A second flank was opened up against liberalism on the grounds of ethnicity. If standpoint theory was true, then liberalism’s claims of universality were no more than a form of ethnocentrism – the evaluation of one culture according to the assumptions of another. Liberalism claimed to project norms that could apply to all humanity, but were in fact culturally specific to the West. In this view, imperialism was not just something that happened to coincide with the advent of liberalism in the late 17th Century. They were the same project.
