POLITICAL

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

DAVID SCOTT
Columbia 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 with
the Other. . . . To say then that since we now see the non-European Other democratically as
merely having a different culture, as being fundamentally ‘only’culturally different, we have a
more just idea of her, a less prejudiced and truer idea of her than did the nineteenth century who
saw her on the horizon of historical evolutionary development, the Enlightenment who saw her
on 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 be
to instantaneously, retroactively, and totally transform this work from being an archaeology of
the different conceptions of difference into being, once again, a history of the progress of
anthropological 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 that

the determined rival to an existing hegemon, beginning with a bold and dra-
matic sense of contrast, and of critical distinctiveness, grows over the long
course of seeking to overcome its nemesis, to much look like it. I have been
intrigued for some time now by the contemporary inflation of “culture,” that
is, the post-1970s culture-as-constructed-meaning concept of culture; the
gradual elevation of it into a sort of general-purpose concept such that in a
curious way it has come to resemble (in some respects at least) its old and now
enfeebled antagonist, Reason. Not so very long ago, comparatively speaking,
knowledge-claims about the West’s Others (I am using an admittedly crude

AUTHOR’S 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 to
Ananda 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 92-115
DOI: 10.1177/0090591702239440
© 2003 Sage Publications
92
 Scott / CULTURE IN POLITICAL THEORY 93

shorthand here) were made and adjudicated in the rarefied name of this uni-
versalistic view-from-everywhere Reason. Today this is easily recogniz-
able—and rightly deplored—as Eurocentrism, and therefore ruled inadmis-
sible in any sophisticated discussion. Things have considerably changed in
our historical and epistemic worlds and now culture has recommended itself
as the conceptual site both of the critique of Enlightenment Reason, and of
the 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 to
offer a doubt that what culture-as-constructed-meaning (in either its more
standard Geertzian edition, or that of the postmodernists) has inaugurated is
really a new egalitarian era of knowledge-relations between the West and its
Others. I have offered the contrary view and urged that the new “democratic”
culture is as complicit with the assumption of the moral and epistemological
privilege of the West as Reason was. In my view, it too, if in altered historical
circumstances, underwrites a liberal conception of how differences are to be
viewed and regulated.1
In what follows I want to extend this argument somewhat. Here I am
interested 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 political
theorists now seem to feel compelled to take account of culture in order to
pursue and sustain a critical reflection on liberalism and democracy. It now
appears that fairness demands more than the neutrality offered by Rawls’s A
Theory of Justice, and that considerations of justice, freedom, citizenship,
equality, and political community require respect for difference understood
as 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 political
theorists. A little belatedly, some might think, nevertheless culture has now
virtually 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 theorizing—that of Amy Gutmann,
someone close enough to the middle in the contemporary debate about multi-
culturalism. Gutmann suggests that liberal democracies have become, as she
puts it, sites of

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

What does it mean, she asks,

94 POLITICAL THEORY / February 2003

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

And she goes on to conclude:

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

There may be much in these remarks to comment on, but for my purposes
here I want to note just two features of Gutmann’s appreciation of the rele-
vance of culture for liberal political theory. The first has to do with the role
culture is to play as a conceptual index. In the view offered by Gutmann there
is a conjunction between “culture” and “disadvantage.” For her (as indeed for
others), culture marks an area of damage or injury or marginalization, and
signals 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 of
putatively harmed communities—defined in terms of race, gender, sexual
orientation, ethnicity, and so on—are 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 Gutmann’s 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 the
attention of Anglo-American political theory has less to do with the geo-
graphical and moral elsewheres that anthropologists have conventionally
studied,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 another
way, something of a displacement has occurred such that the contemporary
problem about culture derives less from anthropologists going to non-Western
places (where after all she or he is more an observer of, than a participant in,
someone else’s way of life), and more from non-Western peoples coming to
the West in large numbers and making material claims on its institutions and
resources. This displacement of the site of the problem of culture may be
what Clifford Geertz (in so many ways the great signifier of the contemporary
age of culture-as-constructed-meaning) is alluding to when he says that today
difference begins not at the water’s edge, but at the skin’s.5 Indeed, this shift
in the locus of where culture matters may be one reason why anthropolo-
 Scott / CULTURE IN POLITICAL THEORY 95

