1. For an example of this sort of approach, see Susan Mendus, ‘The Tigers of Wrath and the Horses of Instruction’, in John Horton (ed.), Liber-alism, Multiculturalism and Toleration (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993) pp. 193–206. I am indebted to Susan Mendus’s original and searching article on the issues raised by the Rushdie affair for stimulating the argu-ments that I develop in this chapter.
2. See, for example, M. Brewster Smith, Jerome S. Bruner and Robert W. White, Opinions and Personality (New York: John Wiley, 1964); Daniel Katz, ‘The Functional Approach to the Study of Attitudes’, in Fred I. Greenstein and Michael Lerner (eds.),A Sourcebook for the Study of Per-sonality and Politics (Chicago: Markham Publishing Company, 1971). Analogously, it seems that people sometimes adopt opinions because those opinions are endorsed by the political party with which they identify, rather than support a political party because it espouses opinions of which they independently approve. See Hugh Berrington, ‘British Public Opinion and Nuclear Weapons’, in Catherine Morse and Colin Fraser (eds.), Public Opinion and Nuclear Weapons (London: Macmillan, 1989).
3. See Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); and Charles Taylor, ‘Atomism’, in Philosophical Papers, Volume 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
4. See Simon Caney, ‘Liberalism and Communitarianism: a Misconceived Debate’, Political Studies, XL (1992) pp. 273–89.
5. I give a fuller justification of these claims about the relationship between choice and belief in ‘Bearing the Consequences of Belief’, Journal of PoliticalPhilosophy, II (1994) pp. 24–43. I am commenting here upon the logic of belief. I do not deny that, psychologically, people are capable of coming to hold a belief because they want it to be true; when that hap-pens, they might be said, colloquially, to ‘choose’ what to believe. It is also possible for someone intentionally to place himself in a position which he reckons will lead him to believe something that he does not cur-rently believe. For example, an agnostic might join a religious community in the expectation that living in that community will eventually induce in him the confident belief in God that he currently lacks. Prima facie, there is something odd about consciously inducing oneself to believe some-thing that one now regards as false, but someone might adopt that tactic because he reckons the new belief will make his life happier or more bearable. However, even in this rather unusual sort of case, it still requires more than a mere act of choice to bring about the belief.