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PARTISAN REVIEW
public culture. The liberal social contract was formed among
individual
citizens who possessed negative liberty, that is, the right
to
defend their
own private self, property, religion, or culture. The sovereign exercised
legitimate authority in the minimal spheres of governmental adminis–
tration, but could not invade, in accordance with negative liberty, the
sphere of the private individual. Consequently, culture or religion were,
in theory, banished from the public domain but reserved for private
expression. Every private individual and the voluntary associations con–
stituted from such individuals were free
to
pursue their preferences in
religion or their choices in education and culture.
Such a founding political theory which required the absence of any
state-recognized religion or state-supported culture with the concomi–
tant, naked public square was championed in theory but never realized
in practice in many Western liberal states, including the United States of
America . Despite the theory which assigned culture
to
the private
domain, the language and religion of the historical majority occupied a
dominant place in the public culture, which accommodated varying
degrees of public expression of minority, religious, and social groups.
Whatever the abstract theory of the social contract, the initiation of the
individual into the obligations of citizenship involved a high degree of
assimilation or integration into the common culture .
According to the second pattern, with the concept of positive liberty,
the focus shifts away from preserving the wall of separation between the
public and private domain toward a concern with the free development
of the group which is identified as the bearer of historical self-con–
sciousness . Characteristically, in liberal theories of democracy, this
group is identified as the nation or the "People." The social contract
was rewritten in cultural terms as a reciprocal agreement embodying
positive liberty for all groups in the society. On the one hand, there was
a cultural requirement that minorities be co-opted into the common
civic, popular, or national culture; on the other hand, minorities were to
willingly seek assimilation and participation in the inherited traditions
of the cultural majority.
In terms of positive liberty, it is consistent with the free development
of the society that minority groups be educated in the historically dom–
inant or traditionally accepted language and culture. The caveat is the
recognition that the concept of positive liberty has often involved the
possibility, in Rousseau's phrase, of "forcing" persons "to be free ."
Thus, in the name of national self-realization, Aborigine children were
coercively separated from their natural families in order to undergo edu–
cation and self-identification as citizens of Australia. More characteris-