gists—whose disciplinary object culture supposedly is—have had so little to

say in the multiculturalism debate about justice, fairness, citizenship, and
so on.6
The point, at any rate, is that for Western political theory culture now
seems very much indispensable. Why is this so? What are the conditions that
have occasioned this new demand in political theory? Are they primarily
epistemological conditions (shifts in theory-claims), or historical ones
(geopolitical transformations)? It may well be said against the direction of
these 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 concerned
precisely with the problem of uniformity and difference. Perhaps, but is the
concept of difference that organized the work of, say, Locke on religious tol-
erance in the seventeenth century, David Hume on national character in the
eighteenth, John Stuart Mill on individual liberty in the nineteenth, and Isaiah
Berlin on value pluralism in the middle twentieth, either identical to each
other or the same as the one that organizes the late twentieth century work of
such multiculturalist political thinkers as James Tully, Charles Taylor, and
Will Kymlicka? I am not so sure. I suspect that there is (if I may put it this
way) a difference. And indeed I want to wonder whether the difference isn’t a
significant one. That is, I wonder whether the late twentieth century concept
of culture and the conditions that sustain it don’t exercise a distinctive imper-
ative on contemporary political theorists. Consequently it may be necessary
to ask: What is the nature of this demand for culture in contemporary political
theory? What are the contours of the concept of culture that it mobilizes to
address this demand? To what extent are these contours and their generative
assumptions 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 frame
my concern in this essay.
I shall take as my point of departure the argument about culture employed
by 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 of
culture in political theory. This is because Tully seeks to take the cultural
claims on the domain of the political—as well as the cultural dimension of the
political itself—seriously, 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
96 POLITICAL THEORY / February 2003

less explicit ways to express ideas about what culture is or how it is to be

understood. But to a large extent these thinkers are less interested in culture
per 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 turning
to 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 of
the way culture works.
Moreover, it seems to me that in a distinctively interesting and admirable
way Tully wants to face up to the double aspiration of people to be free and to
be rooted, without compromising either to universalism or nativism. As we
will see, Tully is not concerned to simply endorse the liberal story of the rela-
tion between culture and politics or between freedom and belonging. He
waves no flag for liberalism.9 Again, for thinkers such as Walzer, Kymlicka,
Kukathas, Carens, and Taylor, what is at stake is rethinking liberal democ-
racy—or, to put this another way, rethinking from the standpoint of liberal
democracy. 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 difference
so as to enhance the claims of this particular organization of modern political
community. Tully, I think, has a wider and more critical agenda. He does not
assume the standpoint of liberal democracy. Indeed he has an acute sense of
the 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 theorist
to 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 which
Tully is indebted is in fact a now familiar constructionist concept, one that he
derives 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 Tully’s
hopes. But my aim in this, I want to make quite clear, is not to simply unmask
Tully’s culture-concept in some way. I am too deeply sympathetic to what, as
I understand it, his general project is. I admire his idea of a constitution as a
“form of accommodation of cultural diversity,” and his pursuit of the
processual idea that a constitution is “an intercultural dialogue in which the
culturally diverse sovereign citizens of contemporary societies negotiate
agreements on their forms of association over time in accordance with the
three 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
 Scott / CULTURE IN POLITICAL THEORY 97

“reconceive” than to simply “defend” or “reject” existing arrangements since

this embodies more a both/and than an either/or sort of logic, which seems to
me more conducive to grasping a present in which the old rival certainties
have 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 fact
that 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 he
thinks will liberate our understanding of difference and so enable his
reconceptualization of the relation between culture and politics to gain the
ground he envisages.
I am interested rather in something else, namely, trying to understand
what some of the conditions are that make the new cultural turn so
unreflexively attractive to—indeed so casually seductive for—democratic
political theorists like Tully. I am interested in the curious fact that Tully is
inattentive to the ideological history of anthropology’s culture. For if it is true
that Tully has no share in the triumphalist tone of so much contemporary lib-
eral theorizing—from Samuel Huntington to Richard Rorty—he neverthe-
less certainly has a share (a large one) in the main background assumptions
about the new naturalized space of culture. The suspicion that I would like to
explore 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 is
to say, with what, in a different moment of cultural pluralism, Ruth Benedict
called “a world made safe for differences.”11 I want to suggest that a more
reflexively critical attentiveness to culture’s conceptual history (indeed of the
sort that Tully applies so rewardingly to his own discipline) would yield an
appreciation of the conditions and possible limits of anthropology’s culture
for 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 come
forward 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 of
constitutionalism in which the demands are taken up and adjudicated. (SM, p. 34)

