Liberal universalism requires violence against the unredeemed outside world

Evidence

The image Canovan employs to present and defend liberalism is striking: “making a garden in a jungle that is continually encroaching” and a “world [that] is a dark place, which needs redemption by the light of a myth.” This image is not only an invitation to adopt a mythic approach; it is already part of the myth. It fixes on (explains and justifies) the violence lying at the heart of a political doctrine that has disavowed violence on principle. … The liberal violence to which I refer (as opposed to the violence of illiberal regimes) is translucent. It is the violence of universalizing reason itself. For to make an enlightened space, the liberal must continually attack the darkness of the outside world that threatens to overwhelm that space. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 293

Categorization

• XREF: Directly extends the vaulted Cooper thread: both Cooper on Christian-social-conservative genealogy of the secular and Asad here expose ‘secular’ liberalism as masking its coercive, particularist commitments. — connects to: Liberal humanitarian rhetoric masks imperial violence and infantilizes its targets — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 471; American Orientalism justifies therapeutic violence against Arabs as civilizing mission — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 235
• DEFINE: Defines ‘translucent’ liberal violence as the violence of universalizing reason itself — the conceptual core of Asad’s secularism critique.