Liberalism offers a very broad range of responses and theoretical constructions when it comes to addressing the issue of the cultural diversity of societies and their cultural management. Compare the responses of Charles Taylor, Clifford Geertz and Michael lgnatieff, to name three important thinkers. They all claim to defend liberalism, but their viewpoints are very different. I have chosen these three because they come from three different disciplinary fields: philosophy, empirical anthropology and political theory.My purpose is to show that their differences do not derive only from their different political sensibilities, from the position they adopt within the broad spectrum of liberalism, but also from theoretical options, one of which - and it is by no means the least important - is their concept of culture. In other words, how they imagine the function and dynamics of culture as a social whole, how they conceive the relations between the concept of culture and the concept of the nation, and also their conceptualisation of personal identity in relation to cultural identity.