Beyond the Culture Wars: Identities in Dialogue Author(s): Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

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PRESIDENTIAL FORUM the Culture Wars: in Dialogue

one

exist in splendid isolation from

another: hence the rubric of

"cultural diversity." This sortof

cultural

Beyond Identities

by a model of cultural distance or so disparity?does not work or sex well with gender identity ual identity. What we call "sexual difference"isa difference within, something culturally intrinsic.
Why won't the culturalist reduc

externalism?required

Henry Louis Gates,Jr.

Multiculturalism at the Limit
out there; it's in here.

tionwork? As Jonathan Dolli

and others point out about

more

sexual difference,homophobia
in our culture

ture of sexuality itself: it's not

Sexism,

is part of the struc even more obvi

What is thiscrazy thingcalledmulticulturalism?As an overview of the currentdebate suggests,a salientdiffi which the termhas culty raisedby thevarietyof uses to

ously, is also part of our conventional gender identities. startsin thehome. Othering I do not mean to deny the existence of subcultural
differentiae in

perhaps

which differences? Almost all differences inwhich we take an interest express themselves in cultural ways; many, perhaps
most, To are exhausted this claim by their cultural cases, manifestations. to assert we a tautol say assert is, in most

been put is thatmulticulturalism itselfhas certain not been easy imperial tendencies. Its boundaries have are to establish. We told that it is concerned with the representationof difference?but whose differences?

ual difference seems to become "ethnicized" and a At the same time, the rela sexual ethnicity is forged. tion between the sexual and the cultural isnecessarily Firbank and Sophocles?or, for thatmatter,Marcel Proust and Michelangelo?would recognize their putative fraternity. And yet ithas sometimes seemed tome thatwhat an preoccupation with Egypt is unexpressed belief that claim that heartfelt Cleopatra was "black" is the lurking conviction that if you traveled back in time and on a James Brown album, Cleo dropped the needle would instantlybreak out into the camel walk. The belief thatwe cherish is not so much a proposition
deep continuities supervene on skin color. Beyond the really explains the fervor of some of the Afrocentrist contingent. Obviously, we can't assume that Ronald

particular

social

contexts,

wherein

sex

the ogy. Narrowing that multiculturalism

terms of argument, is concerned with

might

tion, not of differenceas such, but of cultural identi we askwhat ties.But which ones are those? Indeed, if sortof identitiesare helpfully modeled bymulticultur
alism, the answer is less than obvious. Gender

the representa

sexual identity,racial identity: ifall these things are and produced, ratherthanunmediat socially inflected edly natural, why won't they fit into the culturalist model? (I use the slippery term culturalist here, some
what

identity,

Or will they? tural.) We can probably agree, for example, that gender identityand sexual identityare hard to reduce to the even model of culturaldifference, meaning though the
of these discuss manner, categories the categories if only is we can culturally specific. First, a in transhistorical transcultural, on their transcultural and

anomalously,

as a back-formation

from multicul

about melanin and physiognomy; it's the proposition was a sister. mists of history, that,throughthe Cleopatra For obvious reasons, sexual dimorphism is a basic aspect of human experience. Racial difference is certainly less so; understanding its significancealways a a requires particular engagement with specific his no master There is torical trajectory. key. But what

to elaborate

Chair

with "Basque" or transhistoricaldisparities. (Try that

"Catalan.") Second, the culturalist model

as cultural bubbles imagines itsconstituent elements that may collide but that usually could, inprinciple,

normally

Humanities Bois Professor of the and at Harvard ofAfro-American Studies of theDepartment was at the 1992 MLA University. A version of thispaper presented convention in New York. W. E. B. Du The author is

Profession

93

Henry the is that interrela again, complex despite race and culture?a matter that takes a tions between sinister teenth turn in the racialization of culture in the nine connects

Louis Gates, Jr.

emerges,

familiar with multiculturalism only through its right wing opponents are sometimes surprised to discover
that these

century?no ready conversion of history. the two, the only vagaries

factor

As the criticJohnBrenkman notes, blacks have been American matrix in a particularway; inscribed in the
are not just missing or absent or elsewhere:

"[B] lackswere historically not merely excluded from were inscribed the American polity; they within it as
nonparticipants" He continues:

they

with conservatismhas sequently,the extended face-off had a deformingeffect, multiculturalism to encouraging knowwhat it is against but notwhat it is for.So even if we finallydemur to aspects of the radical we critique, will be betteroffforhaving sorted through some of its adoxes of pluralism and consider some of the limi tationsofmulticulturalism?that is,ofmukiculturalism a model for the range of ?as phenomena ithas often
been arguments. In what follows, Iwant to examine the par

broad-gauge

radical

critiques

even exist. Con

The forms of that negating inscription have varied through a set complex history of legal and political designations. These

the conditions of theAfrican-American discourse on identity and citizenship, and themeaning of that discourse would in turn have to be interpreted in lightof those conditions and of the strategies embedded in its response to them. (98)

thehistorically recent triumphof "ethnicity"as a par human difference.I con clude with an appeal for pluralism, but it is a
pluralism, fair notice, let me of a serve singu adigm or master code for

required

to subsume.

I also

raise

questions

about

The extended face-offwith

conservatism has

What good are roots,Gertrude Stein once asked, if

you can't take them with

E. San Juan, Jr., theorist harshly decries what he calls the "cult of ethnicityand the fetishof pluralism" and most launches probably the thoroughgoingcritique of multiculturalism from a radical perspective thatwe
have. With San Juan writes:

now suggest that the contemporary model of ethnicity sometimes failsus by itshistoricallyforeshortened per spective, its inability to grasp the roots as well as the branches of cultural identity.In a recentbook, the

you? But

a number

of critics

larly banal
to a vision the of

and unin

spiring variety, conducing

of society, and as a university,

encouraged multiculturalism to know what it

place ofwhat one philos opher calls "constrained disagreement" (Macln tyre 231). Here, then,are
two cheers for multiculturalism.

what it is for.

is against but not

the gradual academicization of Ethnic Studies, "the cult of ethnicity" based on the paradigm of European immigrant success became the orthodox doctrine. The theoretical aggran

dizement of ethnicity systematically erased from the historical frame of referenceany perception of race and racism as causal

How does thevocabulary of multiculturalismocclude race? You may have noticed thatmulticulturalism is fre as a in used the media for substitute quently popular the earlierdesignation multiracial.Typically, a column
on

factors in themaking of the political and economic structures of theUnited States. (132)

say, black and white and Asian children together as

"multicultural." Do these

advertising

will

describe

Benetton-style

ad with,

In a similarvein,Hazel Carby has proposed a perspec

nistic tive that "[b]y relations that insisting of domination 'culture' and denotes subordination antago . . .

undermines the pluralistic notion of compatibility

inherent in ww/^'culturalism.. . ." She continues:

will find that in almost every instance where the older formmultiracialwould have been used, thenewer lex
eme multicultural'is tural traits, as cul instead, even where employed to are traits, opposed physiognomic or irrelevant. undiscoverable In many one, cases, a the shift from race move away

plied by the FordModel Agency and in all likelihood Westchester County?in fact repre hailing fromexotic sentdifferent cultures? That, of course, is theone thing you cannot tellfroma photograph of this sort.But you

children?presumably

sup

The paradigm of multiculturalism actually excludes the con cept of dominant and subordinate cultures?either indigenous or fails to recognize that the existence of racism migrant?and relates to the possession and exercise of politico-economic

control and authority and also to forms of resistance to the power of dominant social groups. (64-65)

obviously I want to

to be clear. is a

The issues that radical critics such as San Juan and but theyhave received little Carby raise are important, multiculturalism has generally hearing because liberal failed to engagewith leftist Those critiquesof this sort.

from the essentialistbiologizing of a previous era.The

emphasis on the social construction of race may

ethnicity

salutary

necessary

be a

familiar one, but it remains an imperativeone forall that. And yetwe ought to consider the correlative dan ger of essentializing culturewhen we blithely allow

Beyond

the Culture Wars:

Identities in Dialogue

cultureto substitutefor race without affectingthebasic

circulation vision of the term. The conventional insult multicultural is a culture: suggests that for every there

as an X. This the most

that is, if I can be denigrated as anX, I can be affirmed

mechanism of remediation but the intentions is sophisticated, perhaps are good. not

Finally, to complete our overview of the limits of we should take account of the culturalism, critique of multiculturalism put forwardby the influential French that who contends anthropologistJean-LoupAmselle, or his discipline. Warning againstwhat he dubs ethnic
cultural fundamentalism, Amselle maintains that the the very notion of discrete ethnicities is an artifact of

we've seen the ethnicity So far, paradigm faulted for

tendency to leave out history, power of power relations, But its and, of perplexi the history relations.

