little outside the liberal secularist CWS and into the realm of Nietzsche himself? Short of
conversion, what moral options does Taylor provide for an unbeliever?
III. Connollian Deep Pluralism
For Connolly the answer to the last question is not many. Like Taylor and
Connolly wishes to maintain that the route to an ethically compelling secularism does in
fact lead one a little outside liberalism. Contra Taylor the route leads towards Nietzsche
and it is through the development of Niezschean inspired agonistic model of public
reasoning that one can most fruitfully engage the concerns of a Macintyre.
Connolly’s criticisms of liberal secularism revolve around its inability to respond
to what he calls the politics of becoming, the politics by which particular identities and
the larger social imaginary of a given polity are contested and modified through the
intercultural exchanges of these identities with each other on the one hand, and the larger
social whole on the other.
Liberal secularists, Rawlsian or otherwise, are quite aware of
the metaphysical politics at play in the public spaces of contemporary liberal democracies
where people who take their moral bearing from a disparate array of moral and ethical
sources are, through their interactions with others, constantly contesting, reaffirming and
reconfiguring the identities they have developed in light of such moral or ethical sources.
However, such thinkers often fail to engage the deeper ethical issues at play in such
politics but instead merely work at the surface level of appearances by freezing “the
liberal conception of the person and the secular conception of public space today while
everything else in and around the culture undergoes change.”
84
Nietzsche becomes in fact the basis for what Connolly originally called a “Reconstituted Radicalized
Liberalism” which morphed into and Ethos of Pluralization and later Deep Pluralism. See Political Theory
and Modernity second edition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993) p. 174.
85
Taylor himself refers to this as the process of sharing identity space. See Charles Taylor, “Democratic
Exclusions and its Remedies” in Citizenship, Diversity and Pluralism ed. Alan Cairns (Montreal: McGill-
Queens Univ. Press, 1999) p. 281.
86
William Connolly, Why I am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999)
p. 66.
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Convention