The Skillful Self

Developing a political approach to culture that avoids both the pitfalls of neutralism and the perils of perfectionism is among the most urgent tasks facing contemporary liberal theory. Drawing on Rawls's political liberalism as well as recent work by capability theorists and major critics of liberalism,The Skillful Self makes the case for a liberal politics of skill in which the skillful self forms the focus of a nonperfectionist approach to culture and cultural policy.

The Skillful Self: Liberalism, Culture, and the Politics of Skill presents a political liberal theory of cultural participation and the goals of cultural policy in contemporary pluralistic democracies. The ideal of cultural participation, which many regard as central to the self-conception of modern constitutional democracies, is often subject to the distorting influences of state perfectionism, paternalism, consumerism, and ideology. These distortions and the problems they raise are intensified by the forces of social, cultural, and economic globalization. Using the tools of contemporary liberal theory,The Skillful Self develops an approach to the politics of culture that focuses on the concept of skill and its place in a liberal conception of the self. Support for this approach is derived from the work of Nussbaum and Sen, who make a conception of human capability basic to their views of public policy and the design of political institutions. But the politics of skill modifies the capability approach by characterizing the central human functional capabilities as functions of the skillful self. The final chapters of the book describe the competences of the skillful self, elaborating a new typology of skills and explaining why basic institutions are obliged to promote them. To make the role of skill in the central capabilities explicit in this way is not to invoke the perfectionist ideal of a culture of skill, but rather to focus on the structural role of skill in a nonperfectionist conception of truly human functioning, and on the social conditions of individual capability viewed as a function of skill.

Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2
Chapter One. Liberalism, Culture, Cultural Participation
Chapter 3 Liberalism and Culture
Chapter 4 Cultural Participation
Chapter 5 Globalization and Cultural Participation
Chapter 6
Chapter Two. Community, Culture, Autonomy
Chapter 7 Community, Justice, Culture
Chapter 9 Culture, Context, Autonomy
Chapter 10 System, Lifeworld, Expert
Chapter 11 The Cultural Conditions of Autonomy
Chapter 12
Chapter Three. Culture and Identity
Chapter 13 Politics of Recognition, Politics of Respect
Chapter 14 Recognition and the Politics of Hate
Chapter 15 The Claims of the Indigenous
Chapter 16
Chapter Four. Education
Chapter 17 Education, Diversity, Cultural Competence
Chapter 18 Multicultural Reason
Chapter 19 Dialog as Reasonableness
Chapter 20
Chapter Five. Skill, Technology, Capability
Chapter 21 Skill, the Skillful Self, Deskilling
Chapter 22 Liberalism, Technology, Technological Democracy
Chapter 23 Capabilities, Resources, Capability Constrained Resourcism
Chapter 24 Central Capabilities as Functions of the Skillful Self
Chapter 25
Chapter Six. Politics of Skill
Chapter 26 Representable and Nonrepresentable Skills
Chapter 26 Factors Affecting the Development of the Nonrepresentable Skills
Chapter 27 Conclusion