South African liberal thinking on questions of nationalism reconsidered

Abstract

Liberals have often been criticised for not confronting key questions relating to South Africa’s present and future. While liberals did not address the socalled National Question directly, they did consider the issues that that question concerned, but recent writing on liberalism has often misrepresented their thinking. This article seeks to illustrate a variety of liberal views about the nature of the South African “nation”, to explore what liberals have, over time, thought and done in relation to nationalism and racism, and to consider some of their thinking on what a non-racial South African might look like.