discourse as such. And my concern informulating this disquiet is to raise a doubt about at least one crucial assump-tion that undergirds the story Tully tells about political theory from Hobbesand Locke to the present, namely the assumption that the problem with earlymodern constitutionalists is that they lacked an adequate or correct theory of



culture, and that this ignorance had fatal consequences for their conception ofthe process of constitution making. For if McGrane is right that culture, asground and horizon of difference, is merely the most recent way of conceiv-ing and explaining otherness, of putting otherness in its place, and that, in vir-tue of this, the past, even the recognizably modern past, cannot be simply readin terms of its proximity to this distinctive way of organizing and interpretingdifference, then Tullys story of culture in political theory has to be revised. Inother words, if McGrane is right it is by no means clear that the relevant regis-ter of difference for Hobbes should have been a cultural one. And conse-quently there may be nothing (and indeed less than nothing) to be gainedfrom lamenting the fact that early modern constitutionalists had a narrow oranyway an unsatisfying conception of it.

THE GEERTZ-EFFECT

I want to reiterate that I am not concerned here to argue the case againstTullys understanding of culture as such, to deliberate its coherence, and evenless am I concerned here to offer an improvement in its place. I am concernedmerely to explore the conditions of his unreflected-upon assumption that thenew revolution in anthropologys culture will at last free political philosophyof its imperial voice. Tully is of course not wrong that a new concept of cul-ture has come to animate anthropological discourse in recent decades. This iswhy in the story he tells the culture moment that enables his political theory isnot the founding moment of Franz Boas, nor indeed the successive momentsof the great Boasiansfrom Edward Sapir and Ruth Benedict to MargaretMead and Melville Herskovits and Alfred Kroeberwho have followedhim, but rather a more contemporary, if equally spectacular, moment: themoment of Clifford Geertz.

The explicit assimilation or appropriation of the concept of culture bypolitical theory has been made possible, as Tully rightly argues, by transfor-mations within the discourse of culture itself. These transformations are nowoften referred to as the cultural turn. The cultural turn is at once a turn toculture in a range of disciplines outside of anthropology (such as politicaltheory) that hitherto did not think of culture as their object-domain, and a turnin the concept itself (both inside and outside of anthropology) and in its placein the understanding of human life. The story of this turn is perhaps analready familiar one to many (the rise of such subdisciplinary formations ascultural history, cultural studies, cultural geography, and so on, indicate it),29and therefore there will be little need for me to do more here than rehearse itsoutline in such a way as to bring into view the epistemological, but more



importantly, the moral-political appeal of the distinctive culture-concept itsupports and commends. I shall suggest that at least part of the appeal of thecultural turn to political theorists like James Tully is that it elaborates a con-ception of difference that comports well with a world order in which deepideological conflicts are of diminished and diminishing significance. I want,in other words, to tell the story of this new conjuncture of culture in a way thatconnects the Geertz-effect (as I will call it) to the ideological problem-spaceof postcold war North Atlantic liberalism.

The story of the cultural turn in the United States is often told as a norma-tive epistemological occasion, as a story of the progressive displacement ofthe positivist social science paradigm of the 1950s and 1960s by a hermeneu-tic one in the 1970s and 1980s, a shift from a top-down paradigm of inquiry toa more democratic and humanist one. The idea that human behavior is gov-erned by law-like determinationsof causality and functionand that thetask of the social sciences is to go out and unearth these laws, gave way to themore benign, more people-friendly idea that human behavior is shaped by theconstruction of meaning and that the task of the human sciences is to interpretthese constructed-meanings.30 In Benedict and Mead and Herskovits, ofcourse, the anthropological concept of plural cultures had already establisheditself, but in this alteration or reorientation of the human sciences culturecame to assume a hitherto nonexistent prominenceindeed, soon, much likereason before it, it became the metaconcept able to trump all other concepts.From the relative obscurity of its anthropological enclave, and from under thespecialized disciplinary methodologies required to make it visible (the proto-cols of ethnography), culture came to be seen not merely as one exemplifica-tion of constructed-meaning, but the overdetermining paradigmatic instanceof it. And in this story, of course, it is the anthropologist Clifford Geertz who,more than any other single U.S. scholar, plays the leading dramatic role inboth exemplifying and helping to constitute the cultural turn.31