This is the central aspiration that governs James Tully’s Strange Multiplicity.
And it is especially suggestive of the direction and quality of Tully’s preoccu-
98 POLITICAL THEORY / February 2003

pations and commitments, I think, that in articulating it he invokes the

Antigone of Sophocles, because, as is well known, that tragedy thematizes
precisely the clash between two rival conceptions of justice—on the one
hand, Antigone’s kin-centered and antistatist conception embodied in her
demand to bury the corpse of her dead brother Polyneices, and on the other,
Creon’s authoritarian and secular rationalist conception embodied in his
refusal to allow it on the grounds of Polyneices’ treachery against the city of
Thebes.12
Strange Multiplicity is a work of theoretical reflection deeply indebted to
Charles Taylor’s 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 much
in the humanist and pluralist spirit of Taylor’s political philosophy, and too, to
much in his conceptual language and thematic preoccupations.14 Like Taylor,
Tully is concerned to find an adequate theoretical response to “the conditions
of the contemporary age,” and in particular a way of engaging the political
and constitutional problems thrown up by an acknowledgment of the irreduc-
ible plurality of cultures and values. But Tully’s work has other crucial
sources and affiliations as well—among them, Wittgenstein’s idea of lan-
guage games,15 Michel Foucault’s notions of genealogy and governmental-
ity,16 Quentin Skinner’s rehistoricization of Europe’s political traditions,17
and more recently Hannah Arendt’s conception of freedom and active
citizenship18—sources and affiliations that take him some distance away
from the kind of endorsement of the Enlightenment’s rationality and Chris-
tian teleology to which Taylor subscribes.19 So that although he does not say
so exactly (and perhaps would not say so), Strange Multiplicity can be read as
an argument—friendly yet critical, agonistic yet respectful—with the yield
and the limit of Taylor’s philosophy of pluralism.
In considering Tully’s argument, I shall not be concerned to set out an
exhaustive account; only so much of it as will allow me to trace the lines of his
traffic in culture.20 Strange Multiplicity is animated by the following ques-
tion: What are the conditions for the constitutional recognition of cultural
diversity in a postimperial age? This, says Tully, is the most difficult and
pressing question at the dawn of the twenty-first century. And he proceeds to
answer it by first articulating what he takes to be the new constitutional
demands that characterize the “politics of cultural recognition” in the “age of
diversity.” Careful to delineate the terms of his engagement, Tully advises
that by “politics of cultural recognition” he means to “gather together the
broad and various political activities which jointly call cultural diversity into
question as a characteristic constitutional problem of our time” (SM, pp. 1-2).
There are several such forms of political activity. Among these are nationalist
 Scott / CULTURE IN POLITICAL THEORY 99

movements, multicultural (or as Tully prefers, “intercultural”) claims, femi-

nist movements, and the demands of Aboriginal or Indigenous peoples. In
Tully’s view, however, the “struggles of Aboriginal peoples of the world, and
especially those of the Americas, for cultural survival and recognition are a
special 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. By
contrast, these struggles for cultural recognition constitute, as he says, an
aspiration for appropriate political forms of self-government. It constitutes a
demand, in other words, to govern themselves in ways they deem consonant
with their traditions. From the point of view of these struggles, therefore, cul-
ture is not separable from politics but is, on the contrary, an “irreducible”
aspect of it. Consequently, so far as these struggles are concerned, the institu-
tions of modern constitutional society are unjust precisely to the extent that
they do not enable the political embodiment of cultural traditions. As Tully
phrases 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 in
which they exercise them), whether they are making, following or going against the rules
and 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 cannot
eliminate, overcome or transcend this cultural dimension of politics. (SM, pp. 5-6)

However, the problem, Tully maintains, is that the dominant traditions of

constitutional interpretation have tended to assume an essentialist relation
between 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 these
assumptions 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 formation
of modern constitutionalism from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, a culture is
separate, 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 in
the 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.
100 POLITICAL THEORY / February 2003

There are a number of authoritative sites for the new anthropological

understanding of culture that Tully invokes, among them the work of Michael
Carrithers, (the late) Eric Wolf, Clifford Geertz, and James Clifford.21 On the
new view, cultures are now understood to be “overlapping, interactive and
internally negotiated” (SM, p. 10). However, they do not simply overlap
geographically:

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

Moreover,

cultures are not internally homogeneous. They are continuously contested, imagined and
re-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 aspectival
rather than essential: like many complex human phenomena, such as language and
games, cultural identity changes as it is approached from different paths and a variety of
aspects come into view. (SM, p. 11)

As a consequence of the overlap, interaction, and negotiation of cultures, the

experience of cultural difference is internal to a culture. This, Tully says, is
the 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. One’s own culture provided an identity in the form
of a seamless background or horizon against which one determined where one stood on
fundamental questions. . . . On the aspectival view, cultural horizons change as one
moves about, just like natural horizons. The experience of otherness is internal to one’s
own identity, which consists in being oriented in an aspectival intercultural space. (SM,
p. 13)

