ABSTRACT
The pluralistic ethnic-religious or confessional character of Lebanese society has been the paramount historical feature impinging upon the politics of the country. Students of Lebanon have inveterately pointed this out, while advocating a version of the separation of religion from politics and the inauguration of a secular polity.1 This rationalist model of Western vintage would, it is assumed, neutralize the fire of faith in the public domain. There have been theorists of nonhomogeneous societies who believed, as did Lord Acton, that ‘the combination of different nations [groups] in one State is as necessary a condition of civilized life as the combination of men in society’.2 Cultural richness and political liberty are the fruit of what otherwise appears to be a situation of endemic conflict, perhaps culminating in civil war. But sectarian politics, based on blood and the tribe, are by definition grounded in divisiveness, while the attempt to balance distinct group claims is the result of a conscious and rational effort to contend with a heterogeneous society through compromise and reasonable power-sharing arrangements. It is a hard question indeed to arrive at a single judgment concerning the optimal principle of politics and the practical implications of ethnically diverse societies. Religion as a menace to political order, or rather as one of its legitimate bulwarks, is a way to posit the polar alternatives at issue.