In the two volumes of essays on which a large share of his reputation rests,The Interpretation of Cultures and Local Knowledge (published in 1973 and1983, respectively), Geertz helped to produce a double effect on culture: one,an alteration in the conceptual and methodological dimensions of culture;and the other a transformation in its place in the overall understanding ofhuman thought and behavior.32 First, Geertz redescribed the Parsonian ideaof culture-as-symbolic-action in a constructionist idiom. As he put itfamously, what we call our data are really our constructions of other peo-ples constructions of what their compatriots are up to.33 Thisconstructionism was underlined by a methodological antifoundationalismaccording to which ethnographic fieldwork was no longer a privileged matterof truth-finding in which there was a clear epistemological and moral superi-



ority of anthropologist over native informant, but an extended and edifyingconversation between epistemological and moral equals. Geertz in effectsought to reorient anthropology in precisely the same direction (and in almostexactly the same language) as Richard Rorty was to do for Anglo-Americanphilosophy a few years later.34 The importance of this constructionist idiom isthat it subverted what was left of the imperial presumption of cultural hierar-chy that clung to the postwar paradigm of inquiry, and brought the Other for-ward onto the stage as a fully autonomous agent, a maker and remaker of heror his own culture-history.

Second, Geertz recast the problematic of culture in a literary-textual meta-phor. Culture was neither a merely behavioral nor a mental domain, but apublic semiotic one, analogous to a novel, a poem, a play. It was itself inter-pretation and could be approached properly only in a hermeneutical attitude.This redescription of culture as text had a paradoxical upshot, however, forwhile the initial intention had been to help regain some disciplinary controlover the concept from the splendid vagaries of E. B. Tylors unwieldy com-plex whole, it in fact had the opposite effect.35 The concept now becameunhinged from its specific disciplinary objectification and came to be recog-nized as merely and fundamentally an aspect or dimension of all humanactivities. And with this a curious displacement in its analytic locationoccurred. From the foreground in which it had for several decades been anexplicit object over which rival anthropological theories contentedevolu-tionary, materialist, symbolic, psychoanalytic, functionalist, and so onthenew culture-as-constructed-meaning became part of the general and genera-tive background from which theory (anthropological as much as any other)formulated its concerns. In short, the new culture was no longer the object tobe problematized (by a specialist discipline) so much as the constructedspace or idiom in terms of which other problematizations or theproblematizations of other objects took place.

It is this naturalization of the idiom of constructionism and the relocationof culture as ground of investigation that together constitutes the conceptualGeertz-effect. (Geertz of course would himself later be criticized by thepostmodern theorists of writing cultureJames Clifford most subtleamong themwho would find his attention to authoriality, perspectivalism,power, and so on, conceptually undertheorized and politically complicit withthe status quo. But it is important to understand here that in their own meta-anthropological discontent these postmoderniststhe Left Geertzians, wemight call themwere not so much breaking with the spell of the Geertz-effect as underlining and extending the logic of the semiotic conception ofculture-as-constructed-meaning.36) This is the conceptual alteration in theculture-concept that Tully merely marks as a threshold in his progressivist



narrative. What, though, is the ideological problem-space in which the appealof this concept of culture might be understood? What cognitive-politicaldemand might it be thought of as answering?

