ABSTRACT
The failure to deal in any satisfactory way with race has been the primal curse of American politics, a curse that still has the potential to destroy both liberalism and democracy. At the same time, the manifest differences between, and sometimes within, races and genders suggest to some activists that theory and policy should be based on the particular rather than the general universals of the liberal tradition. Arguments like Mansfield's have also been made by a significant number of black intellectual leaders, and they cannot be easily dismissed. These arguments tell us something about the black conservative minority within a minority. Since the mid-1960s, there have been significant changes in emphasis in feminist theory. The theoretical and sometimes tactical alliance between some forms of feminism, some of the advocates of multiculturalism, and the postmodernist movement in philosophy, literary criticism, and political theory poses a profound challenge to the theory of the liberal consensus.
