quate compensation; so it is an additional pleasure to be given an occasion to respond to one of George Kateb's eloquent and subtle disquisitions on the high culture of American democracy, a phrase which he (and I) would understand to include Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. His central point about Whitman is much appreciated. Whitman is the theorist of democratic identity in a rights-based polity. It is, he argues, crucial not to insist too strongly on one's individual identity. Whitman teaches that in a democracy, one must be receptive to others unlike oneself: This requires each self to acknowledge its plasticity and potential to have been other than it has become and to become other than it presently is.

This defense ofindividualism is paradoxical. The individual in the abstract is the justifiable center of attention in a rights-based polity, but each particular individual finds that which is most peculiar to it, its distinctive way of inhabiting the world, must be to some extent devalued. The self, Kateb urges, must be recognized as a “strange place,” which is an indirect way of claiming that the self cannot be “located.” It has no geography and no place. In an uncanny (and unrecognized?) accord with the thought of Heidegger and his disciples, Kateb asserts:“Knowing oneself is therefore knowing that there is no single transparent self to know.”