As I have suggested, the suspicion I have is that culture-as-constructed-meaning answers an ideological demand for a postideological conception ofdifference. I can best elaborate this suspicion by briefly contrasting the postcold war moment of the Geertz-effect with the cold war one ChristopherShannon describes for Ruth Benedicts classic work, The Chrysanthemumand the Sword.37 This too was a moment in which the rhetoric of culturaldiversity and pluralism was gaining considerable prominence in the UnitedStates, and in which anthropology played a not-insignificant role. It is impor-tant to remember that prior to World War II, the liberal democratic claim onbehalf of cultural diversity was a comparatively weak one. In the climate ofaggressive assimilationism that followed World War I, work such as HoraceKallens Culture and Democracy in the United States (published in 1924, theyear Congress suspended the great migration that had begun in the 1880s)remained largely neglected.38 Kallen virtually invented the phrase culturalpluralism. However, the concerted battle against the Nazi state in Germanyand the Communist one in the Soviet Union gave rise to a new preoccupationwith liberal democracy as precisely the embodiment of pluralism and culturaltolerance. For many differently oriented philosophers and political theoristsof the late 1940s and 1950samong them Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin,Jacob Talmon, Karl Popper, and Friedrich Hayekthe central feature oftotalitarianism was its repression of diversity, its monolithic lack of open-ness, its intolerance of pluralism.

This is the context of Ruth Benedicts memorable The Chrysanthemumand the Sword, published in 1946, two years before her death. Benedict is ananthropologist whose work bears many comparisons with Geertzs. Whileneither Geertz nor his Harvard teachers (Talcott Parsons and ClydeKluckhohn) thought very highly of Franz Boas, there is a clear line that con-nects him to Benedict, Boass student and assistant.39 Indeed Geertz has writ-ten feelingly in tribute of the poetics of her anthropology.40 Most amongBoasians, Benedict was attentive to the formal, stylistic features of culture, towhat, in the title of her more famous prewar book, she called patterns of cul-ture.41 Like her teacher and her fellow Boasians she was also a vigorous pro-ponent of cultural relativism and the virtues of diversity; and during the war,she, like many liberal U.S. scholars, dedicated herself to the fight for democ-racy, which was perceived as synonymous with a fight against fascism andcommunism. In 1943 she went to work for the Overseas Intelligence divisionof the Office of War Information preparing cultural profiles.



The Chrysanthemum and the Sword grew out of one such profile, and wasone of the early postwar texts to advance a comprehensive argument for cul-tural diversity. Beginning with the claim that the Japanese were the mostalien enemy the United States had ever engaged militarily, Benedict set outa plea for an intercultural understanding with many resonances in Geertz. Shecriticized the cultural imperialism of early twentieth century assimila-tionism, advocating a more reflexive self-consciousness about culture thatwould enable more rational choices to be made concerning the peace andprosperity of the globe. As Shannon remarks, Benedict demanded, not thatJapanese become Americans (as the old imperialism demands), but that theybecome anthropologists. That is, her book urged that the Japanese cultivatethe kind of detachment from their cultural values that enables appraisal andflexibility in relation to it:

It demands that the Japanese learn to view their culture with a certain scientific detach-ment and to see their received values as relative and therefore open to revision in the ser-vice of consciously chosen ends. Ultimately, the imperial vision of Benedicts worldmade safe for differences lies not in any covert imposition of American values on theJapanese but in the overt and uncompromising call for the subordination of all cultures tothe demands of individual choice.42

At the same time, however, even though Americans and Japanese were beingheld to the same (anthropological) standard, it was nevertheless clear thatthey did not inhabit the same proximity to it. Whereas Japanese cultural val-ues were, in fundamental ways, antipathetic to the standard of individualautonomy required for detached appraisal, and thus required fundamentalreform, Americans only had a few superficial adjustments to make in order tolive up to what was already a basic value.

