Today culture is being threatened by some who do not understand–and who would oppose if they did understand–this principle of cultural integrity. The chief danger to cultural freedom in our time comes from certain political fanaticisms which are trying to break down this cultural integrity by assuming or attempting to prove that it has no right to exist.
…Culture grows from roots more enduring than those of the political state. It also offers satisfactions more intimate than those of the political state; and hence it is wrong to force it to defer to political abstractions; the very fact that it has not chosen to embody those abstractions is evidence that they are extraneous.
…the primary role of culture is neither to carry into effect the specific laws of the state or to give force to political ideologies which have won a temporary ascendancy.
From Weaver’s essay “The Importance of Cultural Freedom,” originally published in Modern Age, winter 1961. Reprinted by Liberty Fund, 2000.