The trouble, however, is that despite the transformation in the understanding

of cultures made possible by contemporary anthropology,

[political] theorists tend to continue to uphold variations of the old view, inherited from
the age of imperialism, of humans as situated in independent, closed and homogeneous
cultures 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 culture—both the version of it associated with
Clifford Geertz as well as the one associated James Clifford. Without
rehearsing the details of that argument here I will simply reiterate that this
 Scott / CULTURE IN POLITICAL THEORY 101

characterization of culture is open to the question: For whom is culture par-

tial, unbounded, heterogeneous, hybrid, and so on, the anthropologist or the
native? Whose claim is this, theory’s 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 culture
cannot be something given but must, rather, be something that gets estab-
lished in forms of authoritative discourse. So that whereas to stand on the a
priori 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 undoing
of the meta-narratives of the West, it does less well as a principle upon which
to 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 days—between Hobbes and Rawls,
let’s say—political philosophy depended upon a false—that is, essentialist—
conception of culture, now thanks to recent hard-won developments in
anthropology there is a new and correct conception that will at once free
political philosophy of its prejudices and enable it to more adequately refor-
mulate the problem of constitutionalism. The story has about it a curiously
just-so character. Between the seventeenth century inauguration of constitu-
tionalist theory and the late twentieth century revolution in anthropology, so
this story goes, political theorists operated with the fallacious notion that cul-
tures were internally homogeneous, immobile, self-enclosed, seamless, and
so on. On this false conception of culture were built the great constitutional
theories that have defined our political modernity. Indeed these constitutional
theories are themselves false insofar as they have depended upon this errone-
ous conception of culture. Now at last, however, we know what culture really
is, namely, fluid, heterogeneous, partial, and so on. And therefore we can now
begin to reconstruct a more adequate political theory of community for our
age of multiculturalism.
But what is all the more surprising and telling about this story is that where
the language of constitutionalism is concerned Tully is incisively critical of
these very progressivist assumptions, and employs a form of historical inves-
tigation aimed precisely at making visible its ideological history. So that in
turning his attention to the problem of the historicization of constitutional-
ism, Tully urges the deployment of a form of historical critique developed by
Quentin Skinner and John Dunn at Cambridge:

It consists in the historical application of Wittgenstein’s method of dissolving philosoph-

ical problems not by presenting yet another solution, but by a survey which brings to crit-
102 POLITICAL THEORY / February 2003

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

This, of course, is not only an application of Wittgenstein’s doctrine regard-

ing the background language game or form of life, but a version of R. G.
Collingwood’s 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-known
reply to his critics, has acknowledged how crucial this idea has been for his
historical method.23 Like Foucault’s 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 one
hegemonal 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 of
enquiry what we should think of them.”24 In the context of his own particular
concern, Tully argues, the application of this method

consists in a survey of the language employed in the current debate over recognition in
order 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 the
languages that constitute contemporary constitutionalism: the story of the
rise 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 same
historicizing move for anthropology’s object, culture, that he deems neces-
sary for political philosophy’s. Unlike political philosophy’s object, the con-
stitution, so it appears, culture has an unproblematic history, one is tempted to
say, an almost natural history. It is simply there, unfolding, having already
been revolutionized, having already, perhaps, had its unsettling and revivify-
ing encounter with Wittgenstein. There is apparently no need to inquire into
the shared conventions (the distinctions, concepts, assumptions, and so on) of
the language or the discourse of culture that lend it the enabling or conversely
disabling qualities it is assumed to have. It is enough to affirm (by invoking
the names of a number of distinguished anthropological authorities) that a
positive shift has taken place that has finally and gratifyingly supplied culture
with the conceptual character it should have had all along—a shift apparently
perceived as a matter of progress in intellectual history. Whereas
constitutionalism has its ruses, culture is transparent.
 Scott / CULTURE IN POLITICAL THEORY 103

Now, again, my concern here is not to suggest that (say, speaking as an

anthropologist) Tully has gotten culture wrong. Indeed, the trouble, I fear, is
that he has culture right—that is to say, he is speaking the now normalized
truth of (anthropology’s) culture. My concern, rather, is to understand how so
discerning and insightful a thinker as Tully is where political history is con-
cerned could be so blind to culture’s history. What concerns me here, there-
fore, is less whether this view of culture is warranted or coherent, and more
the surprisingly unreflected-upon progressivist assumptions this story of the
availability and accomplishments of the new culture concept rests on—the
assumption, 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 see
what Hobbes, that great seventeenth-century inaugurator, did not.25 I believe
that part of the problem here is that in a curious way Tully has overlooked part
of the ideological history of his own present. But before I come to what seem
to me the dimensions of this present overlooked by Tully, I want to make a
detour 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 to
inspire some misgivings about the kinds of assumptions that underlie Tully’s
just-so story about culture. More than a decade ago he wrote a short and
unsettling book titled Beyond Anthropology.26 Hardly anyone seems to have
noticed it. An almost fiercely Foucauldian book (after the fashion of The
Order of Things), McGrane was concerned to write an epistemic history of
the different conceptions of difference between the sixteenth and the early
twentieth centuries. It was, he said, an archaeology of anthropology formu-
lated around the question: Does culture really exist? In other words, in the
same way that Foucault set out to question the seeming positivity or self-
presence of “man” within the human sciences, McGrane sought to
problematize the seeming positivity or transparency of “culture” within the
authoritative discourse of difference.
In the democratic imagination of contemporary anthropology (indeed in
the 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 difference
of the non-European Other, McGrane argues, deploying the early Foucault’s
schema of historical discontinuity has not always been interpreted on the
horizon of culture. Within the Renaissance order of knowledge, for example,
104 POLITICAL THEORY / February 2003

