Individual self-determination has become a universal value no longer exclusive to the West

Evidence

The right to live one’s life “from within,” which is at the heart of a modern conception of individuality, was indeed honed and developed within the Western liberal tradition. But it is no longer a value restricted to the West—in part because the forms of life in which it developed are no longer exclusively “Western.” It has become a cosmopolitan value and, in the form of the discourse of human rights, is as pertinent to Third World workers struggling at the periphery of the global system, women in the developing world up against patriarchal conceptions of a women’s role, or political dissenters subject to the threat of torture as it is to Western consumers in the weightless economy. In that sense, paradoxically, cultural belongingness (ethnicity) is something, in its very specificity, of which everyone partakes. It is a universal particular, a “concrete universal.” — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 370

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the key framework of ethnicity as a ‘concrete universal’ or ‘universal particular’ — precisely the kind of definitional mechanism the reader’s scaffolding purpose demands.
• QUESTION: Worth pursuing: does ‘concrete universal’ derive from Hegel via Žižek? The genealogy of this phrase matters for how it does theoretical work in later Islamophobia readings.