ABSTRACT
Hegelian defenders of liberal institutions are in the position of defending, on the basis of solidarity alone, a society which has traditionally asked to be based on something more than mere solidarity. This chapter explores the Hegelian attempt to defend the institutions and practices of the rich North Atlantic democracies without using such buttresses postmodernist bourgeois liberalism. The moral deliberations of the postmodernist bourgeois liberal consists largely in this same sort of discourse, avoiding the formulation of general principles except where the situation may require this particular tactic as when one writes a constitution, or rules for young children to memorize. The chapter uses postmodernist in a sense given to this term by Jean-Franois Lyotard, who says that the postmodern attitude is that of distrust of metanarratives. It discusses that those narratives which describe or predict the activities of such entities as the noumenal self or the Absolute Spirit or the Proletariat.
