The first theme in our discussion of modes of politics that push liberalism to its edges is the debate on difference and identity. The frame for this debate was the culture wars of the 1980s and early 1990s around issues such as abortion, sexual preferences, race relations, curriculum content or the place of religion in public life. It was stronger in the USA than in other Western countries, but it nonetheless had an impact in all of them. An optimistic appraisal of this impact would point out that it made us more sensitive to cultural, gender and racial difference as well as non-economic forms of subordination. A more cautious assessment would counter that the culture wars displaced politics into morality and made progressive thought less concerned with economic exploitation and class inequalities. It ultimately blunted its radical edge, given that advocates of difference were critical of liberal democratic politics but felt quite comfortable advancing their agenda within that setting.

Semiotics and Some Programmatic Consequences of the Culture Wars

While both accounts of the consequences of the culture wars are correct, in order to ascertain this we must first position the debate on difference and identity. I want to introduce it by looking at an intellectual footnote that is now largely forgotten but had a surprising influence on this whole affair, namely, the inspiration that semiotics provided in the early stages of the war on words.