course,

notion of a multicultural society, "far from being an instrument of toleranceand of liberationofminorities,

as its

tiesdo not end here. We might bear inmind that the ascent of thevocabulary of ethnicity is,as Werner Sol lorshas emphasized, largelya postwar phenomenon, thevery termhaving been coined by W Lloyd Warner in 1941. The most con
servative

hallmarks of ethnological reason, and that is why ithas New Right" (35). But been taken up in France by the
Amselle's concerns are not

partisans

affirm, manifests,

to the contrary,

all the

one by the as ontological well. "Cultures aren't situated

other like Leibniz's windowless monads,"

merely

political;

they

are

Can multiculturalism support the sort

aspect versions

of some of mul

populist

ticulturalismmay be an understanding of group

Rather, "theverydefinitionof a given culture is in fact the resultof interculturalrelationsof forces" (55). On
the face of it,Amselle's Insofar considerations are

he argues.

of civil society
one

might want?
What's new

tural membership derived from the social sciences

is that cultural survival?

and group rights identity whole hog a thatborrows reified conception of cul

to as the bubble model blow againstwhat I've referred

of cultures. as this idea is a necessary feature of

yet another

the culturalism promoted by multiculturalism, to be discarded. might have

it

of mid-century.

thepreservationof culturaldifferentiae?is assigned an And if the delimita almostmedical sense of urgency. tion of cultural identityborrows from the social sci
the interpretation itwould of its products sometimes ences,

Identity versus Politics While

ation

are often

thediscourses of identity politics and of liber

conflated, they may be in mortal com

seems to court the gaze of anthropology; in place of

hermeneutics, seem, some

bat on a more fundamental level. Identitypolitics, in

its purest an form, must be concerned with the survival of the Utopian identity. By contrast, agenda it takes to be the tion pursues what objective or More of libera interests

nography.That is,under the sign ofmulticulturalism, to are often literary readings guided by thedesire elicit, first and foremost, indices of ethnic particularity,
especially those that can be construed as oppositional, of liberal subversive. transgressive, Then there's another

might

prefer

eth

of its subjects, but it may be littleconcerned with its

cultural

discourse of liberationoften looks forwardto thebirth

of a transformed

continuity

integrity

than

that,

the

individualism,we debunk the supposed "stability"of

the individual and as a category, and yet we sometimes stability reconstitute recuperate the same essential

paradox.

In a critique

which is, by definition, the surcease of the old. And

that, at least in theory, is the rub.

subject,

the creation

of a new

identity,

in the formof an ethnos that allegedly exhibits all the we could not locate in the and uniformities regularities individual subject.Conversely, as John Guillory writes, "The critique of the canon responds to thedisunity of
the culture as a whole,

Consider an example I have touched on in "Critical on the Fanonism." If colonialism inscribesitself psyche of the colonized, if it ispart of the process of colonial establish subject formation,thendoesn't this inscription of liberation? This cri limits to thevery intelligibility
tique, more or less, is the one that the Tunisian

race, or more

at the level of gender, stitutingnew cultural unities

recently, ethnic subcultures, or gay or les

as a fragmented

whole,

by

con

Fanon's losopherAlbert Memmi makes about Frantz

rhetoric. How are we to prize apart the

phi

anticolonial

bian subcultures" (34). Skepticism about the statusof the individual is surely chastening, but there may be
a

discourse of the colonized and thediscourse of the col Memmi suggeststhatFanon, forall his ambiva onizer? lences, somehow believed that "the day oppression
ceases, eyes way the new man immediately." it The happens." is But, supposed to appear "this before is not our says Memmi, moment Utopian the

group, the status of which may be problematic in

another way.

danger

in a too

easy

invocation

of the correlative

that Memmi

Henry

Louis Gates, Jr.

decries in Fanon is the depiction of decolonization as as engendering"a kind of tabula rasa," "quite simply the
of men another of a certain by 'species' replacing so that the fear that we will continue cies' of men" "overdetermined from without" is never 'spe to be

war?support the slippery slope to anarchy and tribal sortof civil societyone want? might In a recent essay, the distinguished historian John Higham complained that
multiculturalism has remained for two decades a stubbornly practical enterprise, justified by immediate demands rather

reconciled

with Fanon's political vision of emancipation (qtd. in would be hard to reconcile Gates 469). Certainly it with any recognizableversion of identitarian politics.
We can

as Algeria. Any discourse of emancipation, insofar it

retains a

easily

retrieve a lesson

from

the hot

sands

of

than long range goals: a movement without an overall theory. . . . Still, it is troubling that twenty years after those convul sive beginnings, multiculturalism has suddenly become a pol icy issue inAmerica's colleges, universities, and secondary schools without yet proposing a vision of the kind of society wants. it (204) or may not have conse