the difference of the non-European Other was experienced and interpreted on

the horizon of Christianity, specifically the Christianity lacked by the Other.
In the Enlightenment an alteration took place in the paradigm for interpreting
and experiencing the Otherness of the non-European Other and difference
came to be experienced on the horizon of Ignorance, the absence of reason. In
the nineteenth century, this paradigm altered once more. As McGrane puts it,
“there occurred a vast hemorrhage of time: geological time, evolutionary
time, developmental time lodged itself between the European and the non-
European Other.” Race, famously, is the master concept of this organization
of difference.
In the early twentieth century (which in certain respects, perhaps, is not
yet over), the reigning paradigm through which the difference of the Other is
interpreted and explained undergoes another mutation. In this century “cul-
ture” emerges as what accounts for the difference of the Other. Culture now
becomes the universal ground and grid and horizon of difference. It becomes,
so to speak, the commanding natural language of difference. A number of
features 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 serially
arranged and classified in a progressively ascending order. In the twentieth
century, by contrast, this vertical model is displaced by a lateral one in which
difference comes to be organized as a kind of mosaic of parallel ensembles,
each constituting an integrated whole with its own rhythm and style, but all
occupying, nevertheless, a single horizontal plane. In this organization of
knowledge, time and history have not been abolished. They have only entered
concretely into the interior of difference. The story of the inauguration of
Boasian anthropology (or at least, George Stocking’s splendid account of the
contribution of Franz Boas to the rise of the culture concept) is much the story
of this alteration.27
This new world was now seen to consist of a plurality of historically con-
ditioned cultural wholes. In anthropology’s autobiography, of course, this
epistemological relativism and the democratic sensibility of pluralism it sus-
tains, is represented and appraised as a fundamental emancipation after the
long disgrace of nineteenth-century racism. But the assumptions of this
progressivist story are precisely what McGrane wishes to query. For
epistemological relativism provided the new concept of culture with its own
special theory of privileged representations. The possibility of seeing all dif-
ference as merely and fundamentally relative depends upon an omniscient
epistemological vantage from which (and of course in relation to which) all
 Scott / CULTURE IN POLITICAL THEORY 105

difference is simultaneously available to a detached, surveying gaze which

itself is not relative. And the new concept could achieve this because one of
the basic values of anthropology’s culture, and one of the basic values that
anthropology 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 and
its basic values are relative, i.e., that it is one culture among many essentially unrelated
cultures. (Beyond Anthropology, p. 120)

In other words, anthropology’s culture

knows that it is one-among-many, knows that it is relative, and further, it values this
knowledge (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 ignorance
lies 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 relativism’s
pretensions to innocence. And McGrane’s account has its own neat story line,
a schematic picture of successive cognitive or epistemic orders unconnected
to any social formation or social practice—all the limitations that led
Foucault to abandon archaeology for genealogy in the 1970s. My point in
drawing on this account, therefore, is not to commend it uncritically. Rather it
is 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 progressivism
that this gives rise to. My point is to worry about the curious way in which
Tully, a thinker otherwise so self-consciously attentive to what Foucault
would call the historicity of modes of problematizations, could be troubled
only by the question of choosing between competing conceptions of culture,
rather than about the terrain of culture-discourse as such. And my concern in
formulating this disquiet is to raise a doubt about at least one crucial assump-
tion that undergirds the story Tully tells about political theory from Hobbes
and Locke to the present, namely the assumption that the problem with early
modern constitutionalists is that they lacked an adequate or correct theory of
106 POLITICAL THEORY / February 2003

culture, and that this ignorance had fatal consequences for their conception of
the process of constitution making. For if McGrane is right that culture, as
ground 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 read
in terms of its proximity to this distinctive way of organizing and interpreting
difference, then Tully’s story of culture in political theory has to be revised. In
other 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 gained
from lamenting the fact that early modern constitutionalists had a narrow or
anyway an unsatisfying conception of it.