In short, for cold war liberal anthropologists like Benedict the conceptionas well as the promotion of cultural diversity was fundamentally shaped bythe ideological antagonism of a world polarized around totalitarianism anddemocracy, and the duty to advance the interests of the latter over the former.Making the world safe for differences depended both upon a greater opennessto diversity and on conformity to certain metavalues (relativism and theautonomous self needed to secure its vantage) that were constitutive ofAmerican individualism. For Benedict, in other words, making the worldsafe for differences depended upon the reinscription of a cultural hierarchythat assigned tacit priority to American values. By contrast, the end of thecold war and the end of the ideological antagonisms that constituted its moralgeography have released liberals from the old defensive attitude to the prior-ity of American values and enabled a more permissive openness to the other-ness of the Wests Others, and a more cosmopolitan rehabilitation or recon-



struction of the commitment to pluralism. Today, as Richard Rorty has arguedwith breathless cogency, liberal commitments require no thoroughgoingargument, no first-order rationale to clinch the claim for the superiority of itsform of life. Daniel Bells end of ideology, then, is not the same as FrancisFukuyamas. Consequently, there is no longer, as there was for Ruth Bene-dict, a systematic conceptual labor necessary to make the world safe for dif-ferences. Our post-Communist and post-Bandung world is already such aseeming world. It is with this world that the idiom of culture-as-constructed-meaning comports well, a world in which difference is no longer connectedto utopian visions of alternative futures, a world in which the otherness of theOther can be edifying without being threatening to the order of things. It is therapid normalization of this world, I suggest, that makes it possible for Tully toneglect the ideological history of culture.

To sum up: I have been concerned to notice the way Western political the-ory (or at least some quarters of it) has sought to pay more attention to differ-ences in historically constituted ways of life. To my mind, works like JamesTullys Strange Multiplicity are significant attempts to imagine apostimperial political philosophy. But at the same time I have been concernedabout the implications of the discrepancy between the careful attention to theideological history of claims about the political and the inattention to theideological history of claims about culture. Culture in political theoryremains oddly undertheorized, oddly underhistoricized; it is merely and fun-damentally there, like a nonideological background, or a natural horizon. Thesuspicion I have offered about this is that the new culture-as-constructed-meaning that, as part of the Geertz-effect, became the normal vocabulary ofcultural difference (indeed, of difference as such) in the last decades of thetwentieth century, answered more than a transdisciplinary demand to dis-place or overcome the reductiveness and positivism of 1950s social science.This it did, to be sure. But in a postcold war world now assumed to be safefor differences it answered also an ideological demand for a post-ideologicalconception of democratic pluralism, a cosmopolitan idiom in which the oth-erness of the Wests Others, once a source of defensive anxiety and the objectof truth-determining investigations, could now be understood conversation-ally, antiessentially, ironically, as mere difference. To my mind, it is the seem-ing self-evidence of this moral demand, a self-evidence secured by the endof ideology, that licenses Tullys assumption that in culture-as-constructed-meaning political philosophy has at last found the conceptual means of liber-ating itself from its service to imperial power.



NOTES

1. This argument was set out some years ago in David Scott, Criticism and Culture: Theoryand Post-Colonial Claims on Anthropological Disciplinarity, Critique of Anthropology 12(1992): 371-94.

2. Amy Gutmann, ed., Introduction, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recog-nition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 3.

3. Ibid., 5.4. Arjun Appadurai, Theory in Anthropology: Center and Periphery, Comparative

Studies in Society and History 28 (1986): 356-57. Appadurai puts it nicely when he writes: Atleast since the latter part of the nineteenth century, anthropological theory has always been basedon the practice of going somewhere, preferably somewhere geographically, morally, andsocially distant from the theoretical and cultural metropolis of the anthropologist. The science ofthe other has inescapably been tied to the journey elsewhere.

5. Clifford Geertz, The Uses of Diversity, Tanner Lectures on Human Values 7 (1986):261. The puzzles about cultural diversity, Geertz is saying, are no longer merely to be foundat the boundary of our society, but at the boundaries of ourselves. Foreignness does not start atthe waters but at the skins.

6. Two exceptions are two Marxist anthropologists: William Roseberry, Multiculturalismand the Challenge of Anthropology, Social Research 59 (1992): 841-58; and Terence Turner,Anthropology and Multiculturalism: What Is Anthropology That Multiculturalists Should BeMindful of It? Cultural Anthropology 8 (1993): 411-29. Their Marxism may not be irrelevant totheir discontent.

