Individual legal integrity requires protecting shared cultural life-contexts.

Evidence

From a normative point of view, the integrity of the individual legal person cannot be guaranteed without protecting the inter-subjectively shared experiences and life-contexts in which the person has been socialized and formed his or her identity. The identity of the individual is interwoven with collective identities and can be stabilized only in a cultural network that cannot be appropriated as private property, any more than the mother tongue itself can. Hence the individual remains the bearer of “rights to cultural membership.” (Habermas 1994) In practice, under the pressure of multicultural difference, some Western constitutional states like Britain have been obliged to move to what Walzer calls “Liberalism 2,” or what in a less constricted vocabulary in Europe would be called a “social-democratic” reformist program. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 364

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces Habermas’s ‘rights to cultural membership’ as the normative counterweight to individualist liberalism — a key vocabulary item for debates about cultural and religious accommodation.
• XREF: Connects to the group-rights vs individual-rights tension that recurs in Islamophobia debates over religious accommodation, veils, and communal identity. — connects to: Criminal law curbs domination only through cultural backup — Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and…, 705