Is Anything Weirder than Liberalism?

Human history is full of earlier, hierarchical regimes…But the progress of what we call modernity, in its different forms, undermines all these traditional ideas and eventually makes them incredible. In the end, the only basis for stable legitimacy we can fall back on turns out to be that we should obey our rulers because in doing so we are really obeying ourselves.
- Charles Taylor, "Cultures of Democracy and Citizen Efficacy" in Public Culture 19 (1).