Cultural relativism, a term that had been introduced to the public with Benedict’s Patterns of Culture in 1934, was supposed to be a way of thinking about the world.

A s a young conservative, I was taught to despise something we were taught to call “moral relativism.” The moral relativism of the time was a particular Cold War variant: The United States and ...

Moral relativism has been a conservative boogeyman since at least the Cold War. Conservative stalwarts like William F. Buckley claimed that liberals had accepted a view that morality was ...

Cultural relativism, the realization that diverse cultures have different, incommensurable aesthetic standards, anticipated by Montaigne and Machiavelli, was the discovery of the Neapolitan ...

Relativism is not to be absolutized; it is itself to be relativized by the absolute. Milton D. Hunnex is professor and head of the department of philosophy at Willamette University, Salem, Oregon.

A typical example of this phenomenon appeared in the pages of Australia’s bastion of serious conservative thought, the journal Quadrant: “Relativism and the Right” by Sam Roggeveen, March 2000. Not ...