Charles Taylor Responds

A diaphanous screen seems to separate “liberals” from opponents, who are often grouped together (by “liberals”) in clumps called “communitarians,” or here “culturalists.” One of the things that doesn’t seem to get through the screen is the sense attributed to the crucial words.

I put the key terms above in quotation marks as a way of saying that they have no agreed sense, not even quite the same logic, in the writings of Bromwich (he is far from alone among American “liberals”) and, say, my own. He really gets me quite wrong at times, but this is not surprising, like someone trying to puzzle out a German text with a Dutch dictionary.

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