7. James Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge,UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995) (originally the inaugural John Robert Seeley Lecturesdelivered at the University of Cambridge in 1994). Seeley, it is useful to remember, was a scholarof English history who wrote a famous book called The Expansion of England.

8. I have in mind here work such as, Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: BasicBooks, 1983); Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (New York: Oxford University Press,1995); Chandran Kukathas, Cultural Toleration, Ethnicity and Group Rights: NOMOS XXXIX,ed. Ian Shapiro and Will Kymlicka (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 69-104;Joseph Carens, Culture, Citizenship, and Community (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press,2000); and Charles Taylor, The Politics of Recognition, Multiculturalism: Examining the Poli-tics of Recognition, ed. Amy Guttman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 25-73.

9. Unlike political theorists such as Will Kymlicka and Chandran Kukathas, both of whom(whatever their differences) seek a resolution to the culture/politics conundrum within explicitlyliberal terms. See Chandran Kukathas, Are There Any Cultural Rights? Political Theory 20(1992): 105-39; Will Kymlicka, The Rights of Minority Cultures: Reply to Kukathas, PoliticalTheory 20 (1992): 140-46; and Chandran Kukathas, Cultural Rights Again: Rejoinder toKukathas Political Theory 20 (1992): 674-80. I have commented on aspects of this exchange ina preliminary way in David Scott, Toleration and Historical Traditions of Difference, Subal-tern Studies, vol. 11, Community, Gender and Violence, ed. Partha Chatterjee and PradeepJeganathan (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2000), 283-304.

10. For some sense of my sympathy for the kind of argument Tully advances, see DavidScott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-sity Press, 1999), esp. chap. 7.

11. Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946), 15. See also Christopher Shannons discussion in his AWorld Made Safe for Differences: Ruth Benedicts The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, Ameri-



can Quarterly 47 (1995): 659-80. The general argument has been expanded into the book AWorld Made Safe for Differences: Cold War Intellectuals and the Politics of Identity (Lanham,MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 2001).

12. As close readers of the Antigone are well aware, however, Sophocles does not suggest astraightforward celebration of Antigone as against Creon. Indeed the tragedy arises in part pre-cisely because of Antigones own unyielding and one-sided attachment to an equally abstractif differently affiliatedconception of justice. For useful discussions of this aspect of theAntigone, see Charles Segal, Tragedy and Civilization: An Interpretation of Sophocles (Norman:University of Oklahoma Press, 1981); and Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luckand Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,1986).

13. Charles Taylor, The Politics of Recognition.14. See, for example, James Tully, ed., Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism: The Philosophy of

Charles Taylor in Question (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994).15. See James Tully, Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy, Political Theory 17 (1989):

172-204.16. See James Tully, Governing Conduct, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in

Contexts (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 179-241; see also his To Thinkand Act Differently: Foucaults Four Reciprocal Objections to Habermas Theory, FoucaultContra Habermas: Recasting the Dialogue between Genealogy and Critical Theory, ed.Samantha Ashenden and David Owen (London: Sage, 1999), 190-241.

17. See James Tully, The Pen Is a Mighty Sword, Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinnerand His Critics ed. James Tully (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 7-25.

18. See James Tully, The Agonic Freedom of Citizens, Economy and Society 28 (1999):161-82.

19. Taylors Christianity and Hegelianism are well known. For an interesting comment seeIsaiah Berlins Introduction, Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism: The Philosophy of CharlesTaylor in Question, ed. James Tully (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 1-3.

20. For a sympathetic account see David Owen, Political Philosophy in a Post-ImperialVoice: James Tully and the Politics of Cultural Recognition, Economy and Society 28 (1999):520-49.