THE GEERTZ-EFFECT
I want to reiterate that I am not concerned here to argue the case against
Tully’s understanding of culture as such, to deliberate its coherence, and even
less am I concerned here to offer an improvement in its place. I am concerned
merely to explore the conditions of his unreflected-upon assumption that the
new revolution in anthropology’s culture will at last free political philosophy
of 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 is
why in the story he tells the culture moment that enables his political theory is
not the founding moment of Franz Boas, nor indeed the successive moments
of the great Boasians—from Edward Sapir and Ruth Benedict to Margaret
Mead and Melville Herskovits and Alfred Kroeber—who have followed
him, but rather a more contemporary, if equally spectacular, moment: the
moment of Clifford Geertz.
The explicit assimilation or appropriation of the concept of culture by
political theory has been made possible, as Tully rightly argues, by transfor-
mations within the discourse of culture itself. These transformations are now
often referred to as the “cultural turn.” The cultural turn is at once a turn to
“culture” in a range of disciplines outside of anthropology (such as political
theory) that hitherto did not think of culture as their object-domain, and a turn
in the concept itself (both inside and outside of anthropology) and in its place
in the understanding of human life. The story of this turn is perhaps an
already familiar one to many (the rise of such subdisciplinary formations as
cultural history, cultural studies, cultural geography, and so on, indicate it),29
and therefore there will be little need for me to do more here than rehearse its
outline in such a way as to bring into view the epistemological, but more
 Scott / CULTURE IN POLITICAL THEORY 107

importantly, the moral-political appeal of the distinctive culture-concept it

supports and commends. I shall suggest that at least part of the appeal of the
cultural 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 deep
ideological 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 that
connects the Geertz-effect (as I will call it) to the ideological problem-space
of post–cold 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 of
the 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 to
a more democratic and humanist one. The idea that human behavior is gov-
erned by law-like determinations—of causality and function—and that the
task of the social sciences is to go out and unearth these laws, gave way to the
more benign, more people-friendly idea that human behavior is shaped by the
construction of meaning and that the task of the human sciences is to interpret
these constructed-meanings.30 In Benedict and Mead and Herskovits, of
course, the anthropological concept of plural cultures had already established
itself, but in this alteration or reorientation of the human sciences “culture”
came to assume a hitherto nonexistent prominence—indeed, soon, much like
reason before it, it became the metaconcept able to trump all other concepts.
From the relative obscurity of its anthropological enclave, and from under the
specialized 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 instance
of 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 in
both 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 and
1983, 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 of
human thought and behavior.32 First, Geertz redescribed the Parsonian idea
of culture-as-symbolic-action in a constructionist idiom. As he put it
famously, “what we call our data are really our constructions of other peo-
ple’s constructions of what their compatriots are up to.” 33 This
constructionism was underlined by a methodological antifoundationalism
according to which ethnographic fieldwork was no longer a privileged matter
of truth-finding in which there was a clear epistemological and moral superi-
108 POLITICAL THEORY / February 2003

ority of anthropologist over native informant, but an extended and “edifying

conversation” between epistemological and moral equals. Geertz in effect
sought to reorient anthropology in precisely the same direction (and in almost
exactly the same language) as Richard Rorty was to do for Anglo-American
philosophy a few years later.34 The importance of this constructionist idiom is
that 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 her
or 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 a
public 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, for
while the initial intention had been to help regain some disciplinary control
over the concept from the splendid vagaries of E. B. Tylor’s unwieldy “com-
plex whole,” it in fact had the opposite effect.35 The concept now became
unhinged from its specific disciplinary objectification and came to be recog-
nized as merely and fundamentally an aspect or dimension of all human
activities. And with this a curious displacement in its analytic location
occurred. From the foreground in which it had for several decades been an
explicit object over which rival anthropological theories contented—evolu-
tionary, materialist, symbolic, psychoanalytic, functionalist, and so on—the
new 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 to
be problematized (by a specialist discipline) so much as the constructed
space or idiom in terms of which other problematizations or the
problematizations of other objects took place.
It is this naturalization of the idiom of constructionism and the relocation
of culture as ground of investigation that together constitutes the conceptual
Geertz-effect. (Geertz of course would himself later be criticized by the
postmodern “theorists” of “writing culture”—James Clifford most subtle
among them—who would find his attention to authoriality, perspectivalism,
power, and so on, conceptually undertheorized and politically complicit with
the status quo. But it is important to understand here that in their own meta-
anthropological discontent these postmodernists—the Left Geertzians, we
might call them—were not so much breaking with the spell of the Geertz-
effect as underlining and extending the logic of the semiotic conception of
culture-as-constructed-meaning.36) This is the conceptual alteration in the
culture-concept that Tully merely marks as a threshold in his progressivist
 Scott / CULTURE IN POLITICAL THEORY 109

