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Notes -
This to me is the Culture not seeming like a liberal utopia but being one in truth. A liberal nation cannot resolve all questions of significance, that's just going against the whole point. It's a practical limitation for other forms of government but not for liberals.
Just as liberal societies are divided today by major issues the Culture are divided. But the difference is that Banks uses the Culture's nature itself as a tool to manage this: secession means nothing in a post-scarcity, interstellar context where each ship is a hologram of the Culture and can rebuild the bits it likes. The Culture doesn't just make more of itself, it can fracture too when it runs into issues that just can't be resolved and maintain all of the benefits of its technology.
Banks is explicit that he made the Culture was much of a utopia as he could. His liberal instincts and need to write a good story drive him in certain directions.
The Gzilt are the closest thing to a Culture analogue that maintains some agency for non-superintelligences.
The problem is that the Culture are atypically focused on the galaxy: once cultures reach a certain level of success they tend to descend into some sort of steady state as an elder civ or Sublime and leave the material world, as the Gzilt did. So a lot of the alternatives have weeded themselves out.
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