Liberal self-defense of sacred goods licenses punitive violence

Evidence

Violence required by the cultivation of enlightenment is therefore distinguished from the violence of the dark jungle. The former is to be seen as an expression of law, the latter of transgression. Political and legal disciplines that forcefully protect sacred things (individual conscience, property, liberty, experience) against whatever violates them is thus underwritten by the myth. Liberalism is not merely the passion of civility, as Hampshire and others have asserted. It claims the right to exercise power, through the threat and the use of violence, when it redeems the world and punishes the recalcitrant. There is no fatality in all this—as Adorno and Horkheimer claimed—no necessary unfolding of an Enlightenment essence. It is just a way some liberals have argued and acted. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 295

Categorization

• XREF: Parallel to Cooper: the marketplace of ‘freedom’ in US conservatism deploys state violence to protect property and family; Asad gives the philosophical mechanism for why such violence stays unmarked as violence.