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Foucault's theory of disciplinary power and Bourdieu's theory of symbolic power are among the most innovative attempts in recent social thought to come to terms with the increasingly elusive character of power in modern society. Both theories are based on cri tiques of subject-centered analyses of power and offer original accounts of modern social institutions. But Foucault's critique of the subject is so radical that it makes it impossible to identify any deter minate social location of the exercise of power or of resistance to its operations. Bourdieu's theory of practice in terms of the symbolically mediated interaction between the habitus and social structure avoids these problems by connecting relations of domination both to identi fiable social agents and to the institutions of the modern state. However, Bourdieu's strategic model of social action remains too narrow to allow for the possibility of autonomous agency and an emancipatory political praxis. The theory of symbolic power must be supplemented by a normative conception of practical reason if its emancipatory potential is to be realized.

The heightened concern of liberal political theory over the past decade with issues of identity and culture has raised the question of whether particularistic identities are compatible with commitment to universal values such as freedom and equality and, more specifically, what forms of patriotic attachment are still possible in pluralistic liberal democracies. Liberals sympathetic to nationalism have argued that nationality is a central component of individual identity for modern subjects and that access to one's national culture is essential for realizing important liberal democratic values such as individual autonomy and social equality. 1 Some thinkers sympathetic to the republican tradition, by contrast, hold that self-governing political communities, or the constitutional principles on which they are based, can provide sufficient focus for forms of loyalty and patriotism that do not presuppose prior cultural commonalities. 2 Among prominent defenders of the latter view, Jü rgen Habermas has proposed a model of loyalty to the principles and institutions of constitutional democracy, Verfassungspatriotismus or 'constitutional patriotism', as a viable democratic alternative to nationalism.However, critics have questioned whether the idea of patriotism based on loyalty to the constitution is really coherent or, assuming it is, whether it could inspire sufficiently strong attachment to preserve the unity and stability of a democratic state. In one form or another these objections turn on whether constitutional patriotism strikes an appropriate balance between the universalism of principles and the particularism of identity and attachment. Anticipating this problem, Habermas has emphasized that he is not thinking of constitutional principles as disembodied abstractions but as embedded in particular democratic political and legal cultures, since only thus can they shape citizens' identities and loyalties. Yet this does little to resolve the apparent tension between nationalist particularism and democratic universalism, for stable democratic cultures have flourished exclusively within nation-states, which suggests that the fate of democracy may be tied inextricably with that of nationalism, at least under modern social conditions. The tension is exacerbated by the fact that Habermas seems to be in two minds over whether constitutional patriotism is supposed to supersede nationality as a form of political identification or whether constitutional patriotism can flourish within nationally differentiated political cultures.In this paper I will argue that constitutional patriotism provides a coherent model of political identification for culturally pluralistic democracies once it is

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