Over the course of the last three years, British Government counter-terrorism policy has shifted significantly to embrace “counter-extremism.” This is justified not only in terms of addressing the underlying causes of terrorism, but also in its own right as addressing the “harm” of extremism. These proposals raise fundamental questions about the limits of religious and other civil liberties. However, the problem of extremism is not new. The German public intellectual and constitutional lawyer Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde reflected extensively on the same problem in the context of German responses to left-wing radicalism in the mid-1970s. His work touched on both concrete legal problems as well as fundamental philosophical assumptions about the nature, characteristics, and limits of the liberal democratic constitutional state. In this article, I seek to retrieve his ideas and arguments for the current British context. I argue that the current discourse of extremism and fundamental British values risks being used as a vehicle for promoting a “progressive” public ideology of individual self-creation. This fails to take moral and religious diversity seriously, and its implementation betrays the foundations of the liberal democratic constitution. It provides striking confirmation of Böckenförde's thesis that the liberal state is perennially prone to a totalitarian tendency to seek to generate its own distinctive ethical community. As Böckenförde recognized, what is needed instead is the recovery of a thin common morality of civic loyalty as shown pre-eminently in obedience to law.

In recent years, the relationship between law and religion has been subject to increased scholarly interest. In part this is the result of new laws protecting religious liberty and non-discrimination, and it may be that overall levels of litigation have increased as well. In all this activity, there are signs that the relationship between law and religion is changing. While unable to address every matter of detail, this article seeks to identify the underlying themes and trends. It starts by suggesting that the constitutional settlement achieved by the end of the nineteenth century has often been overlooked, religion only appearing in the guise of inadequately theorised commitments to individual liberty and equality. The article then considers the role of multiculturalism in promoting recent legal changes. However, the new commitment to multiculturalism cannot explain a number of features of the law: the minimal impact of the Human Rights Act 1998, the uncertain effect of equality legislation, an apparent rise in litigation in established areas of law and religion, and some striking cases in which acts have been found to be unlawful in surprising ways. In contrast, the article proposes a new secularisation thesis. The law is coming to treat religions as merely recreational and trivial. This has the effect of reducing the significance of religion as a matter of conscience, as legal system and as a context for public service. As a way of managing the ever-deepening forms of religious diversity present within the United Kingdom, such a secularisation strategy is implausible.1

Modern theorists often use Immanuel Kant's work to defend the normative primacy of human rights and the necessity of institutionally autonomous forms of global governance. However, properly understood, his law of nations describes a loose and noncoercive confederation of republican states. In this way, Kant steers a course between earlier natural lawyers such as Grotius, who defended just-war theory, and visions of a global unitary or federal state. This substantively mundane claim should not obscure a more profound contribution to the science of international law. Kant demonstrates that his concept of law forms part of a logical framework by which to ascertain the necessary institutional characteristics of the international legal order. Specifically, his view is that the international legal order can only take a noncoercive confederated form as its subjects become republican states and that in these circumstances law can exist without a global state. Put another way, Kant argues that if we get state-building right, the law of nations follows.

When Theseus returned from Crete, his ship was long preserved in Athens. Over time, individual planks rotted and were replaced, until eventually all the planks had been renewed. Was the Athenian ship still the original one of Theseus? The problem that vexed Greek philosophers can be made more acute if one imagines that the rotten planks had been preserved, restored and eventually reconstructed into another ship. Which is now Theseus' ship? This was the problem facing Blackburne J in the High Court in the case of Dean v Burne. In effect, he decided that the ship of new planks is still the original one.

Radcliffe-Brown used to define social anthropology as ‘comparative sociology’, yet the school of thought that he engendered has not been much prone to comparison. Indeed, in their revulsion from the ‘comparative method’ of their evolutionist predecessors anthropologists of that tendency have largely avoided formal comparison and left to the “non-comparative” sociologists the duty of comparing. The definition nevertheless still has a certain validity if one recognises that an implied comparison lies behind every ethnographic description and that the anthropologist's comparative range–that is, the range of phenomena regarded as belonging to the class under consideration and therefore relevant to a potential comparison–is wider than the sociologist's, since it includes “other cultures” (i) and traditionally primitive ones, while sociology commonly, if not always, confines itself to civilised society and operates within the framework of the values of its national culture. Social anthropology's claim to be comparative rests upon its awareness of cultural differences and its recognition of their importance in determining the forms which social institutions can take.

It is well known that the attitudes of the Latin Americans towards race are not the same as those of the inhabitants of Europe and the United States. This observation led scholars as distinguished as Gilberto Freire and Arnold Toynbee to put forward the view that there is no ‘race prejudice’ in Latin America, a view that has been criticised by more recent writers. In Latin America distinctions of ‘race’ are indeed made, but not on the basis of the same premisses as in North America and, though raza and race are the same word, they do not bear the same connotations in Spanish-speaking as in Englishspeaking countries—outside scientific circles, perhaps. ‘Race’ is a system of classifying individuals and, as such, part of each culture, and therefore liable to vary from one to another. But what science has done with the word is another matter.