That is theparadox entailed by a politics similar issues. when those conducted on behalf of cultural identities or posi identitiesare in part defined by the structural
tional features that the Return, for a moment, aims politics to Carby's and to dismantle. insistence that the

specifically

cultural

cast, must

contend

with

Multiculturalism

may

quences, in persuasive diagnosis, but it Higham's rather a not does have political vision.
In a provocative and unusual multicultural Brenkman Citizens agenda takes up Higham's attempt to the program challenge. to connect of democracy, He argues: the

political

"paradigm ofmulticulturalism actually excludes the what sense is this statementtrue? I think that Guillory, whose work on the canon debate isplainly the best of itskind, provides a helpful glosswhen he writes that
a culturalist at the politics, though it glances worriedly phe nomenon of class, has in practice never devised a politics that would arise from a class "identity." For while it is easy enough to conceive of a self-affirmative racial or sexual identity, it very little sense to posit an affirmative lower-class as such an identitywould have to be identity, grounded in the experience of deprivation per se, [the affirmationof which is] hardly incompatible with a program for the abolition (13) concept of dominant subordinate cultures." In

can enter the field of political freely persuasion and decision only insofar as theydraw on the contingent vocabu laries of their own identities. Democracy needs participants who are conversant with the images, symbols, stories, and

makes

vocabularies thathave evolved across thewhole of the history. ... By the same token, democracy also requires citizens who are fluent one another's vocabularies and histories enough in an to share the forums of political deliberation and decision on equal footing. (89)

ofwant.

And yet classmay provide a particularlystark instance of amore general limitation. Obviously, ifbeing subor
dinate is a constitutive

I find this formulation attractive and heartening, though in its instrumental conception of cultural with knowledge itmay have unsuspected affinities
E. D. Hirsch. First, a caveat: But Iwant tomake two other can to say that "[cjitizens here. points enter the freely

erationpoliticswould foreclosean identity politics and vice versa.This situation is stipulativelytrue for Guil
not, lory's example at least of a "lower-class contingently, prove it But identity." might true for a host of other

aspect

of an

identity,

then a lib

field of political persuasion and decision"?that is, the field of politics, toutcourt?"only insofaras theydraw
on the vocabularies of their own identities" contingent is to suppose that one exists, in some sense, as a cultural that one's identity exists anterior to one's engage

putativelycultural identitiesaswell? The point is that identity politics cannot be under stood as a politics in theharness of a pregiven identity. The "identity" half of the catchall phrase "identity pol itics"must be conceived as being just as labile and must dynamic as the "politics" half is.The two terms be indialogue, as it were, orwe should be prepared for
the phrase to be revealed as an oxymoron.

atom, one

ment in the field of the political. It is to suppose that

arrives turally whole, political at this field already constituted, already cul rather than to that the acknowledge create or contour one's cultural or ethnic might

Second, thisformulationdoes not entailwhat identity. we which devotes multiculturalism, might call "group" to the empowerment of itself delimited cultural crisply
units and conceives

Multiculturalism

and Democracy

We've already officially recognizedcultural sovereignties. registeredthe sortsof criticisms thathave been raised
against between that model, Brenkman they needn't arise just yet. a tension he remarks Pangloss: a and democracy multiculturalism but proposes is no but

society

as a sort of federation

of

We might thenask how identity and politics are best

reconciled. Can multiculturalism?often depicted as a

10

Wars: Identities in Culture Beyondthe Dialogue

haunts many its enemies. of multiculturalism For the cultural s friends and outrages from

traditionof civic republicanism or civic humanism by which the tensionmight be resolved. The emphasis of this tradition, which was of particular influence in the of the United States, ison civicparticipation earlyhistory over liberalism's privatism;individualdevelopment (here he cites theBritish historian J. G. A. Pocock) is seen as linked to the individual'sparticipation as a intrinsically
of an "autonomous polis or republic." a decision-making Even so, Brenkman commu concedes: citizen nity,

conservatives,

William Kristol toRoger Kimball, ithas totemic sig

nificance, a one-word

with theirprogressive counterparts. If all difference

deserves

encapsulation can

of all that iswrong survive and

ship in revolutionary America tacitly depended upon the exclusion of women, African slaves, and Native Americans from the forms of literacy that were the emblem and the means of the patriots' equality. To evoke the republican tradi tion in the context of multicultural societies quickly exposes those elements of civic humanism that run directly counter to diversity and plurality. (95)