21. See Michael Carrithers, Why Humans Have Cultures: Explaining Anthropology andSocial Diversity (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1992); Eric Wolf, Europe and the Peo-ple without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Clifford Geertz, The Inter-pretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973); and James Clifford, The Predicament ofCulture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). With the exception of Carrithersacurious, almost anomalous, choice in many respects, since this book, and his others as well, areconventional to a remarkable degreethese thinkers have had an enormous impact on the direc-tions of North American anthropology in the last decade and a half.

22. See Scott, Culture and Criticism, 375-78. Readers of Alasdair MacIntyres Three RivalVersions of Moral Inquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame, IN: Univer-sity of Notre Dame Press, 1990), will be familiar with his doubts about the posture of subversion.

23. Skinner, Reply to My Critics, Meaning and Context.24. See Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University

Press, 1998), 117.25. I agree with Owen, Political Philosophy in a Post-Imperial Voice, that more (and

better) than other works of its kind Tullys teaches political philosophy to speak in a post-imperial tone of voice (p. 547). But like Tully himself Owen simply glides over the problem ofculture with which I am concerned.



26. Bernard McGrane, Beyond Anthropology: Society and the Other (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1989).

27. See George W. Stocking Jr., ed., Franz Boas and the Culture Concept in Historical Per-spective, Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (Chicago: Uni-versity of Chicago Press, 1968), 195-233.

28. This is also one of the themes of Shannons A World Made Safe for Differences.29. For a collection of essays by various authors who have taken the cultural turn and are

now assessing it, see, Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn (Berke-ley: University of California Press, 1999).

30. There is, parenthetically, an important converging story to be told here about the vicissi-tudes of Marxism, still in the 1960s and 1970s the reference point for any oppositional criticism.In the postwar years, an economistic Marxism gave way to a New Left Marxism more interestedin superstructures, in the meaning-domains of ideology and consciousness. The influence ofthe work of Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser and Raymond Williams, for instance, helpedto urge U.S. Marxist anthropologists in the direction of a constructionist conception of culture.

31. For an appreciative discussion of Geertzs contribution see Sherry Ortner, Introduc-tion, The Fate of Culture: Geertz and Beyond, ed. Sherry Ortner (Berkeley: University of Cali-fornia Press, 1999), 1-13. For a more general account of the rise of the anthropological conceptof culture, one very critical of Geertz, see Adam Kuper, Culture: The AnthropologistsAccount(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

32. The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), collects essays first pub-lished between 1957 and 1972; and Local Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1983), collectsessays originally published between 1974 and 1982.

33. Clifford Geertz, Thick Description, Interpretation of Cultures, 9.34. I am thinking, of course, of Richard Rortys Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Prince-

ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), chap. 8, Philosophy without Mirrors, in which hedevelops the contrast between systematic and edifying philosophy.

35. Geertz, Thick Description, Interpretation of Cultures, 4.36. The classic text that defines this moment of criticism is of course, James Clifford and

George Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Politics and Poetics of Ethnography (Berkeley: Uni-versity of California Press, 1986).

37. See Shannon, A World Made Safe for Differences.38. Horace Kallen, Culture and Democracy in the United States (New York: Boni and

Liveright, 1924). For normative discussions of Kallen, see David Hollinger, Postethnic America(New York: Basic Books, 1995), 92-93; and Michael Walzer, What It Means to Be an American(New York: Marsilio, 1992), 63-64. For a finely polemical discussion see Russell Jacoby, TheEnd of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

39. See Richard Handler, An Interview with Clifford Geertz, Current Anthropology 32(1991): 609. The image of Boas himself was of someone who collected fish recipes. There wasa feeling that he meant well but that he didnt think much.

40. See Clifford Geertz, Us/Not-Us: Benedicts Travels, Works and Lives: The Anthropol-ogist as Author, ed. Clifford Geertz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 102-28.

41. Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934).42. Shannon, A World Made Safe for Differences, 660.



David Scott teaches in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. He isthe author of two books, Formations of Ritual (1994) and Refashioning Futures (1999),and he is the editor of the journal Small Axe.



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