narrative. What, though, is the ideological problem-space in which the appeal

of this concept of culture might be understood? What cognitive-political
demand 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 of
difference. I can best elaborate this suspicion by briefly contrasting the post–
cold war moment of the Geertz-effect with the cold war one Christopher
Shannon describes for Ruth Benedict’s classic work, The Chrysanthemum
and the Sword.37 This too was a moment in which the rhetoric of cultural
diversity and pluralism was gaining considerable prominence in the United
States, 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 on
behalf of cultural diversity was a comparatively weak one. In the climate of
aggressive assimilationism that followed World War I, work such as Horace
Kallen’s Culture and Democracy in the United States (published in 1924, the
year Congress suspended the great migration that had begun in the 1880s)
remained largely neglected.38 Kallen virtually invented the phrase “cultural
pluralism.” However, the concerted battle against the Nazi state in Germany
and the Communist one in the Soviet Union gave rise to a new preoccupation
with liberal democracy as precisely the embodiment of pluralism and cultural
tolerance. For many differently oriented philosophers and political theorists
of the late 1940s and 1950s—among them Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin,
Jacob Talmon, Karl Popper, and Friedrich Hayek—the central feature of
totalitarianism was its repression of diversity, its monolithic lack of open-
ness, its intolerance of pluralism.
This is the context of Ruth Benedict’s memorable The Chrysanthemum
and the Sword, published in 1946, two years before her death. Benedict is an
anthropologist whose work bears many comparisons with Geertz’s. While
neither Geertz nor his Harvard teachers (Talcott Parsons and Clyde
Kluckhohn) thought very highly of Franz Boas, there is a clear line that con-
nects him to Benedict, Boas’s student and assistant.39 Indeed Geertz has writ-
ten feelingly in tribute of the poetics of her anthropology.40 Most among
Boasians, Benedict was attentive to the formal, stylistic features of culture, to
what, 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 and
communism. In 1943 she went to work for the Overseas Intelligence division
of the Office of War Information preparing cultural profiles.
110 POLITICAL THEORY / February 2003

The Chrysanthemum and the Sword grew out of one such profile, and was
one of the early postwar texts to advance a comprehensive argument for cul-
tural diversity. Beginning with the claim that the Japanese were the most
“alien” enemy the United States had ever engaged militarily, Benedict set out
a plea for an intercultural understanding with many resonances in Geertz. She
criticized the cultural imperialism of early twentieth century assimila-
tionism, advocating a more reflexive self-consciousness about culture that
would enable more rational choices to be made concerning the peace and
prosperity of the globe. As Shannon remarks, Benedict demanded, not that
Japanese become Americans (as the old imperialism demands), but that they
become anthropologists. That is, her book urged that the Japanese cultivate
the kind of detachment from their cultural values that enables appraisal and
flexibility 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 Benedict’s “world
made safe for differences” lies not in any covert imposition of American values on the
Japanese but in the overt and uncompromising call for the subordination of all cultures to
42
the demands of individual choice.

At the same time, however, even though Americans and Japanese were being
held to the same (anthropological) standard, it was nevertheless clear that
they did not inhabit the same proximity to it. Whereas Japanese cultural val-
ues were, in fundamental ways, antipathetic to the standard of individual
autonomy required for detached appraisal, and thus required fundamental
reform, Americans only had a few superficial adjustments to make in order to
live up to what was already a basic value.
In short, for cold war liberal anthropologists like Benedict the conception
as well as the promotion of cultural diversity was fundamentally shaped by
the ideological antagonism of a world polarized around totalitarianism and
democracy, and the duty to advance the interests of the latter over the former.
Making the world safe for differences depended both upon a greater openness
to diversity and on conformity to certain metavalues (relativism and the
autonomous self needed to secure its vantage) that were constitutive of
American individualism. For Benedict, in other words, making the world
safe for differences depended upon the reinscription of a cultural hierarchy
that assigned tacit priority to American values. By contrast, the end of the
cold war and the end of the ideological antagonisms that constituted its moral
geography 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 West’s Others, and a more cosmopolitan rehabilitation or recon-
 Scott / CULTURE IN POLITICAL THEORY 111

struction of the commitment to pluralism. Today, as Richard Rorty has argued

with breathless cogency, liberal commitments require no thoroughgoing
argument, no first-order rationale to clinch the claim for the superiority of its
form of life. Daniel Bell’s end of ideology, then, is not the same as Francis
Fukuyama’s. 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 a
seeming world. It is with this world that the idiom of culture-as-constructed-
meaning comports well, a world in which difference is no longer connected
to utopian visions of alternative futures, a world in which the otherness of the
Other can be edifying without being threatening to the order of things. It is the
rapid normalization of this world, I suggest, that makes it possible for Tully to
neglect 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 James
Tully’s Strange Multiplicity are significant attempts to imagine a
postimperial political philosophy. But at the same time I have been concerned
about the implications of the discrepancy between the careful attention to the
ideological history of claims about the political and the inattention to the
ideological history of claims about culture. Culture in political theory
remains oddly undertheorized, oddly underhistoricized; it is merely and fun-
damentally there, like a nonideological background, or a natural horizon. The
suspicion I have offered about this is that the new culture-as-constructed-
meaning that, as part of the Geertz-effect, became the normal vocabulary of
cultural difference (indeed, of difference as such) in the last decades of the
twentieth 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 post–cold war world now assumed to be safe
for differences it answered also an ideological demand for a post-ideological
conception of democratic pluralism, a cosmopolitan idiom in which the oth-
erness of the West’s Others, once a source of defensive anxiety and the object
of 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 end
of ideology,” that licenses Tully’s 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.
112 POLITICAL THEORY / February 2003