[Cjivic humanism also always assumed the homogeneity of those who enjoyed citizenship. As Michael Warner has shown, for example, the republican representation of citizen

nance be maintained? Progressives find the doctrine equally unsettling: the rightingofwrongs, after all, demands a recognition of them as wrongs. And the classic 1965 handbook byHerbert Marcuse, Barring ton Pure Moore, and Robert PaulWolff, A Critique of Tolerance,should remindus thatcritiques from the left
are far from

respect,

how

morality

gover

has anything like the currencythat sible that relativism

some critics have has stated, Rorty to it. "'Relativism,'" Richard imputed "is the view that every belief on a cer

exceptional.

Indeed,

it seems

scarcely plau

tain topic, or perhaps about any topic is as good as every other. No one holds this view," he says flatly, except "the occasional cooperative freshman" (166).
this is surely an overstatement, a salutary though one. in the climate probably

The charge that thiscivic humanism depended on the homogeneity of itscitizenry is easily supported, but is As I noted ear cultural homogeneitypreciselythe issue?
lier, the exclusion of women

Alas, present

Certainly, relativism comes inmany differentfla

and aesthetic as well as epistemological?

And while both depicted as amatter of culturaldistance. Native Americans and African slaveswould doubtless what Brenkman crit bemarked by culturaldifferentiae,

is not, at least customarily,

vors?moral

and what actually follows from relativism of any particular variety is seldom clear. But one kind of
relativism?the achieved a or cognitive?has epistemological some certain limited currency among to make an occasional

patriots' withholding the tools of assimilation,namely, What is at stake isnot the eradication English literacy. of difference?by, forexample, theunwanted imposi tion of English literacy, which is a grievance thathas
arisen conclude of Native trary, in some non-Western distance that cultural Americans exclusion We settings. motivated slaves; cannot, then, the exclusion on the the con patriots' we come

icizeshere is theperpetuation of such differences by the

whose business is culture, and might anthropologists,

supposed multicultural be appearance context.

in the

and African was achieved And

their

enforcing against, its model, as up

the cultural once

distance.

by so what

However symptomatic these slippages?and

them cautionary?I believe that Brenkman's

are the limits of the culturalist again, to occlude the of race. tendency categories elabo

I cite

multiculturalism (99).

ratedvision of the "modernpolity [as] a dynamic space inwhich citizenship is always being contested rather than thefixed space of thepremodern ideal of a repub lic" is a signal contribution to thedebate surrounding

The Wittgensteinian Peter Winch, for example, in his classic book The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation toPhilosophy, has argued that "our idea of what belongs to the realmof realityisgiven to us in the we use" (15). JohnBeattie has decried a language that similar cognitive relativism in, for example, F. Allan Hanson's Meaning inCulture and RoyWagner's The Invention ofCulture. ForWinch, there is no reality our conceptual schemes,which may independent of differin incommensurable ways. This is a curious view, one that has been rebutted non most vigorously by intellectuals from just those Western cultures that relativismwould consign to hermetic isolation. As the distinguished Ghanaian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu writes:
[RJelativism . . . falsely denied the existence of inter-personal criteria of rationality. That iswhat the denial of objectivity amounts to.Unless at least the basic canons of rational think were common tomen, they could not even communicate ing among themselves. Thus, in seeking to foreclose rational dis cussion, the relativist view is in effect seeking to undermine the foundations of human community. (220-21)

Multiculturalism versus Relativism

One last obstacle remains to the articulation of a

which multicultural polity: the specter of relativism,

Henry

Louis Gates, Jr.

11

of this sort is that The general problemwith relativism it makes the project of cross-cultural understanding unintelligible. (MartinHollis observes that "without
assumptions translate anything about reality rationality and no translation could and we cannot show the

The vision here, if it is a vision, is one of the central themes of Berlin's corpus, but we can find itpromul
gated elsewhere with a

offfinal solutions of all sorts,admonishes us that the

search for

range of inflections. we

Itwarns

us

assumptions to be wrong" [240].) me put the argument at its strongest: if rela So let tivism is right, thenmulticulturalism is impossible. Relativism, far from conducing tomulticulturalism, would rescind itsvery conditions of possibility.

