Abstract:The principles of liberal political theory are often said to be "freestanding." Are they indeed sufficiently detached from the cultural setting where they emerged to be intelligible to people with other backgrounds? To answer this question, this essay examines the Indian secularism debate and develops a hypothesis on the process whereby liberal principles crystallized in the West and spread elsewhere. It argues that the secularization of western political thought has not produced independent rational principles, but transformed theological ideas into the "topoi" of a culture. Like all topoi, the principles of liberalism depend on other clusters of ideas present in western societies.When they migrate to new settings, the absence of these surrounding ideas presents fundamental obstacles to the interpretation and elaboration of liberal principles. If liberal principles ought to be freestanding, we should be able to determine whether this is the case. This essay raises a simple question: Does liberal political theory remain intelligible to people with cultural backgrounds completely different than that of modern westerners? Are liberal principles sufficiently freestanding from the cultural and religious setting where they emerged to be accessible to reasonable individuals from cultures other than the modern West? Answering this question is important to political theorists. First, the claim that political liberalism can be endorsed by people from different cultures presupposes that its principles are intelligible to such people. When groups of citizens fail to make sense of liberal tenets of justice, we cannot expect them to join any reasonable agreement on such tenets. Second, liberal political theory has been exported to non-western societies to guide their political institutions and problem-solving. There, the demand that liberal principles be freestanding has additional urgency. In case these principles require the support of western metaphysical conceptions, they will not function adequately in the absence of those conceptions.Third, contemporary western societies are becoming increasingly diverse and include citizens with 3 different cultural experiences. This poses another challenge: if the intelligibility of liberalism depends on a particular cultural background, it cannot without difficulty continue to offer a basic political model for western democracies.To answer our question, we should examine what happens when concepts from liberal political theory migrate to different cultural settings. This essay intends to do so by looking at the secularism debate in India. First, we reveal some problems in the thesis that the concept of secularism has changed in India because of the historical conditions under which it developed. To account for these problems, we have to re-examine the process through which liberal principles emerged in the West and then spread elsewhere. We present a hypothesis on the dynamic of secularization that produced the principles of the liberal secular state. Next, we show its imp...

That is, what would be the consequences if Locke's political philosophy has theological foundations, but has also given shape to secular liberalism? Examining Locke's theory in the Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), the article argues that this is indeed the case. The liberal model of toleration is a secularization of the theology of Christian liberty and its division of society into a temporal political kingdom and the spiritual kingdom of Christ. Therefore, when liberal toleration travels beyond the boundaries of the Christian West or when western societies become multicultural, it threatens to lose its intelligibility.

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The classical account of the Brahmin priestly class and its role in Indian religion has seen remarkable continuity during the past two centuries. Its core claims appear to remain unaffected, despite the major shifts that occurred in the theorizing of Indian culture and in the study of religion. In this article, we first examine the issue of the power and status of the Brahmin and show how it generates explanatory puzzles today. We then turn to 18th- and 19th-century sources to identify the cognitive conditions which sustained the classical account of the Brahmin priest and allowed for its transmission. Three clusters of concepts were crucial here: Christian-theological ideas concerning heathen priesthood and idolatry; racial notions of biological and cultural superiority and inferiority; and anthropological speculations about ‘primitive man’ and his ‘magical thinking’. While all three clusters were rejected by 20th- and 21st-century scholarship, the related claims about Brahmanical ritual power continue to be presented as facts. What accounts for this peculiar combination of continuities and discontinuities in the study of (ancient) Indian religion? We turn to some insights from the philosophy of science to sketch a route toward answering this question.

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