NOTES
1. This argument was set out some years ago in David Scott, “Criticism and Culture: Theory
and 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: “At
least since the latter part of the nineteenth century, anthropological theory has always been based
on the practice of going somewhere, preferably somewhere geographically, morally, and
socially distant from the theoretical and cultural metropolis of the anthropologist. The science of
the 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 found
at “the boundary of our society,” but “at the boundaries of ourselves. Foreignness does not start at
the water’s but at the skin’s.”
6. Two exceptions are two Marxist anthropologists: William Roseberry, “Multiculturalism
and the Challenge of Anthropology,” Social Research 59 (1992): 841-58; and Terence Turner,
“Anthropology and Multiculturalism: What Is Anthropology That Multiculturalists Should Be
Mindful of It?” Cultural Anthropology 8 (1993): 411-29. Their Marxism may not be irrelevant to
their discontent.
7. James Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995) (originally the inaugural John Robert Seeley Lectures
delivered at the University of Cambridge in 1994). Seeley, it is useful to remember, was a scholar
of 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: Basic
Books, 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 explicitly
liberal 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,” Political
Theory 20 (1992): 140-46; and Chandran Kukathas, “Cultural Rights Again: Rejoinder to
Kukathas” Political Theory 20 (1992): 674-80. I have commented on aspects of this exchange in
a preliminary way in David Scott, “Toleration and Historical Traditions of Difference,” Subal-
tern Studies, vol. 11, Community, Gender and Violence, ed. Partha Chatterjee and Pradeep
Jeganathan (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2000), 283-304.
10. For some sense of my sympathy for the kind of argument Tully advances, see David
Scott, 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 Shannon’s discussion in his “A
World Made Safe for Differences: Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword,” Ameri-
 Scott / CULTURE IN POLITICAL THEORY 113

can Quarterly 47 (1995): 659-80. The general argument has been expanded into the book A
World 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 a
straightforward celebration of Antigone as against Creon. Indeed the tragedy arises in part pre-
cisely because of Antigone’s own unyielding and one-sided attachment to an equally abstract—
if differently affiliated—conception of justice. For useful discussions of this aspect of the
Antigone, see Charles Segal, Tragedy and Civilization: An Interpretation of Sophocles (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1981); and Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck
and 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 Think
and Act Differently: Foucault’s Four Reciprocal Objections to Habermas’ Theory,” Foucault
Contra 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 Skinner
and 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. Taylor’s Christianity and Hegelianism are well known. For an interesting comment see
Isaiah Berlin’s “Introduction,” Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism: The Philosophy of Charles
Taylor 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-Imperial
Voice: 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 and
Social 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 of
Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). With the exception of Carrithers—a
curious, almost anomalous, choice in many respects, since this book, and his others as well, are
conventional to a remarkable degree—these 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 MacIntyre’s Three Rival
Versions 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 Tully’s “teaches political philosophy to speak in a post-
imperial tone of voice” (p. 547). But like Tully himself Owen simply glides over the problem of
culture with which I am concerned.
114 POLITICAL THEORY / February 2003

26. Bernard McGrane, Beyond Anthropology: Society and the Other (New York: Columbia
University 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 Shannon’s “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 interested
in “superstructures,” in the meaning-domains of ideology and consciousness. The influence of
the work of Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser and Raymond Williams, for instance, helped
to urge U.S. Marxist anthropologists in the direction of a constructionist conception of culture.
31. For an appreciative discussion of Geertz’s 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 concept
of culture, one very critical of Geertz, see Adam Kuper, Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account
(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), collects
essays originally published between 1974 and 1982.
33. Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description,” Interpretation of Cultures, 9.
34. I am thinking, of course, of Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), chap. 8, “Philosophy without Mirrors,” in which he
develops 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, The
End 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 was
a feeling that he meant well but that he didn’t think much.”
40. See Clifford Geertz, “Us/Not-Us: Benedict’s 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.
 Scott / CULTURE IN POLITICAL THEORY 115

David Scott teaches in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. He is

the author of two books, Formations of Ritual (1994) and Refashioning Futures (1999),
and he is the editor of the journal Small Axe.