a ing" or of primordial "cultural authenticity"?poses to than threat civil and human order, greater decency, does the messy affairof cultural variegation. It letsus remember that identities are always in dialogue, that they exist (asAmselle expatiates) only in relation to
one another, and that

purity?whether

speak

of "ethnic

cleans

Pluralism Redux By way of a returnto politics and a rounding out of whom my criticaloverview,Iwish to enlist IsaiahBerlin, we as thepaterfamiliasof liberalplural describe might ism and whose banishment from the currentdebate is amatter of puzzlement, unless the fear is thatadducing Berlin's lifelong argument would compromise our
claims to

sites of contest and negotiation, self-fashioningand refashioning. (AsHigham observes, "[A]n adequate theoryofAmerican culture will have to address the realityof assimilation aswell as the persistence of dif ferences" [209]). And it suggests,finally,that a multi culturalism that can accept its limitationsmight be one worth working for.

they are,

like

everything

else,

as

theonly alternativeto what Lovejoy called uniformitar ianism" ("Relativism"85). Inwhat Berlin distinguishes
"[w]e are free to criticize the values of other pluralism, to condemn them, but we cannot pretend not them at all, or to regard them simply

novelty.

Berlin

stresses

that "relativism

is not

Works

Cited_

cultures,

Amselle, Jean-Loup. Logiques metisses.Paris: Payot, 1990. Beattie, JohnM. "Objectivity and Social Anthropology." Objectiv ityand Cultural Divergence. Ed. S. C. Brown. Cambridge: Cam

to understand

as -.

circum subjective,theproduct of creaturesindifferent stanceswith differenttastes from our own, which do not to us at all" ("Pursuit" 11).He writes: speak
What is why civilizations are incompatible. They can be incompatible between cultures, or groups in the same culture, or between you and me. . . . Values may easily clash within the breast of a single individual; and itdoes not follow that, if theydo some must be true and others false. [Indeed], these collisions of values are of the essence ofwhat they are and what we are. ("Pursuit" 12-13) is clear is thatvalues can clash?that

bridge UP, 1984.1-20. Berlin, Isaiah. "Alleged Relativism inEighteenth-Century European Thought." Crooked Timber 70-90.

The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas. New York: Knopf, 1991. -. "The Pursuit of the Ideal." Crooked Timber 1-19.

Brenkman, John. "Multiculturalism and Criticism." English Inside and Out. Ed. Susan Gubar and Jonathan Kamholtz. New York: Routledge, 1993. 87-101. Carby, Hazel. "Multi-culture." Screen 34 (1980): 62-70. Dollimore, Jonathan. "Homophobia and Sexual Difference." Oxford LiteraryReview 8.1-2 (1986): 5-12.

Berlin's pluralism is radicallyanti-utopian. Perhaps it is not the sortof thing likely to inspireone to riskone's lifeor the livesof others.But I don't think it is a flaccid or undemanding faith for all that.And, in the essay from which I've been reading,entitled "The Pursuit of the Ideal," Berlin anticipates the complaint:
Of course social or political collisions will take place; themere conflict of positive values alone makes this unavoidable. Yet

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. "Critical Fanonism." Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 457-70. Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. John. "Multiculturalism and Universalism: A History and Critique." American Quarterly 45 (1993): 195-219. Hollis, Martin. "Reason and Ritual." Philosophy 43 (1968): 231-47. Higham, Enquiry. Notre

Moral Maclntyre, Alasdair. Three Rival Versions of Dame: U ofNotre Dame P, 1990. Marcuse,

we are bound to lose our way. A littledull as a solution, you will say?Not the stuff of which calls to heroic action by

they can, I believe, be minimized by promoting and preserv an uneasy ing equilibrium, which is constantly threatened and in need of repair?that alone, I repeat, is the precondition for decent societies and morally acceptable behavior; otherwise

Rorty, Richard. "Pragmatism, Relativism, Irrationalism."Consequences ofPragmatism. Minneapolis: U ofMinnesota ?, 1982. 160-75.

Herbert, Barrington Moore, and Robert Paul Wolff. A Critique ofPure Tolerance. Boston: Beacon, 1965.

are made? Yet if there is some truth in this inspired leaders view, perhaps that is sufficient. (19)

phy. London: Routledge, 1958. Wiredu, Kwasi. Philosophy and an African Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980.

Atlantic Highlands: Humanities, 1992. Sollors,Werner. "E Pluribus Unus." Unpublished essay. Winch, Peter. The Idea ofa Social Science and Its Relation toPhiloso

San Juan, E., Jr.Racial Formations/Critical Transformations:Articu lations ofPower inEthnic and Racial Studies in theUnited States.